The Royal Society has a history of being dogmatic but wrong

Despite their motto. Freely translated, the motto means "don't trust anyone". An email below from Claude Allegre to Benny Peiser [benny.peiser@thegwpf.org]. Allegre is a prominent French geochemist and Leftist politician. He is referring to the frantic Warmism of the Royal Society in recent years.

The Royal Society is a splendid institution of which I am proud to be a member. However, despite it wonderful motto NULLIS IN VERBA the Society has a long record of dogmatic attitudes, some of which have turned out to be wrong: defending Alchemy in the early days, refusing the Leibniz notation dy/dx, refusing to accept radioactivity until Rutherford, more recently by claiming the non-human possibility for mad-cow disease.

Why not to be more open to arguments?




CO2, Global Warming and the Royal Society

An email from Norm Kalmanovitch [kalhnd@shaw.ca]. Norm is a practicing geophysicist with over 35 years of experience

The concept of human caused global warming is entirely predicated on the assumption that the rapid increase in fossil fuel consumption will raise the atmospheric CO2 concentration to levels that will cause catastrophic warming of the Earth. The IPCC defined an atmospheric CO2 concentration of 650ppmv as the absolute maximum tolerable level beyond which catastrophic global warming will be a certainty. This was presented at the climate conference in Nairobi Kenya, in 2006 along with the prediction that at the current increasing rate of CO2 emissions, by 2100 the atmospheric CO2 will be well in excess of 1200ppmv (1248ppmv according to IPCC 2007 lead Author Andrew Weaver’s November 27, 2008 presentation to the University of Calgary).

The global reference for atmospheric CO2 concentration is the Mauna Loa Observatory and this data is used by the IPCC as their only reference. The CO2 concentration data which can be downloaded directly from the site at:

ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_mm_mlo.txt

ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_annmean_mlo.txt

ftp://ftp.cmdl.noaa.gov/ccg/co2/trends/co2_gr_mlo.txt

In the past ten years CO2 emissions have climbed from 24.75gt/year in 2000 to over 32gt/year by 2009, but the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration remained a virtually straight line, averaging 1.977ppmv/year with the high value of 2.56ppmv/year occurring in 2003 and the low value of 1.55ppmv/year occurring in 2005.

The official CO2 concentration for 2009 from Mona Loa Observatory is 387.35ppmv, and with the average rate of increase in concentration for the past decade of just 1.977ppmv/year, by year 2100 the concentration will only be 567.25ppmv, having increased by just 179.90ppmv over the next 91 years.

This is less than half of what the IPCC predicted and more importantly it is below the 650ppmv maximum that the IPCC deemed safe. Essentially without even criticizing the faulty science behind AGW, it can be shown, based on the actual statements of the IPCC, that the world faces no threat from global warming as a result of increased CO2 emissions.

If one were to bring physical science into the argument it is easily demonstrated that this 179.90ppmv increase in CO2 concentration will not increase the greenhouse effect by the 1.5307°C predicted by the forcing parameter of the climate models, but by something well under 0.2°C (because of the effect of this on an already near saturated wavelength band accessible to CO2).

The fraudulent global warming alarmism becomes even more apparent when one looks forty years into the future to 2050. The optimum target declared by the IPCC is 450ppmv. At the current rate of increase of 1.977ppmv/year by 2050 the CO2 concentration will have only increased by 81.057ppmv bringing the atmospheric CO2 concentration to 468.407ppmv; just 18.4ppmv over what the IPCC sees as an ideal target; yet this is occurring as CO2 emissions continue to increase unabated at ever increasing rates.

If the atmospheric CO2 concentration data demonstrates that we face zero danger from human caused global warming for the next forty years; why is the IPCC still insisting that the world devastate its economy and starve the poor to prevent this danger?

This brings the global temperature manipulations by the IPCC that were exposed in the “climategate emails” from the “slap on the wrist” conviction of not properly sharing data, to the realm of “crimes against humanity” because of all the damage caused by this fraud.

In 1990 the IPCC properly demonstrated a temperature graph based on at least 18 temperature proxy studies. This graph showed the Medieval Warm period being substantially warmer than today which eliminated any alarmism from observed global temperature increases. The graph also showed the Little Ice Age which correlates with the Maunder Minimum and Dalton Minimum demonstrating solar influence and not emissions influence as the cause of the observed warming.

In 1998 immediately after the signing of the Kyoto Protocol in 1997, a new temperature proxy appeared that was based on a small sampling of tree ring data statistically manipulated to eliminate both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age, and further manipulated with the addition of thermometer data to the proxy data to justify the proxy by having it fit the observed temperature data better than the previous proxies. This is referred to in the emails as “Mike’s Nature trick”.

In 2001 with the global temperature data starting to refute the AGW premise and the date for ratifying the Kyoto Accord fast approaching, the IPCC rejected the previous temperature graph based on 18 proxies and replaced it with the graph based on the single fraudulently contrived MBH98 temperature proxy.

The original version of this graph presented in the 1998 paper only included temperature data up to 1995 because there was a drop in global temperature in 1996 and 1997 which would limit the impact of the graph. When the IPCC published this graph in the 2001 Fourth Assessment report they embellished the alarmism by extending the temperature data on the graph to include the temperature spike from the 1998 el Niño, but did not include the data for either 1999 or 2000 because 1999 was cooler than 1997, and this eliminated the alarmist impact of the 1998 temperature spike.

The problem with the Hockey Stick Graph is that in matching the four global temperature representations it clearly showed the global cooling from 1942 to 1975. This is a big problem for the AGW hypothesis because the warming that occurred from 1910 to 1942 only represented a 14% increase in CO2 emissions; but the cooling that took place from 1942 to 1975 occurred as emissions increased by over 500%, completely refuting any claim of correlation between CO2 emissions and global warming.

This led to the out and out fraud of physically changing the actual temperature data at the Hadley CRU. The Hadley CRU data shown in the IPCC 2007 Fourth Assessment Report is clearly different than the same Hadley CRU data as well as all the other data representations including the Hockey Stick Graph shown in the IPCC 2001 Third Assessment Report.

The Royal Society has put themselves in a very difficult position, by failing to expose the faulty science behind AGW right from the onset in 1988 with the contrived scientifically baseless computer model projections of catastrophic global temperature increases related to CO2 emissions. The simple question is whether the Royal Society can extricate itself after being so entrenched in the global warming alarmist’s camp.

PS: Over this last decade with the 29.3% increase in CO2 emissions, there has been zero global warming and in fact the Earth has been cooling since 2002. This reveals the true nature of the IPCC which still promotes global warming alarmism as the Earth continues to cool.





James Lovelock: Climate Change May Not Happen As Fast As We Thought

Nice to hear any expression of uncertainty from the dogmatic Green/Left

[...] To boil down any of [James] Lovelock's thoughts to a few sentences is to do him a serious disservice, but here goes. As he sees it, climate change is now all but out of control. We should certainly cut our greenhouse-gas emissions, but focus most of our efforts on adapting to a world that, sooner or later, will turn troublesome beyond words. As part of that, he has long claimed the only sustainable method of generating the electricity Britain needs is nuclear power – and that in large swathes of the world, solar and wind power are already proving to be a dangerous distraction. From time to time, he dispenses optimism, of a sort: he's not having the standard-issue predictions of steadily-rising global temperatures, and thinks that though the Earth could suddenly heat up in a way that few models have so far predicted, we might also have longer to prepare than some people think.

"Who knows? Everybody might be wrong," he says. "I may be wrong. Climate change may not happen as fast as we thought, and we may have 1,000 years to sort it out."

If that sounds comforting, bear in mind that the subtitle of his latest book, The Vanishing Face of Gaia, is "the final warning" – and when it comes to the kind of climate change-related schemes that dominate the headlines, he tends to sound withering, to say the least. Copenhagen, he tells me, was not just "futile" but "a monumental extravagance – I'm never convinced that big people-gatherings like that can solve the truly important issues." His most dismissive words, however, are reserved for the Stern Review: "If you mix up some science that's incomplete with some economics which is almost as bad, you're going to get an absolutely dreadful progeny."

In the context of Hay, Lovelock's most sobering point takes on a grim hilarity. The argument is simple enough: even if the public were to get newly excited, and politicians were united by fresh resolve, the human race might face an insurmountable problem – that even the kind of great minds who come to Hay might not have the IQ required for such a massive challenge.

"The main problem is that we're not really clever enough as a species," he says, with a wry look. "We haven't developed far enough. The Earth's evolving, and we're evolving with it – but it's a damn slow process. It's taken us a million years to change from being semi-intelligent animals to what we are now: still animals, and still semi-intelligent. I don't think we can handle big problems like the Earth."

More HERE





The Death Spiral for Climate Alarmism Continues

.... The negotiations in Copenhagen were a complete shambles, resulting only in a non-binding, let’s-meet-again memorandum that the various participating countries “recognized” having seen.

Greenpeace activist, and Independent Commentator Joss Garman characterized the “Copenhagen Accord” thus:

This “deal” is beyond bad. It contains no legally binding targets and no indication of when or how they will come about. There is not even a declaration that the world will aim to keep global temperature rises below 2 C. Instead, leaders merely recognise the science behind that vital threshold, as if that were enough to prevent us crossing it.

The only part of this deal that anyone sane came close to welcoming was the $100bn global climate fund, but it’s now apparent that even this is largely made up of existing budgets, with no indication of how new money will be raised and distributed so that poorer countries can go green and adapt to climate change.

In the EU, the vaunted European Trading System continues to come apart at the seams. According to James Kanter at the NYT:

Carbon traders, for example, have been arrested for tax fraud; evidence has emerged of lucrative projects that may do nothing to curb climate change; and steel and cement companies have booked huge profits selling surplus permits they received for free.

And the EU is backing away from previous plans to tighten its carbon reduction targets. According to Greenwire,

For months, Europe has mulled whether to increase to 30 percent its current commitment to reduce CO2 emissions 20 percent from 1990 levels by 2020. E.U. leaders in Brussels, including the bloc’s climate chief, Connie Hedegaard, have seemed to favor such a commitment, while influential member states like Germany and France have expressed skepticism of such a pledge without binding support from other major industrial powers like the United States.

A study, released today by the European Commission, expresses concern that Europe’s trading system for limiting emissions will remain less effective than planned without reductions in carbon allowances over the next decade. But addressing that problem may have to take a back seat for now, Hedegaard said.

Meanwhile, here in the U.S., climate alarmism has sunk so low that Senator John Kerry risks choking himself to death as he ties his tongue into knots to pretend that his climate bill, the misleadingly named “American Power Act,” is not a climate bill. Depending on the date, Senator Kerry disingenuously characterizes as a job creation bill, or a bill to end dependency on foreign oil, or as a bill to rejuvenate the moribund US nuclear energy sector…or anything but what it is, which is a bill full of direct and indirect taxes on carbon: that is, on coal, natural gas, oil, and gasoline.

Pundits give the bill little chance of passage in this Congress, and if Democrats take anything like the whuppin’ they’re expected to get in November, I wouldn’t look for a reprise of the “American Power Act” any time soon.

[Personal note to Senator Kerry: Dear Senator, will you please stop perpetuating the fiction that you can createjobs by forcing up the cost of power (and making it less reliable) in the United States. All you’re going to do with your fraudulently titled climate bill is kill jobs, reduce economic growth, export more of America’s industrial base to other countries, and perpetuate the misery of this lackluster economy. Even worse, you’ll hurt the people you claim as your primary constituency – the poor – more than the wealthy, as the poor spend more of their budget on energy than those with greater wealth.]

Poll numbers continue to decline when it comes to people expressing serious concern about climate change, or willingness to pay anything to remedy it.

The New York Times points out that public belief levels are plummeting even in Jolly Old Britain, (and not-so-jolly old Germany) both of which have been, until recently, a seething hotbed of climate alarmism:

Nowhere has this shift in public opinion been more striking than in Britain, where climate change was until this year such a popular priority that in 2008 Parliament enshrined targets for emissions cuts as national law. But since then, the country has evolved into a home base for a thriving group of climate skeptics who have dominated news reports in recent months, apparently convincing many that the threat of warming is vastly exaggerated.

A survey in February by the BBC found that only 26 percent of Britons believed that “climate change is happening and is now established as largely manmade,” down from 41 percent in November 2009. A pollconducted for the German magazine Der Spiegel found that 42 percent of Germans feared global warming, down from 62 percent four years earlier.

Conclusion

My colleague, Steve Hayward, thinks that future historians will peg 2008 as the year that climate alarmism jumped the shark. If so, it’s clear that in 2010, the Fonz is on the sharp declining phase of the jump, headed back down to the water. On every front, climate alarmists are losing, from international negotiations, to domestic legislation, to public opinion. Even the UK’s Royal Society is being forced to reconsider their position on climate change.

We can hope that climate alarmism will be replaced by a new era of climate realism, where the focus is on fostering resilience: building institutions, and helping other countries build institutions that would give them resilience in the face of any sort of climate change, manmade or natural, modest or major. Instead, however, my guess is this won’t happen. The alarmists are unable to give up the sense of panic they need to preserve to promote radical policies.

Instead, what I suspect will happen is that the entire issue of climate change will go sub rosa, and be embedded in discussions of energy, sustainability, energy security, renewable energy, protecting biodiversity, or anything that lacks the words “climate change” in the title.

More HERE (See the original for links)





NASA Gagging Policy: Climate Scientist Quit over Controversy

By John O'Sullivan

In a bad week for NASA, evidence shows the beleaguered space agency gagged its climate scientists. But the policy is starting to backfire as ex-employee speaks out.

Confirmation of the gagging policy comes from ex-NASA high-flier, Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi, who upset his former employers with the 2007 publication of his paper, ‘Greenhouse effect in semi-transparent planetary atmospheres,’ in the Quarterly Journal of the Hungarian Meteorological Service.

Miskolczi claims his illustriously-funded government employers tried to silence him to preserve public credibility in its policy on global warming. The noble doctor refused to be gagged and out of scientific principle chose to quit and speak out.

The root of the problem was in the ex-NASA man’s debunk of the greenhouse gas (GHG) theory. Dr. Miskolczi claims he “proves that the classic solution [greenhouse gas theory] significantly overestimates the sensitivity of greenhouse forcing.”

But No NASA Gag on Warming Advocates

Now contrast and compare to what ‘New Scientist’ reported in 2006 when pro-green doomsayer, James Hansen was chastised by his employer for daring to suggest any such gag was in force. Hansen has been a prominent and public climate doomsayer ever since.

Back then Dean Acosta, deputy assistant administrator for public affairs at NASA, denied that there was any effort to silence Hansen. “That’s not the way we operate here at NASA,” Acosta said. “We promote openness and we speak with the facts.”

Pointedly, unlike Miskolczi, Hansen didn’t resign from his well-paid post. Yet, unlike Miskolczi, his petulant outburst garnered much pro-green media interest.

Greenhouse Gas Theory ‘Bogus’

Now free from the shackles of NASA censorship, Dr. Miskolczi is finally coming to the fore as a serious critic of the theory behind man-made global warming. He is gaining note for proving that the Earth has an in-built ‘safety mechanism’ that prevents runaway global warming from greenhouse gases.

The top Hungarian physicist, in fact, identified that the greenhouse effect upon which the whole man-made global warming theory is based, is probably bogus. The highly-principled researcher discovered that the sum of all radiation absorbed in the atmosphere is equal to the total internal kinetic energy of the atmosphere. That in turn then is equal to the total gravitational potential energy.

In other words, the planet is most capable at keeping itself in a heat energy balance and is not vulnerable to so-called runaway warming. Thus, there is no ‘tipping point’ to fear from any atmospheric increase of a trace gas such as carbon dioxide.

Support for Climate Skeptic

The disgruntled former NASA man’s views are much in tune with world-renowned Swedish climate professor, Hans Jelbring. It seems other scientists are becoming more open in their agreement with such findings.

More recently, science author Heinz Thieme and 130 German scientists have also come out to refute the greenhouse gas theory as a plausible explanation of the mechanism of Earth’s climate.

This is not what NASA and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) want the public to hear as President Obama’s Democrat administration struggles to force through swingeing cap and trade taxes in the backdrop of an already over-stretched U.S. economy.

NASA’s Dr. Curry: NASA Numbers “drastic oversimplification”

Indeed, so persuasive is Dr. Miskolczi among his scientific peers that no advocate of the GHG theory (that relies on the Stefan-Boltzmann “black body” numbers) has yet been able to refute him. As I recently reported, NASA is now in a considerable disarray over what exactly is the correct equation. In fact, their education department is currently printing high-school textbooks disagreeing with the orthodox theory. So what’s going on?

As explained to me lately in e-mail correspondence by NASA’s Dr. Judith Curry: “Everybody would agree that the simple black body planetary energy balance model is a drastic oversimplification, it is used only for illustrative purposes.”

So I asked Dr. Curry if NASA could show the taxpaying American public a more exact set of equations than the crude Stefan-Boltzmann “black body” numbers: no answer.

Indeed, Stefan-Boltzmann who devised the “blackbody” equation never intended his numbers to be applied to a three-dimensional rotating planet. So why NASA’s reluctance to accept a more sophisticated and accurate new climate equation-or, at least use the tried and tested numbers that safely got Neil Armstrong landed on the Moon?

New Revelations Encourage Scientists to Speak Out

Signing up to join Dr. Miskolczi in the skeptic attack on the debunked greenhouse theory are dozens of eminent international scientists in tandem with a startling new research paper that proved NASA Apollo Moon mission scientists, forty years ago, had a better set of climate equations than the “black body” numbers that NASA’s own Dr. Curry says are,” only for illustrative purposes. Why doesn’t NASA now come clean about this?

Concern about the science behind the man-made global warming theory grew after the November 2009 Climategate. The official British Oxburgh Inquiry into alleged ‘cherry-picking’ of climate data confirmed scientists acted with subjective advocacy and being over-zealous ‘poor statisticians.’

NASA to stall and Help Climate Bill in 2010?

U.S. Senators John Kerry and Joseph Lieberman, who unveiled their climate bill earlier this month, will be sweating that NASA keeps this under wraps as they seek to force through their controversial climate bill passed before the break for Independence Day on July 4.

So if NASA truly has no gagging policy over the climate controversy then perhaps it should come clean and make a statement on these latest developments and remove all doubt?

SOURCE






Chicxulub: A Lesson In How shaky a climate-relevant "consensus" can be

Recently this site posted an article about the extinction event 65.5 million years ago at the end of the Cretaceous period. That extinction coincided with a large asteroid impact at Chicxulub, Mexico, and occurred within the time of Deccan flood basalt volcanism in India. A new review article by 41 scientists, published in the March 5, 2010, edition of Science, was cited that summarized what science thinks it knows about the extinction. That article reinforced the single cause asteroid impact extinction scenario. Now, in an excellent example of how the scientific process works, and why scientific consensus is such a bogus term, the May 21 issue of Science has published a number of letters that take exception to the previous article's conclusions.

The controversy over what killed the dinosaurs has raged among paleontologists for three decades. As previously reported, the asteriod impact theory seems to have gained the upper hand recently, though there are compeeting theories constantly arising (see “Chicxulub Resurgent” and “Shiva The Dinosaur Killer,” respectively). In the Science review article “The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact and Mass Extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene Boundary,” Peter Schulte and 40 colleagues from from 33 institutions and universities, put forward a comprehensive review of the evidence surrounding the disappearance of the dinosaurs. Their conclusion: “The correlation between impact-derived ejecta and paleontologically defined extinctions at multiple locations around the globe leads us to conclude that the Chicxulub impact triggered the mass extinction that marks the boundary between the Mesozoic and Cenozoic eras ~65.5 million years ago.” More succinctly, the asteroid did it.

While this may sound like the fabled “scientific consensus” has been reached, the article instead has triggered a firestorm. In a letter, entitled “Cretaceous Extinctions: Multiple Causes,” J. David Archibald and 28 colleagues from 22 different institutions have taken strong exception to the conclusions stated by Schulte et al. Here is the first paragraph of their letter:

In the Review "The Chicxulub Asteroid Impact and Mass Extinction at the Cretaceous-Paleogene boundary" (P. Schulte et al., 5 March, p. 1214), the terminal Cretaceous extinctions were confidently attributed to a single event, the environmental consequences of the impact of an extraterrestrial body. The list of 41 authors, although suggesting a consensus, conspicuously lacked the names of researchers in the fields of terrestrial vertebrates, including dinosaurs, as well as freshwater vertebrates and invertebrates. Although we the undersigned differ over the specifics, we have little doubt that an impact played some role in these extinctions. Nevertheless, the simplistic extinction scenario presented in the Review has not stood up to the countless studies of how vertebrates and other terrestrial and marine organisms fared at the end of the Cretaceous.

The letter signatories clearly come down on the side of the multiple causes theory, or as Douglas Erwin puts it, the “Murder on the Orient Express” model. But what about the asteroid? Archibald et al state, “it is telling that in all other instances of mass extinction in the past 600 million years, no signature of an extraterrestrial impact has ever been reliably detected, despite extensive searches.” Sounds like fighting words to me. But the fun is only getting started.

In their letter, “Cretaceous Extinctions: The Volcanic Hypothesis,” Vincent Courtillot and Frédéric Fluteau, of the Institut de Physique du Globe in Paris, France, argue for their favorite dinosaur eradicating hypothesis: killer volcanoes. In fact, they protest that Schulte et al misused their work to dismiss the volcanic hypothesis...

More HERE (See the original for links)

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