Most widely used climate computer model exaggerates actual global warming by 67%

A paper published today in the Journal of Climate announces a new version of the computer climate model most widely used by climate scientists and the IPCC, called the Community Climate System Model (CCSM) version 4. The creators claim their program is

"a fully-coupled, global climate model that provides state-of-the-art computer simulations of the Earth’s past, present, and future climate states."

The abstract, however, contains a remarkable admission that the model exaggerates the global warming from 1850 to 2005 by 0.4°C more than observations. The observed global warming from 1850 to 2005 was only 0.6°C, thus the computer model predicted ~ 67% more global warming than actually occurred. This exaggeration alone could account for all of the claimed "heat trapping" from the increase in man-made carbon dioxide over that same 155 year period. IPCC projections for future global warming based upon this model may be similarly greatly exaggerated.

The Community Climate System Model Version 4

Abstract:

The fourth version of the Community Climate System Model (CCSM4) was recently completed and released to the climate community. This paper describes developments to all CCSM components, and documents fully coupled pre-industrial control runs compared to the previous version, CCSM3. Using the standard atmosphere and land resolution of 1° results in the sea surface temperature biases in the major upwelling regions being comparable to the 1.4° resolution CCSM3. Two changes to the deep convection scheme in the atmosphere component result in CCSM4 producing El Nino/Southern Oscillation variability with a much more realistic frequency distribution than CCSM3, although the amplitude is too large compared to observations. They also improve the Madden-Julian Oscillation, and the frequency distribution of tropical precipitation. A new overflow parameterization in the ocean component leads to an improved simulation of the Gulf Stream path and the North Atlantic Ocean meridional overturning circulation. Changes to CCSM4 land component lead to a much improved annual cycle of water storage, especially in the tropics. The CCSM4 sea ice component uses much more realistic albedos than CCSM3, and for several reasons the Arctic sea ice concentration is improved in CCSM4. An ensemble of 20th century simulations produces a pretty good match to the observed September Arctic sea ice extent from 1979 to 2005. The CCSM4 ensemble mean increase in globally-averaged surface temperature between 1850 and 2005 is larger than the observed increase by about 0.4°C. This is consistent with the fact that CCSM4 does not include a representation of the indirect effects of aerosols, although other factors may come into play. The CCSM4 still has significant biases, such as the mean precipitation distribution in the tropical Pacific Ocean, too much low cloud in the Arctic, and the latitudinal distributions of short-wave and long-wave cloud forcings.

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After 20 years involved in academic psychological research, I concluded that most psychological research consisted simply of academics having fun playing silly games. The above would suggest the same of climate scientists -- JR




Australia: Crazy Greenie recycling scheme leads to dangerous parasites in the Sydney water supply

HUMAN faeces used as fertiliser on farms is being blamed for a breakout of Third World parasites causing a serious stomach illness across Sydney.

Doctors fear the Sydney Water Biosolids Strategy, which turns 180,000 tonnes of human waste into fertiliser yearly, could be behind the emergence of stomach bug, Blastocystis hominis, usually found in dirty water in Third World countries and spread via faeces, and a second parasite which often accompanies it, D. fragilis. Both cause cramps, extreme pain, distended stomach, diarrhoea, weight loss and fatigue.

Confidential microbiology tests, signed off on by Sydney Water in the past four months and obtained by The Sunday Telegraph, detected D. fragilis in one in five samples of primary wastewater. The tests did not look for Blastocystis hominis.

Solid waste removed from the sewage is turned into biosolids and sent to 20 farms in NSW to enrich soil under a sustainability program.

Professor Kerryn Phelps, former head of the Australian Medical Association said there needs to be an independent inquiry into the practice after detecting an increasing number of patients with the parasites in their gut. "I've noticed an increase in these pathogens in people who have not travelled overseas," she said.

"One hundred and eighty thousand tonnes of partially treated sewage is being used as fertiliser annually and the program had not been independently assessed. "From a public health point of view, we have what appears to be a significant problem."

Switzerland and Austria have banned the use of sewerage sludge as fertiliser, while in Sweden and parts of Germany, supermarkets do not stock products treated with biosolids.

Three studies, published in international medical and public health policy journals, found residents living near land where biosolids are used suffered a statistically higher rate of illness.

The most recent, a 2007 health survey of residents living near Ohio farm fields which use biosolids, published in the international journal, Archives of Environmental & Occupational Health, said this: "Results revealed that some reported health-related symptoms were statistically significantly elevated among the exposed residents. The findings suggest an increased risk for certain respiratory, gastrointestinal and other diseases among residents living near farm fields on which the use of biosolids was permitted."

Yet, NSW Health has not reviewed the potential health impacts of the program nor conducted tests on the farms where soil has been fertilised with human faeces.

Leading gastroenterologist, Professor Thomas Borody, who carried out research supporting the team that won a Nobel Prize for cure of stomach ulcers, said there needs to be an investigation into the biosolids program to give the public certainty that human faeces is not infecting our food supply.

He said in the past 10 to 15 years, 1500 people had been diagnosed with D. fragilis and Blastocystis in his practice. "If we are going to be using foods grown on crops which use these biosolids it would be good to have a certain level of assurance that they are not carrying pathogens," he said.

He said the parasite Blastocystis homonis was difficult to kill in humans. "The problem, apart from parasites, is viruses," he said. "Faecal matter transmits viruses that give you diarrhoea. What worries us more is the sporadic case of Hepatitis B and C when you do not know how it has been caught. Some people have never used needles."

Despite the discussion in medical journals about the transmission of D. fragilis, Sydney Water's spokesman said the bug was not a concern and was unlikely to survive for long outside the human body. "Sydney Water is unaware of any cases of illnesses directly caused by biosolids," the spokesman said.

Former general manager of Pittwater City Council, Angus Gordon, who retired in 2006, said NSW Health advised him not to use biosolids on sports ovals because it was not safe around children.

"The problem with biosolids was, at the time we were being advised, that there was the possibility of pathogens being within the biosolids," he said. "We were asking the question: if we were to use this material would it be safe for people, particularly children, to play on those fields, given that people do sustain injuries and grazes? "At the time we rejected it on the basis that we weren't able to get the assurances."

NSW Health's spokesman said if Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) guidelines were adhered to, the use of biosolids was unlikely to present a risk to public health. The 92-page long EPA guidelines state that if biosolids are used on agricultural land, crops - from potatoes to lettuce and turf - should not be grown for between 18 months and five years. There is also a 30-day harvesting rule for animal feed and fibre crops.

"Where there is a high potential for public exposure, access should be restricted by fencing and signing for one year after biosolids application," the guidelines state.

Sydney Water's water quality and public health program manager Peter Cox could not give a definitive answer when asked whether pathogens could be transferred from biosolids to humans, posing a health risk.

"What we do is we manage the guidelines to make sure that the biosolids are safe for the purpose that they are used," he said. "Pathogens can exist in very low numbers but not enough to cause any harm. There are lots and lots of pathogens and it will depend on the individual bit of biosolid that you pick up to analyse. The whole management of biosolids, which includes treatment and potential for exposure, is there so that it doesn't cause a risk to health."

Sydney Water does not conduct testing on its biosolids for the two parasites and would not reveal which pathogens, if any, it does test for. "We don't routinely test for things that are not required for us to test in the guidelines," Mr Cox said.

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How to abolish the EPA

Over a dozen Senate Republicans led by Sen. Richard Burr (R-N.C.) are pushing a plan that would merge the Energy Department and the Environmental Protection Agency into one department.

“The bill would provide cost savings by combining duplicative functions while improving the administration of energy and environmental policies by ensuring a coordinated approach,” Burr’s office said in a statement on the legislation.

Combining duplicative functions and nixing ineffective programs could save $3 billion over the next year alone, Burr’s office said.
The bill introduced Thursday would create a Department of Energy and Environment. It comes at a time when Republicans are alleging that many EPA policies are hindering domestic energy production.

Burr’s 15 co-sponsors include Sens. Jim Demint (R-S.C.), Mike Enzi (R-Wyo.), John Thune (R-S.D.), John McCain (R-Ariz.), as well as several freshmen such as Sens. Mike Lee (R-Utah) and John Boozman (R-Ark.).

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The dupication of functions argument is a good one. It could potentially lead to the complete abolition of Federal departments that overlap with State ones, such as the EPA -- JR





Dave Roberts Of Grist Tells Germans: “U.S. Climate Bill Is Dead"

According to klimaretter.de, a warmist site operated by socialists and green Utopians, Dave Roberts was invited by the Heinrich Böll Foundation as a speaker for climate blogs at the network conference re:publica in Berlin last month. Roberts, you will recall, is the activist at Grist who in 2006 called for Nuremberg-type trials for bastards who deny global warming.

Klimaretter.de interviewed Roberts here and asked him about the US failure to pass a climate bill and the power of American conservatives. He had some interesting responses. Here are some excerpts of questions and answers in paraphrased form (I’ve eliminated all the rambling).

klimaretter: After the wonderful election of Barack Obama, hopes to pass a climate were high. What happened?

Roberts: The idea that it would be enough to replace “bad people” with “good people” turned out to be utterly naive. Barack Obama seemed to be the Messiah we had been waiting for. But his charisma was not enough to solve the USA’s deep problems. The Republicans routinely used delay and disrupt tactics.

klimaretter: Why didn’t the law get passed?

Roberts: Obama thought he could quickly pass health care reform, and then use the momentum to pass a climate bill. But passing health care reform got bogged down and became a very difficult issue. The momentum got lost. So the climate bill died and the only thing left to do is to set our hopes on EPA and its authority to regulate CO2. The Republicans want to defund the EPA. The fight is tough, but it’s not over yet.

klimaretter: What makes the conservative climate skeptics so powerful in the USA?

Roberts: The conservatives really know how to create an atmosphere of controversy in order to block climate protection measures. The Republicans are focused on spreading doubt and portraying scientific consensus as being in dispute. There are great parallels with the tactics used by the tobacco industry.

klimaretter: Will it be possible to expect progress in US climate protection over the next 2 Obama years?

Roberts (see English below): Das Klimagesetz ist jedenfalls erstmal tot – wahrscheinlich sogar auf etliche Jahre. Und auch wenn Obama wiedergewählt wird und die Demokraten im Repräsentantenhaus die Mehrheit zurückgewinnen muss man sich fragen, ob das reichen wird. Denn an dem Punkt waren wir schon einmal – und das Klimagesetz ist trotzdem grandios gescheitert.

In English: “The climate bill is now dead in any case – probably even for a number of years. And even if Obama gets re-elected and the Democrats regain the majority in the House of Representatives, one has to ask whether that will be enough. We were at that point once already, and the climate bill failed spectacularly.”

More HERE





Corruption of Climate Science Has Created 30 Lost Years

Traditionally, the older scientists held to the prevailing wisdom and were challenged by the new, skeptical graduates looking for wider answers. In climatology, the opposite has happened. The so-called skeptics challenging the prevailing wisdom are the professors who have researched and taught the subject for 30 years or longer. Their knowledge is much wider than that of the new young scientists because climate science has stagnated for thirty years. All the funding was directed to only one side of climate science, and that was the side promoted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and accepted as the ‘official science’ by governments.

It’s now frightening how little climate science is known by both sides of the debate on human causation of global warming. I wrote this sentence before I saw a paper from Michigan State University that found,

Most college students in the United States do not grasp the scientific basis of the carbon cycle – an essential skill in understanding the causes and consequences of climate change.

The professor says students need to know because they must deal with the buildup of CO2 causing climate change. This discloses his ignorance about the science of the carbon cycle and the role of CO2 in climate. It’s not surprising, and caused by three major factors:

* a function of the emotional, irrational, religious approach to environmentalism;

* the takeover of climate science for a political agenda; and
funding directed to prove the political, rather than the scientific, agenda.

* The dogmatism of politics and religion combined to suppress openness of ideas and the advance of knowledge critical to science.

We now have a generation (30 years) of people teaching, researching, or running government that has little knowledge because of lack of fundamental education. Because of them, the public is ill-informed, doesn’t understand the problem, and doesn’t even know the questions to ask.

Correcting the education process will take time, because there are insufficient people with the knowledge or expertise. Correcting and widening the research functions will take longer because of removing or re-educating current personnel and the lack of qualified replacements. Even if achieved, success is unlikely because there is the massive problem of inadequate data.

Reduction in the number of weather stations, elimination of raw data by national governments, unexplained manipulations of existing data, and deliberate loss of data were all done to predetermine and justify results. This couples with failure to fund research to recover and reconstruct historical data. In his autobiography, Hubert Lamb said he founded the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in 1972 because

…it was clear that the first and greatest need was to establish the facts of the past record of the natural climate in times before any side effects of human activities could well be important.

The situation is worse now, sadly, due to the people at the CRU and government weather agencies.

The blame begins with the political manipulations of Maurice Strong, but he only succeeded because of the so-called climate scientists. Among them, computer modelers caused the biggest problem. They needed to know the most, but knew the least. If they knew anything, they would know there is inadequate data and understanding of the major components and mechanisms on which to build the models.

A former editor of an enlightened environmental journal said we need a committee of scientists from the many disciplines involved in climate science. Such a committee existed 25 years ago, and produced groundbreaking work. It was a joint project funded by The National Museum of Canada and Environment Canada under the title Climatic Change in Canada During the Past 20,000 Years. Each year a specific topic was considered, and scientists presented material that was published in Syllogeus. For example, Syllogeus 55 examined Critical Periods in the Quaternary of Climatic History of Northern North America. All the problems that plague climate science, such as tree rings, ice cores, circulation patterns, and proxy data, among many others, were identified and researched.

In the last meeting, I was elected Chair, and in my acceptance speech I said we needed to consider, carefully and scientifically, the claims of global warming. Environment Canada cut the funding, apparently, because it challenged the political position the agency had already taken; the project died. Canada should reconstitute it, because it was producing useful and non-political science.

People who totally accepted the corrupted, limited and narrowly focused science of the IPCC have taught climate science for the last 30 years. They should all read H.H. Lamb’s monumental two-volume set Climate: Present, Past and Future. Vol. 1: Fundamentals and Climate Now (1972) and Climate: Present, Past and Future. Vol. 2: Climatic History and the Future (1977).

They’d learn that all issues now put forward as ‘new’ are not new at all. They only appear new because of the black hole that politicians, aided by a few climatically uneducated political scientists, have dragged climate science into over the last 30 years.

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Warmists trying new legal ploy

A group of attorneys representing children and young adults began to file legal actions Wednesday in every state and Washington in an effort to force government intervention on climate change.

The courtroom ploy was backed by activists looking for a legal soft spot to advance a cause that has stumbled in the face of stiff congressional opposition and a skeptical U.S. Supreme Court.

The goal is to have the atmosphere declared for the first time as a "public trust" deserving special protection. That's a concept previously used to clean up polluted rivers and coastlines, although legal experts said they were uncertain it could be applied successfully to climate change.

The spate of lawsuits, led by an Oregon-based non-profit called Our Children's Trust, were based on "common law" theories, not statutes adopted by state or federal lawmakers. Documents in the cases were provided in advance to The Associated Press.

Conservative opponents warned the effort could overload the judicial system and paralyze the economy with over-regulation.

Attorneys involved in the lawsuits said a victory in even one or two cases would give environmentalists leverage, leading to new regulations to rein in greenhouse gas emissions that scientists say are driving global temperatures higher.

State-level lawsuits were planned in Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Massachusetts, Minnesota, Montana, New Mexico, Oregon and Washington, organizers said. A federal lawsuit was to be filed in California, while regulatory petitions filed elsewhere would ask state environmental agencies to tighten restrictions on vehicle and industrial plant emissions.

A 16-year-old climate activist listed as a plaintiff in one of the cases, Alec Loorz of California, said he latched onto the effort because he thought "it would give us teeth, give us a bigger voice than just yelling and marching."

"People have tried pushing legislation and that hasn't worked. Obama hasn't been able to push anything through. The only option we have is the judicial system — taking this to the courts," said Loorz.

Loorz said he began giving public presentations on climate change when he was 13, soon after seeing former Vice-President Al Gore's movie, "Inconvenient Truth."

Another case that relied on unconventional legal tactics to address climate change got a tepid reception during arguments last month before the U.S. Supreme Court. That matter involved several states that sought to rein in power plant emissions by declaring them a public nuisance.

A ruling is pending, but Harvard Law School professor Jody Freeman said justices had questioned whether courts were the appropriate forum for the issue.

"I am generally skeptical the plaintiffs will succeed in the courts pressing for common-law remedies from judges," Freeman said.

Columbia University law professor Michael Gerrard described the public trust suits as a "bold move" by activists looking to use all available options to impose greenhouse gas restrictions. Still, he joined Freeman in saying the pending decision in the public nuisance case would heavily influence the outcome of the state-level lawsuits.

A more optimistic view came from Gus Speth, chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality under President Jimmy Carter.

Speth, now at the Vermont Law School, said public trust litigation over climate change could work if its backers can find a judge willing to innovate a new area of law.

Yet that outcome could only result if a judge is willing to buy into what conservative analyst Hans von Spakovsky called "a creative, made-up legal theory."

"This is a complete violation of our whole constitutional system. These kinds of public policy issues are up to either the state legislatures or Congress to determine, not judges," said von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation.

Eddy and others involved in Wednesday's lawsuits credited University of Oregon law professor Mary Christina Wood as laying the legal groundwork for their litigation.

Wood told the AP that mainstream environmental groups had approached climate change with the same tactics used to combat industrial developments or protect endangered species. But she said lawsuits based on existing environmental laws had come up short.

What is needed, Wood said, is a sweeping challenge to the government's failure to address climate change. And having young people as plaintiffs in the cases gives added moral authority, she added.

The plaintiffs include college students, high school activists, and children of conservationists and attorneys, along with at least one environmental group WildEarth Guardians.

"We should be getting youths in front of the courts, not polar bears," Wood said, referring to widely publicized attempts to have courts declare polar bears endangered as rising temperatures melt Arctic ice.

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Only one-quarter of Britons think risks of climate change outweigh the benefits

The private think-tank Ipsos recently surveyed more than 2,000 Britons aged 16 and above about their attitudes toward science. A news release about the survey findings says nothing about climate change.

But if you actually dig into the topline results there’s a startling finding with regard to climate change. I’m speaking of question Q11F, which asked respondents: From what you know or have heard about climate change, which of these statements, if any, most closely reflects your own opinion?

The following table shows the results of the survey (middle column) along with results of a similar question asked in 2004-2005 (far-right).



Let’s break that down. In the middle of the number of respondents believed the risks of climate change outweighed the benefits by a considerably more than three-to-one margin.

Fast forward to today. In Britain more people believe the benefits of climate change outweigh the risks than believe the risks outweigh the benefits. In fact, only about one-quarter of respondents seem to think the risks of climate change outweigh the benefits.

For more fun, check out the response to question Q10K, in which 75 percent of respondents deemed themselves as “very well” or “fairly well” informed about climate change. That was higher than every other scientific category measured, including vaccinations (74 percent), nuclear power (45 percent) and clinical trials (33 percent).

Now let’s say you’re a scientist concerned about climate change. (Despite what you may have read, a lot of them really are). Here’s the challenge you’re facing: Not only does the public not presently believe you, but 75 percent of them think they already know enough about the issue to not need any further lecturing from you, thank you very much.

It’s an overwhelming science communication challenge. Geoscientist Michael Oppenheimer recently offered some sage advice to colleagues considering the roles scientists can play in the public discourse of climate change. It’s worth a read.

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