Sunday, February 05, 2012

More on the "exchange of views" in the WSJ

By Martin Hertzberg, Ph. D., Stanford, 1959

The recent exchange of letters entitled "No Need to Panic About Global Warming" and "Check With Climate Scientists for Views on Climate" are, either implicitly or explicitly, appeals to politicians based mainly on arguments from "Authority". It is tragic that what should have been an objective evaluation of the available data by independent scientists, has instead degenerated into a partisan political diatribe.

    Weather and Climate are controlled by natural laws on a scale that is enormous compared to the scale of human activity. Those natural laws engender forces and motions in the Earth's atmosphere, its oceans, and its surface that are beyond human control. Weather and Climate existed long before humans appeared on Earth, and they will continue to exist in the same way long after we are gone, either individually or collectively as the human race.

    Those forces and motions are driven by the following phenomena. First, there is the motion of the Earth relative to the Sun: the periodic changes in its elliptical orbit, the rotation of the Earth about its axis, the periodic changes in the tilt of that axis, and the periodic precession of that axis.

Second, there is the variation in Solar activity which causes changes in the amount of radiant energy that reaches the Earth and also causes variations in the Cosmic Ray input into its atmosphere, which effect the Earth's cloudiness.

Third, there is the distribution of land and water on the Earth's surface which controls the temperature distribution of the atmosphere, the availability of moisture, monsoon effects, and the paths and intensities of hurricanes, typhoons, and other storms.

Fourth, there is the topography of the Earth's land mass which causes copious precipitation on the windward side of mountains and aridity on the leeward side. Fifth, there are the motions within the Earth's oceans that determine moisture availability and its surface temperature distribution (El Nino and La Nina cycles).

    The determinant of weather is mainly water in all of its forms: as vapor in the atmosphere; in its heat transport by evaporation and condensation, as the enormous circulating mass of liquid ocean whose heat capacity and mass/energy transport dominate the motions of our atmosphere and the precipitation from it, and finally as cloud, snow, and ice cover which influence the radiative balance between the Sun, the Earth, and free Space. In comparison, the human emission of CO2 is totally insignificant for the Earth's weather and climate and there is not one iota of reliable evidence that proves otherwise.

    This was all learned by me when I served as a research and forecasting Meteorologist while on active duty in the U. S. Navy. That was long before the ersatz field now called "Climate Science" was fabricated out of thin air for the main purpose of promoting the false theory that human CO2 emission was causing "global warming/climate change/extreme weather phenomena." Note that the theory has become a moving target over the last decade, but it is still relatively easy to track and shoot down.
 
Letter submitted to the WSJ, received by email





Snow falls in Rome for the first time in 26 YEARS as -36c temperatures across eastern Europe send death toll to 150

Snow fell in Rome today for the first time in 26 years as freezing temperatures took the death toll across Europe to more than 150.

The Italian capital is usually blessed by a moderate climate but the snowfall prompted authorities stop visitors from entering the Colosseum, the Roman Forum and the Palatine Hill, the former home of Rome's ancient emperors.

The last substantial snowfalls in Rome were in 1985 and 1986, though there have been other cases of lighter snow since then, including in 2010. The director of the Colosseum, Rossella Rea, said the sites were closed out of fears that visitors could slip on ice..

Snow began falling in the late morning Friday, leaving a light dusting on trees and cars and forming slush on the roads. It wasn't clear if there would be any significant accumulation on the ground.

The European Union is bracing for another potential energy crisis in the dead of winter as Russian gas supplies to some of its member states suddenly have dwindled by up to 30 percent.

The European Commission put its gas coordination committee on alert today, but insisted the situation had not yet reached an emergency level since coordination between nations to help each other had improved and storage facilities had been upgraded.

Commission spokeswoman Marlene Holzner said Russia was going through an extremely cold spell and needed more gas to keep its citizens warm.

She said that Russia's gas contracts 'allow for certain flexibility in case they also need the gas. And that is the situation that Russia is facing at the moment.' The severe winter in Russia has seen temperatures drop to minus 35 C (minus 30 F).

Snow fell across large parts of the UK, with two inches covering Lincolnshire, Norfolk and Suffolk in white, while in the Pennines, fences and phone masts resembled ice sculptures.

The east of the country will again be covered in snow today and the South-East, Midlands and North will be hit tomorrow afternoon.

The Met Office said up to four inches of snow could fall over the weekend across much of England and Wales, with southern and central areas likely to see the worst of it.

A level three ‘amber’ cold weather alert - the second most serious - was issued, which warns of health risks to the elderly and vulnerable, and the likelihood of disruption to transport. Level four 4 would mean a 'major cold weather incident', in which normally healthy people are at risk from the cold.

The alerts are tied in to the Government’s Cold Weather Plan and are relayed to organisations such as Age UK, which help the elderly through winter.

The military have been put on alert should conditions deteriorate to a level four. When freezing conditions struck in 2010, members of the armed forces were called in to help clear snow from the roads and assist residents in particularly hard-hit areas and help clear special locations such as hospitals and care homes.

Parts of the Black Sea froze near the Romanian coastline and there was a rare snowfall on Croatian islands in the Adriatic Sea. In Bulgaria, 16 towns recorded their lowest temperatures since records started 100 years ago.

Police spokesman Predrag Maric said emergency crews were pressing hard to try to clear the snow and deliver badly needed supplies. He said: 'We are trying everything to unblock the roads since more snow and blizzards are expected in the coming days,' Maric said.

Newly reported deaths on Thursday because of the cold included 20 in Ukraine, nine in Poland, eight in Romania, and one more each in Serbia and the Czech Republic.

About 180 schools were closed in Romania because of the freezing cold. Three ships were blocked on the Danube River - one German, one Dutch and one Romanian - and efforts were made to unblock them from ice.

In Bulgaria, where 16 towns recorded their lowest temperatures since records started 100 years ago, 1,070 schools across the country remained closed Thursday and large sections of the Danube were frozen, hampering navigation.

Dutch authorities banned boats from some of Amsterdam's canals and waterways in the hope the big freeze gripping the city would turn the still water to ice and allow residents to go skating. They also turned off mills and pumps that regulate water levels in the low-lying, flood-prone nation to improve the chances of canals freezing over.

Speed skating is a winter obsession in the Netherlands and hopes are about the possibility of holding the Elfstedentocht - or '11 Town Tour' - skating race being staged for the first time since 1997.

The 200-kilometer (125-mile) tour route takes skaters over frozen canals and lakes linking 11 towns in the northern Netherlands. The tour, which is also a race for elite skaters, has only been staged 15 times since the first official event in 1909.

SOURCE







Greenie nut caught out in Britain

The feud between Energy Secretary Chris Huhne and his economist ex-wife Vicky Pryce culminated yesterday in sensational charges against both of perverting the course of justice.

Mr Huhne, the first Cabinet minister in history to be forced from office by a criminal prosecution, fiercely protested his innocence and pledged to fight the charge of using his former wife’s name to escape speeding penalty points.

Greek-born Miss Pryce, by contrast, made no reference to how she intends to plead, simply declaring she hoped for a rapid resolution to the case.

If she admits the charge, she could be called to give evidence against Mr Huhne, while if she decides to plead not guilty, she will almost certainly end up side by side with her husband in the dock.

The allegations, which stretch back to 2003, surfaced after the couple separated in 2010 when the Energy Secretary announced he was leaving his wife of 27 years for his aide Carina Trimingham, who had previously been in a civil partnership with a woman.

It is claimed that the millionaire MP sought to evade speeding points by putting them in Miss Pryce’s name.

The long-running criminal probe has sent shock waves through the Liberal Democrats and the Government as a whole.

Friends said Deputy Prime Minister Nick Clegg’s wife Miriam telephoned Miss Pryce minutes after she learned she was to face trial, telling her: ‘If you need somewhere to stay, if the kids need support, we’re here.’

One friend who spoke to Miss Pryce after charges were announced said: ‘She seems very cheerful and in a good mood. It’s like a Greek drama. But she was very buoyed up by Miriam’s call.’

For months, the Energy Secretary had appeared confident that charges would not be brought, declaring only last week that he believed prosecutors would drop the case.

Allies even suggested that he might stay in his job if he faced trial – a prospect apparently killed off by Mr Clegg and Cabinet

Yesterday 57-year-old Mr Huhne, who has three children and two stepchildren with his former wife, quit shortly after charges were announced, describing the decision to take the case to court as ‘deeply regrettable’.

‘I am innocent of these charges and I intend to fight this in the courts and I am confident that a jury will agree,’ he insisted. He said he was resigning as Energy Secretary ‘to avoid any distraction’ to his official duties or trial defence.

Mr Huhne and his ex-wife face the extremely serious charge of perverting the course of justice – an offence for which, along with perjury, former Tory Cabinet minister Jonathan Aitken was jailed for 18 months.

A jail sentence of more than 12 months would mean Mr Huhne’s Parliamentary career coming to an end, as well as his Cabinet one. MPs who are imprisoned for more than a year automatically lose their seats.

Regardless of the merits of the case against him, his departure from the Cabinet was met with private delight by many senior Tories, who have regarded him as an abrasive and grandstanding coalition colleague.

Mr Huhne’s relationship with Mr Clegg has also long been tense. Mr Clegg only narrowly defeated Mr Huhne in a contest for the Lib Dem leadership, and Mr Huhne’s allies always insisted he would have been crowned the winner had a bunch of postal votes not been delayed.

The Deputy Prime Minister went out of his way to suggest Mr Huhne could make a swift return to Government if he was acquitted.

In a letter to his former leadership rival, Mr Clegg said: ‘I fully understand your decision to stand down from government in order to clear your name, but I hope you will be able to do so rapidly so that you can return to play a key role in Government as soon as possible.’

The Prime Minister pointedly made no mention of a possible return in his own letter accepting Mr Huhne’s resignation.

During a visit to Plymouth, Mr Cameron said: ‘I think Chris Huhne has made the right decision, given the circumstances.’ Mr Cameron’s spokesman declined to say that the Prime Minister felt any personal sympathy for Mr Huhne.

The charges relate to a speeding offence committed on March 12, 2003. It is said to have taken place while Mr Huhne was driving back from Stansted airport having returned from the European Parliament, where he was then an MEP.

Last week Essex police took possession of emails and other material from the Sunday Times, which published an interview with Miss Pryce in which she first made the allegations.

SOURCE




Britain's Solar power incentives lose their shine

The fledgling industry has been flourishing, but the halving of government subsidies has thrown it into confusion

The last year hasn’t been a happy one for the British economy: GDP fell by 0.2 per cent in the final quarter of 2011; unemployment rose to a 17-year high; and government debt recently reached a record £1 trillion.

One sector, however, has been bathing in the broad sunlit uplands of growth. In 2010 there were 450 solar businesses, employing around 3,000 people; by the end of last year, there were almost 4,000, employing more than 25,000 people. In September alone, some 16,000 households had solar panels installed – twice as many as in June – as everyone from farmers to vicars to Mick Jagger (plus thousands of other canny home owners with £12,000 to spare) scrambled to take advantage of generous government subsidies.

It was, said Lord Marland, an energy minister, in a House of Lords debate this week about halving the subsidies, “one of the most ridiculous schemes ever dreamed up”.

The Government’s case is that the taxpayer is paying through the nose to subsidise inefficient technology at the expense of other renewable technologies. The solar industry argues that the Government has acted unlawfully, putting thousands of jobs at risk and stifling a promising industry at birth.

The feed-in tariff (FIT) scheme was introduced, appropriately for its detractors, on April 1, 2010. Under the scheme, householders could install solar panels on their roofs – at around £12,000 – and receive a high rate, guaranteed for 25 years, from energy companies for the electricity generated, while simultaneously saving on their energy costs (the average installation generates just over half a home’s energy needs).

According to the Energy Saving Trust, the average household could expect to be almost £1,200 a year better off by selling electricity to the grid at a rate of 43.3p per kilowatt hour (six times more than the energy companies pay for their own electricity).

Inevitably, the generous scheme ran out of control – there were more than three times as many solar installations as predicted. The Department of Energy and Climate Change estimated that, if the subsidies continued at the same rate, £100 could be added to everyone’s electricity bills by 2020. Meanwhile, the average cost of a solar panel had fallen by a third. Last October, the Government decided that this jamboree had to stop.

They went about it in a remarkably cack-handed way, however, announcing a halving of the tariff to 21p on December 12 – 11 days before a consultation period finished. A high court judge found this legally flawed, following a challenge by Friends of the Earth and two solar firms. On January 25, the Court of Appeal upheld his decision. Chris Huhne, the former Energy Secretary, was said to be considering a further appeal, to the Supreme Court, just before he resigned to spend more of his own time in the courts.

This has left the solar industry in limbo, as customers have variously rushed to take advantage of offers before they vanish or stood back to see what happens next. Now that the Government has lost its appeal, there is a further window until March 3 before the feed-in tariff is reduced. Anyone installing a system before then can join existing solar owners in benefiting from the 41p rate.

“It went ballistic before Christmas,” says Andy Tanner, chief executive of Plug Into the Sun, a firm that’s been operating in Penzance for seven years. “Then it was as dead as a doornail. Now it’s gone ballistic again. However, we’re on tenterhooks for February 9.”

That is the date when the Government announces the results of its consultation, including a scantily reported proposal to pay feed-in tariffs only to homes with an energy performance certificate of grade C or above. “That would rule out some 80 per cent of our customers,” says Tanner.

Toby Darbyshire, chief executive of Engensa, which is based in London and made a profit of £2 million on a turnover of £15 million in its first year of trading, has a list of 400 potential customers wondering whether or not to install solar panels.

“There’s a huge amount of uncertainty in the industry at the moment,” he says. “There is real anger about the sledgehammer way this has happened.”

The industry’s beef is not so much with the tariff cut – Engensa had even been lobbying the Government to reduce it, to make the industry more viable in the long term – as with the timing. “It’s left the industry high and dry,” says Derry Newman, chief executive of Solarcentury, one of the firms that took the Government to court. Solarcentury has had to scrap 12 new jobs, each of which had attracted more than 60 applicants. Investor confidence has evaporated, leading the company to cancel a social housing project in Wales. While the hysterical predictions in December of 25,000 job losses haven’t (yet) turned out to be true, some firms have gone bust. “Lots are just hanging on,” says Newman. “The small guys with large bank loans, who don’t have the cash-flow to pay them back.”

Of course, many of us without solar power – but still subsidising it – will wonder just how sympathetic we’re supposed to be. Even with a reduced feed-in tariff, those who can afford the installations will still make more than £600 a year. We’ll still be helping them to recoup their initial investment, albeit in 18 years, instead of 10. As Lord Marland put it this week: “It is already going to cost the consumer £7 billion for £400 million of net present value. This is on a product where you need the electricity when the sun doesn’t shine. It is going to produce 1.1 per cent of our electricity supply, and it doesn’t target the needy and the consumers.”

The response of the solar industry is: bear with us a little longer. According to the Solar Future campaign, costs will come down so much over the next decade that new solar capacity will not have to be subsidised. The total subsidy, it estimates, over the next 30 years will be a maximum of £9 per household.

SOURCE






How green zealots are destroying the planet: The provocative claim from a writer vilified for denying global warming

Just imagine a world where you never had to worry about global warming, where the ice caps, the ‘drowning’ Maldives and the polar bears were all doing just fine.

Imagine a world where CO2 was our friend, fossil fuels were a miracle we should cherish, and economic growth made the planet cleaner, healthier, happier and with more open spaces.

Actually, there’s no need to imagine: it already exists. So why do so many people still believe otherwise?

How come, against so much evidence, everyone from the BBC to your kids’ teachers to the Coalition government (though that may change somewhat now Energy Secretary Chris Huhne has resigned), to the President of the Royal Society to the Prince of Wales continues to pump out the message that man-made ‘climate change’ is a major threat?

Why, when the records show that there has been no global warming since 1997, are we still squandering billions of pounds trying to avert it?

These are some of the questions I set out to answer in my new book — which I can guarantee will not make me popular with environmentalists.

Almost every day, on Twitter or by email, I get violent messages of hate directed not just at me, but even my children. Separately, I’ve been criticised by websites such as the Campaign Against Climate Change (Honorary President: the environmental activist and writer George Monbiot). I’ve had a green activist set up a false website in my name to misdirect my internet traffic. I’ve been vilified everywhere from the Guardian to a BBC Horizon documentary as a wicked ‘denier’ who knows nothing about science.

Not that I’m complaining. Margaret Thatcher once famously said: ‘I always cheer up immensely if an attack is particularly wounding because I think, well, if they attack one personally, it means they have not a single political argument left.’ That’s just how I feel about my critics’ ad hominem assaults. They’re born not of strength but out of sheer desperation.

The turning point towards some semblance of sanity in the great climate war came in November 2009 with the leak of the notorious Climategate emails from the University of East Anglia.

What these showed is that the so-called ‘consensus’ science behind Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) — ie the theory that man-made CO2 is causing our planet to heat up in a dangerous, unprecedented fashion — simply cannot be trusted.

The experts had, for years, been twisting the evidence, abusing the scientific process, breaching Freedom of Information requests (by illegally hiding or deleting emails and taxpayer-funded research) and silencing dissent in a way which removes all credibility from the scaremongering reports they write for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

(The IPCC is the heavily politicised but supposedly neutral UN advisory body which has been described by President Obama as the ‘gold standard’ of international climate science.)

Since Climategate, the scientific case against AGW theory has hardened still further. Experiments at the CERN laboratory in Geneva have supported the theory of Danish physicist Henrik Svensmark that the sun — not man-made CO2 — is the biggest driver of climate change.

The latest data released by the Met Office, based on readings from 30,000 measuring stations, confirms there has been no global warming for 15 years.

Now, with sunspot activity (solar flares caused by magnetic activity) at its lowest since the days of the 17th-century frost fairs on the Thames, it seems increasingly likely we are about to enter a new mini Ice Age. Should we be bothered by this? Of course we should. Not only does it mean that for the rest of our lives we’re likely to be doomed to experience colder winters and duller summers, but it also makes us victims of perhaps the most expensive fraud in history.

Over the past 20 years, across the Western world, billions of pounds, dollars and euros have been squandered by governments on hare-brained schemes to ‘combat climate change’.

Taxes have been raised, regulations increased, flights made more expensive, incandescent light bulbs banned, landscapes despoiled by ugly, bird-chomping wind farms, economic growth curtailed — all to deal with what now turns out to have been a non-existent problem: man-made CO2.

But if anthropogenic warming is not the threat environmentalists would have us believe, why do so many people believe it is? And how come so many disparate groups — from the hair-shirt anti-capitalist activists of Greenpeace and Friends Of The Earth to the executives of big corporations, to politicians of every hue from Gordon Brown to David Cameron to scientists at NASA and the UEA — are working together to promote this pernicious myth?

The short answer is ‘follow the money’.

Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at the UEA which was at the centre of the ‘Climategate’ scandal, for example, was given £13.7 million in grants for his department’s research work; the environmental non-governmental organisations such as Greenpeace came on board because scaremongering helps them raise revenue.

You’re not going to give money to the charity’s Project Thin Ice if you think the polar bear is good for another 10,000 years, but you might if you’re told it’s seriously endangered.

Politicians were attracted because it was a good way of being seen to be addressing an issue of popular concern, and a handy excuse to put up taxes.

Big corporations joined in the scam as a) it enabled them to ‘greenwash’ their image through campaigns like BP’s ‘Beyond Petroleum’ and b) it meant all that extra environmental regulation would be a handy way of pricing their smaller competitors out of the market place.

But money isn’t the only reason. If you read the private emails of the Climategate scientists, what you discover is that most of them genuinely believe in the climate change peril.

That’s why they lied about the evidence and why they tried to destroy the careers of those scientists who disagreed with them: because they wanted to scare politicians into action before time ran out. This was not science, in other words, but political activism.

A similar ‘end justifies the means’ mentality seems to prevail among all those environmental lobby groups. They don’t exaggerate or misrepresent because they’re bad people. They do it, as a former head of Greenpeace once charmingly put it when accused of having overstated the decline in Arctic sea ice, to ‘emotionalise the issue’; because they want to make the rest of the world care about these issues as much as they do.

Powerful feelings, though, are hardly the most sensible basis for global policy. Especially not when, as it turns out, they are based on a misreading of the facts.

One of the grimmest ironies of the modern environmental movement is just how much damage it has done to the planet in the name of ‘saving’ it. Green biofuels (crops such as palm oil grown for fuel) have not only led to the destruction of millions of acres of rainforest in Asia, Africa and South America, but are now known to produce four times more CO2 pollution than fossil fuels.

Wind farms, besides blighting views, destroying topsoil and causing massive noise pollution, kill around 400,000 birds a year in the U.S. alone. Environmentalists, in fact, have a disastrous track record when it comes to predictions and policy recommendations. Rachel Carson’s 1962 bestseller Silent Spring — which promised a cancer epidemic from pesticides — led to a near worldwide ban on the malarial pesticide DDT, thus condemning millions in the Third World to die from malaria.

Paul Ehrlich’s 1968 bestseller The Population Bomb, meanwhile, rehearsed another of the green movement’s favourite themes: overpopulation. By the Seventies and Eighties, he warned, hundreds of millions of us would be dying like flies because there wouldn’t be enough food.

Why did Ehrlich’s prediction never come to pass? Because, like most of the greenies’ doomsday scenarios, it overlooked one vital factor: progress.

Because the green movement has for years been ideologically wedded to the notion that mankind is an ecological curse (‘The Earth has a cancer. The cancer is man’, as a global think tank called The Club of Rome, which includes several current and former heads of state, puts it), it fails to understand the role which technology, human ingenuity and adaption play in our species’ survival.
Ehrlich’s population disaster was averted thanks to a brilliant American scientist called Norman Borlaug who devised new mutant strains of wheat which managed to treble cereal production on the starving Indian subcontinent.

Of course, there is still widespread concern over the use of genetically modified crops, but scientists argue that with proper safeguards in place they can actually be more environmentally friendly than conventional crops, using less water and fewer pesticides.

Similar technological advances in the field of energy make a nonsense of environmentalists’ claims that we are running out of fuel: long before coal ran out came the petroleum revolution; and, though we still have plenty of oil left, we now have the miracle of shale gas which lies in abundance everywhere from Blackpool to the North Sea, and is released using blasts of high-pressure liquid to open pockets of gas in rock.

When, many decades hence, that runs out we will start to harvest clathrates (solid methane deposits) buried on the ocean floor.

Economic progress is not our enemy but our friend. It is an historical fact that the richer nations are, the more money they have to spare on ensuring a cleaner environment: compare the relatively clean air in London to the choking smog that envelops Beijing and Delhi; look at where the worst ecological disasters happened in the last century — under impoverished Communist regimes, from the Aral Sea to Chernobyl.

But the greens refuse to accept this because, according to their quasi-religious doctrine, industrial civilisation is a curse and economic growth a disease which can only be cured by rationing and self-sacrifice, higher taxes and greater state control.

That’s why I call my new book Watermelons — because it’s about zealots who are green on the outside, but in political terms, red on the inside. If only their views weren’t so influential, in schools, universities, in the media, in the corridors of power, the global economy wouldn’t be nearly in the mess it’s in today.

As someone who loves long walks in unspoilt countryside and who wants a brighter future for his children, I’m sickened by the way environmental activists tar anyone who disagrees with them as a selfish, polluting, anti-science ‘denier’.

The real deniers are those ideological greens who refuse to look at hard evidence (not just pie-in-the-sky computer models which are no more accurate than the suspect data fed into them) and won’t accept that their well-intentioned schemes to make our world a better place are in fact making it uglier, poorer and less free.

SOURCE





GISS Temperature Trend Is Complete Garbage

According to Hansen, the land surface has warmed 1.2C since 1880.



This is blatant scientific fraud. As you can see below, he had almost no temperature data in the 1880s for Africa, Greenland, South America, Northern Canada, Siberia, The Arctic, the Antarctic and South Asia. His error bar (green) is much too small to be correct. The few stations in South America and Africa show little or no warming since 1880



To make matters worse, he has corrupted the US temperature data, which makes up more than a third of the available stations for comparison. Note that a number of stations in Africa and Australia have cooled, and that most of his warming is in UHI affected areas. For all we know, the 1880s may have been warmer than the present. How is it that glaciers were rapidly melting in the 1880s, and growing in the 1960s and 1970s? How can he possibly claim that 2011 is 1.2C warmer than the 1880s based on the limited data above? It is complete nonsense to make such a claim.



Before Hansen tampered with the data, the 1880s were nearly as warm in the US as they were in the 1990s. This is critically important – because the lion’s share of high quality global weather stations during the 1880s were located in the US. Hansen’s thermometers reported little warming in the US since 1880s, and the “warming” only appears after the data has been modified. Without the US temperature data tampering (adjustments) the “global” trend since 1880 gets greatly reduced.

The hottest temperature ever recorded in Europe and in Washington DC both occurred in 1881. Hansen’s data has zero legitimacy. He is missing data from at least 0.70 of the land surface during the 19th century, yet reports trends within 0.01 degrees. He would fail any undergraduate science class for reporting a precision two orders of magnitude larger than his accuracy. It is illegitimate science to publish this temperature data without an accurate error bar, and lots of disclaimers describing the severe limitations of accuracy.

It is imperative that he publishes equally available graphs made from unaltered data, even if he honestly believes his bogus adjustments are accurate. And his altered graphs need to be clearly marked. Most people believe that they are seeing temperatures reported by thermometers, and that simply isn’t true.





CIA report below from 1974, showing that snow and ice were increasing during the 1970s. Hansen reports higher temperatures in the 1970s than the 1880s, yet we know that glaciers and polar ice were disappearing in the 1880s.

It would be impossible to have disappearing ice at lower temperatures, and increasing ice at higher temperatures – yet that is exactly what Hansen’s data shows.



More HERE (See the original for links)

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