Tuesday, September 03, 2013



Consensus? What Consensus?

Global Warming Survey Virtually Meaningless.  Even very skeptical writers were alleged to be part of the "consensus"

In recent weeks US President Obama and the UK’s Energy and Climate Secretary Ed Davey have both cited a survey of climate science abstracts that alleges an overwhelming consensus on the subject of global warming.

In a new briefing note published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation today, Andrew Montford reviews the methodology used in the survey and concludes that the consensus revealed by the paper by Cook et al. is so broad that it incorporates the views of most prominent climate sceptics.

“The consensus as described by the survey is virtually meaningless and tells us nothing about the current state of scientific opinion beyond the trivial observation that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that human activities have warmed the planet to some unspecified extent,” Andrew Montford says.

“The survey methodology therefore fails to address the key points that are in dispute in the global warming debate,” Montford adds.

Full paper here




IPCC Lead Author Reports Flaws in Asserted 97-Percent Consensus

A recently published paper claiming 97 percent of peer-reviewed studies on climate change agree “humans are causing global warming” is riddled with errors and ends-driven measuring sticks, according to United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change lead author Richard Tol. Tol reported his findings in an August 27 letter to University of Queensland (Australia) professor Peter Hoj.

Tol said the paper first caught his attention when he noticed several procedural errors.

“My attention was drawn to the fact that the headline conclusion had no confidence interval, that the main validity test was informal, and that the sample contained a very large number of irrelevant papers while simultaneously omitting many relevant papers,” Tol explained.

Tol then wrote to the main author of the paper, John Cook, seeking the underlying data forming the basis of the study. Cook, a blogger and global warming activist who works under Hoj at the University of Queensland, declined to send Cook all or even most of the data. Instead, Cook sent merely 13 percent of the requested data.

Even in the small percentage of data Cook submitted, Tol found many new problems.

“I found that that the consensus rate in the data differs from that reported in the paper,” Tol noted in his letter to Hoj. “Further research showed that, contrary to what is said in the paper, the main validity test in fact invalidates the data. And the sample of papers does not represent the literature. That is, the main finding of the paper is incorrect, invalid and unrepresentative.”

“Furthermore, the data showed patterns that cannot be explained by either the data gathering process as described in the paper or by chance,” Tol observed.

Tol noted the small number of people who rated the peer-reviewed studies and the lack of any identified means of assessing and correcting for reviewers’ bias.

Tol concluded his letter by asking Hoj to provide the requested data Cook declined to send to Tol.

“His foot-dragging, condoned by senior university officials, does not reflect well on the University of Queensland’s attitude towards replication and openness. His refusal to release all data may indicate that more could be wrong with the paper.”

SOURCE




2013 Hurricane Season Continues Record Inactivity

This week marks the halfway point of the 2013 Atlantic hurricane season – and not a single hurricane has formed anywhere in the Atlantic. This year’s lack of hurricanes continues an ongoing, beneficial trend of fewer hurricanes coinciding with moderately warming temperatures as the planet continues its recovery from the Little Ice Age. The decline in hurricanes also coincides with global warming alarmists ramping up a deceptive public relations campaign designed to convince the public that global warming skeptics are causing more hurricanes.

The lack of hurricanes so far in 2013 is remarkable in several particulars.

First, hurricanes have posted a giant goose egg so far on the 2013 hurricane scoreboard. This isn’t just hurricane strikes in the United States; this is hurricane formation anywhere in the Atlantic.

Second, this year’s hurricane inactivity continues what was already a record lack of recent hurricanes. Although President Barack Obama is well into his fifth year in office, the Obama administration is tied for the fewest number of U.S. hurricane strikes for any one- or two-term presidency in history.

Third, the silent 2013 hurricane season extends an amazing record regarding major hurricane strikes of Category 3 or higher. The United States is currently undergoing its longest period in history without a major hurricane strike.

Fourth, the record lack of major hurricane strikes continues a longer-term decline. During the past five decades, an average of 5.6 major hurricanes struck the United States per decade. During the preceding five decades, an average of 8.4 major hurricanes struck the United States.

Fifth, a fairly typical number of small tropical storms continue to form in 2013, but the tropical storms are not growing into hurricanes. This runs counter to alarmist claims that global warming puts tropical storms on steroids.

Sixth, the silent 2013 Atlantic hurricane season continues a longer-term decline in global hurricane activity. The global number of tropical storms and hurricanes has been in slow but steady decline since at least 1970, bringing 40-plus years of relief from the planet’s most devastating storms.

Nevertheless, alarmists are doubling down on false hurricane claims, all the while engaging in name-calling and personal attacks against the “deniers” who defer to objective facts and real-world hurricane data.

The 350 Action group garnered substantial media attention this week by engaging in just such misleading and personal attacks. The global warming activist group released a video proposing to name hurricanes after prominent legislators who “deny” that global warming causes more hurricanes.

There is an important lesson to learn from the alarmists’ attempt to smear people who defer to objective evidence and factual data rather than misguided speculation and alarmism: The “denier” label applies most fittingly to global warming activists rather than skeptics.

SOURCE





Population Bomb-er Paul Ehrlich claims vindication b/c 2 billion are ‘undernourished’

The “undernourished” may as well never have been born, right Paul? The San Francisco Chronicle spotlights the eternally-wrong Paul Ehrlich:

"…People have been predicting disaster for centuries, including 18th century scholar Thomas Malthus and Stanford University ecologist Paul Ehrlich, who in 1968 with his wife Anne predicted famines from runaway population growth in “The Population Bomb.”

Ehrlich said he was right because at least 2 billion people are malnourished.

“You’ll find plenty of people who will tell you not to worry, technology will take care of it,” Ehrlich said. “We’ll feed, house, clothe and so on 9.5 billion people, give them happy lives with no problem at all. That’s exactly the line that Anne and I got when there were 3.5 billion people on the planet. … The answer is, they haven’t done it.”

Reducing population growth was central to the U.S. environmental movement at its birth in 1970, spurred in part by Ehrlich’s book.  Most environmental groups now steer clear of the subject…"

SOURCE





Climate Change Reconsidered II to be Released on September 17

2013 NIPCC CoverThe Heartland Institute and the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) have been hard at work since 2011 on a new edition of Climate Change Reconsidered. The first volume of the new report, titled Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science, will be released in digital form in September to coincide with the release of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) 5th Assessment Report. A second volume on “Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerabilities” is slated for release in March or April 2014.

Heartland is planning to hold a press conference in Chicago on Sept. 17 at which it will announce the findings of the 1,200-plus-page report and release an executive summary. The organization will also host a “book launch luncheon” on Sept. 18 in the Heartland Institute library featuring three of the report’s lead authors. More details of the unveiling of Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science, will be released in the coming weeks.

The research effort has been led by Craig Idso, Ph.D., chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change; Robert Carter, Ph.D.,  Former Head of the School of Earth Sciences, James Cook University (Australia), and S. Fred Singer, Ph.D., president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project and professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia. An international team of lead authors, section authors, contributors, and reviewers is participating in the effort.

The first two volumes published in the Climate Change Reconsidered series, in 2009 and 2011, were widely recognized as the most comprehensive and authoritative critiques of the alarmist reports of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Reviews and the complete texts of both volumes are available here and here. In June, a division of the Chinese Academy of Sciences published a Chinese translation and condensed edition of the two volumes.

SOURCE

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