Climate Change Consensus?

[Canus Chinookus]

Absolutely.

In addition chockalicious has also altered woxof's quotes in a further attempt to vilify & discredit.

Woxof...you're presenting reasoned sound arguments that need to be heard, are well written and in my view, show amazing restraint. Well done.

Agreed.

W0X0F, saying what most of us are already thinking.

[Guest rattler]

About climate change, I do agree with WOXOF ,,,, on other things.......

[Canus Chinookus]

Do you agree on what might be causing it?

[Guest woxof]

Thanks for the show of support. Perhaps the silent majority starting to speak out? I think Mitch's very last response is something that perhaps others on the board should consider as a model for response from others.

Due to the encouraging last few posts, I will continue to post credible articles questioning the man-made global warming theory.(Well...I probably would have anyway).

[Guest rattler]

Do you agree on what might be causing it?

Not completely.

My position is that the change we are seeing could be a number of things (change in solar activity, natural cycles and of course some influence from humans).

I am certain however that Carbon trading will never do anything except line some pockets.

I am also very certain that if and I repeat if, human activity is part of the cause, then cutbacks on C02 by developed countries will have no effect as long as the two worst (in total tonnes) do nothing.

Mind you , like all of us on this forum, I can only base my opinion on what I garner from what I consider creditable sources.

Unlike some though, I do think that there is nothing wrong with reducing our impact on the earth by:

recycling, more efficient use of hydrocarbons and other energy sources, conservation of our wetlands to name a few ways that we can not but help to preserve what we have for future generations.

[Canus Chinookus]

When I fly over southern BC on a weekly basis(it seems) during all seasons, sometimes there are forest fires, sometimes not. During the off fire season, for all mankind's emissions in that area, I rarely see anything but a localized effect to man's output. During the fire season, all I see is valley after valley covered in smoke(sometimes entire moutains), ash, and other byproducts of nature's fury.

I also note the effects of one volcanic eruption last spring/summer, centered somewhere on the Alaskan island chain, affecting high altitude visibility 1000's of miles away(as far as southern Manitoba, but probably further), for a couple weeks straight.

And, when I observe the natural earth processes, and observe the manmade addition, I see a mouse vs goliath.

Now having said that, I'm only applying my argument to the CO2 debate, not water pollution, overfishing, air pollution(although a forest fire and volcano easily win there too), deforestation, etc.

I have said before and I'll say it again. There are far greater and more pressing ecological emergencies that this CO2 BS the political activists are screaming about.

[Moon The Loon]

I don't think too many doubt what many of us have been saying for years. Kyoto was a thinly veiled sham to limit growth of third world countries; any damage done by heavy particulates of CO2 to our atmosphere have already taken place, based upon (what I believe to be good) scientific data; the idea of taxing carbon emissions is nothing but a tax winfall for any government invoking the process; and the list goes on.

One can sit in front of one's computer for weeks at a time bolstering one's opinion. That is what is at issue in the current debate. Most people simply regurgitate other's opinions without spending the time to formulate their own. Others have done the research to make up their own minds. Still others have decided upon what they believe to be right, then propagate things they've found in order to support their opinions. Still others again simply parrot those who speak the loudest about any given subject.

Those who seek only those arguments that support their view are the most heinous of scientists. Some Big Bang theorists continue to modify their theory of the Big Bang because modern observations don't fit the model. So rather than come up with a new model that reflects the observations, they continue to modify the model to fit the conflicting observations. This has been the practice of many climatologists, in my opinion. This has also been the practice of some on this forum.

That is nothing more than my opinion. We all know about opinions.

Which is the brunt of Mitch's and others criticisms of a few in our midst.

Everybody needs to lighten up. Nobody is going to live or die by what's posted here.

[Guest rattler]

Which is the brunt of Mitch's and others criticisms of a few in our midst.

Everybody needs to lighten up. Nobody is going to live or die by what's posted here.

You're no fun, if that happens what will the trolls eat?

[Guest woxof]

After Copenhagen, the end of the science

Rising uncertainty over science existed long before the CRU emails surfaced

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/f...he-science.aspx

By Terence Corcoran

In the run-up to next month’s increasingly shaky Copenhagen global warming policy negotiations, the official advice from the world’s climatists is that the politicians and the rest of us should just pay no attention to the science of climate change. It is settled, they say, and all we have to do — as the Financial Times editorialized recently — is “follow the science” and get on with the business of reconstruction and redistributing world economic production. We must, in the words of Elizabeth Kolbert, The New Yorker’s resident climatist, maintain our “faith in science.”

Among true believers, holding on to that deep faith in the scientific process must be something of a strain, not unlike holding on to the conviction that Moses actually did part the Red Sea. That’s some trick! Before this past weekend, doubts about the foundations of climate science were already being seriously raised by climate observers who noted, among other anomalies, that average global temperatures are no higher than they were in 1998 and may get cooler in coming years? If the world is getting hotter, how come it’s not getting hotter?

Other observations are also feeding public skepticism of the idea that man-made global warming is a risk to planetary ecosystems and the future of human life on Earth. One could fill pages with evidence either of global warming’s manifest absence from our lives or its failure to show up on schedule or as expected. Where are the hurricanes, the sea level increases, the floods in Europe, the steady signs of warming? Fewer people believe the hype, one of the main reasons politicians heading to the Copenhagen are shying away from major commitments.

If, as expected, Copenhagen fails to rewrite the rules of the world economy to meet climate objectives, the next step in the process will be the slow collapse of the science. It will not happen overnight — billions of dollars and man-hours have already been invested in the science. It will take time to unwind.

Already fraying at the edges, the science unravelled a little more over the past weekend. Fresh reason for skepticism emerged with the release — via hackers or internal leaks — of a massive cache of emails collected in the computer systems at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in Britain. The CRU is the prime source of global temperature data, and the emails raise serious issues about some of the methods and practices of the leading figures in the official science of global warming.

Climate skeptics have swarmed the email cache and are trying to turn it into evidence of science skulduggery. There is evidence, they say, of science fraud that should serve to discredit the work of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Defenders of the establishment claim the emails are much ado about not much, beyond revealing routine inside-science debates and conflicts. A few of the key emails from the massive collection are reproduced elsewhere on this page, cherry-picked from more than 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 documents that are now readily available to the curious in the Internet.

Clearly climate science is not Louis Pasteur in his lab or Alexander Fleming searching for antibiotics and discovering penicillin. Providing the proof for man-made global warming is big business and big politics, backed by hundreds of billions of dollar and deep ideological convictions. Have the convictions overtaken the search for scientific proof? The CRU emails, while no smoking gun of fraud and malfeasance, can only add to the already mounting scientific and popular skepticism.

The coming end of certainty over man-made warming was already a possibility before the CRU events. The idea that the science is not settled, or that it is incomplete and uncertain, shows up in many places, even among the true believers.

One of the CRU emails is from Kevin Trenberth, head of the Climate Analysis Section at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Colorado and a leading member of the IPCC science team. Last month, in a letter to Michael Mann, the inventor of the “hockey stick” graph, he asked: “Where the heck is global warming?” It’s freezing in Colorado, he said, and “the fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”

It could be more than a travesty if, over the next few years, global warming doesn’t make a major appearance in the world’s climate. If world temperatures — which are now no hotter than they were in 1998 — stay low for the next five to 10 years, it suggests a major gap in climate models that support global warming theory. The BBC’s science-based climate blogger recently summarized the looming dilemma. Under long-range climate model simulations of man-made global warming, it is supposedly impossible for there to be no warming over a 15-year period. Since 10 years have passed, the next five are crucial. If temperatures rise to above 1998 levels, the BBC’s Paul Hudson writes, “then climate skeptics will have nowhere to hide.” But if in the next few years temperatures “do not exceed 1998 temperature levels, then this could cause big questions to be asked.”

Such big questions are already being asked at the highest scientific levels. The official UN science community is currently totally at a loss to understand, let alone explain, much of anything beyond their 100-year prediction of rising temperatures brought on by increases in carbon emissions. They have the big picture, but they have none of the little pictures of what will happen in five years or 10 years or even three or four decades. Mojib Latif, of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, Kiel University, outlined the gaps in decadal prediction at a conference in September.

Two or three decades of “cooling” may well happen, said Prof. Latif, referring to a chart that shows temperatures below current levels as late as 2030. He also showed that hurricanes have not increased in frequency, there is no evidence so far of rising sea levels, key rainfall measures show no trend linked to global warming, and climate models can be off by as much as 10 degrees locally.

Another new paper by NCAR’s James Hurrell and others in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society reviews the “profound gaps,” “compromises,” “errors” and general failures and inadequacies in existing climate models. He calls for massive increases in computer power to resolve the issues. How much power? Scientists at the World Climate Conference in September, where the science gaps were explored, endorsed an earlier recommendation. “There is a compelling need for dedicated computational facilities that are 1,000 times to 10,000 times more powerful than available today.”

With public suspicion already high and current climate science already in some doubt if not disrepute, and with politicians not quite willing to sacrifice economy growth over computer modelled climate, that chances that scientists will get that computer power seem to be diminishing.

[Guest woxof]

Woxof has some information for those trusting the climate scientists......

http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/f...limategate.aspx

CLIMATEGATE

What the climate scientists wrote and when they wrote it

On Friday, news broke that a hacker had broken in to the computer systems used by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia in Britain, obtaining more than 1,000 e-mails and 3,000 documents. The material, which covers a period of more than a decade, has led many to conclude that climate scientists associated with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and various government agencies have been cooking the books to make the case for man-made global warming. Climate researchers deny any wrongdoing, explaining that the e-mails are innocent and have been taken out of context. The University, while confirming the hacking, cannot confirm the authenticity of all the stolen documents. Here is a sampling of some of the exchanges.

•From Phil Jones, head of the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University, to Ray Bradley, Michael Mann, and Malcolm Hughes, three U.S. scientists who have produced the controversial “hockey-stick graphs” that purport to show rapidly increasing temperatures in recent decades. Nov, 16, 1999.

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

•From Kevin Trenberth, a lead author with the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, to Michael Mann, on Oct 12. 2009. The email, titled “BBC U-turn on climate,” laments a BBC article that reversed its long-held position on man-made global warming.

“The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t. ... Our observing system is inadequate.”

•From: Michael Mann, Oct 27, 2009

“Perhaps we’ll do a simple update to the Yamal post... As we all know, this isn’t about truth at all, its about plausibly deniable accusations.”

•From: Edward Cook, June 4, 2003

“I got a paper to review (submitted to the Journal of Agricultural, Biological, and Environmental Sciences), written by a Korean guy and someone from Berkeley, that claims that the method of reconstruction that we use in dendroclimatology (reverse regression) is wrong, biased, lousy, horrible, etc. ... If published as is, this paper could really do some damage … It won’t be easy to dismiss out of hand as the math appears to be correct theoretically (...) I am really sorry but I have to nag about that review — Confidentially I now need a hard and if required extensive case for rejecting.”

•From: Tom Wigley, Sep 27, 2009

“So, if we could reduce the ocean blip by, say, 0.15 C, then this would be significant for the global mean — but we’d still have to explain the land blip. I’ve chosen 0.15 here deliberately. This still leaves an ocean blip, and i think one needs to have some form of ocean blip to explain the land blip (via either some common forcing, or ocean forcing land, or vice versa, or all of these).”

•From: Phil Jones, Feb 2, 2005

“The two MMs [Canadian skeptics Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick] have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.”

•From: Phil Jones, May 29, 2008

“Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He’s not in at the moment – minor family crisis. Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don’t have his new email address. We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.”

•From: Keith Briffa, Sep 22, 1999

“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. We don’t have a lot of proxies that come right up to date and those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies ) some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming.”

•From: Michael E. Mann, Mar 11, 2003

“I think we have to stop considering Climate Research as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal. We would also need to consider what we tell or request of our more reasonable colleagues who currently sit on the editorial board.”

•From: Tom Wigley, Apr24, 2003

“Mike’s idea to get editorial board members to resign will probably not work — must get rid of von Storch too, otherwise holes will eventually fill up with people like Legates, Balling, Lindzen, Michaels, Singer, etc.”

•From: Phil Jones, July 5, 2005

“If anything, I would like to see the climate change happen, so the science could be proved right, regardless of the consequences. This isn’t being political, it is being selfish.”

[Canus Chinookus]

http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-roo...change-research

Inhofe to call for hearing into CRU, U.N. climate change research

By Tony Romm - 11/23/09 01:23 PM ET

The publication of more than 1,000 private e-mails that climate change skeptics say proves the threat is exaggerated has prompted one key Republican senator to call for an investigation into their research.

In an interview with The Washington Times on Monday, Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.) announced he would probe whether the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) "cooked the science to make this thing look as if the science was settled, when all the time of course we knew it was not."

"[T]his thing is serious, you think about the literally millions of dollars that have been thrown away on some of this stuff that they came out with," Inhofe, the ranking member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, said during the interview.

He added that it was "interesting" that the e-mails surfaced only weeks before an important climate change summit would bring world leaders to Copenhagen.

Fueling Inhofe's concerns is last week's news that a blogger hacked into the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit (Cru) and published about 1,000 e-mails and more than 3,000 private documents relating to climate change.

Some of those communications disparaged climate change skeptics and their views, while others contained conversations about how to best portray climate change research.

The scientists have since insisted their e-mails were hardly deceptive and that their words were taken out of context. Still, their assurances have not settled the concerns of their biggest foes -- including Inhofe, who has long maintained global warming is a "hoax."

However, it is not immediately clear what Inhofe hopes to accomplish with his proposed hearing. U.S. lawmakers and scientists routinely cite IPCC evidence when discussing climate change legislation, but Congress can hardly force the United Nations to halt spending on a program over which it has no jurisdiction.

Rather, Inhofe perhaps hopes to deal a symbolic blow to next month's climate change conference, at which IPCC is likely to play a major role.

"The timing couldn’t be better," said the Oklahoma Republican, who previously announced he would attend the December summit as a "one-man truth squad." "Whoever is on the ball in Great Britain, their time was good."

... continues on...

[Guest woxof]

I would like to introduce AEF'ers to George Monbiot. He is a British writer, known for his environmental and political activism. He writes a weekly column for The Guardian, and is the author of a number of books. If there was ever a man-made global warming advocate, it is Mr. Monbiot. Wikipedia describes below....

Activism

Climate change

Monbiot believes that drastic action coupled with strong political will is needed to combat global warming. Monbiot has written that climate change is the "moral question of the 21st century" and that there is little time for debate or objections to a raft of emergency actions he believes will stop climate change, including: setting targets on greenhouse emissions using the latest science; issuing every citizen with a 'personal carbon ration'; new building regulations with houses built to German passivhaus standards; banning incandescent lightbulbs, patio heaters, garden floodlights, and other inefficient technologies and wasteful applications; constructing large offshore wind farms; replacing the national gas grid with a hydrogen pipe network; a new national coach network to make journeys using public transport faster than using a car; all petrol stations to supply leasable electric car batteries with stations equipped with a crane service to replace depleted batteries; scrap road-building and road-widening programmes, redirecting their budgets to tackle climate change; reduce UK airport capacity by 90%; closing down all out-of-town superstores and replacing them with warehouses and a delivery system.

In The Guardian, Monbiot wrote: ‘flying across the Atlantic is as unacceptable, in terms of its impact on human well-being, as child abuse’. Later he conceded that he did himself fly 'hypocritically or paradoxically, depending on your point of view'. Accused of hypocrisy by Julie Burchill, Monbiot defended himself in a column, 'Hypocrites unite!'

Monbiot says the campaign against climate change is 'unlike almost all the public protests' that came before it:

It is a campaign not for abundance but for austerity. It is a campaign not for more freedom but for less. Strangest of all, it is a campaign not just against other people, but against ourselves.

Monbiot also thinks that economic recession can be a good thing for the planet: "Is it not time to recognise that we have reached the promised land, and should seek to stay there? Why would we want to leave this place in order to explore the blackened waste of consumer frenzy followed by ecological collapse? Surely the rational policy for the governments of the rich world is now to keep growth rates as close to zero as possible? " While he does recognize that recession can cause hardship, he points out that economic growth can cause hardship as well. For example, the increase in sales of jet skis would count as economic growth, but they would also cause hardships such as water pollution and noise pollution.

Monbiot purchased a Renault Clio (diesel) after moving to a small town in mid-Wales in 2007, leading to charges of hypocrisy. Similarly he has also travelled through Canada and the United States, campaigning on climate change and promoting his book. He contends that this travel was justifiable as it sought to boost the case for much greater carbon cuts there.

[Guest woxof]

Here is what George Monbiot wrote two days ago after a thousand hacked scientific emails were published showing the scientific deception.

By George Monbiot, published in the Guardian, 23rd November 2009

"It’s no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging. I am now convinced that they are genuine, and I’m dismayed and deeply shaken by them.

Yes, the messages were obtained illegally. Yes, all of us say things in emails that would be excruciating if made public. Yes, some of the comments have been taken out of context. But there are some messages that require no spin to make them look bad. There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released, and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request.

Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics, or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed."

Woxof...someday you will thank me

[Mitch Cronin]

Woxof...someday you will thank me

How 'bout today? Thanks for posting that Woxof. Interesting developments indeed.

I agree with him that any data specifically mentioned as having been "tricked" or suppressed, should now be examined.

It may be worth considering though, that we're zeroing in on some selected emails among thousands that were hacked, no doubt the vast majority of which we'd find uninteresting, between good scientists doing good science.

Hopefully, this will provide something of a springboard to get everything known and not known fully exposed for all to examine, then the wisest among us can decipher it all.

[Seeker]

How 'bout today? Thanks for posting that Woxof. Interesting developments indeed.

I agree with him that any data specifically mentioned as having been "tricked" or suppressed, should now be examined.

It may be worth considering though, that we're zeroing in on some selected emails among thousands that were hacked, no doubt the vast majority of which we'd find uninteresting, between good scientists doing good science.

Hopefully, this will provide something of a springboard to get everything known and not known fully exposed for all to examine, then the wisest among us can decipher it all.

Mitch, I don't know if you can call it "good science" if it's based on flawed or cooked data. Although I draw no conclusion I find that the thing reeks - not a stretch at all to see the whole man-made-climate-change as a house of cards.

[DEFCON]

But yet, God is dead & science rules?

[Canus Chinookus]

Only his noodley appendage is real.

[Canus Chinookus]

Wow, what a read!

http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/ha...k-and-cru-crud/

[Moon The Loon]

Wow, what a read!

http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2009/11/21/ha...k-and-cru-crud/

The article reminds me that there are 10 kinds of people in this world: those that know binary, and those that don't.

[Canus Chinookus]

There's much more posted in there besides pulling apart programming code.

[Mitch Cronin]

I don't know if you can call it "good science" if it's based on flawed or cooked data.

Absolutely you can't call that "good science". What I tried to say was that we've been given a specific look at a few emails within a horde... A little bit of bad stuff appears to have been going on amid all the rest of what I suggest was probably, on the whole, good science. How much of what we've been hearing and reading is based on "cooked" science?... , I suppose we'll have to wait for more learned folks to let us know.

[Canus Chinookus]

Hey, I have a question, what does driving a hummer on Earth, and the warming of Mars' atmosphere(melting the martian polar caps) have in common?

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/20...rs-warming.html

Saturn's moon Encedelus?

http://mensa-barbie.blogspot.com/2009/09/s...ing-videos.html

I like this one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics

[FireFox]

The sad thing is Canus that the date on that first reference is Feb., 2007.

It makes you wonder why those sort of things didn't get much notoriety. I guess the press was

too busy covering our school boards trying to get Gore's "Inconvenient Truth" into the curriculum.

[Canus Chinookus]

Once again, it's a glaring rebuttal against the high-pitched scream of the Mother Nature Deniers, that's why it didn't get anything more than a gloss over. Hat's off to National Geographic for being more factually responsible than the mainstream media.

[dagger]

It's immaterial what the science says. You're all pissing in the wind. The world is responding to this real or contrived threat, and the only thing that counts is

1) Will those countries that lag on acting to reduce emissions - reducing oil, coal and to a lesser extent natural gas - lose out on the tens of billions of dollars being directed into building the post-fossil fuel economy?

2) What will be Canada's ability to resist the negative impacts of $200 oil when it comes if we have failed to reduce our dependence on fossil fuel?

I couldn't give a damn about the science of climate change.

Maybe I am not a climate change advocate. Maybe I'm more of a denier.

But science is absolutely irrelevant.

The real inconvenient truth is that we're running out of oil and all the tar sands in the all the world won't save us from $200 oil.

So if cap and trade and green energy are the ticket to get us moving towards the post-fossil fuel economy - a journey of many decades - then so be it.

We need to get ready, we need to reshape our economy, we need the green energy jobs - Germany has a quarter million green energy jobs alone because of aggressive public policy.

And Alberta will still sell every drop of oil and every BTU of natgas because the shift to the post-fossil fuel economy isn't an overnight phenomenon.

So Stelmach should just STFU about climate change because we need a national policy ASAP to encourage energy efficiency and green energy. Alberta, with wind and geothermal and solar potential in abundance, needs to diversify its own energy sources.

The industrial world was built on cheap energy. It's no longer cheap. The post-industrial economy will be built on green energy, and if we're lucky and oil costs a fortune, we will be ready for an economic renaissance based on the regionalization of production and green energy self-sufficiency. Bad news for people who want cheap Chinese toasters.