Posts Tagged ‘climate change’

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Et tu IAC? Time for Pachauri to exit.

August 30, 2010

The IAC report is in.

And this is a report by a “friend”.

It is time for Pachauri to leave the reform and the improvement of the IPCC (assuming such a politically charged body can ever be reformed) to somebody else since he has clearly not been up to the task.

http://images.cheezburger.com/completestore/2009/11/22/129033627605776300.jpg

The Telgraph: The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change should only make predictions when it has solid scientific evidence and avoid straying into policy advocacy, a group of national science academies has warned in a report.

The report said the chairman of the IPCC should be limited to one six year term. Its current head Rajendra Pachauri of India, is in the middle of his second term. It called for an overhaul of the panel’s management, including the creation of an executive committee that would include people from outside the IPCC. Regarding the errors that appeared in the IPCC reports, the review group’s report called for stronger enforcement of the panel’s scientific review procedures to minimise future mistakes.

Professor Mike Hulme, a professor of climate change at the University of East Anglia, is due to deliver a keynote lecture to the Royal Geographical Society Annual conference this week in which he will call for a dramatic changes to the way the IPCC operates. Speaking ahead of his lecture, he said: “The IPCC has not sufficiently adapted to the changing science and politics of climate change, nor to the changing expected and demanded role of science and expertise in society. “The IPCC’s approach of seeking consensus obscures and constricts both scientific and wider social debates about both knowledge-driven and value-driven uncertainties that surround climate change politics.”

Rajendra Pachauri

The BBC: UN climate body ‘needs reforms’, review recommends.

Among the IAC committee’s recommendations was that the UN body appoint an executive director to handle day-to-day operations and speak on behalf of the body. It also said the current limit of two six-year terms for the chair of the organisation is too long. The report also suggests the UN body establish an executive committee which should include individuals from outside the IPCC or even outside the climate science community in order to enhance the UN panel’s credibility and independence.

The use by the IPCC of so-called “grey literature” – that which has not been peer-reviewed or published in scientific journals – has been subjected to particular scrutiny of late, partly because this type of material was behind the glacier error. The committee said that such literature was often relevant and appropriate for inclusion in the IPCC’s assessment reports. But it said authors needed to follow the IPCC’s guidelines more closely and that the guidelines themselves are too vague.

Bishop Hill: “Furthermore, by making vague statements that were difficult to refute, authors were able to attach “high confidence” to the statements. The Working Group II Summary for Policy Makers contains many such statements that are not supported sufficiently in the literature, not put into perspective, or not expressed clearly.”

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Posted in Alarmism, Bureaucracy, Environment, Science, Scientific Fraud | Comments Off on Et tu IAC? Time for Pachauri to exit.

Mild rap on the knuckles likely for IPCC / Pachauri from friendly IAC

August 29, 2010

The Hindustan Times reports that former railwayman Pachauri will likely get away with a mild rap on his knuckles from the Inter Academy Council (little known)-  an establishment body tasked with defending another establishment body.

There is speculation that Pachauri might get away with just a rap on the knuckles for IPCC’s assessments that the Himalayan glaciers will be gone by 2035, and the Amazonian forests were in danger too. The Wall Street Journal quoted an unidentified member of the probe team to say the report will merely suggest that IPCC “should beef up its capacity to ferret out errors in its scientific assessments”.

http://www.cartoonsbyjosh.com/index.html

The Telegraph comes out a little stronger and suggests that the IPCC could actually be “warned”. But when the IAC report is presented to Ban Ki Moon tomorrow it is unlikely to find much fault with one of its own.

The United Nation’s climate change organisation faces a warning over how it uses scientific facts in its influential reports, following the discovery of a series of embarrassing errors in its work.

Professor Robert Watson, the chief scientific adviser to the Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs and a former chair of the UN’s IPCC, told the InterAcademy Council’s review committee that more needed to be done to prevent errors appearing in the panel’s reports.

He described the way the IPCC handled the mistakes as “totally and utterly atrocious” and suggested that the panel should consider hiring additional staff to check through the sources of information, or references, to ensure the accuracy of statements made in future reports.

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Bitter cold wave in S. America — blamed on global warming!!

August 29, 2010

The bitter cold wave being experienced in S. America does not conform to the Global Warming Religion’s creeds. Facts cannot be suppressed forever and Nature has finally acknowledged one cold event in Bolivia but even here finds a way to contort itself to claim this ” as an example of a sudden climatic change wreaking havoc on wildlife”.

Antarctic cold snap kills millions of aquatic animals in the Amazon. Cold empties Bolivian rivers of fish

dead fish

With high Andean peaks and a humid tropical forest, Bolivia is a country of ecological extremes. But during the Southern Hemisphere’s recent winter, unusually low temperatures in part of the country’s tropical region hit freshwater species hard, killing an estimated 6 million fish and thousands of alligators, turtles and river dolphins.

But the cold wave is not an isolated incident and appears to be widespread over a large part of the southern hemisphere. Der Spiegel (translation in Politically Incorrect) reports today that:

Cold wave in South America: The continent is experiencing one of the harshest winters in many years. Altogether 175 people have died as a result of the bitter cold, according to official statements. Especially affected are the more impoverished population groups who are often poorly protected from the cold by precarious housing that has no heating and are poorly cared for.

In Argentina, such low temperatures haven’t been recorded for ten years. There, 16 people froze to death, another eleven died from Carbon Monoxide poisoning because of faulty stoves. It was also unusually cold in the bordering countries: In Bolivia, 18 people fell victim to the cold, in Paraguay it was five, in Chile and Uruguay there were two each, and in southern Brazil nine people.

In addition, thousands of cattle froze to death in the pastures of Paraguay and Brazil. There aren’t stalls because normally it doesn’t get very cold, even in the winter.

In some regions of Bolivia and Peru, children had school-free days until the end of the week. In the larger cities of the region emergency shelters were opened for people who live on the street. The system for supplying electricity and natural gas were working to capacity in many communties. In Argentina there were even shortages in some provinces.

With La Niña already established the Northern Hemisphere may also be in for another harsh winter.

Further contortions are likely by the religious fanatics to show that it is just further evidence of  global warming !

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Posted in Alarmism, Environment, Science | 2 Comments »

How can we – if we should – prepare for a new Little Ice Age?

August 22, 2010

It seems that we are in a Solar Cycle Minimum – a Landscheidt Minimum which will perhaps be comparable to the Maunder Minimum.

The last decade has seen flat or declining global temperatures.

The Ocean temperature oscillations could indicate 20 or 30 years cooling ahead of us.

If these are all indicators of a coming Little Ice Age, then it may be time to take some preparatory actions to help humans adapt. I think adaptation to Climate Change when it happens is the key not some mis-guided and futile attempt to prevent the Climate Change from happening (as being proposed by the IPCC and other global warming fanatics).

image: http://t2.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:TtpOoja-ueuOLM:http://www.wilsonsalmanac.com/images3/frost_fair_C18.jpg

The question which is more for engineers rather than for scientists is “What are the actions that could be taken to prepare and help for such an adaptation?”

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Posted in Engineering, Environment, Science, Technology | 2 Comments »

Climate models don’t need the sun – “Venus is similar to Earth” !!!

August 17, 2010

Japanese Spacecraft Approaches Venus

Venus Climate Orbiter “AKATSUKI”

This from NASA Science News:

[Global view of Venus]

Imamura is the project scientist for Akatsuki, a Japanese mission also called the Venus Climate Orbiter. The spacecraft is approaching Venus and will enter orbit on December 7, 2010. Imamura believes a close-up look at Venus could teach us a lot about our own planet.

“In so many ways, Venus is similar to Earth. It has about the same mass, is approximately the same distance from the sun, and is made of the same basic materials,” says Imamura. “Yet the two worlds ended up so different. We want to know why.”

Considering NASA’s own Venus fact sheet and the fact that Venus is about 41 million km closer to the sun it is – in the kindest interpretation – sloppy to permit a statement that “Venus is similar to earth.. approximately the same distance from the sun”.

“By comparing Venus’s unique meteorology to Earth’s, we’ll learn more about the universal principles of meteorology and improve the climate models we use to predict our planet’s future” says Imamura.

Of course the models will no doubt take into account that solar radiation on Venus is about  2688 J while the Earth receives 1365 J or perhaps the models don’t need the sun and will base everything on the heating effects of carbon dioxide.

I would have thought that it is the differences between Venus and Earth which can be revealing and to consider a distance of 41 million km closer to the sun as being negligible does not inspire confidence in any subsequent climate modelling.

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Flattening the Mann hockey stick

August 15, 2010

The shape of Mann’ s hockey stick is morphing. The long horizontal handle (obtained by eliminating the MWP)  actually turns out to be sloping and the sharp upturn gets flattened.

WUWT reports a new and important study on temperature proxy reconstructions (McShane and Wyner 2010) submitted into the Annals of Applied Statistics and is listed to be published in the next issue.

A Statistical Analysis of Multiple Temperature Proxies: Are Reconstructions of Surface Temperatures Over the Last 1000 Years Reliable?

BY BLAKELEY B. MCSHANE∗ AND ABRAHAM J. WYNER†
Northwestern University∗ and the University of Pennsylvania†
This paper is a direct and serious rebuttal to the proxy reconstructions of Mann. It seems watertight on the surface, because instead of trying to attack the proxy data quality issues, they assumed the proxy data was accurate for their purpose, then created a bayesian backcast method. Then, using the proxy data, they demonstrate it fails to reproduce the sharp 20th century uptick

FIG 16. Backcast from Bayesian Model of Section 5. CRU Northern Hemisphere annual mean land temperature is given by the thin black line and a smoothed version is given by the thick black line. The forecast is given by the thin red line and a smoothed version is given by the thick red line. The model is fit on 1850-1998 AD and backcasts 998-1849 AD. The cyan region indicates uncertainty due to t, the green region indicates uncertainty due to β, and the gray region indicates total uncertainty.

The Mann Hockey Stick
Multiproxy reconstruction of Northern Hemisphere surface temperature variations over the past millennium (blue), along with 50-year average (black), a measure of the statistical uncertainty associated with the reconstruction (gray), and instrumental surface temperature data for the last 150 years (red), based on the work by Mann et al. (1999). This figure has sometimes been referred to as the hockey stick. Source: IPCC (2001).

The authors conclude that:

“…..we conclude unequivocally that the evidence for a ”long-handled” hockey stick (where the shaft of the hockey stick extends to the year 1000 AD) is lacking in the data.…..Climate scientists have greatly underestimated the uncertainty of proxy based reconstructions and hence have been overconfident in their models.”


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Posted in Environment, Science, Scientific Fraud | 1 Comment »

When “models” and fudge factors are touted as evidence

August 6, 2010

Doomsday scenarios are taken to be evidence!!

Dr. Nepstad is at it again but he has a great deal of money to protect.

The same actors, the same advocacy and the same techniques to forecast DOOM.

Only this time drought, land use, illegal logging and climate change  are taken together to provide the necessary forcings to provide the catastrophe. It is called a “study” and implies some objectivity but the models use a variety of fudge factors to decide on the impact of the various variables. It might be more accurate to call it The Doomsday Scenarios since the “study” is no more than the generation of scenarios to come to a pre-determined conclusion. The conclusion is of course that we must immediately reduce greenhouse gas emissions drastically!

The Daily Telegraph reports today that

Rainforest loss may have been overstated, scientists

Climate change and illegal logging could wipe out rainforest wildlife by 2100

Daniel Nepstad, an ecologist at the Woods Hole Research Center in Massachusetts, said only a cut in greenhouse gases can save the world’s wildlife.

“This study is the strongest evidence yet that the world’s natural ecosystems will undergo profound changes — including severe alterations in their species composition — through the combined influence of climate change and land use,” he said.

Unfortunately Dr. Nepstad is already rather tainted. He works for the Woods Hole Research Centre which is associated in Brazil with the Instituto de Pesquiza Ambiental da Amazonia (IPAM).  IPAM is a Brazilian advocacy group. He appears to have a vested interest in magnifying the value of carbon contained within the Rain Forests.

He is entitled to advocate for his point of view of course and to advocate for getting even more funding but his advocacy is not science.

Booker had this to say about 3 weeks ago:

This curious episode may also point to another reason why WWF and Woods Hole have been so active in recent years to promote concern over the danger of global warming for the Amazon rainforest. As I revealed here on March 20, they have been closely allied in support of a scheme known as REDD (Reduction in Emissions from Deforestation and Degradation of Tropical Forests). Its aim is to turn the CO2 in forest trees into “carbon credits”, saleable on the world market to allow firms to continue emitting CO2. Backed by $80 million from the World Bank, WWF, Woods Hole and IPAM are partners in a consortium, supported by the Brazilian government, to protect and manage a vast area of forest in the Tumucumaque region, in return for which they would have the right to sell its carbon credits. In 2007 Dr Nepstad published a formula which would allow the carbon contained in the entire forest to be valued at $60 billion.

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Posted in Alarmism, Ethics, Non-Science, Science | Comments Off on When “models” and fudge factors are touted as evidence

Global warming – science versus political correctness

August 3, 2010

When a scientific question diverges from a treatment of evidence, facts or theories it is often based on beliefs (and a belief by definition comes into play only when facts are lacking). Hypotheses and theories necessarily must rely – to some extent – on belief.

As soon a question regarding facts becomes instead a question regarding beliefs it leads to a political label (right wing, left wing, capitalist, communist, liberal, fascist). A political label generally assumes an adherence to a particular set of beliefs on many diverse topics. A scientific discussion then becomes a political argument. Positions on any topic under the umbrella of the political label – whether or not relevant to the topic under discussion – are then used to “discredit” or “support” a particular belief.

But I note that the “tools” used in political argument are the same whichever side of the political divide one is. These “tools” are used to reinforce the views of those already in agreement or to “convert” those on the fence.  They are only rarely used to “convert” those on the other side of the divide. These tools are for the manipulation of belief and have nothing whatever to do with science or the scientific method. The “tools” commonly used are

  • Alarmism (or the pseudo-science precautionary principle which permits common-sense to be ignored)
  • Claiming to be the “majority” view (and this is resorted to because a “majority” in a democracy is ascribed the “right” to summarily over-rule and oppress a minority)
  • Guilt, wrongness, injustice or immorality  – all by association
  • Ridicule
  • Distortion, misrepresentation and even fraud
  • Inquistions against heretics and witch hunts

The entire AGW argument – for it  has degenerated into a political argument and is no longer a scientific discussion (if it ever was one) – is permeated by the use of such tools. The sound and fury mask the underlying question which remains:

What is the magnitude and significance of man-made effects on the global climate?

My position is that I don’t know.

I believe that it is not of any great significance – but not that it is absent. I believe that whatever effect man has pales into insignificance compared to what the sun does primarily through the oceans and – only then – through and to the atmosphere.

There are those who believe – note “believe” – that posing the question is itself a matter of belief and denies the obvious. For posing the question I have been given various political labels. But the simple fact is that the answer is not obvious and not a settled science for me.

It is entirely a political matter – and perfectly valid as a political matter but it is not a matter of science – when the belief in something so dreadful in the future – but which cannot be proven – is used as a vehicle for satisfying greed (carbon trading, so-called environmental subsidies or research funding) or a political agenda.

There is nothing wrong with having a political agenda. But it cannot be labelled science.

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Posted in Alarmism, Environment, Non-Science, Philosophy, Science | Comments Off on Global warming – science versus political correctness

NonScience — not even Pseudo-Science

July 31, 2010

No doubt it is the quest for funding for what are “fashionable” projects which leads to this kind of rubbish. This is not even worthy of being called pseudo science – this is just nonscience (pun intended).

We find that an increase in a state’s unemployment rate decreases Google searches for “global warming” and increases searches for “unemployment,” and that the effect differs according to a state’s political ideology.

This is is what passes for science for University of California economists Matthew Kahn and Matthew Kotchen in their peer-reviewed paper (abstract here) “Environmental Concern and the Business Cycle: The Chilling Effect of Recession”.

Apparently this is funded by the National Bureau of Economic Research. Clearly they have surplus funds to disseminate, or was it the trigger words “Environmental Concern” which loosened the purse strings.

image

Does it really take two University economists to come to the conclusion that

Finally, in California, we find that an increase in a county’s unemployment rate is associated with a significant decrease in county residents choosing the environment as the most important policy issue.

One wonders who the peers who reviewed this article and recommended publication could be — and are they getting any funding from the NBER?

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Posted in Environment, Non-Science, Science | 1 Comment »

Global Warming: The wagons are circling

July 29, 2010

Met Office report: global warming evidence is ‘unmistakable’

A new climate change report from the Met Office and its US equivalent has provided the “greatest evidence we have ever had” that the world is warming.

Report cover

They protest too much.

Since it is the Met Office “this is powerful evidence – perhaps definitive – that the hysteria is overdone”.

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