Topic: Climate change rally, 8th December 2007

[Brunel]

I should like to thank the TS team for taking such a reasoned and democratic approach at arriving at their decision.

I've been moderating various e-groups for about 10 years.  During this time I've had to unsubscribe 3 contributors who used the e-groups to have a pop at someone.  No sooner had I re-subscribed all three, they all abused the system again. 

Thank you Jean, it's nice to get a pat on the back now and again

[szn]

Doesn't look like 10 years of decreasing global temperatures to me.

Typical warmist cherry picking. Look at the x-axis. Oh, it's the longest range of years you can find, from 1850...

Still, funny how the global temperature 'increase' hasn't shot up in the last ten years, is it? What with all the million of tonnes of CO2 that the Chinese and the Indians have been pumping into the atmosphere.

Looks like it has stopped to me. Along with the occurrence of sunspots and solar flares.

Game over.

Ironically the cherrypicking is exclusive to the skeptics and it's that game which is over.

Over the last two years skeptics have enjoyed claiming "no warming in 10 years" and owing to a large temperature anomoly in 1997/1998 caused by a super el nino this claim has been partially true (although misleading).

But the hands of time have now shifted and 10 years no longer contains the peak of this super el nino. The claim "no warming in 10 years" will shortly vanish.

Here's the linear trend in global temperature for the last 10 years to the month, September 1998 to September 2008. Looks like it's up:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998.6/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998.8/trend

In order to cherrypick a period starting with the 97/98 super el nino from now on, skeptics will now have to say "no warming in 11 years". Such an odd number makes the cherrypick a bit more obvious to most people..

To make it sound legitimate the nearest "whole" number is 15, but skeptics won't want to go there:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1993.6/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1993.8/trend

[adamd]

Here's the linear trend in global temperature for the last 10 years to the month, September 1998 to September 2008. Looks like it's up:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998.6/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1998.8/trend

In order to cherrypick a period starting with the 97/98 super el nino from now on, skeptics will now have to say "no warming in 11 years". Such an odd number makes the cherrypick a bit more obvious to most people..

To make it sound legitimate the nearest "whole" number is 15, but skeptics won't want to go there:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1993.6/plot/hadcrut3vgl/from:1993.8/trend

Hello all, I am 29 and have lived in Swindon for three years.

I have been browsing the forum for a while and then came across this thread tonight. I have to say that the hadcrut data looks completely and totally compromised by yesterday's revelations with the exposure of the data fixing and FOI avoidance strategies and practices that have been employed by UEA CRU and also the rest of the cabal that make up the warmists.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/21/science/earth/21climate.html?_r=1&hpw

Hooray - the game is finally up and let there be prosecutions and imprisonments around the world for all of the deceitful evil and misguided elite that have tried to force this on normal people.

Hopefully Gore will be the first.

Thanks

Adam

[Simon]

Yet more chaff from the denial camp.

What that New York Times link tells us is that scientists are being scientists, questioning each others results, and discussing whether their results are robust enough to release into the wild.

The NYT chose to ignore the facts and use this story to stoke a controversy to sell more papers, and of course they found a climate sceptic talking head willing to provide quotes for it.

Let's examine that talking head...

“This is not a smoking gun; this is a mushroom cloud,” said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and is criticized in the documents.

FACTSHEET: Patrick J. Michaels
DETAILS

Research Professor of Environmental Sciences, University of Virginia
Senior Fellow, Cato Institute. Visiting Scientist, Marshall Institute. State Climatologist, Virginia. Advisor, American Legislative Exchange Council.

Dr. Patrick Michaels is possibly the most prolific and widely-quoted climate change skeptic scientist. He has admitted receiving funding from various fossil fuel industry sources. His latest book, published in September 2004 by the Cato Institute, is titled: Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.

Michaels is the Chief Editor for the "World Climate Review," a newsletter on global warming funded by the Western Fuels Association. Dr. Michaels has acknowledged that 20% of his funding comes from fossil fuel sources: (http://www.mtn.org/~nescncl/complaints/determinations/det_118.html) Known funding includes $49,000 from German Coal Mining Association, $15,000 from Edison Electric Institute and $40,000 from Cyprus Minerals Company, an early supporter of People for the West, a "wise use" group. He received $63,000 for research on global climate change from Western Fuels Association, above and beyond the undisclosed amount he is paid for the World Climate Report/Review. According to Harper's magazine, Michaels has recieved over $115,000 over the past four years from coal and oil interests. Michaels wrote "Sound and Fury" and "The Satanic Gases" which were published by Cato Institute. Dr. Michaels signed the 1995 Leipzig Declaration. In July of 2006, it was revealed that the Intermountain Rural Electric Association "contributed $100,000 to Dr. Michaels." (http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/GlobalWarming/story?id=2242565&page=1) ALEC advisor. http://www.heartland.org/Article.cfm?artId=11310 and http://www.cato.org/pub_display.php?pub_id=3558

A.B. and S.M. degrees in biological sciences and plant ecology, University of Chicago Ph.D. in ecological climatology , University of Wisconsin at Madison. Former President of the American Association of State Climatologists, and Program Chair for the Committee on Applied Meterology of the American Meterological Society.

A cushy number, and well paid. I'd become a paid climate change denier too if my beliefs weren't so diametrically opposed to the people holding the purse strings.

Climate change is happening, our excessive consumption of fossil fuels is accelerating it, and no amount of denial or spin can stop that.

Hooray - the game is finally up and let there be prosecutions and imprisonments around the world for all of the deceitful evil and misguided elite that have tried to force this on normal people.

Prosecutions? Under what law exactly?

Last time I checked, it wasn't illegal to point out to people that climate change is a real problem, and that it'Homo Sapiens are adding to the problem.

Neither is it illegal to say that climate change is a myth. Although such a statement would be entirely wrong.

[Mart]

If you are a 'Warmist' (liking that) this is more chaff, if you are a cycnical sod who thinks they are watching a revenue stream go through a vigorous growth spurt this is 'the truth',  a coldist perhaps, (wasn't there a prison camp called that?) personally I think the real truth sits somewhere in between. A view based on no scientific knowledge at all, based more on exasperation about being berated.

How can producing less of anything cost more? Mind you, there's petrol I suppose.

Over the last few days I have been trying to make sense of the so-called CRU emails. These are a series of emails which have been published following the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit. They purport to show how climate change scientists have deliberately skewed the scientific evidence to their side of the argument and how they are trying to silence scientists who are sceptics about man-made global warming.

Devil's Kitchen has provided the most comprehensive coverage of this subject and you can see a comprehensive list of his postings on the subject HERE. Some of the subject matter is incredibly confusing, but let's just look at a few examples from the data from the UEA climate scientists. Over to James Delingpole...

Perhaps the most damaging revelations – the scientific equivalent of the Telegraph’s MPs’ expenses scandal – are those concerning the way Warmist scientists may variously have manipulated or suppressed evidence in order to support their cause.
Here are a few tasters. (So far, we can only refer to them as alleged emails because – though Hadley CRU’s director Phil Jones has confirmed the break-in to Ian Wishart at the Briefing Room – he has yet to fess up to any specific contents.) But if genuine, they suggest dubious practices such as:

Manipulation of evidence:

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

Private doubts about whether the world really is heating up:

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. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Suppression of evidence:

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.

Fantasies of violence against prominent Climate Sceptic scientists:

Next
time I see Pat Michaels at a scientific meeting, I’ll be tempted to beat
the crap out of him. Very tempted.

Attempts to disguise the inconvenient truth of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP):

……Phil and I have recently submitted a paper using about a dozen NH records that fit this category, and many of which are available nearly 2K back–I think that trying to adopt a timeframe of 2K, rather than the usual 1K, addresses a good earlier point that Peck made w/ regard to the memo, that it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “MWP”, even if we don’t yet have a hemispheric mean reconstruction available that far back….

And, perhaps most reprehensibly, a long series of communications discussing how best to squeeze dissenting scientists out of the peer review process. How, in other words, to create a scientific climate in which anyone who disagrees with AGW can be written off as a crank, whose views do not have a scrap of authority.

“This was the danger of always criticising the skeptics for not publishing in the “peer-reviewed literature”. Obviously, they found a solution to that–take over a journal! So what do we do about this? 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…What do others think?”

“I will be emailing the journal to tell them I’m having nothing more to do with it until they rid themselves of this troublesome editor.”“It results from this journal having a number of editors. The responsible one for this is a well-known skeptic in NZ. He has let a few papers through by Michaels and Gray in the past. I’ve had words with Hans von Storch about this, but got nowhere. Another thing to discuss in Nice !”


Is this all conclusive evidence of a conspiracy by climate change scientists to silence some of their colleagues and suppress evidence which is inconvenient to their case? Maybe, or maybe not. But what it does show is that there are serious questions to be answered by the scientific community. Devil's Kitchen concludes...


What these emails show is that members of The Club have presented, as fact, data which privately they have acknowledged to be, at best, flawed.

Further, many members of The Club are editors of the reports submitted to the IPCC, and the emails show that they have deliberately cherry-picked those that agree with their position—and conspired to discredit or reject those that do not agree with their political position.

The Club has also conspired to suborne journals, and to oust editors of other journals who are perceived as being unsympathetic to their cause. And they have been successful.

The emails show that, whilst claiming that sceptics' papers are not peer-reviewed, The Club have actively and deliberately used blackmail and smears to prevent such peer-review or, when review is unavoidable, to have conspired to skew the review process to discredit their opponents.

All of these actions render the scientific reports produced by the IPCC extremely suspect. At best.

And they most certainly destroy the concept of the "scientific consensus".

None of these emails disprove anthropogenic climate change: but they do shatter the idea that there is no dissent and, crucially, they absolutely annihilate the idea that scientists are impartial and uncorrupt.

And these emails most certainly explode the proposition that we should reorder the world economy because of an impending climate disaster.

I wonder when this debate will actually enter the mainstream media. I admit that I have been very slow to follow this up. But perhaps not as slow as some others

I refuse to subscribe to the view that all 'Warmists' are right thinking angels and all 'Coldists' are petrol swilling despoilers of planets, too many vested interests on both sides I think.

[Simon]

None of these emails disprove anthropogenic climate change: but they do shatter the idea that there is no dissent

I don't think anyone ever said there was no dissent. There will always be people who beg to differ. But that doesn't change the reality of the situation, that over the course of a couple of centuries we have dug up huge amounts of carbon which nature has been sequestering since before our atmosphere could support animal life, and poured it back into the atmosphere. That this will affect the climate is beyond doubt, the only question is how much. And the scientists researching this subject keep finding that the reality is worse than their predictions.

I've argued this subject on numerous other threads and I won't go repeating myself here, but in the mean time I saw this today and found it rather entertaining (I think you might even enjoy it Mart, although I guess it may not be a very close match with your musical tastes).

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/KBzR0-j0O0o" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/KBzR0-j0O0o</a>

[Tea Boy]

For many years i have worked out and about in parks and open spaces. If there's one thing i can say without fear of contradiction it is that summers are less warm and tend to be wet. But Winters are nowhere near as cold as they were when i first started work. We are moving towards a homogenous mess of seasons.

The ground hardly freezes any more in winter, it's raining all the time, without a doubt it’s on average warmer across the year.

Trees are coming into leaf much sooner than they used to, and they stay in leaf much later. A basis evolutionary design of trees in the temperate zone, in fact the whole point of being deciduous, is that when water is frozen in the ground, trees drop leaves so that they can shut down their transpiration.

Also and this might sound silly, but i can assure you it is a real effect, the grass round Swindon is gradually changing. We are getting a greater prevalene of rye grass species,  i see this more and more. Rye grass is well known to thrive in milder conditions.

Where as ephemeral weed once had a flower, seed cycle 3 times a year, i am definitely seeing an extra reproductive cycle, maybe 4 times a year rather than 3

Say what you like about scientific trends,  'on the ground' empirical data, 'wot i see with my own eyes' is telling me that nature is changing to accept a warmer climate.

I do get bit fed up with attacks by people on the whole concept of global warming, surely the point is that we should take a precautionary principle and respect the planet, not just carry on polluting it because we can't let go of the metal box on wheels.

you can't use scientific data t really argue against it, science allways admits it might be wrong, it a fundamental corner stone of the scientific method that you can never be completely accurate and that theories can be proved or disproved.

The point should be if the chance that it is right is high enough (which i supported by the data) then we should act now while we still can.

To ignore the risk is foolhardy to those that will follow in future generations. Do people really want to run the very real risk of their children and grand children living in a world fundamentally different in nature to the one we are living in now.

[Simon]

Thank you Tea Boy. In a debate which is increasingly dominated by vested interests who seek to maximise the profit from whichever side they seek to profit from (those who deny that climate change is anything to do with Homo Sapiens, and those who want to make a quick buck off the back of genuine concern about climate change), it's refreshing to see some empirical evidence from someone who cares about the world they live in.

(where's the thumbs-up smiley when you need it?)

In the absence of a thumbs-up smiley, I think you deserve one of these:
 

[adamd]

Hello Simon, thank you for your replies.

That's a really funny video. I thought that you might like this one as well:

<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/nEiLgbBGKVk" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/nEiLgbBGKVk</a>

Also, I love your comment about the gentleman mentioned in the press article:

A cushy number, and well paid. I'd become a paid climate change denier too if my beliefs weren't so diametrically opposed to the people holding the purse strings.

That will be completely different to the cushy number enjoyed by Phil Jones at the UEA CRU then, who has taken over £13M of grants in the last decade and is now proven to be a liar, a scientist of no morals or values and ultimately a crook then?

As for 'more chaff from the deniers', ho ho ho - the storm has broken. Even the Moonbat high priest thinks it has all gone tits up. I think that your fake religion is now getting a visit from the Reality Inquisition. Best if you renounce it and become an athiest asap, love.

[adamd]

Thank you Tea Boy. In a debate which is increasingly dominated by vested interests who seek to maximise the profit from whichever side they seek to profit from (those who deny that climate change is anything to do with Homo Sapiens, and those who want to make a quick buck off the back of genuine concern about climate change), it's completely tedious to see somebody who selectively picks whatever they think will back their argument, however unscientific that may be.

I could go on about how the summers were always hotter when I was younger or that winters were always colder and the snow lasted for weeks. Sorry, that's just the things that you remember that were exceptional. How about last winter when it was freezing for three weeks because of a high pressure anticyclone over the UK? A real cold snap. Ah and the wind turbines were still and no electricity was forthcoming. Fantastic technology considering the power demands, don't you think? It is all dubious, based on pseudo science or crooked morals I am afraid. Personally if we enjoyed the climate of the Dordogne is this country I would be elated.

[Tea Boy]

Hi Adamd

Your right people only remember extremes. As a outdoor worker you get used to cold snaps, extreme warm, rain etc. Extremes don't really bother me, in the cold i think of warmer times, you end up looking for the signs of warmer weather coming.

unfortunately we live in an age where every one has an opinion (as a friend of mine once said "opinions are like a...holes", everyone has one) and it’s as easy to muddy scientific evidence as it is to find clarity by it.

So i don't look at it, instead i look around me to prove or disprove global warming

I'm actually not arguing that it warmer in summer or colder in winter (although i do have some examples in mind) just that triggers in nature that react to the warmer periods are happening sooner and going on for longer. I'm typing this as my external thermo is reading 5 degrees (a bit more like a proper winter temp) however the oak tree outside my window still has a lot of it leaves o it and they are green... its a month to go to the new year, after a serious gale which has brought down trees across swindon....  and a tree which should have shed its leaves a month ago is yet to drop them?

My work takes me out of the nicer centrally heated environment of home / office and places me where i can see such effects. Of course it unscientific, i don't exactly take a thermometer out with me, but ask any gardener, (not a weekend tinkerer) but anyone who works on the ground in close proximity to nature what they see and they will tell you the same.

Things like

buds forming on trees, cherry/ blackthorn blossom (always a good sign of spring), puff ball fungi on cricket squares, the first week of soil temps >57 Fahrenheit (grass puts on first spurt of growth), Crocus coming up and then flowering too fast (a sign of warm weather).

I see all these happening earlier and earlier every year. Its not statistics that are telling me something is going on with our climate, its what i am seeing, and I am seeing it earlier each year.

Warmer temps for longer and cold temps for shorter periods just add up to warmer on average. i don't profess to be a scientist i couldn't interpret a complex graph etc (never good at maths) but i do know what i am seeing.

We may get 3 weeks of extreme cold, but 25 years ago, when first started to work for the then Parks Department i was sent out to measure the thickness of the ice on coate water.(in the middle!).. it was completely (and i mean completely), frozen over to a depth of at least 4 inches.

An extreme to be sure, it may not have usually frozen this much, that completely, but it did ice over regularly.

It doesn't do that anymore at all, even during last year’s cold snap. Which incidentally was followed by about a month of mild wet weather......

About 20 years ago there was another cold winter, not bitterly so, but temp dropped below 5 celcius for a long time, this weakened a load of ornametnal shrubs in the older estates of Swindon that were not quite hardy enough. Eventually the shrubberies got so patchy and diseased they had to be removed. It had nothing to do with making it affordable etc it had everything to do with colder weather affecting non indigeous partialy hardy plants.

Have a look around Penhill, Pinehurst, Parks, Liden, Dorcan, Stratton, old town etc not many shrubberies, not because they were not planted there, but because the colder winters then, weakened many plants to the point that they had best be removed.

A series of constant, cold winters now, would do untold damage to the shrubs / trees of newer estates such as West swindon, Abbey meads, Stratone Village or Priory vale.

Personaly i believe that the 'Earth' gaia if you like will repair any damage we do, but before that happens our careless, throw away, use and abuse mentality will mean the end to our way of life. Substantially altering our world, its population dynamics, migration, food supply to such a point that the sections of the western world's civilisation will not be able to sustain itself.

What would it be like if large sections of the worlds food producing areas suffered from a change in climate to the extent that a major food crop would fail or more importantly no longer be as productive.

Just to protect what we got ,surely it's worth just trying not to be such a bunch of mindless users, tied into modern commericalism and ruled by big buisness.

I don't think i want to see a new area of 'green' policies that don't allow advancment etc, i would just like society to change for the better and stop wasting this world and its resources.

[Simon]

CLIMATE CHANGE EMAILS STOP GLACIERS FROM MELTING
25-11-09

GLACIERS in the Alps, Andes and Himalayas have stopped melting after the release of secret emails showing climate change scientists are at it.

Vast ice sheets across the globe gained up to four inches just hours after it emerged experts at the University of East Anglia had been manipulating data in a bid to knock-off early.

Meanwhile in the Antarctic the 200 square mile Donnelly ice shelf changed direction and headed back towards the continent where it then reattached itself to the slightly larger McPartlin ice shelf.

Climate change sceptic and fully-qualified blogger Martin Bishop said: "As soon as these emails were released the world's glaciers resumed their normal, icey behaviour, as long-predicted by some of London's most important journalists.

"This is the smoking iceberg that fires a polar bear of truth between the eyes of hysteria and communism."

He added: "More than half the world's journalists who have read Nigel Lawson's book now accept that the atmosphere could not possibly have been affected by setting fire to millions of tons of coal, oil and gas every single day for 150 years while at the same time chopping down most of the really big trees.

"Can we all please now return to some kind of sanity and tie George Monbiot to the back of a Range Rover?"

Professor Henry Brubaker, of the Institute for Studies, said: "While there will always be debate over climate data, it's important to remember that the state of the world's icebergs and glaciers remains wholly dependant on which group of tedious, hectoring arseholes is currently winning the argument."

But Bill McKay, an accountant from Dunbar, said: "I'm not a scientist, but last week I noticed some mosquito-like creatures buzzing around the light at my back door. Again, not a scientist, but... mosquitos, November, Scotland.

"Someone needs to explain that to me, because as things stand, it does seem to be a tad fucked up."

http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/news/environment/climate-change-emails-stop-glaciers-from-melting-200911252254/

 

[Mart]

I think I am hacked off with Warmists and Coldists.

I am fed up with the science, cos I was crap at science, explaining to me about how it is down to me and similar that the polar ice caps are melting. I suspect Mother Nature is thinking 'Oh you conceited little twonks'.

Medieval freeze etc, this planet will do as it pleases, I think our influence is overstated, but not negligible.

Fact is we need to build better and live better because it would be well, better, get a bit more in tune as it were. I would just like us to do it without posturing and hairshirts.

It is a practical problem that requires practical solutions, not rhetoric.

The delicious irony would of course be that if by fighting the alleged global warning we were in fact perverting the natural course of nature.

Ha ha. Ironically.