Category Archives: Climate change

Another climate change scandal

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When you really, really want something to be true it’s easy to find evidence and “reasons” which match your desired belief. This may be another case:

Exposed: How world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data

The Mail on Sunday today reveals astonishing evidence that the organisation that is the world’s leading source of climate data rushed to publish a landmark paper that exaggerated global warming and was timed to influence the historic Paris Agreement on climate change.

A high-level whistleblower has told this newspaper that America’s National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) breached its own rules on scientific integrity when it published the sensational but flawed report, aimed at making the maximum possible impact on world leaders including Barack Obama and David Cameron at the UN climate conference in Paris in 2015.

…

NOAA’s 2015 ‘Pausebuster’ paper was based on two new temperature sets of data – one containing measurements of temperatures at the planet’s surface on land, the other at the surface of the seas.

Both datasets were flawed. This newspaper has learnt that NOAA has now decided that the sea dataset will have to be replaced and substantially revised just 18 months after it was issued, because it used unreliable methods which overstated the speed of warming. The revised data will show both lower temperatures and a slower rate in the recent warming trend.

The land temperature dataset used by the study was afflicted by devastating bugs in its software that rendered its findings ‘unstable’.

The paper relied on a preliminary, ‘alpha’ version of the data which was never approved or verified.

A final, approved version has still not been issued. None of the data on which the paper was based was properly ‘archived’ – a mandatory requirement meant to ensure that raw data and the software used to process it is accessible to other scientists, so they can verify NOAA results.

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The sea dataset used by Thomas Karl and his colleagues – known as Extended Reconstructed Sea Surface Temperatures version 4, or ERSSTv4, tripled the warming trend over the sea during the years 2000 to 2014 from just 0.036C per decade – as stated in version 3 – to 0.099C per decade. Individual measurements in some parts of the globe had increased by about 0.1C and this resulted in the dramatic increase of the overall global trend published by the Pausebuster paper. But Dr Bates said this increase in temperatures was achieved by dubious means. Its key error was an upwards ‘adjustment’ of readings from fixed and floating buoys, which are generally reliable, to bring them into line with readings from a much more doubtful source – water taken in by ships. This, Dr Bates explained, has long been known to be questionable: ships are themselves sources of heat, readings will vary from ship to ship, and the depth of water intake will vary according to how heavily a ship is laden – so affecting temperature readings.

Dr Bates said: ‘They had good data from buoys. And they threw it out and “corrected” it by using the bad data from ships. You never change good data to agree with bad, but that’s what they did – so as to make it look as if the sea was warmer.’

ERSSTv4 ‘adjusted’ buoy readings up by 0.12C. It also ignored data from satellites that measure the temperature of the lower atmosphere, which are also considered reliable. Dr Bates said he gave the paper’s co-authors ‘a hard time’ about this, ‘and they never really justified what they were doing.’

Quote of the day—Christiana Figueres

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This is the first time in the history of mankind that we are setting ourselves the task of intentionally, within a defined period of time to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution.

Christiana Figueres
Executive secretary of U.N.’s Framework Convention on Climate Change
February 3, 2015
Figueres: First time the world economy is transformed intentionally
[See also: Global Warming is About Destroying Capitalism? and U.N. Official Reveals Real Reason Behind Warming Scare.

They always have to use force don’t they? It’s always about control by whatever ruse they think might work.

Free markets and free minds are just not acceptable to them.—Joe]

Quote of the day—James Taylor

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Don’t look now, but maybe a scientific consensus exists concerning global warming after all. Only 36 percent of geoscientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem.

James Taylor
February 13, 2013
[Via a tweet from Scott Adams.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Scott Adams

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You’re wondering how I can know that other people are hallucinating and not me. That’s where it comes in handy to study persuasion and hypnosis. Delusional people leave tells.

One of the tells in this case is an ad hominem attack on whoever disagrees with you on climate science. You can see that happening on my Twitter feed today as the pro-climate-science types are coming after me in numbers. When you see an oversized reaction to what should be nothing but competing scientific claims, that’s usually a tell that someone slipped into cognitive dissonance.

Scott Adams
December 29, 2016
The Illusion of Knowledge
[And in the gun rights domain we have Markley’s Law demonstrating anti-gun people are delusional in regards to their beliefs.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Lamar Smith

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The Committee concludes that the DOE placed its own priorities to further the President’s Climate Action Plan before its Constitutional obligations to be candid with Congress. The DOE’s actions constitute a reckless and calculated attack on the legislative process itself, which undermines the power of Congress to legislate. The Committee further concludes that DOE’s disregard for separation of powers is not limited to a small group of employees, but rather is an institutional problem that must be corrected by overhauling its management practices with respect to its relationship with the Congress.

Congressman Lamar Smith
December 20, 2016
Chairman
Staff Report Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
U.S. Department of Energy Misconduct Related to the Low Dose Radiation Research Program
[Drain the swamp.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Forrest Bishop

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In order to continue to exist and to prosper, life on Earth needs one more trick, the one thing that not one of the marvelous inventions of all the eons past had ever been able to accomplish. There has to be some way,somehow, to wrench the locked carbon up out of the earth, to throw it back into the air.

We are that way. We make the keys that unlock the carbon from the stone and return it to the world. We are the solution to the impending extinction of life and this is the most important story ever heard.

Forrest Bishop
July 2016
The Solution to the Ice Age Extinctions
[H/T to Rolf.—Joe]

Carbon, warming, C4 vs C3 photosynthesis, and an interesting detective story

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I came across an interesting story. A different perspective that brings together the mystery of the mega-fauna die-out in the last ice age, science-geek level photosynthesis details, global warming / climate change, crop science, and more. It was written sort of like a mystery story, but I think it merits consideration and more research.

The title of it is The Solution to Ice Age extinctions. The title is a joke, or at least a play on words and meaning, at a couple of level.

Ultra-short version: there is more than one type of photosynthesis, they operate at different efficiencies at different CO2 concentrations, different types of plants utilize different methods of photosynthesis, and different animals eat different types of plants. Nothing earth-shattering from each of these items individually. Very interesting when considered together, because organisms respond to changes in the environment.

Quote of the day—Tatiana Schlossberg

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Crime is one example where a rebound in carbon emissions could be an issue, according to this study. While there is an energy cost to operating prisons, the study notes, inmates generally consume less than an average citizen in the country, so fewer prisoners might mean higher overall energy consumption.

Additionally, the money saved from reducing crime would go into the government’s budget and people’s pockets. All that money could be spent in other ways — infrastructure, buildings or goods — that may require more energy to produce or operate, possibly adding more greenhouse gases to the atmosphere.

Tatiana Schlossberg
August 3, 2016
How Lowering Crime Could Contribute to Global Warming
[H/T to Anonymous Conservative.

I found this very telling. The violation of the rights of people by criminals is secondary to the concern about carbon emissions. And, most importantly, they now have the idea that putting lots of people in prison is good for the environment. Think about what that might lead to.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Tim Ball

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Figure 2 provides a brief context to show the wider natural range of temperature over the last 10,000 years. It shows the temperature of the Northern Hemisphere derived from Greenland ice cores.

GreenlandTemp
Figure 2.

The current temperature is on the right (red line). Some salient points that expose the lies and distortions;
* The world was warmer than today for 97 percent of the last 10,000 years, a period known variously as the Climatic Optimum, or more recently the Holocene Optimum. We have known about this warmer period for at least 75 years.

* The world was 2°C warmer than today 1000 years ago during the Medieval warming. Remember, you are told that the world is going to warm by 2°C, and that is catastrophic.

* The world was 4°C warmer than today during the Minoan warming.

* We are told the amount and rate of temperature increase in the last 100 years (shown in red) is abnormal. Compare the slope with any of the previous increases.

* The green line indicates the larger trend and shows that the Earth has cooled for approximately the last 7000 years.
The CO2 changes over this period, but those changes follow the temperature. The global warming proponents tell the public it is the opposite.

Tim Ball
August 1, 2016
Dr. Tim Ball: How the world was deceived about global warming and climate change
[Assuming Figure 2 is factual data then this would seem to be conclusive evidence that nearly everything the fear mongering climate change people claim is false.—Joe]

Deliberate deception or crap for brains?

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I know mainstream media reporters get a lot of things wrong through ignorance and laziness. But this seems like a tough one to mess up on without being deliberate. The Washington Post headline is After the Pacific Ocean swallows villages and five Solomon Islands, a study blames climate change:

In a recent paper in the journal Environmental Research Letters, the scientists link the destructive sea level rise to anthropogenic — that is, human-caused — climate change. The study marks the first time anyone has concretely analyzed the loss of Solomon Island shoreline in the context of global warming, they say.

…

the sea-level rise observed in this study — at about a fourth to two-fifths of an inch a year — is triple the global average.

Really? So they believe the water just got piled up in the South Pacific? Do they have crap for brains? Or do they just believe their readers do?

So… I read the original paper, Interactions between sea-level rise and wave exposure on reef island dynamics in the Solomon Islands. Abstract:

Low-lying reef islands in the Solomon Islands provide a valuable window into the future impacts of global sea-level rise. Sea-level rise has been predicted to cause widespread erosion and inundation of low-lying atolls in the central Pacific. However, the limited research on reef islands in the western Pacific indicates the majority of shoreline changes and inundation to date result from extreme events, seawalls and inappropriate development rather than sea-level rise alone. Here, we present the first analysis of coastal dynamics from a sea-level rise hotspot in the Solomon Islands. Using time series aerial and satellite imagery from 1947 to 2014 of 33 islands, along with historical insight from local knowledge, we have identified five vegetated reef islands that have vanished over this time period and a further six islands experiencing severe shoreline recession. Shoreline recession at two sites has destroyed villages that have existed since at least 1935, leading to community relocations. Rates of shoreline recession are substantially higher in areas exposed to high wave energy, indicating a synergistic interaction between sea-level rise and waves. Understanding these local factors that increase the susceptibility of islands to coastal erosion is critical to guide adaptation responses for these remote Pacific communities.

Nothing about climate change.

Here is the conclusion of the paper:

This study represents the first assessment of shoreline change from the Solomon Islands, a global sea-level rise hotspot. We have documented five vegetated reef islands (1–5 ha in size) that have recently vanished and a further six islands experiencing severe shoreline recession. Shoreline recession at two sites has destroyed villages that have existed since at least 1935, leading to community relocations. The large range of erosion severity on the islands in this study highlights the critical need to understand the complex interplay between the projected accelerating sea-level rise, other changes in global climate such as winds and waves, and local tectonics, to guide future adaptation planning and minimise social impacts.

The paper mentions concerns about changes in climate which may affect the islands, but they do not attribute the changes they have seen to climate change. And, in fact, the paper mentions something the Washington Post conveniently doesn’t mention (emphasis added):

Change in the twelve islands in Roviana was mixed with six islands growing slightly (<20%) and six islands declining slightly (<20%).

Some islands are growing in size. Apparently that doesn’t fit the narrative so the general public doesn’t need to see it.

My conclusion: The Washington Post is deliberately deceiving the general public and has crap for brains for believing their readers are too stupid or lazy to read the original paper when they even give us a link to the original paper.

Quote of the day—Scott H. Greenfield

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So make your case. Advocate your position. Persuade everyone you see that your position is right, that the demise of humanity is imminent and that we must act immediately to stem climate change.  Yes, go for it.

But never by silencing critics, no matter how wrong you are certain they are.  This subpoena cannot stand, no matter how strongly, how passionately, you disagree with CEI.  There is a line that cannot be crossed, no matter what, and that line has been crossed. Prevail because your ideas are better than theirs, but not because government has the means to bludgeon ideas with which it, and you, disagree.

Scott H. Greenfield
April 8, 2016
The CEI Subpoena Cannot Stand
[H/T to Alan Gura on April 8th for the retweet of Greenfield’s tweet.—Joe]

It’s not an open loop system

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In control systems and electronic amplifiers engineers design things to be self correcting. Think of the simple control system for the heating system in your home. You set the thermostat to a particular temperature and it will turn the heat on it if gets too cool and off when it reaches the desired temperature. This is a closed loop system. There is a sensor which provides information about the current status of the system and this information is used to control the heat source and keep the temperature within acceptable limits. The system has a feedback loop from the output (the room temperature) back to the input (the heat supply).

Without such a feedback loop it would be very difficult to maintain a system at a stable temperature. When the outside temperature changed the inside temperature would change too. If someone left a window open the interior temperature would change.

I have often thought our planet must have one or more feedback loops to maintain it’s temperature at something very close to the same (averaged the entire surface over the entire year) temperature. I knew one feedback loop, which the climate change people seldom, if ever, mention, was that plants are CO2 starved. At our current concentration of about 400 ppm of CO2 in the atmosphere it’s not easy for the plants to absorb and then pull the carbon apart from the oxygen to build plant matter. In fact, at current atmospheric pressures, photosynthesis shuts down at between 150 ppm and 200 ppm. As atmospheric CO2 increases plants grow faster. Faster growing plants mean more energy is absorbed from the sun, reducing atmospheric heating, and more CO2 is absorbed from the air. Hence the green house effect, atmospheric warming, from increased CO2 is counteracted, at least in part, by the feedback mechanism of increased plant growth.

There are other feedback systems as well. One of which only very recently was discovered:

According to a study by the Institute of Catalysis and Environment in Lyon (IRCELYON, CNRS / University Lyon 1) and the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS), the oceans are producing unexpectedly large quantities of isoprene – a volatile organic compound (VOC) – which is known to have a cooling effect on climate.

Our planet temperature is not an open loop system. If it were then the global warming/cooling climate change people would be right to be concerned. But it is, almost, obviously not. Closed loop systems are much more difficult to upset and are much more stable. We have a closed loop system with many feedback loops. These loops make the system extremely difficult to model but don’t tell me climate is changing until you can explain to me how the inputs to the system have the potential to break the feedback loops which stabilize the temperature.

Quote of the day—Matt Ridley

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The environmental movement has advanced three arguments in recent years for giving up fossil fuels: (1) that we will soon run out of them anyway; (2) that alternative sources of energy will price them out of the marketplace; and (3) that we cannot afford the climate consequences of burning them.

Matt Ridley
March 13, 2015
Fossil Fuels Will Save the World
[There is some really good stuff in the article. If you don’t have a subscription to the Wall Street Journal you can read the article here as well.

There is stuff like:

More than a billion people on the planet have yet to get access to electricity and to experience the leap in living standards that abundant energy brings. This is not just an inconvenience for them: Indoor air pollution from wood fires kills four million people a year. The next time that somebody at a rally against fossil fuels lectures you about her concern for the fate of her grandchildren, show her a picture of an African child dying today from inhaling the dense muck of a smoky fire.

And this point about plants being CO2 starved and grow better with more CO2 which I bring up with nearly everyone that wants to tell me about man caused global warming:

Although the world has certainly warmed since the 19th century, the rate of warming has been slow and erratic. There has been no increase in the frequency or severity of storms or droughts, no acceleration of sea-level rise. Arctic sea ice has decreased, but Antarctic sea ice has increased. At the same time, scientists are agreed that the extra carbon dioxide in the air has contributed to an improvement in crop yields and a roughly 14% increase in the amount of all types of green vegetation on the planet since 1980.

The more sophisticated global-warming/climate-change people want to talk about the positive feedback loops that will create runaway warming. But they give me a blank look when I ask about the negative feedback from the plants consuming more CO2 and more vegetation resulting from the increased CO2.—Joe]

The science is settled

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Via ‏@ItsRobbAllen we have an article about a paper demonstrating that mass shootings do not usher in a new age of gun control. In fact it is just the opposite.

Correlation is not causation but from looking at the numbers it seems pretty clear that horrific mass shootings are followed, a year or so later, by less support for gun control than just before the mass shooting.

The authors of the paper are clearly in favor of gun control. They ask, and answer, the question of how to go about “Breaking the Cycle”. The cycle being the “regression to the mean” and a continued drop in support after an initial surge in support for gun control following a particularly horrific mass shooting.

Their answer, in part, is:

To change the shooting cycle, gun control advocates must change the gun culture. But to change the gun culture, gun control advocates must explain, or at least distance themselves from the position that causes the fiercest opposition—that the Brady Campaign sees as its ultimate goal the criminalization of possessing guns. Nelson “Pete” Shields III, a founder of Handgun Control, Inc.—the aptly named progenitor of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence—openly advocated for the elimination of all handguns: “‘We’re going to have to take this one step at a time. . . . Our ultimate goal—total control of all guns—is going to take time.’ The ‘final problem,’ he insisted, ‘is to make the possession of all handguns and all handgun ammunition’ for ordinary civilians ‘totally illegal.’”197 John Hechinger, a sponsor of the D.C. handgun ban and a board member of Handgun Control, Inc., put it simply: “We have to do away with the guns.”198

The anti-gun people have difficult hurdles to overcome. They must attract supporters that are willing to donate money and time to, at best, only make small incremental, paper-work type, changes to gun laws. They cannot speak or even whisper of banning guns. Without banning, and perhaps even with draconian bans, people with any smarts about them will realize “universal background checks”, “gun free zones”, and restrictive carry laws are just crazy talk. How many people are willing to spend time and money on something that only benefits their cause in some abstract way of encumbering “the gun culture”.

If they could speak of grand plans to ban guns and create a “gun free America” if only given enough money and time then they probably could get more support. But doing so increases their opposition more than their support.

So how to “change” (eliminate) the gun culture? That is another huge hurdle. There are no “anti-gun ranges” or “anti-gun shows” to take people to for fun, learning, and familiarity. A process/cycle has been identified for which the chances of the anti-gun forces breaking is very low. To disrupt the cycle requires a raising the bar to gun ownership such that the propagation of “the gun culture” is inhibited. But raising such a bar is virtually impossible at this time because of the courts and the resistance with which disruption is met with.

It’s a similar problem to that faced by those who advocate for reducing greenhouse gases which contribute to “Global Warming”/”Climate Change”. People like the benefits of those activities which produce the greenhouse gases as a side effect. Any effort to break “the cycle” of greenhouse gas production encounters very stiff resistance on the specifics of the proposed legislative action even though some polling data indicates a sizable portion of the (mostly ignorant) population agree with the vague, overall goals.

One could say that this paper settles the science on the politics of gun control. The gun control people are losing and as long as we continue expanding our culture they will continue to lose.

Quote of the day—James Lovelock

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We need a more authoritative world. We’ve become a sort of cheeky, egalitarian world where everyone can have their say. It’s all very well, but there are certain circumstances – a war is a typical example – where you can’t do that. You’ve got to have a few people with authority who you trust who are running it.

…

But even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while.

James Lovelock
March 2010
James Lovelock: ‘Fudging data is a sin against science’
[A pretty good case can be made that one of the main motivators for the whole global cooling/warming/change fraud is to give more power to governments. That this guy, a global warming fire and brimstone prophet, embraces the government acquisition of power should come as no surprise.

And just who do you think will have the authority? You can be pretty certain he thinks he will have a lot of it. But historically, from China and the USSR, people like him were the first to get a bullet to the back of the head or sent to the gulag.—Joe]

Changing climage- It’s the sun, in a nutshell

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Why would someone push an agenda that is wrong? Lots of reasons that most of us are familiar with: ignorance, their parents did it, being reactionary, people like to feel they are part of a bigger group (there is strength in numbers, and strength is comforting), misguided principles, etc., etc. But things like ignorance can be cured, IF the ignorant person doesn’t have a significant vested interest in maintaining their current belief.

A related but different question: why would someone push something they know is wrong? Usually, it’s because they profit from it personally in some way, via research grants, accumulation of political power, they own the “alternatives” being pushed, it is a structural part of a larger belief system, or whatever.

Most global warmists / climate-change pushers can get binned into “profit from it” or the “scaring people is good for pushing more / larger government controls and regulations” view. You know the type. So here are a couple of very short, simple things about it all.

Cause MUST come before EFFECT. This isn’t even scientific method 101, this is toddler-learning-about-gravity level stuff. And if you graph CO2 and temperature, temperature change leads CO2 change. Ergo, CO2 CANNOT be driving temperature.

OK, a warmest replies, then what alternatives are there? Answer: The sun.

But, they say, the sun is constant. Ahem. No, it is NOT.

So how does it change that we can test or measure, the smarter ones counter, what’s the mechanism; it’s 93,000,000 miles away? (yes, yes, I know – it’s a darn small percentage of them that goes here, but let’s go there anyway).

Answer: Sun-spots. Sunspots, they reply, you must be joking.

Nope. Sunspots are indicative of magnetic field activity. The stronger the sun’s magnetic field, the more Galactic Cosmic Rays it deflects from Earth. You see, GCR passing through the Earth’s atmosphere interact with it in a way and at a rate that they act to seed cloud nuclei. Clouds are white and reflective. So:

Lots of sunspots -> few GCR -> less cloud cover -> lower albedo, -> more energy absorbed from the sun -> planet warms.

Few sunspots -> more GCR -> more cloud cover -> higher albedo, -> less energy absorbed from the sun -> planet cools.

In the 400+ years of actual sunspot observation, the correlation between long-term sunspot patterns and climate is well established. Now we know HOW. We’ve tested it in the lab. (Svensmark at CERN) And hey, what do you know – 700 million years ago, the sun was in a part of the Milkey Way that had much higher levels of GCRs – and it was an ice-ball, pole to pole.

Quote of the day–Robert J. Avrech

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Liberty is too messy, too chaotic for the forces of the Democrat party. They yearn for conformity, for a uniform sameness that gives the illusion of a serenely content society. That’s why they want to get rid of cars and shove us all into railroad cars. Socialists just love cattle cars; they just relabel them high-speed rail.

That’s why Democrats want to get rid of the Second Amendment. An armed citizenry can resist an unjust government.

Robert J. Avrech
June 24, 2013
Climate Change = People Control
[I have nothing to add.—Joe]

Quote of the day—Béla Nagy, et al

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A combination of an exponential decrease in cost and an exponential increase in production would make Moore’s law and Wright’s law indistinguishable, as originally pointed out by Sahal. We show for the first time that these regularities are observed in data to such a degree that the performance of these two laws is nearly the same. Our results show that technological progress is forecastable, with the square root of the logarithmic error growing linearly with the forecasting horizon at a typical rate of 2.5% per year. These results have implications for theories of technological change, and assessments of candidate technologies and policies for climate change mitigation.

Béla Nagy
J. Doyne Farmer
Quan M. Bui
Jessika E. Trancik
2012
Statistical Basis for Predicting Technological Progress
[I have two observations.

One; This is awesome! A variation of Moore’s Law applies to, apparently, all technology.

Two; It looks as if they had to make a tie in “climate change” to get National Science Foundation grant money. That’s really messed up. Government grants should not exist. The politics of research should succeed or fail using the money of someone other than that taken by gunpoint via taxes.—Joe]