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Newsletter (October 2, 2009)
Above the FoldIn this, the fourth of five segments from a much longer interview, we hear first-hand accounts of how rising regulations are driving up electricity rates in rural Virginia. This is forcing families to make cuts and even move. A local factory owner even threatened to move production overseas over the rate increases.
One couple from Bishop Harry Jackson’s church relates how the wife lost her job, twice, due to rising energy bills, how the rising cost of gasoline finally forced them to move, and the hardships that higher energy prices cause their parents.
Governor George Allen draws them out and helps connect the dots: Higher energy prices hurt businesses, cost jobs, and impact even middle-income families. And government mandates, even when well-intentioned, have often had an effect of increasing pollution by shifting industries over-seas, where regulations are relaxed.In this issue
Featured- Defects in Key Climate Data Are Uncovered
- The Dog Ate Global Warming
- Not Evil Just Wrong Coming Soon
- An Inconvenient Question Suppressed at The Age of Stupid Premiere
Debate- Kerry and Boxer's New Climate Bill
- Exile for Non-Believers
- Congress Letter to EPA Questions Cap-and-Trade
Science- Lawrence Solomon Explains Extreme Variations in Arctic Ice
- Why We Need a New Global Data Set
Economics- Belatedly, Egypt Spots Flaws in Wiping Out Pigs
Meet the Critics: Madhav L. Khandekar & Don J. Easterbrook
Briefly Noted
Featuredby Ross McKitrick
Associate Professor of Environmental Economics, University of Guelph; Co-author, Taken by Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy, and Politics of Global Warming
Financial Post, October 1, 2009
Beginning in 2003, I worked with Stephen McIntyre to replicate a famous result in paleoclimatology known as the Hockey Stick graph. Developed by a U.S. climatologist named Michael Mann, it was a statistical compilation of tree ring data supposedly proving that air temperatures had been stable for 900 years, then soared off the charts in the 20th century. Prior to the publication of the Hockey Stick, scientists had held that the medieval-era was warmer than the present, making the scale of 20th century global warming seem relatively unimportant. The dramatic revision to this view occasioned by the Hockey Stick’s publication made it the poster child of the global warming movement. It was featured prominently in a 2001 report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as government websites and countless review reports.
Steve and I showed that the mathematics behind the Mann Hockey Stick were badly flawed, such that its shape was determined by suspect bristlecone tree ring data. Controversies quickly piled up: Two expert panels involving the U.S. National Academy of Sciences were asked to investigate, the U.S. Congress held a hearing, and the media followed the story around the world.
The expert reports upheld all of our criticisms of the Mann Hockey Stick, both of the mathematics and of its reliance on flawed bristlecone pine data. One of the panels, however, argued that while the Mann Hockey Stick itself was flawed, a series of other studies published since 1998 had similar shapes, thus providing support for the view that the late 20th century is unusually warm. The IPCC also made this argument in its 2007 report. But the second expert panel, led by statistician Edward Wegman, pointed out that the other studies are not independent. They are written by the same small circle of authors, only the names are in different orders, and they reuse the same few data climate proxy series over and over.
Most of the proxy data does not show anything unusual about the 20th century. But two data series have reappeared over and over that do have a hockey stick shape. One was the flawed bristlecone data that the National Academy of Sciences panel said should not be used, so the studies using it can be set aside. The second was a tree ring curve from the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, compiled by UK scientist Keith Briffa.
Briffa had published a paper in 1995 claiming that the medieval period actually contained the coldest year of the millennium. But this claim depended on just three tree ring records (called cores) from the Polar Urals. Later, a colleague of his named F. H. Schweingruber produced a much larger sample from the Polar Urals, but it told a very different story: The medieval era was actually quite warm and the late 20th century was unexceptional. Briffa and Schweingruber never published those data, instead they dropped the Polar Urals altogether from their climate reconstruction papers.
In its place they used a new series that Briffa had calculated from tree ring data from the nearby Yamal Peninsula that had a pronounced Hockey Stick shape: relatively flat for 900 years then sharply rising in the 20th century. This Yamal series was a composite of an undisclosed number of individual tree cores. In order to check the steps involved in producing the composite, it would be necessary to have the individual tree ring measurements themselves. But Briffa didn’t release his raw data.
Over the next nine years, at least one paper per year appeared in prominent journals using Briffa’s Yamal composite to support a hockey stick-like result. The IPCC relied on these studies to defend the Hockey Stick view, and since it had appointed Briffa himself to be the IPCC Lead Author for this topic, there was no chance it would question the Yamal data.
Despite the fact that these papers appeared in top journals like Nature and Science, none of the journal reviewers or editors ever required Briffa to release his Yamal data. Steve McIntyre’s repeated requests for them to uphold their own data disclosure rules were ignored.
Then in 2008 Briffa, Schweingruber and some colleagues published a paper using the Yamal series (again) in a journal called the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which has very strict data-sharing rules. Steve sent in his customary request for the data, and this time an editor stepped up to the plate, ordering the authors to release their data. A short while ago the data appeared on the Internet. Steve could finally begin to unpack the Yamal composite.
It turns out that many of the samples were taken from dead (partially fossilized) trees and they have no particular trend. The sharp uptrend in the late 20th century came from cores of 10 living trees alive as of 1990, and five living trees alive as of 1995. Based on scientific standards, this is too small a sample on which to produce a publication-grade proxy composite. The 18th and 19th century portion of the sample, for instance, contains at least 30 trees per year. But that portion doesn’t show a warming spike. The only segment that does is the late 20th century, where the sample size collapses. Once again a dramatic hockey stick shape turns out to depend on the least reliable portion of a dataset.
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Only by playing with data can scientists come up with the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph of global warming. -Ross McKitrick
But an even more disquieting discovery soon came to light. Steve searched a paleoclimate data archive to see if there were other tree ring cores from at or near the Yamal site that could have been used to increase the sample size. He quickly found a large set of 34 up-to-date core samples, taken from living trees in Yamal by none other than Schweingruber himself! Had these been added to Briffa’s small group the 20th century would simply be flat. It would appear completely unexceptional compared to the rest of the millennium.
Combining data from different samples would not have been an unusual step. Briffa added data from another Schweingruber site to a different composite, from the Taimyr Peninsula. The additional data were gathered more than 400 km away from the primary site. And in that case the primary site had three or four times as many cores to begin with as the Yamal site. Why did he not fill out the Yamal data with the readily-available data from his own coauthor? Why did Briffa seek out additional data for the already well-represented Taimyr site and not for the inadequate Yamal site?
Thus the key ingredient in most of the studies that have been invoked to support the Hockey Stick, namely the Briffa Yamal series, depends on the influence of a woefully thin subsample of trees and the exclusion of readily-available data for the same area. Whatever is going on here, it is not science.
I have been probing the arguments for global warming for well over a decade. In collaboration with a lot of excellent coauthors I have consistently found that when the layers get peeled back, what lies at the core is either flawed, misleading or simply non-existent. The surface temperature data is a contaminated mess with a significant warm bias, and as I have detailed elsewhere the IPCC fabricated evidence in its 2007 report to cover up the problem. Climate models are in gross disagreement with observations, and the discrepancy is growing with each passing year. The often-hyped claim that the modern climate has departed from natural variability depended on flawed statistical methods and low-quality data. The IPCC review process, of which I was a member last time, is nothing at all like what the public has been told: Conflicts of interest are endemic, critical evidence is systematically ignored and there are no effective checks and balances against bias or distortion.
I get exasperated with fellow academics, and others who ought to know better, who pile on to the supposed global warming consensus without bothering to investigate any of the glaring scientific discrepancies and procedural flaws. Over the coming few years, as the costs of global warming policies mount and the evidence of a crisis continues to collapse, perhaps it will become socially permissible for people to start thinking for themselves again. In the meantime I am grateful for those few independent thinkers, like Steve McIntyre, who continue to ask the right questions and insist on scientific standards of openness and transparency.
Related items:
Yamal: A 'Divergence' Problem
by Steve McIntyre
Author, ClimateAudit.org
September 27, 2009
Leading UK Climate Scientists Must Explain or Resign
by Jennifer Marohasy
Senior Fellow, Australian Institute of Public Affairs; Director, Australian Environment Foundation
jennifermarohasy.com/blog, September 30, 2009
Mann-Made Warming Confirmed
by Christopher C. Horner
Senior Fellow, Competitive Enterprise Institute; Author, Red Hot Lies and The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming
National Review, September 28, 2009
Ding Dong the Stick is Dead
by Anthony Watts
Author, Watts Up With That?
September 27, 2009
The Siberian Tree-Ring Circus
by Francis Turner
L'Ombre de l'Olivier, September 28, 2009Back to top by Patrick J. Michaels
Chief Editor, WorldClimateReport.com; Research Professor, University of Virginia; Senior Fellow, Cato Institute; Visiting Scientist, Marhsall Institute; Author, Climate of Extremes, Meltdown, The Satanic Gases, and Sound and Fury
National Review, September 23, 2009
Imagine if there were no reliable records of global surface temperature. Raucous policy debates such as cap-and-trade would have no scientific basis, Al Gore would at this point be little more than a historical footnote, and President Obama would not be spending this U.N. session talking up a (likely unattainable) international climate deal in Copenhagen in December.
Steel yourself for the new reality, because the data needed to verify the gloom-and-doom warming forecasts have disappeared.
Or so it seems. Apparently, they were either lost or purged from some discarded computer. Only a very few people know what really happened, and they aren't talking much. And what little they are saying makes no sense.
In the early 1980s, with funding from the U.S. Department of Energy, scientists at the United Kingdom's University of East Anglia established the Climate Research Unit (CRU) to produce the world's first comprehensive history of surface temperature. It's known in the trade as the "Jones and Wigley" record for its authors, Phil Jones and Tom Wigley, and it served as the primary reference standard for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) until 2007. It was this record that prompted the IPCC to claim a "discernible human influence on global climate."
Putting together such a record isn't at all easy. Weather stations weren't really designed to monitor global climate. Long-standing ones were usually established at points of commerce, which tend to grow into cities that induce spurious warming trends in their records. Trees grow up around thermometers and lower the afternoon temperature. Further, as documented by the University of Colorado's Roger Pielke Sr., many of the stations themselves are placed in locations, such as in parking lots or near heat vents, where artificially high temperatures are bound to be recorded.
So the weather data that go into the historical climate records that are required to verify models of global warming aren't the original records at all. Jones and Wigley, however, weren't specific about what was done to which station in order to produce their record, which, according to the IPCC, showed a warming of 0.6° +/- 0.2°C in the 20th century.
Now begins the fun. Warwick Hughes, an Australian scientist, wondered where that "+/-" came from, so he politely wrote Phil Jones in early 2005, asking for the original data. Jones's response to a fellow scientist attempting to replicate his work was, "We have 25 years or so invested in the work. Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?" . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Not Evil Just Wrong is the film Al Gore and Hollywood don't want you to see. It reveals the true human cost of Global Warming hysteria.
Not Evil Just Wrong shows how Global Warming alarmism and the tax increases that go along with it are going to increase costs for working families during one of the worst recessions in living memory.
Al Gore and his allies want to ban fossil fuels in the developed world. This would devastate the American economy and drive jobs to India and China.
Be part of the resistance. With your help we can bypass the barriers to distribution that Hollywood and the mainstream media put up to stop you from hearing the truth.
Be part of the premiere night by hosting a screening in your home, community center or church. Be part of the cinematic tea party movement and tell Al Gore and the elites that you are fed up with taxes and restrictions that threaten jobs across the country.
October 18th 2009 8 pm EST: Host a PremiereBack to top View the video of Not Evil Just Wrong director and producer Phelim McAleer being forcibly suppressed for exposing Age of Stupid supporters' use of airplanes to reach the premiere of the anti-flying documentary.Back to top DebateView the full 821-page bill (PDF).
Related items:
Inhofe EPW Press Blog: Some Questions for Sen. Boxer
New York Times: Draft Bill Seeks Lower Aircraft Emissions
. . . The draft Senate bill's many provisions include a requirement that U.S. EPA, by the end of 2012, set greenhouse gas emissions standards for new aircraft and new aircraft engines. The agency would work with the Federal Aviation Administration on the standards.
The standards must "achieve the greatest degree of emission reduction achievable based on the application of technology which the administrator determines will be available at the time such standards take effect, taking into consideration cost, energy, and safety factors associated with the application of such technology," the draft Senate bill states.
Standards would take effect "after such period as the administrator finds necessary to permit the development and application of the requisite technology." . . .Back to top by Joanne Nova
Author, The Skeptics Handbook; Author, JoanneNova.com; Partner, Science Speak
Science & Public Policy Institute, September 21, 2009
. . . Mitchell Taylor is a Polar Bear researcher who has caught more polar bears and worked on more polar bear groups than any other, but he was effectively ostracized from the Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) specifically because he has publicly expressed doubts that there is a crisis due to carbon dioxide emissions.
Dr Andy Derocher, the outgoing chairman of the PBSG and Professor at the University of Alberta, wrote to inform Taylor that he was not welcome at the 2009 meeting of the PBSG. Keep in mind as you read his comments (below) that Taylor had arranged funding to attend the meeting in Copenhagen, and has been at every meeting of this group since 1981. With 30 years of experience in polar bear research, it goes without saying that he has something to contribute to any discussion about polar bear conservation.
This is the original email from Derocher to Taylor explaining why he was not invited:
Hi Mitch,
The world is a political place and for polar bears, more so now than ever before. I have no problem with dissenting views as long as they are supportable by logic, scientific reasoning, and the literature.
I do believe, as do many PBSG members, that for the sake of polar bear conservation, views that run counter to human induced climate change are extremely unhelpful. In this vein, your positions and statements in the Manhattan Declaration, the Frontier Institute, and the Science and Public Policy Institute are inconsistent with positions taken by the PBSG.
I too was not surprised by the members not endorsing an invitation.
Nothing I heard had to do with your science on harvesting or your research on polar bears - it was the positions you've taken on global warming that brought opposition.
Time will tell who is correct but the scientific literature is not on the side of those arguing against human induced climate change.
I look forward to having someone else chair the PBSG.
Best regards,
Andy (Derocher) So in polar bear research, your opinion on climate change is more important than your knowledge about polar bears. . . .
Read the rest (PDF).Back to top Letter sent by Representatives Joe Barton and Greg Walden to EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson
September 10, 2009
. . . Given the reliance upon EPA's analysis of the economic impacts of the [Waxman-Markey] bill, Congress and the public must be assured that EPA adhered to the highest standards of objectivity in carrying out its modeling. Accordingly, the agency should fully and completely evaluate and explain its modeling results. EPA's recent analysis of the Waxman-Markey legislation, published June 23, 2009, generated information that apparently has not been fully explained and that suggests EPA's carbon price projections are not valid. Such apparent problems deserve close scrutiny.
In the agency analysis, EPA based its carbon price estimates (and projected economic impacts) on computable general equilibrium (GCE) models. Yet EPA reported at page 22 and elsewhere that these models are not well suited for the near-term economic impacts (i.e., through 2025) of the Waxman-Markey legislation. Because the electricity sector provides the bulk of emissions reductions under the legislation, EPA says it employed the so-called Integrated Planning Model (IPM) to "supplement" the GCE results with a more detailed picture of electricity sector response to higher carbon prices through 2025. We note the results EPA reported for this model run, at page 25 of the analysis, substantially fail to produce the emissions reductions necessary to meet the goals of the legislation at EPA's estimated carbon prices. In fact, EPA's own data suggest carbon prices under this detailed modeling produce only about half the emissions cuts in the electricity sector required under the legislation, suggesting prices may have to be almost double what EPA reported to Congress and the public to achieve the bill's aims. . . .
Read the rest (PDF).Back to top Scienceby Lawrence Solomon
Executive Director, Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute; Writer, National Post; Author, The Deniers: The World-Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud
September 25, 2009
. . . In the Arctic, the ice has indeed been contracting, as the global warming doomsayers have been telling us. But it has also been expanding. The riddle of how the Arctic ice can both be contracting and expanding is easily explained. After you read the next two paragraphs, you’ll be able to describe it easily to your friends to set them straight.
Each winter, the Arctic ice pack rapidly expands and each summer it rapidly contracts, as you can see thanks to photos from a Japanese Aerospace Exploration Agency satellite that tracks the changes in the ice pack. On its website, you can also get data showing the area of sea ice for every month going back to 2002.
Compare March of this year to previous Marches, for example, and you’ll see that the Arctic ice has been expanding of late — a story rarely told. But compare August of this year to previous Augusts and you’ll see that the August ice over the years has tended to contract — this is the basis of the scary stories that we hear about the Arctic ice disappearing. A snapshot of the Arctic ice, without knowledge of the bigger picture, can lead to scary conclusions. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top by Joseph D'Aleo
Founder and Director, International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project
September 23, 2009
. . . As I showed in the first analysis here, the long term global temperature trends in their data bases have been shown by numerous peer review papers to be exaggerated by 30% to 50% and in some cases much more by issues such as uncorrected urbanization (urban heat island or UHI), land use changes, bad siting, bad instrumentation, and ocean measurement techniques that changed over time. NOAA made matters worse by removing the satellite ocean temperature measurement which provide more complete coverage and was not subject to the local issues except near the coastlines and islands. The result has been the absurd and bogus claims by NOAA and the alarmists that we are in the warmest decade in 100 or even a 1000 years or more and our oceans are warmest ever. See this earlier story that summarizes the issues. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Economicsby Michael Slackman
Writer, New York Times
September 19, 2009
. . . When the government killed all the pigs in Egypt this spring — in what public health experts said was a misguided attempt to combat swine flu — it was warned the city would be overwhelmed with trash.
The pigs used to eat tons of organic waste. Now the pigs are gone and the rotting food piles up on the streets of middle-class neighborhoods like Heliopolis and in the poor streets of communities like Imbaba. . . .
Read the rest.Back to top Meet the CriticsHave you ever been at a loss for words when challenged by the alarmist's claim of scientific "consensus," or that dissenting scientists are unqualified? Not only does consensus prove nothing, but the very idea of "consensus" among scientists on catastrophic manmade climate change is simply unfounded. A 2008 Senate Environment and Public Works Minority Report documents dissension around the world:More Than 700 International Scientists Dissent
Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims Two notable critics are:
Madhav L. Khandekar, Ph.D.
Madhav Khandekar serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Hazards, is a Natural Resources Stewardship Project scientist, a Friends of Science environmental consultant, and a former research scientist for Environment Canada. "As I see it, the global warming that we are all debating today is an interesting scientific problem, but it is by no means a crisis. Global warming is no threat to humanity. . . . It is a gradual change and humans have a remarkable ability to adapt to extremes of climate, which they have done in the past, and I am sure that they will be able to do so and still be able to make significant progress," said Khandekar, who contributed to the recent NIPCC report and was an IPCC reviewer (saying of the latter, "To my dismay, IPCC authors ignored all my comments and suggestions for major changes"). Questioning the Global Warming Science and India's Economic Progress in a Changing Climate: Benefits of Global Warming are just a couple samples of Khandekar's publications, which include more than 120 papers, reports, and book reviews.
Don J. Easterbrook, Ph.D.
Award-winning geologist Don Easterbrook, professor of geology at Western Washington University, has been involved in the Quaternary Geology and Geomorphology Division (of which he was the president), the Geological Society of America (whose bulletin he edits), the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, the American Geophysical Union, and other professional societies. Easterbrook, the author of eight scientific books, explains a climate driver more believable than CO2: "In one year--1977--the Pacific Ocean switched from its cool mode into its warm mode and bingo!--within one year we get the big shift in climate and we start the beginning of what's now known as the global warming period." Having presented research papers in a dozen countries, Easterbrook is the author of around 150 scientific papers, including Correlation of Climatic and Solar Variations over the Past 500 Years and Predicting Global Climate Changes from Recurring Climate Cycles and The Next 25 Years: Global Warming or Gobal Cooling?--Geological and Oceanographic Evidence for Cyclical Climate Oscillations.Back to top Briefly NotedChristy: CO2: Undergirding Modern Science
On Climate, Bad News Will Resume
Spencer: Evidence Clouds Caused Recent Cooling
Idso: Fat Folks Beware!
Birth Control Proposed to Fight Climate Change
DeWeese: The Trouble with 'Sustainable Development'
Ambler: United Nations Uses Wikipedia Graph
E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D., National Spokesman
Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation, http://www.cornwallalliance.org/
Information in this newsletter is for scholarly and educational use only and may not be copied or reproduced for any other purposes without prior permission of the copyright holders.
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