Climate Science Advocacy and Modeling

From Watts Up with That

Lindzen on climate science advocacy and modeling – “at this point, the models seem to be failing”

This is a letter professor Richard Lindzen of MIT sent to the Boston Globe and was published today. It is well worth the read.

KERRY EMANUEL’S Feb. 15 op-ed “Climate changes are proven fact’’ is more advocacy than assessment. Vague terms such as “consistent with,’’ “probably,’’ and “potentially’’ hardly change this. Certainly climate change is real; it occurs all the time. To claim that the little we’ve seen is larger than any change we “have been able to discern’’ for a thousand years is disingenuous. Panels of the National Academy of Sciences and Congress have concluded that the methods used to claim this cannot be used for more than 400 years, if at all. Even the head of the deservedly maligned Climatic Research Unit acknowledges that the medieval period may well have been warmer than the present.

The claim that everything other than models represents “mere opinion and speculation’’ is also peculiar. Despite their faults, models show that projections of significant warming depend critically on clouds and water vapor, and the physics of these processes can be observationally tested (the normal scientific approach); at this point, the models seem to be failing.

Finally, given a generation of environmental propaganda, a presidential science adviser (John Holdren) who has promoted alarm since the 1970s, and a government that proposes funding levels for climate research about 20 times the levels in 1991, courage seems hardly the appropriate description – at least for scientists supporting such alarm.

Richard S. Lindzen

Cambridge

The writer is Alfred P. Sloan professor of atmospheric sciences at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

UH OH the IPCC has lost India

From International Business Times via the Daily Caller:

India abandons IPCC, sets up own panel

The Indian government has moved to establish its own body to address and monitor science surrounding climate change, saying it "cannot rely" on the official United Nation panel.

The move is a severe blow to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) following the revelation parts of its 3000 page 2007 report on climate science was not subjected to peer review.

A primary claim of the report was the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035, but the claim was not repeated in any peer-reviewed studies and rebuffed by scientists.

India's environment minister Jairam Ramesh announced that the Indian government will establish a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor climate change in the region.

"There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism," Ramesh said. "I am for climate science."

Well, If they are looking for pure climate science the will definitely have to do it themselves.  Read it all here.
Posted 05 February 2010 @ 11:10 am ET

You Lie! (Just like everybody else...)

From the telegraph UK:

Climate change: the true price of the warmists' folly is becoming clear

From the Met Office's mistakes to Gordon Brown's wind farms, the cost of 'green' policies is growing, warns Christopher Booker

Impeccable was the timing of that announcement that directors of the Met Office were last year given pay rises of up to 33 per cent, putting its £200,000-a-year chief executive into a higher pay bracket than the Prime Minister. As Britain shivered through Arctic cold and its heaviest snowfalls for decades, our global-warming-obsessed Government machine was caught out in all directions.

For a start, we saw Met Office spokesmen trying to explain why it had got its seasonal forecasts hopelessly wrong for three cold winters and three cool summers in a row. The current cold snap, we were told with the aid of the BBC – itself facing an inquiry into its relentless obsession with “global warming” – was just a “regional” phenomenon, due to “natural” factors. No attempt was made to explain why the same freezing weather is affecting much of the northern hemisphere (with 1,200 places in the US alone last week reporting record snow and low temperatures). And this is the body on which, through its Hadley Centre for Climate Change and the discredited Climatic Research Unit, the world’s politicians rely for weather forecasting 100 years ahead.

Then, as councils across Britain ran out of salt for frozen roads, we had the Transport Minister, Lord Adonis, admitting that we entered this cold spell with only six days’ supply of grit. No mention of the fact that the Highways Agency and councils had been advised that there was no need for them to stockpile any more – let alone that many councils now have more “climate change officials” than gritters. Read it all.

From PowerLine:

Why is Umar being Treated as a Criminal Rather than an enemy Combatant?

The Obama administration's decision to treat Umar Abdulmutallab as a criminal defendant rather than an enemy combatant is indefensible on the merits. It is also incredibly costly in terms of foregone intelligence. The administration's combined arrogance and stupidity would be laughable if their consequences weren't so serious.

Today's Telegraph carries Philip Sherwell's article quoting former Senator and 9/11 Commission member Slade Gorton on the issue. Speaking of Abdulmutallab, Gorton says:

"He was singing like a canary, then we charged him in civilian proceedings, he got a lawyer and shut up," Slade Gorton, a member of the 9/11 Commission that investigated the Sept 2001 terror attacks on the US, told The Sunday Telegraph.

"I find it incomprehensible that this administration is treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue. The president has finally said that we are at war with al-Qaeda. Well, if this is a war, then Abdulmutallab should be treated as a combatant not a criminal."

Why is the Obama administration treating Abdulmutallab as a criminal defendant? It is an unbelievable fact that we have as yet no straightforward answer to this question. There is, in any event, no good answer to it. If we are at war with al Qaeda, as Obama himself asserted last week in the statement to which Gorton alludes, why are we treating Umar Abdulmutallab (not to mention Khalid Sheikh Mohammed) like John Gotti?

JOHN adds: Check out, too, Marc Thiessen's excellent piece which explains the unique value of intelligence gained from captured al Qaeda terrorists.

From NeoNeocon:
Are Obama’s lies politics as usual?

Most people now recognize that Obama has been lying about a lot of things. But it’s often said that’s just business as usual for politicians, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is being naive.

Blogger Richard Fernandez of Belmont Club, a writer with a keen mind and a graceful style, as well as more than his share of that rare commodity known as wisdom, has this to say on the subject:

An Election Promise is now almost synonymous with a Lie. Few voters believe that an election promise will actually be kept, but many vote according to what they are promised anyway…

From Just One Minute:
What Columbia And Harvard Man Could?
From a Mark Steyn headline:

Obama can't say who we're at war with

Posted by Tom Maguire

Well of course he can't - having elected a properly educated Columbia and Harvard man, we look to Obama for leadership on critical issues such as the proper distinction between "who" and "whom", not to mention the vital national security matter of ending sentences with prepositions. C'mon - this is the President who returned the Churchill bust, so we can hardly look to him for Churchillian leadership.

Now, if Obama could tell us with whom we are at war, that might be helpful. But can we handle the truth? Eric Holder seems to think we are at war with the Evil BushCo legacy.

Something we have been thinking here at our house now posted in an article from Bookworm:

Obama’s emotional affiliations are not American

Bookworm on Jan 10 2010

I’ve been harping for years now about the fact that Obama’s emotional connection isn’t to America, but to something else. I’ve thought it was to Leftism. Rabbi Spero makes the very good argument that Barack Hussein Obama’s emotional affiliation is to Islam. He doesn’t say that Obama is a religious Muslim. He just notes that Obama’s emotions, when not tied to Leftist causes, resonate with a desire to admire and, to America’s cost, protect Islam.

Great. Just what we need in our White House: a Lefty Islamophile.

Scientific Integrity is a Must

Two years ago I disagreed with a government scientist who wrote an article concluding overfishing had depleted a specific species of fish in a specific bay. (He used computer modeling as the basis for his conclusion.) I emailed and asked for the 30 years of fish population data he cited. 30 years of several different species for a dozen different bays. It was an enormous amount of data, and enormously valuable. He promptly sent it to me.

I looked at the data, graphed much of it to explore my own thoughts on the decline in the population, compared it to other populations in similar bays (where there was no decline) and I verified the accuracy of the graphs in his article. And guess what, I found nothing wrong with the data or his presentation of the data.

I still didn't agree with his conclusion -- based on the computer modeling's inconsistency with other trends going on in other, adjacent bays. But I could clearly see that he was presenting the data accurately. And if I thought the data was made up, I had enough information to verify it further. (I had no reason to suspect this data's integrity.)

His willingness to share this data is what science is all about. Especially government-funded science. And this was gov't funded science.

On a side note, the fact that "we" paid for it is enough reason to share. Did you know any photo (or video) taken by NASA or its astronauts is available to any US citizen? All you have to do is pay for the cost of the duplication (the print). Incredible shots of earth taken from the moon, satellite photos of any part of the earth, pictures the space shuttle astronauts take of each other doing goofy things in zero gravity -- all of it is yours for the asking -- because your tax dollars paid for it. You do have to pay for the postage, too. And that's how it should be.

Temperature data taken by a US gov't agency should be readily available to the taxpayers. As well as any thing the gov't does related to those temperatures.

Much is being written about the stolen climate science emails. The real story is in the links within these articles -- links to the actual documents and actions by the people many of these stolen emails are about. People like me who disagreed. People who wrote to get the data (like I did in the previous case). But these people were told "no" -- for political reasons.

Hmmm. Good science?

All of this climate muck is a lot to read. That's one of the reasons it's been difficult to challenge global warming alarmists -- they hide behind the complexities of the science and calculations. It is very easy for them to bog down any discussion with the EXTREMELY complex way they have built layer upon layer of assumptions, deductions, calculations and theories. And piled this into computer models -- where you then have to read computer code to understand what is going on.

And the science itself -- radiation forcing and gases and pressure and solar activity and moisture and tree rings and ice cores and blah, blah, blah...

It's like a big recipe. But by the time you've gotten to the end, you've died of starvation.

Despite this, as we now know, when dedicated truth-seekers plodded on anyway to get the data, key scientists resorted to unethical (and possible illegal) means to keep the data hidden. And probably the truth. They are more interested in politics than scientific integrity.

These are sad days for science.

If you have the time (who does!?) you can read deeper by clicking on links within any of the climate articles listed in this blog.

Two good recent ones by Douglas J. Keenan, who wrote a paper formally alleging fraud in a temperature article published by a climate scientist. His filed a very formal claim of fraud with the universities in question. There was an investigation and a report -- and then a dead end. They wouldn't show him the report, but told him there was no fraud. When he filed a Freedom of Information request for the report, he was denied. But then, he found the report in the hacked emails. (Links below). And the report said there might be merit to his claim of fraud.

Political integrity is now a contradiction in terms. And I see that in Republicans as much as Democrats. We're like a corrupt 3rd-world nation, except it's hidden behind the pretense of "lobbying" and influence peddling and "the system". You pretty much have to be convicted of a felony first these days for a congressional ethics committee to even review your case.

Who do you think wrote the current healthcare bill? The Senate didn't... they just published it. Most of our Senators still haven't even read it...

Scientific intergrity is a must. And certainly now that so much science is political (environmental science).

We can draw the line here, we can and we must.

Always read deeper (the links to the actual emails, and people they are about). That's where the truth is. The scientific truth. The political truth. And the real truth.

Remember when there just used to be "the truth"?

--------------------------

Keenan's paper alleging fraud in temperature data collection.
http://www.informath.org/pubs/EnE07a.pdf

The chronology of Keena's actions, and the report on his accusations (that he was denied access to) which he found in the stolen emails -- and it (the report) shows his claim had credibility.
http://www.informath.org/apprise/a5620.htm