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the.bricoleur
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Re:The Flipping Point
« Reply #240 on: 2009-10-12 16:23:04 »
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Record level minimum Antarctic ice melt since satellite records began

An updated Antarctic melt record through 2009 and its linkages to high-latitude and tropical climate variability

Marco Tedesco. Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, City College of New York, New York, New York, USA

Andrew J. Monaghan. National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, Colorado, USA

A 30-year minimum Antarctic snowmelt record occurred during austral summer 2008–2009 according to spaceborne microwave observations for 1980–2009. Strong positive phases of both the El-Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode (SAM) were recorded during the months leading up to and including the 2008–2009 melt season. The 30-year record confirms that significant negative correlations exist at regional and continental scales between austral summer melting and both the ENSO and SAM indices for October–January. In particular, the strongest negative melting anomalies (such as those in 2008 and 2009) are related to amplified large-scale atmospheric forcing when both the SAM and ENSO are in positive phases. Our results suggest that enhanced snowmelt is likely to occur if recent positive summer SAM trends subside in conjunction with the projected recovery of stratospheric ozone levels, with subsequent impacts on ice sheet mass balance and sea level trends.

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Re:The Flipping Point
« Reply #241 on: 2009-10-29 11:36:22 »
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Turmoil from climate change poses security risks

Source : Associated Press
Authors: Not Credited
Dated: 2009-10-29

An island in the Indian Ocean, vital to the U.S. military, disappears as the sea level rises. Rivers critical to India and Pakistan shrink, increasing military tensions in South Asia. Drought, famine and disease forces population shifts and political turmoil in the Middle East.

U.S. defense and intelligence agencies, viewing these and other potential impacts of global warming, have concluded if they materialize it would become ever more likely global alliances will shift, the need to respond to massive relief efforts will increase and American forces will become entangled in more regional military conflicts.

It is a bleak picture of national security that backers of a climate bill in Congress hope will draw in reluctant Republicans who have denounced the bill as an energy tax and jobs killer because it would shift the country away from fossil fuels by limiting carbon dioxide emissions from power plants and industrial facilities.

At the current increasing rate of global carbon dioxide pollution, average world temperatures at the end of this century will likely be about 7 degrees higher than at the end of the 20th century, and seas would be expected to rise by as much as 2 feet, according to a consensus of scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The security implications of global warming were center stage Wednesday at a Senate Environment and Public Works Committee hearing, one of a series of sessions in advance of voting on the climate bill, possibly as early as next week.

"Our economic, energy and climate change challenges are all inextricably linked," retired Vice Adm. Dennis McGinn told the committee. "If we don't address these challenges in a bold way and timely way, fragile governments have great potential to become failed states ... a virile breeding ground for extremism." [ Hermit :And courtesy of the Bush wars and Obama's extension of them, the equipment upon which the US military depends, particularly aircraft and logistics vehicle, are worn out. The budget does not exist to correct this. ]

"The U.S. military will be called to respond to these threats," added McGinn, a member of the CNA Military Advisory Board, an influential think tank on military and security issues.

The security implications of climate change have been an issue of growing concern in the defense and intelligence communities.

Dennis Blair, the Obama administration's national intelligence director, has told Congress that global warming will have broad security implications over the next two decades. Also, the Central Intelligence Agency has created a new group of experts to study the security fallout of increased droughts, population shifts, sea level rise and other likely impacts of severe climate change, and the Pentagon has embarked on a detailed study on the military's vulnerabilities from a warmer world.

"U..S. vulnerabilities to climate change are linked to the fate of other nations," says Kathleen Hicks, a deputy undersecretary for defense. She told the Senate panel that senior defense officials believe climate change will make U.S. security challenges more difficult and complex.

While the debate over climate legislation has been sharply split along partisan lines, the alarm over impacts on national security has come from both Democrats and Republicans in the defense and intelligence communities.

A recent report by the American Security Project, an advisory group of high-powered Republicans and Democrats, called global warming "not simply about saving polar bears or preserving beautiful mountain glaciers ... (but) a threat to our security." The group has on its board Republicans such as former Sen. Warren Rudman as well as Democrats including Sen. John Kerry of Massachusetts, the chief author of the Senate climate bill.

Across the globe there exist conflicts and security challenges including ethnic conflicts and emerging radicalism and often "these are also the parts of the world where we will see the most severe consequences from climate change," Bernard Finel, a co-author of the American Security Project report, said in an interview. " The intelligence community, CIA, (military) commanders, they're all looking at these issues."


Former Republican Sen. John Warner, a longtime chairman of the Armed Services Committee and a close ally of the military, has been touring the country to talk about climate change and national security.

"We are talking about energy insecurity, water and food shortages, and climate-driven social instability," says Warner. "We ignore these threats at the peril of our national security and at great risk to those in uniform."

Among the flash points:
  • Himalayan glaciers are likely to recede, producing fresh water shortages in India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and parts of China.
  • Receding Arctic ice could trigger a territorial conflict involving Russia, the United States, Canada and others.
  • Sea level rise in Bangladesh, and drought in other parts of the world could unleash a flood of cross-border "climate refugees" and violence.
  • The Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia, an atoll only a few feet above sea level, likely would disappear, taking away a critical U.S. military staging area.
Still these concerns are not unanimous.

At Wednesday's hearing, retired Army Major General Robert Scales, who said he had "deep reservations" about the science of climate change, worried that if fossil fuels were curtailed it would reduce the availability of diesel and jet fuel "that might reduce our ability to go to war." [Hermit : This would be a bad thing? ]

On the prospects of global political and military instability from climate change, Scales said, "such unlikely events would cause enormous suffering and social dislocation. But the history record strongly suggests that such devastating humanitarian disasters rarely if ever result in large-scale wars." [Hermit : The man is an idiot. America's wars against Iraq? THe Vietnam War? Hitler's Operation Barbarossa? WW I? The American invasion of the Phillipines? Napoleon's Invasion of Russia? Mao's Wars? The American Civil War? The Indian wars and associated pandemics that killed perhaps 120 million native Americans. The Anglo-Boer war? To anyone who has studied any military history at all, the examples are legion. Think of almost any war, and investigate the associated humanitarian disasters.]
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Re:The Flipping Point
« Reply #242 on: 2009-11-21 23:25:09 »
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Hacked climate emails: conspiracy or tempest in a teapot?

Source: CS Monitor
Authors: Pete Spotts
Dated: 2009-11-21

For all its gee-whiz discoveries and its influence on public policy, science can be a messy, sometimes ugly enterprise.

When the science is paleontology, astronomy, or geophysics, internal politics, thinly or not-so-thinly veiled personal attacks, and water-cooler discussions among influential scientists about whose research is junk and not worth publishing draw a collective yawn from anyone outside the relatively small circle of researchers involved.

When the topic is global warming, however, look out.

This week, more than 169 megabytes worth of global-warming emails and related files were either hacked and/or leaked from computers at the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Center in Britain and released to the world via the Internet.

(If you’re interested in poring through some 169 megabytes of emails and files, you can download 26-megabyte FOI2009.zip from here, then unpack it. You’ll need to set up a free account [ Hermit : No you don't. Just wait for the Download message, then enter the Captcha and choose "Regular" (Free) download ] , then you can download the file.) [ Hermit : Or, if you prefer you can download it via BitTorrent.  http://thepiratebay.org/torrent/5171206/Hadley_CRU_Files_(FOI2009.zip) ] .

The package includes a number of innocuous discussions among the 1,073 emails that span a period from March 1996 to this month. But others treat with disdain colleagues who don’t share the views of the majority or who challenge the way data are analyzed. Some emails give the appearance of fudging data. Others show the authors concerned about the ways their methods or data could be (mis)interpreted by global-warming skeptics.

In yet another email, one researcher influential in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) process vows to keep two sets of results from being included in the group’s widely cited reports “somehow — even if if we have to redefine what the peer review literature is.”

The appearance of these emails and files comes at a time when the US Senate has punted action on a climate and energy bill into next year, and with a major climate summit coming up next month in Copenhagen. Over the past three months — if not longer — it’s become increasingly clear that the meeting will not yield a legally binding climate treaty, as negotiators hoped at a similar meeting in Bali in December 2007.

This confluence of postponements led US Sen. James Inhofe (R) of Oklahoma, a prominent political skeptic of global warming, to announce on the Senate floor last Wednesday: “I proudly declare 2009 as the Year of the Skeptic, the year in which scientists who question the so-called global warming consensus are being heard.” [ Hermit : Given the reports that the warming to date already means that the greenhouse warming potential of Methane released from Methyl Hydrates/Clathrates and Carbon released from the defrosting permafrost are now both equal or greater to anthropogenic sources - which are already 270 times greater than those released by all volcanoes, the year the dinosaurs kept dooming us all might be more appropriate.]

For researchers directly involved in the email exchanges, such emails really present a picture of the lengths scientists go to ensure the high quality of the science. The exchanges are shocking to some of the rest of us only because they open a window on an enterprise alien to most people. The debates are public in the sense that they crop up in scientific journals. But most people don’t keep science journals handy as reading material for the commute to and from work.

Over at Realclimate.org, several of whose climate-scientist contributors were involved in the pilfered email-exchanges, the “group” explains the collection this way:
    …There is a peek into how scientists actually interact and the conflicts show that the community is a far cry from the monolith that is sometimes imagined. People working constructively to improve joint publications; scientists who are friendly and agree on many of the big picture issues, disagreeing at times about details and engaging in ‘robust’ discussions; Scientists expressing frustration at the misrepresentation of their work in politicized arenas and complaining when media reports get it wrong; Scientists resenting the time they have to take out of their research to deal with over-hyped nonsense. None of this should be shocking.
Yet some of the targets of the emails’ ire understandably see things differently. One target, climate researcher John Christy at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, finds the emails reflect a disturbing level of what he terms “group think.” In an email exchange (a polite one), he writes:
    These people act in concert to diminish, reject, and otherwise denigrate findings with which they do not agree — and they are able to do so because of their “establishment” positions. This is the preservation of “group think” at its most serious level…. The group represented by the bulk of these emails does indeed have a message to defend. Those of us who see problems with that message are aware of how the data are manufactured and interpreted to support that message — and worse, how these establishment scientists act as gatekeepers for the “consensus” reports to suppress alternative findings.
Another target of email ire, Roger Pielke Sr. at Colorado State University, makes much the same argument. You can read his latest blog post on the subject here.

Neither rejects the notion of a human role in global warming. But they consistently object to the disaster scenarios that permeate the political discussions about global warming. And in Dr. Pielke’s case, the human role extends beyond carbon dioxide to include “forcings” such as land-use change or the production of black-carbon soot from biomass burning.

Nothing in the package appears to overturn the general idea — arrived at via many lines of evidence — that the CO2 humans have been pumping into the atmosphere is warming the planet, nor does anything bolster the notion some put forward of a hoax on the part of climate scientists.

It remains to be seen how the release of the emails and files plays out beyond the circle of people who follow the issue closely and who hold strong views on either side of the issue. It could turn out to be a tempest in a teapot or a PR gotcha for US climate scientists. At the least, it reinforces the maxim: Don’t put into an email information you don’t want to see on the front page of someone’s newspaper (Oops, old medium) web site.


The irony: Since the international community first took up the climate issue in a serious way in 1992, the focus of attention has been on the atmospheric effects of pumping long-sequestered carbon into the atmosphere through burning fossil fuels. But that CO2 also is working its way into the oceans, making them more acidic — something that raises its own set of serious challenges.
« Last Edit: 2009-11-21 23:27:39 by Hermit » Report to moderator   Logged

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Re:The Flipping Point
« Reply #243 on: 2009-11-22 05:22:24 »
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It is amusing.

Here are some of my personal favourites (emphasis mine):

Quote:
From: Phil Jones
To: ray bradley ,mann@[snipped], mhughes@
[snipped]
Subject: Diagram for WMO Statement
Date: Tue, 16 Nov 1999 13:31:15 +0000
Cc: k.briffa@[snipped],t.osborn@[snipped]
Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,

Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow. 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 [sic] from1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline(the.bricoleur: that will be Michael Mann and his Hockey Stick trick btw). Mike’s series got the annual land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999 for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

Thanks for the comments, Ray.

Cheers, Phil
Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit


Quote:
From: Kevin Trenberth
To: Michael Mann
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:37 -0600
Cc: Stephen H Schneider , Myles Allen , peter stott , “Philip D. Jones” , Benjamin Santer , Tom Wigley , Thomas R Karl , Gavin Schmidt , James Hansen , Michael Oppenheimer

Hi all

Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record. We had 4 inches of snow. The high the last 2 days was below 30F and the normal is 69F, and it smashed the previous records for these days by 10F. The low was about 18F and also a record low, well below the previous record low.

This is January weather (see the Rockies baseball playoff game was canceled on Saturday and then played last night in below freezing weather).

Trenberth, K. E., 2009: An imperative for climate change planning: tracking Earth’s global energy. Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability, 1, 19-27, doi:10.1016/j.cosust.2009.06.001. [1][PDF] (A PDF of the published version can be obtained from the author.)
***

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.bricoleur - ask Hermit, he seems to have this whole thing figured out). 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 (the.bricoleur - or, forbid, the data is right and the hypothesis is wrong!). Our observing system is inadequate.


And lastly, recall the scientist, Prof Jones, who did not want to make publicly available his raw data? Some background, here and here

Quote:
From: Phil Jones
To: “Michael E. Mann”
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008

Mike,

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.

I see that CA (the.bricoleur - CA = Climate Audit) claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!

Cheers

Phil

Prof. Phil Jones
Climatic Research Unit


Delete emails ... why?

But, according to the propaganda machine RealClimate there is nothing to see here, it is normal practise, business as usual ... avert your gaze and move on ...

the.bricoleur
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Re:The Flipping Point
« Reply #244 on: 2009-11-22 10:00:17 »
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[[ author reputation (1.66) beneath threshold (3)... display message ]]

 ssn_predict_l_strip.gif
« Last Edit: 2009-11-22 10:12:27 by MoEnzyme »
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Re:The Flipping Point
« Reply #245 on: 2009-11-22 15:11:22 »
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[MoEnzyme] My understanding is that we are in an usually low-level period in sunspot activity, which significantly reduces solar radiation. As sunspots regularly come and go over time, it would seem to me that far from refuting global warming - we ought to take it as a predictor that we are in for some terrific global warming when they come back as they inevitably do. I hope that this doesn't imminently trigger catastrophic positive feedback loops, but even if it doesn't the steady long-term warming eventually will.


[Hermit]

You are essentially correct.

Current models suggest that solar forcing is responsible for 14% or less of surface temperatures. The Sun is approaching a simultaneous minima of many identified cycles. This will occur in the 2028-2038 era and is why many scientists of the 1960s and 1970s predicted the onset of a major ice age.

The fact that the tundra, Arctic ocean and sub-Arctic lakes are releasing Methane at a GWP level significantly exceeding both anthropic causes and historic levels should give cause for thought.

Of course it is the combination of emergencies, our excessive populations and total lack of reserves that will probably lead to our extinction, and climate will just be one of many contributing factor.

Image Source: http://www.vukcevic.co.uk/GrandMinima.gif
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Re:The Flipping Point
« Reply #246 on: 2009-11-24 21:20:47 »
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Climate change quickens, seas feared up 2 meters

Source: Reuters
Dated: Alister Doyle (Environment Correspondent)
Dated: 2009-11-24

Global warming is happening faster than expected and at worst could raise sea levels by up to 2 meters (6-1/2 ft) by 2100, a group of scientists said on Tuesday in a warning to next month's U.N. climate summit in Copenhagen. [ Hermit : I see this as very conservative as it is based purely on the human-driven climate models and does not in my opinion sufficiently account for the contributions of sublimating arctyic methane reserves, melting tundra or the acceleration of ice pack collapse due to water erosion and consequent loss of reflectance. ]

In what they called a "Copenhagen Diagnosis," updating findings in a broader 2007 U.N. climate report, 26 experts urged action to cap rising world greenhouse gas emissions by 2015 or 2020 to avoid the worst impacts of climate change.

"Climate change is accelerating beyond expectations," a joint statement said, pointing to factors including a retreat of Arctic sea ice in summer and melting of ice sheets on Greenland and Antarctica.

"Accounting for ice-sheets and glaciers, global sea-level rise may exceed 1 meter by 2100, with a rise of up to 2 meters considered an upper limit," it said. Ocean levels would keep on rising after 2100 and "several meters of sea level rise must be expected over the next few centuries."

Many of the authors were on the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which in 2007 foresaw a sea level rise of 18-59 cms (7-24 inches) by 2100 but did not take account of a possible accelerating melt of Greenland and Antarctica.

Coastal cities from Buenos Aires to New York, island states such as Tuvalu in the Pacific or coasts of Bangladesh or China would be highly vulnerable to rising seas.
[ Hermit : Far more significant is the effect that this will have in accelerating the salination of critical aquifers. ]

"This is a final scientific call for the climate negotiators from 192 countries who must embark on the climate protection train in Copenhagen," Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Director of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, said in a statement.

AMAZON, MONSOON

Copenhagen will host a December 7-18 meeting meant to come up with a new U.N. plan to succeed the Kyoto Protocol beyond 2012. But a full legal treaty seems out of reach and talks are likely to be extended into 2010.

"Delay in action risks irreversible damage," the researchers wrote in the 64-page report, pointing to a feared runaway thaw of ice sheets or possible abrupt disruptions to the Amazon rainforest or the West African Monsoon.

The researchers said global carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels were almost 40 percent higher in 2008 than in 1990.


"Carbon dioxide emissions cannot be allowed to continue to rise if humanity intends to limit the risk of unacceptable climate change," said Richard Somerville of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography at the University of California.

In a respite, the International Energy Agency has said emissions will fall by up to 3 percent in 2009 due to recession.

The report said world temperatures had been rising by an average of 0.19 Celsius a decade over the past 25 years and that the warming trend was intact, even though the hottest year since records began in the mid-19th century was 1998.

"There have been no significant changes in the underlying warming trend," it said. A strong, natural El Nino weather event in the Pacific pushed up temperatures in 1998.
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Re:The Flipping Point
« Reply #247 on: 2009-11-28 03:59:28 »
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Goerge Monbiot on why Phil Jones must go.

Pretending the climate email leak isn't a crisis won't make it go away

Climate sceptics have lied, obscured and cheated for years. That's why we climate rationalists must uphold the highest standards of science [the.bricoleur - splutter, cough]

I have seldom felt so alone. Confronted with crisis, most of the environmentalists I know have gone into denial. The emails hacked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, they say, are a storm in a tea cup, no big deal, exaggerated out of all recognition. It is true that climate change deniers have made wild claims which the material can't possibly support (the end of global warming, the death of climate science). But it is also true that the emails are very damaging.

The response of the greens and most of the scientists I know is profoundly ironic, as we spend so much of our time confronting other people's denial. Pretending that this isn't a real crisis isn't going to make it go away. Nor is an attempt to justify the emails with technicalities. We'll be able to get past this only by grasping reality, apologising where appropriate and demonstrating that it cannot happen again.

It is true that much of what has been revealed could be explained as the usual cut and thrust of the peer review process, exacerbated by the extraordinary pressure the scientists were facing from a denial industry determined to crush them. One of the most damaging emails was sent by the head of the climatic research unit, Phil Jones. He wrote "I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"

One of these papers which was published in the journal Climate Research turned out to be so badly flawed that the scandal resulted in the resignation of the editor-in-chief. Jones knew that any incorrect papers by sceptical scientists would be picked up and amplified by climate change deniers funded by the fossil fuel industry, who often – as I documented in my book Heat – use all sorts of dirty tricks to advance their cause.

Even so, his message looks awful. It gives the impression of confirming a potent meme circulated by those who campaign against taking action on climate change: that the IPCC process is biased. However good the detailed explanations may be, most people aren't going to follow or understand them. Jones's statement, on the other hand, is stark and easy to grasp.

In this case you could argue that technically he has done nothing wrong. But a fat lot of good that will do. Think of the MPs' expenses scandal: complaints about stolen data, denials and huffy responses achieved nothing at all. Most of the MPs could demonstrate that technically they were innocent: their expenses had been approved by the Commons office. It didn't change public perceptions one jot. The only responses that have helped to restore public trust in Parliament are humility, openness and promises of reform.

When it comes to his handling of Freedom of Information requests, Professor Jones might struggle even to use a technical defence. If you take the wording literally, in one case he appears to be suggesting that emails subject to a request be deleted, which means that he seems to be advocating potentially criminal activity. Even if no other message had been hacked, this would be sufficient to ensure his resignation as head of the unit.

I feel desperately sorry for him: he must be walking through hell. But there is no helping it; he has to go, and the longer he leaves it, the worse it will get. He has a few days left in which to make an honourable exit. Otherwise, like the former Speaker of the House of Commons, Michael Martin, he will linger on until his remaining credibility vanishes, inflicting continuing damage to climate science.

Some people say that I am romanticising science, that it is never as open and honest as the Popperian ideal. Perhaps. But I know that opaqueness and secrecy are the enemies of science. There is a word for the apparent repeated attempts to prevent disclosure revealed in these emails: unscientific.

The crisis has been exacerbated by the university's handling of it, which has been a total trainwreck: a textbook example of how not to respond. RealClimate reports that "We were made aware of the existence of this archive last Tuesday morning when the hackers attempted to upload it to RealClimate, and we notified CRU of their possible security breach later that day." In other words, the university knew what was coming three days before the story broke. As far as I can tell, it sat like a rabbit in the headlights, waiting for disaster to strike.

When the emails hit the news on Friday morning, the university appeared completely unprepared. There was no statement, no position, no one to interview. Reporters kept being fobbed off while CRU's opponents landed blow upon blow on it. When a journalist I know finally managed to track down Phil Jones, he snapped "no comment" and put down the phone. This response is generally taken by the media to mean "guilty as charged". When I got hold of him on Saturday, his answer was to send me a pdf called "WMO statement on the status of the global climate in 1999". Had I a couple of hours to spare I might have been able to work out what the heck this had to do with the current crisis, but he offered no explanation.

By then he should have been touring the TV studios for the past 36 hours, confronting his critics, making his case and apologising for his mistakes. Instead, he had disappeared off the face of the Earth. Now, far too late, he has given an interview to the Press Association, which has done nothing to change the story.

The handling of this crisis suggests that nothing has been learnt by climate scientists in this country from 20 years of assaults on their discipline. They appear to have no idea what they're up against or how to confront it. Their opponents might be scumbags, but their media strategy is exemplary.

The greatest tragedy here is that despite many years of outright fabrication, fraud and deceit on the part of the climate change denial industry, documented in James Hoggan and Richard Littlemore's brilliant new book Climate Cover-up, it is now the climate scientists who look bad. By comparison to his opponents, Phil Jones is pure as the driven snow. Hoggan and Littlemore have shown how fossil fuel industries have employed "experts" to lie, cheat and manipulate on their behalf. The revelations in their book (as well as in Heat and in Ross Gelbspan's book The Heat Is On) are 100 times graver than anything contained in these emails.

But the deniers' campaign of lies, grotesque as it is, does not justify secrecy and suppression on the part of climate scientists. Far from it: it means that they must distinguish themselves from their opponents in every way. No one has been as badly let down by the revelations in these emails as those of us who have championed the science. We should be the first to demand that it is unimpeachable, not the last.

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Re:The Flipping Point
« Reply #248 on: 2009-11-28 04:34:24 »
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For those relying on computer models, the 'HARRY_READ_ME.txt' from the CRU 'leak/hack' might be sobering.

Here is the original txt file - HARRY. It is essentially a document by a programmer given the task of updating a key temperature database. Fortunately the txt file includes the data, so, readers can do their own investigating.

Here are some of said programmers comments about the code:


Quote:
I am seriously worried that our flagship gridded data product is produced by Delaunay triangulation - apparently linear as well. As far as I can see, this renders the station counts totally meaningless. It also means that we cannot say exactly how the gridded data is arrived at from a statistical perspective - since we're using an off-the-shelf product that isn't documented sufficiently to say that. Why this wasn't coded up in Fortran I don't know - time pressures perhaps? Was too much effort expended on homogenisation, that there wasn't enough time to write a gridding procedure? Of course, it's too late for me to fix it too. Meh.

I am very sorry to report that the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates. I know it could be old and new stations, but why such large overlaps if that's the case? Aarrggghhh! There truly is no end in sight... So, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!

One thing that's unsettling is that many of the assigned WMo codes for Canadian stations do not return any hits with a web search. Usually the country's met office, or at least the Weather Underground, show up – but for these stations, nothing at all. Makes me wonder if these are long-discontinued, or were even invented somewhere other than Canada!

Knowing how long it takes to debug this suite - the experiment endeth here. The option (like all the anomdtb options) is totally undocumented so we'll never know what we lost. 22. Right, time to stop pussyfooting around the niceties of Tim's labyrinthine software suites - let's have a go at producing CRU TS 3.0! since failing to do that will be the definitive failure of the entire project.

Ulp! I am seriously close to giving up, again. The history of this is so complex that I can't get far enough into it before by head hurts and I have to stop. Each parameter has a tortuous history of manual and semi-automated interventions that I simply cannot just go back to early versions and run the update prog. I could be throwing away all kinds of corrections - to lat/lons, to WMOs (yes!), and more. So what the hell can I do about all these duplicate stations?...

Some other comments found in CRU code:
"Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!" and "APPLY ARTIFICIAL CORRECTION."
- file briffa_sep98_ d.pro

"Low pass filtering at century and longer time scales never gets rid of the trend - so eventually I start to scale down the 120-yr low pass time series to mimic the effect of removing/adding longer time scales!"
- file quantify_tsdcal. pro


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Re:The Flipping Point
« Reply #249 on: 2009-11-28 11:21:17 »
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HARRY's comments. My reading of Harry is that he is probably young, bright, out of depth but not so far as not to recognise it - maybe lonely and definitely garrulous. I think that if he had thought that his log book might be seen by anyone else other than another programmer he would undoubtedly have worded things better; but it is quite clear that he took what he was doing seriously, tried very hard, and usually succeeded to at least some extent, in cleaning up the stygian mess of International data sets and their labels. Why we haven't already moved to using a truncated lat/long as a station identifier for data sets old and new has me baffled. For most of the world this could be a GPS WGS 84 datum point, and for the poles GLONAS provides coverage when it works and there remain people competent to determine locations astronomically if all else fails.

Aside from repeating that it doesn't look to me as if anything I have seen so far is indicative of anything more than the messy working out of positions with sharpened spoons which is very typical of academia, I will comment that Monbiot may have missed a fairly critical point (for once). That is that the managers of this mess are not corporate officers, nor even PR representatives. Perhaps they should be, because that would mean that their management process and response to this theft and display of snapshots of the messy sausage making process they have been engaged in for years would have been vastly better (and they probably would not have had such a repository lying around to embarrass them). Yet were such a person to have been hired from out of their anaemic funds, or should, as seems possible that Monbiot is proposing, they be hired now, the enormously better funded opposition would indubitably have a field day poking fingers at the waste of funds and abuse of money intended for research. A perfect example of Catch-22 in practice.

What should give those crowing over this pause for thought is that even with vastly better funding and a far more diverse base that has not, so far as I know, been subject to FOIA or hacking, the denialists are blatantly in a far worse position, as their ever changing objections have - so far - appeared unsustainable and unsupportable.
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Re:The Flipping Point
« Reply #250 on: 2009-11-29 00:45:23 »
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Is Global Warming Unstoppable?

Source: ScienceDaily
Authors: Adapted from materials provided by University of Utah.
Dated: 2009-11-24

In a provocative new study, a University of Utah scientist argues that rising carbon dioxide emissions -- the major cause of global warming -- cannot be stabilized unless the world's economy collapses or society builds the equivalent of one new nuclear power plant each day.

"It looks unlikely that there will be any substantial near-term departure from recently observed acceleration in carbon dioxide emission rates," says the new paper by Tim Garrett, an associate professor of atmospheric sciences.

Garrett's study was panned by some economists and rejected by several journals before acceptance by Climatic Change, a journal edited by Stanford University climate scientist Stephen Schneider. The study will be published online the week of November 23.

The study -- which is based on the concept that physics can be used to characterize the evolution of civilization -- indicates:
  • Energy conservation or efficiency doesn't really save energy, but instead spurs economic growth and accelerated energy consumption.
  • Throughout history, a simple physical "constant" -- an unchanging mathematical value -- links global energy use to the world's accumulated economic productivity, adjusted for inflation. So it isn't necessary to consider population growth and standard of living in predicting society's future energy consumption and resulting carbon dioxide emissions.
  • "Stabilization of carbon dioxide emissions at current rates will require approximately 300 gigawatts of new non-carbon-dioxide-emitting power production capacity annually -- approximately one new nuclear power plant (or equivalent) per day," Garrett says. "Physically, there are no other options without killing the economy."

Getting Heat for Viewing Civilization as a "Heat Engine"

Garrett says colleagues generally support his theory, while some economists are critical. One economist, who reviewed the study, wrote: "I am afraid the author will need to study harder before he can contribute."

"I'm not an economist, and I am approaching the economy as a physics problem," Garrett says. "I end up with a global economic growth model different than they have."

Garrett treats civilization like a "heat engine" that "consumes energy and does 'work' in the form of economic production, which then spurs it to consume more energy," he says.

"If society consumed no energy, civilization would be worthless," he adds. "It is only by consuming energy that civilization is able to maintain the activities that give it economic value. This means that if we ever start to run out of energy, then the value of civilization is going to fall and even collapse absent discovery of new energy sources."

Garrett says his study's key finding "is that accumulated economic production over the course of history has been tied to the rate of energy consumption at a global level through a constant factor."

That "constant" is 9.7 (plus or minus 0.3) milliwatts per inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar. So if you look at economic and energy production at any specific time in history, "each inflation-adjusted 1990 dollar would be supported by 9.7 milliwatts of primary energy consumption," Garrett says.

Garrett tested his theory and found this constant relationship between energy use and economic production at any given time by using United Nations statistics for global GDP (gross domestic product), U.S. Department of Energy data on global energy consumption during1970-2005, and previous studies that estimated global economic production as long as 2,000 years ago. Then he investigated the implications for carbon dioxide emissions.

"Economists think you need population and standard of living to estimate productivity," he says. "In my model, all you need to know is how fast energy consumption is rising. The reason why is because there is this link between the economy and rates of energy consumption, and it's just a constant factor."

Garrett adds: "By finding this constant factor, the problem of [forecasting] global economic growth is dramatically simpler. There is no need to consider population growth and changes in standard of living because they are marching to the tune of the availability of energy supplies."

To Garrett, that means the acceleration of carbon dioxide emissions is unlikely to change soon because our energy use today is tied to society's past economic productivity.

"Viewed from this perspective, civilization evolves in a spontaneous feedback loop maintained only by energy consumption and incorporation of environmental matter," Garrett says. It is like a child that "grows by consuming food, and when the child grows, it is able to consume more food, which enables it to grow more."

Is Meaningful Energy Conservation Impossible?

Perhaps the most provocative implication of Garrett's theory is that conserving energy doesn't reduce energy use, but spurs economic growth and more energy use.

"Making civilization more energy efficient simply allows it to grow faster and consume more energy," says Garrett.

He says the idea that resource conservation accelerates resource consumption -- known as Jevons paradox -- was proposed in the 1865 book "The Coal Question" by William Stanley Jevons, who noted that coal prices fell and coal consumption soared after improvements in steam engine efficiency.

So is Garrett arguing that conserving energy doesn't matter?

"I'm just saying it's not really possible to conserve energy in a meaningful way because the current rate of energy consumption is determined by the unchangeable past of economic production. … If it feels good to conserve energy, that is fine, but there shouldn't be any pretense that it will make a difference."

Yet, Garrett says his findings contradict his own previously held beliefs about conservation, and he continues to ride a bike or bus to work, line dry family clothing and use a push lawnmower.

An Inevitable Future for Carbon Dioxide Emissions?

Garrett says often-discussed strategies for slowing carbon dioxide emissions and global warming include mention increased energy efficiency, reduced population growth and a switch to power sources that don't emit carbon dioxide, including nuclear, wind and solar energy and underground storage of carbon dioxide from fossil fuel burning. Another strategy is rarely mentioned: a decreased standard of living, which would occur if energy supplies ran short and the economy collapsed, he adds.

"Fundamentally, I believe the system is deterministic," says Garrett. "Changes in population and standard of living are only a function of the current energy efficiency. That leaves only switching to a non-carbon-dioxide-emitting power source as an available option."

"The problem is that, in order to stabilize emissions, not even reduce them, we have to switch to non-carbonized energy sources at a rate about 2.1 percent per year. That comes out to almost one new nuclear power plant per day."

"If society invests sufficient resources into alternative and new, non-carbon energy supplies, then perhaps it can continue growing without increasing global warming," Garrett says.

Does Garrett fear global warming deniers will use his work to justify inaction?

"No," he says. "Ultimately, it's not clear that policy decisions have the capacity to change the future course of civilization."
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With or without religion, you would have good people doing good things and evil people doing evil things. But for good people to do evil things, that takes religion. - Steven Weinberg, 1999
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Re:The Flipping Point
« Reply #251 on: 2009-11-30 03:36:58 »
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Quote from: Hermit on 2009-11-28 11:21:17   

HARRY - page not found.

Catch-22 is always a bitch.

It just worked for me.

Keep trying.

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Re:The Flipping Point
« Reply #252 on: 2009-11-30 03:43:48 »
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Time for a more open debate on climate change

Published: November 28 2009 02:00 | Last updated: November 28 2009 02:00

From Dr Tom Allan.

Sir, Your article on climate change featuring 10 supporters of anthropogenic warming and one sceptic (“Definitely maybe”, FT Magazine, November 21/22) possibly reflects the relative funding levels.

The answers you receive from such an imbalance are never in doubt. But doubt is exactly what is required – even if much of it does come from a few retired, and therefore independent, environmentalists.

It is observations, not consensus, that we must heed. Sea level has increased by a modest 3mm per year since precise measurements from satellites began 18 years ago. The satellite view of Antarctica has just recorded the lowest summer melt in 30 years, and global temperatures rose no more than 0.6°C in the 1980s and 1990s. Facts. Everything else is conjecture stemming from a belief that carbon dioxide concentrations might cause temperatures to rise in future.

The models that climate scientists have signed up to do not inspire confidence. Unable to replicate the modest excursions in temperature over the 20th century, they also failed to predict the downturn witnessed over the past decade.

Anyway, who determines that any change in our climate will be bad. When the scientists told us in the 1970s that we were heading for another ice age they also forewarned (with perhaps more reason) that the consequences would not be good. Does that mean we are living in the best possible climate ever?

The time has come for a more open debate on what may (or may not be) cause the modest changes we witness in our climate – or must we wait for another 10 years of cooling? The issue is far from “settled”.

Tom Allan,
CEO,
Satellite Observing Systems,
Godalming, Surrey, UK
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Re:The Flipping Point
« Reply #253 on: 2009-12-01 15:28:15 »
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Thanks for the informative post Hermit.

=============

UK climate scientist to temporarily step down

(AP) – 1 hour ago

LONDON — Britain's University of East Anglia says the director of its prestigious Climatic Research Unit is stepping down pending an investigation into allegations that he overstated the case for man-made climate change.

The university says Phil Jones will relinquish his position until the completion of an independent review into allegations that he worked to alter the way in which global temperature data was presented.

The allegations were made after more than a decade of correspondence between leading British and U.S. scientists were posted to the Web following the security breach last month.

The e-mails were seized upon by some skeptics of man-made climate change as proof that scientists are manipulating the data about its extent.

Copyright © 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved.
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Re:The Flipping Point
« Reply #254 on: 2009-12-01 17:46:13 »
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[[ author reputation (1.66) beneath threshold (3)... display message ]]

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