"The West Side Highway will be under water by 2028"

While doing research 12 or 13 years ago, I met Jim Hansen, the scientist who in 1988 predicted the greenhouse effect before Congress. I went over to the window with him and looked out on Broadway in New York City and said, “If what you’re saying about the greenhouse effect is true, is anything going to look different down there in 20 40 years?” He looked for a while and was quiet and didn’t say anything for a couple seconds. Then he said, “Well, there will be more traffic.” I, of course, didn’t think he heard the question right. Then he explained, “The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won’t be there. The trees in the median strip will change.”

And the reality after 23 years?

According to the actual data, after 23 years, we’ve seen about a 2.5 inch rise. There’ s still a very long way to go to ten feet to cover the West Side Highway there.

To reach the goal he predicted in 1988, Dr. Hansen needs to motivate the sea to do his bidding, he’s gonna have to kick it in gear and use a higher octane driver if he’s going to get there

So what are the current predictions?

IPCC (2007) projected sea level rise by the end of this century of about 29 cm (midrange 20-43 cm, full range 18-59 cm). These projections did not include contributions from ice sheet dynamics, on the grounds that ice sheet physics is not understood well enough.

The "midrange" estimate of about one foot by 2100 is basically the natural rate of the sea level rise – we are still seeing the effect of the end of the last ice age.

So what does one do, when the predictions of immediate doom fall through? Postpone the apocalypse.

Under BAU ["Business As Usual"] forcing in the 21st century, the sea level rise surely will be dominated by a third term: (3) ice sheet disintegration. This third term was small until the past few years, but it is has at least doubled in the past decade and is now close to 1 mm/year, based on the gravity satellite measurements discussed above. …  As a quantitative example, let us say that the ice sheet contribution is 1 cm for the decade 2005–15 and that it doubles each decade until the West Antarctic ice sheet is largely depleted. That time constant yields a sea level rise of the order of 5 m this century.

Neat. Exponential sea level rise! 5 meter by the end of this century! You don't see it now, but it will be horrible – because we know.

(Look at the update of Willis Eschenbach a bit down the page too)

[Update] From IPCC's AR5 chapter 11 summary:

We have low confidence that over the next few decades there will be global and regional increases in the intensity of the strongest TCs, and the decrease in global TC frequency as is projected for the end of the 21st century in response to increasing greenhouse gases.

"Dear Professor Jones"

Dear Professor Jones I have just read with great interest the reporting of your work on sea water temperatures. However, am a little confused by what has been reported. Firstly the canvas bucket v sea water intake differences. We were always taught by the met office that only surface temperatures should be taken using the bucket just dipped into the sea. The design of the bucket greatly reduced colling through evaporation as it was double skinned. The sea water intake is by definition below the waterline. This must remain below the waterline at all stages of loading. So if you take a ship with a lightship draught of 2m its sea water intake will be just below the surface. If you now load that ship, the intake is now some 10m below the surface. This must throw up an enormous variation in readings.

Secondly, the UK register after 1945 greatly increased to its heyday in the 1970s before declining again. During this time the number of reports from UK ships must have grown vastly, dwarfing the number of US sources. This must then through up some variation in temperature reading methods post say the mid 50s.

Thirdly, as a former navigator I remember how hit and miss the whole method was. Chucking this bucket over the side, pulling it back in (trying not to hit the side of the ship and wake the Captain), peering at the thermometer with a weak torch in the middle of a gale, spilling most of the water, making up readings, copying what others had written before (as it was dark, blowing a hooley and you couldn't be bothered to go onto the bridge wing). And I was a pretty conscientious officer.

The met reports from the observing ships is pretty dubious at times. I remember crossing the Atlantic one time and could not understand why there was this isolated fog bank following us across as indicated on the weather fax. Then checked the visibility codes for our reports and found that we had all just been copying the wrong number down. Would be interested to hear some thoughts about the above issues though.

(via)

Eduardo Zorita on Climategate

To the question of legality or ethicalness of reading those files I will write a couple of words later.

I may confirm what has been written in other places: research in some areas of climate science has been and is full of machination, conspiracies, and collusion, as any reader can interpret from the CRU-files. They depict a realistic, I would say even harmless, picture of what the real research in the area of the climate of the past millennium has been in the last years. The scientific debate has been in many instances hijacked to advance other agendas.

These words do not mean that I think anthropogenic climate change is a hoax. On the contrary, it is a question which we have to be very well aware of. But I am also aware that in this thick atmosphere -and I am not speaking of greenhouse gases now- editors, reviewers and authors of alternative studies, analysis, interpretations,even based on the same data we have at our disposal, have been bullied and subtly blackmailed. In this atmosphere, Ph D students are often tempted to tweak their data so as to fit the 'politically correct picture'. Some, or many issues, about climate change are still not well known. Policy makers should be aware of the attempts to hide these uncertainties under a unified picture. I had the 'pleasure' to experience all this in my area of research.

I thank explicitely Keith Briffa and Tim Osborn for their work in the formulation of one Chapter of the IPCC report. As it destills from these emails, they withstood the evident pressure of other IPCC authors, not experts in this area of research, to convey a distorted picture of our knowledge of the hockey-stick graph.

Climate Deaths

The climate kills people. In Finland alone 3.500 people are killed per year by winter.

The Finnish Meteorological Institute this week began a regular service of cold weather warnings. The winter cold contributes to as many as 3,500 deaths annually in the country. Experts say that dressing warmly and common sense are the keys to survival.

Well, maybe not all are killed directly by winter:

More deaths in winter
Since the 1700's it has been recognized that mortality rates increase during the winter. This is not mainly due to deaths from hypothermia, but rather from illnesses induced or exacerbated by the cold.

Each winter 2,500-3,500 deaths are registered as occurring from natural causes, such as heart disease, cerebral haemorrhage or pulmonary disorder that are directly or indirectly the result of the cold.

The number of people who actually freeze to death is around 70-80 each winter. Usually these cases are associated with alcohol abuse.

Michael Mann on Climate Change

The 100th post in this blog, on Michael Mann…

Well - I saved you all a lot of time. (Although if you do decide to watch the whole thing, it may be useful to realise that you can incease speed of lecture to e.g. 1.4 or 1.6 x normal speed.)

Mann shows observed temperatures following "scenario B" with uncanny accuracy - but stops the observations in 2005. Lots of alarming images: Cooling towers belching steam, Polar bear on shrinking ice floe, House teetering on cliff edge.

Comparisons with tobacco industry.

Shows the Hockey stick - but does not actually explain hide the decline at the same time.
Shows 12 independent reconstructions from proxy data, followed by "modern observations" without making it clear that proxy data stops.

Introduces new terminology: Scientization of politics?

"The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks"

From the Amazon book description:

Her name was Henrietta Lacks, but scientists know her as HeLa. She was a poor Southern tobacco farmer who worked the same land as her slave ancestors, yet her cells—taken without her knowledge—became one of the most important tools in medicine. The first “immortal” human cells grown in culture, they are still alive today, though she has been dead for more than sixty years. If you could pile all HeLa cells ever grown onto a scale, they’d weigh more than 50 million metric tons—as much as a hundred Empire State Buildings. HeLa cells were vital for developing the polio vaccine; uncovered secrets of cancer, viruses, and the atom bomb’s effects; helped lead to important advances like in vitro fertilization, cloning, and gene mapping; and have been bought and sold by the billions.

Yet Henrietta Lacks remains virtually unknown, buried in an unmarked grave.

Now Rebecca Skloot takes us on an extraordinary journey, from the “colored” ward of Johns Hopkins Hospital in the 1950s to stark white laboratories with freezers full of HeLa cells; from Henrietta’s small, dying hometown of Clover, Virginia—a land of wooden slave quarters, faith healings, and voodoo—to East Baltimore today, where her children and grandchildren live and struggle with the legacy of her cells.

Henrietta’s family did not learn of her “immortality” until more than twenty years after her death, when scientists investigating HeLa began using her husband and children in research without informed consent. And though the cells had launched a multimillion-dollar industry that sells human biological materials, her family never saw any of the profits. As Rebecca Skloot so brilliantly shows, the story of the Lacks family—past and present—is inextricably connected to the dark history of experimentation on African Americans, the birth of bioethics, and the legal battles over whether we control the stuff we are made of.

Over the decade it took to uncover this story, Rebecca became enmeshed in the lives of the Lacks family—especially Henrietta’s daughter Deborah, who was devastated to learn about her mother’s cells. She was consumed with questions: Had scientists cloned her mother? Did it hurt her when researchers infected her cells with viruses and shot them into space? What happened to her sister, Elsie, who died in a mental institution at the age of fifteen? And if her mother was so important to medicine, why couldn’t her children afford health insurance?

Intimate in feeling, astonishing in scope, and impossible to put down, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks captures the beauty and drama of scientific discovery, as well as its human consequences.

How to exploit the poor – and why

That said, you wrote "exploiting the poor" isn't really a well-defined concept. Actually, it tuns out to be quite well defined:

exploit (verb): 1) to take unfair advantage of 2) to control or take advantage of by artful, unfair, or insidious means

Do I really need to explain this? If we're engaged in a negotiation and I'm rich and you're poor then I might choose to proceed on the assumption that you need my money more than I need your labor, because if I fail to obtain your labor then maybe my profits will go down by some unmeasurably small increment, but if you fail to obtain my money your children will go hungry. So even though the incremental value of your labor to me might be X I might decide to offer you Y<<X (for you non-geeks, that means Y is much less than X) instead knowing that you have a strong incentive to accept this offer even though I would actually be willing to pay you more if you had any leverage. But you don't, so I'm not. Having come to this realization, I might further decide that it is in my interests to deploy my resources so that you remain poor. Of course, I don't think of this as insuring that you remain poor, I think of it as insuring a ready supply of cheap labor. But it amounts to the same thing.

This is the fundamental problem: labor is unlike other commodities. If we have a surplus of wheat that causes the bottom to fall out of the wheat market and excess wheat to rot in silos, the wheat doesn't care. But labor does care because, to paraphrase Mitt Romney, labor is people, my friend. And labor has children that aren't going to stop needing food just because society has no present need for what their parents have to offer in the way of tradable goods and services.

"This goes both ways..."

R. Gates says:
January 25, 2012 at 7:59 pm

Lawrie Ayres says:
January 25, 2012 at 6:54 pm
I find myself on the horns of a dilemma; I want a cold period so the great fraud and it’s perpetraters can be destroyed once and for all but fear for the widespread disruption to food supplies that such occurrence would precipitate.
______
This kind of thinking should be a huge red flag for you and others. It shows that are not really a skeptic in the true scientific sense of the word, as a true skeptic doesn’t “want” anything in particular to happen. What this kind of thinking shows is that your thought processes are guided by some burning desire to prove your “side” right, which is of course, more politically motivated and exactly as expected for a certain segment of those who would otherwise call themselves “skeptics”, but in reality, are nothing of the sort. You give true skeptics a bad reputation.

Leif Svalgaard says:
January 25, 2012 at 7:56 pm

How about:
1) the sunspot number is artificially too high [inflated] by 20 after 1945.
2) this means that the cycles appear too large after 1945
3) when we correct for that, there is no longer a distinct Modern Grand Maximum
4) it is therefore not correct to associate the modern warming with a [non-existent] modern grand solar activity maximum

R. Gates says:
January 25, 2012 at 8:06 pm

Indeed, but in pointing this out, you are taking away the last best hope of skeptics who’d like to find something…anything…to pin the late 20th century warming on other than the 40% rise in CO2 since the Industrial Revolution. Now, as we are likely looking at a Dalton or even Maunder Minimum in the next few decades, it will be interesting to see how a very quiet sun counteracts the contined forcing from CO2. I cannot imagine a more exciting time to be studying the sun and the climate in general. We live at a very fortunate juncture in history.

And BTW, thanks for your excellent website.

Leif Svalgaard says:
January 25, 2012 at 8:19 pm
Which explains the hostility towards what I say. but that ‘last best hope’ is just wishful thinking [as you say 'something....anything']. One should not let what one wishes to happen control the science [this goes both ways...].
This is a recent invited talk on sun-climate given during a Workshop in Japan for an audience of climate scientists. They didn’t like it either, as the AGW crowd also needs the sun to explain climate variations before SUVs.

Threats against Kerry Emanuel and his wife – Climate Depot to blame

Prominent MIT researcher Kerry Emanuel has been receiving an unprecedented "frenzy of hate" after a video featuring an interview with him was published last week by Climate Desk. Emails contained "veiled threats against my wife," and other "tangible threats," Emanuel, a highly regarded atmospheric scientist and director of MIT's Atmospheres, Oceans and Climate program, said in an interview. "They were vile, these emails. They were the kind of emails nobody would like to receive."
…
The comments were seized upon, Emanuel suspects, by "bloggers bent on distorting that message and amplifying it." One website, Climate Depot, posted Emanuel's email address.

What savage idiots.

Roger Pielke Sr. comments on Michael Mann: "significant positive radiative feedback from added water vapor" or lack thereof

Roger Pielke Sr. dissects a Michael Mann interview:

“The details, how much warming you get, depend on things like feedbacks. And you can’t incorporate feedbacks through a back of the envelope approach. You actually have to critically think about the interactions that take place in this very complex system. And those feedbacks ultimately determine the extent to which that initial warming will be amplified, but they don’t even change the fact that you elevate greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere and you’ll get a warming of the surface. That’s basic physics and chemistry and people who claim that they don’t believe that, they don’t believe we’re warming the planet through increasing CO2 levels because of climate models, they don’t understand the fact that you don’t need a climate model to come to that conclusion. It’s basic physics and chemistry.

My Comment: Mike is arguing about an issue that is not in disagreement! Of course, if you add greenhouse gases, there is a radiative warming effect. However, its magnitude is relatively small unless there is a significant positive radiative feedback from added water vapor. It is this feedback, which involves the entire hydrologic cycle that is still so poorly understood; e.g. see

Stephens, G. L., T. L’Ecuyer, R. Forbes, A. Gettlemen, J.‐C. Golaz, A. Bodas‐Salcedo, K. Suzuki, P. Gabriel, and J. Haynes (2010), Dreary state of precipitation in global models, J. Geophys. Res., 115, D24211, doi:10.1029/2010JD014532.

Defending a cause with faulty arguments

The most perfidious way of harming a cause consists of defending it deliberately with faulty arguments.
– Friedrich Nietzsche

Randi on Climate Change

I strongly suspect that The Petition Project [about AGW being not the main driver of the climate] may be valid. I base this on my admittedly rudimentary knowledge of the facts about planet Earth. This ball of hot rock and salt water spins on its axis and rotates about the Sun with the expected regularity, though we're aware that lunar tides, solar wind, galactic space dust and geomagnetic storms have cooled the planet by about one centigrade degree in the past 150 years. The myriad of influences that act upon Earth are so many and so variable -- though not capricious -- that I believe we simply cannot formulate an equation into which we enter variables and come up with an answer. A living planet will continually belch, vibrate, fracture, and crumble a bit, and thus defeat an accurate equation. Please note that this my amateur opinion, based on probably insufficient data.

It appears that the Earth is warming, and has continued to warm since the last Ice Age, which ended some 10,000 to 20,000 years ago. But that has not been an even warming. Years of warming followed by years of cooling have left us just a bit warmer than before. This conclusion has been arrived at from data collected at some 1,200+ weather stations in the USA, though bear in mind that there are very few weather stations over the vast oceans that cover 70% of our planet, or on the continents Africa, South America, and especially Antarctica.

We can now record temperatures with much better than the former fraction-of-a-degree accuracy we had just a decade ago, but that temperature change appears to be just about half a degree Centigrade.
…

In my amateur opinion, more attention to disease control, better hygienic conditions for food production and clean water supplies, as well as controlling the filth that we breathe from fossil fuel use, are problems that should distract us from fretting about baking in Global Warming. From Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's 1891 A Scandal in Bohemia, I quote:

Watson: "This is indeed a mystery," I remarked. "What do you imagine that it means?"

Holmes: I have no data yet. It is a capital mistake to theorise before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts...

How to deal with religious cults

When dealing with a religious cult (or a pseudoscientific cult), it is best to take them at face value. Know their scripture and bring them down with their own internal inconsistencies. Do what Christopher Hitchens did. Don't convince them that others might be right, show them that what they believe is wrong (and that they might have been lied to by their high priests). The down-side is you need to read and learn their gibberish scripture…

"Unprecedented loss of ice"

Yeah right, more like linear.

Glacier Bay: Map of Alaska and Glacier Bay. Red lines show glacial terminus positions and dates during retreat of the Little Ice Age glacier. Green polygon outlines approximate area mapped by multibeam system in May-June 2001. The source of that map is the USGS Monthly Newsletter for July 2001, seen here.

Note that the majority of the glacier retreat occurred well before CO2 was said to be a problem, when CO2 was at the “safe” level below 350 parts per million as espoused by weepy Bill McKibben and Dr. James Hansen of NASA GISS.

On polar bears and climate change

Polar bears Ursus maritimus have become an iconic species in the communication of climate change, with media coverage implying a rapid population decline. This contrasts with scientific research, which indicates that most populations are currently stable or growing. Negative impacts of climatic warming on polar bears have been suggested, but cannot be quantified as no models yet exist to analyse the relationship between polar bear population dynamics and climate change.

Snow falling in New Zealand

Snow falling in South Island
2:32 PM Sunday Jan 22, 2012

Mid-Summer snow is falling and settling on Porters Pass this afternoon in the South Island, along with hail and other winter conditions on Arthurs Pass reports WeatherWatch.co.nz.

WeatherWatch.co.nz's West Coast reporter, Andy Thompson, says traffic is heavier than usual and describes the current weather conditions as "completely winter-like".

Reports coming in from Southland to Canterbury talk of people lighting fires, turning on heaters and heat pumps and generally saying it feels like the middle of winter.

(via)

Phil Jones unwilling to testify under oath

An excellent article at Bishop Hill here describing a clean sweep for Don Keiller in court (with David Holland as a “Mackenzie friend”) against the University of East Anglia and its solicitors.

The article reports on Keiller’s appeal to the First-Tier Tribunal (Case No. EA/2011/0152) in the General Regulatory Chamber – Information Rights. The appeal related to the second part of Keiller’s original FOI – instructions sent by CRU to Georgia Tech on their use of CRUTEM. CRU had argued that they didn’t have the information because Jones had deleted the email and they did not have access to the server in police possession. All arguments by the university were dismissed, with the judge being more than somewhat acid in some of his comments.

The University of East Anglia’s argument was hampered by their failure to present direct evidence from Phil Jones. (Assertions by Jones were presented by what Don Keiller described as “third-hand hearsay” – a conversation between Jones and David Palmer, passed on to Jonathan COlam-French, passed on to the UEA solicitor. Keiller and Montford observe:

…
With the Appeals Panel having decided in Keiller’s favour the appeal was then considered by the “First-Tier Tribunal (Information Rights)”. Normally such appeals are dealt with by an exchange of written correspondence, but UEA decided that they wanted to call a witness, necessitating a full court hearing. This was no small step, since judges and barristers are involved and in the event of an unsuccessful appeal it is possible, in theory at least, to end up with a large bill for costs.

This was not the only obstacle placed in the way of the appeal. Parties are required to agree on an “open bundle” of documents to be provided as evidence for the Tribunal to consider. Here Dr. Keiller asked for sections of the Muir Russell Report and the minutes of the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, which examined emails “leaked” from CRU. He also asked to include the letter to UEA from the Deputy Commissioner of the ICO which famously stated “The prima facie evidence from the published emails indicate an attempt to defeat disclosure by deleting information.”

All these publicly available documents were objected to by solicitors acting for UEA, on the grounds that they were “prejudical”. In the end Keiller had to write directly to the Tribunal to get them admitted as evidence. This evidence proved crucial.

…
It appears that UEA were keen that Jones should not appear on the witness stand, where he would be required to give evidence under oath. In fact it is noteworthy that, despite all the official “investigations”, Jones has never been required to answer questions under oath or provide a signed declaration.

Cubans are living longer

It is a bit difficult to follow it through as data for Cuba is not available for all time points, but Cubans (a blueish medium size blob in this diagram) are living longer lives than most others in Latin America and the Caribbean.

What sort of thing is the state?

You have been penned in, kettled, assaulted and arrested. You have had your protest broken up, your occupation invaded, your picket line disbanded. Now you're facing something called 'Total Policing'. Wherever you try to organise, you confront the state as the constant factor in your disorganisation. Whether 'personated', as Marx puts it, by the riot cop, the senior civil servant, or the coalition minister, you find it is always there, resourceful, organised, centralised, almost always one or two steps ahead, almost always with a monopoly on political initiative. Of course, the state represents itself as a popular, democratic institution, upholding the general will, maintaining law and order as the condition for the full participation of each in the political community. Yet your experience suggests that something else is at work, and you have to ask: what sort of thing is the state? Is it even a thing? Is it an autonomous power over and against society, or does it 'represent' sectional (class) interests within it? Is it an 'instrument' of the powerful or a venue of contestation? What are its boundaries? Where are its weaknesses? How does its power accumulate, and disintegrate?

The Four Horsemen Discussion - Dawkins, Dennett, Harris, Hitchens

Part 1


Part 2

"The FOI was designed to make government more accountable, but it affects many more institutions and organizations than intended."

Keith/Tim will pass these onto the FOI person at UEA. It might surprise you all to know that we have a full time person here at UEA for this! The FOI was designed to make government more accountable, but it affects many more institutions and organizations than intended.

Listen mate, you are part of the government.

First of all, you work in the research and eduction branch of the government.

Secondly, you are paid by the government (or would you rather like to compete exclusively for money from the private sector, as from the oil industry?).

And thirdly and most importantly, your research work is used to guide government positions world wide.

So better get used to the fact that rules made to "make governments more accountable" especially apply to you, my dear fried.

"Clearly these two statements can not simultaneously be true."

I begin by noting that it is wholly perverse to claim simultaneously that the data is "already available" and that the data is "confidential". Clearly these two statements can not simultaneously be true.

The evolution of the Alpha?

Anthropology argument against tribal alpha-male narrative
…
There is no good reason to believe that humans evolved in hierarchical tribes between tens of thousands to two million years ago. To the contrary, there is a mountain of evidence showing that humans evolved in largely egalitarian bands that punished attempts of dominance with social sanctioning, banishment, and death (Boehm 1999). Yes, that’s basically saying that alpha males got offed by their social group — not exactly a benefit to reproduction. It appears that human ancestors likely lived in dominance hierarchies sometime in our distant past, but probably prior to the evolution of the hominin (human) line (Boehm 1999; Debreuil 2010). These works indicate that whatever “alpha” dominance tendencies evolved in our remote ancestors has most likely been evolving in the opposite direction for a couple million years.
…

Evolutionary argument against tribal alpha-male narrative
Without going into tedious detail, it’s unlikely that the alpha-male behavioral type (however imprecise that classification may be) is particularly adaptive. Traits that confer significant reproductive advantage tend to spread through a population rapidly. That basically means that traits that consistently vary widely among a species are probably not under significant selection pressures. If being alpha was the ne plus ultraof mate wooing strategies, there would be a whooooooollle lot fewer “betas.”

Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus

Jones told Hume that his comments had been “tongue in cheek” and that the agreements in question were “not really confidentiality agreements” – an astonishing statement given the line taken with respect to FOI requesters. Jones went on to say that “there is never any obligation on CRU or UEA” arising from these agreements which are “generally about agreeing to work together on something”.

Furthermore:

The Climategate 2.0 emails clearly show that they were knowledgeable about the ins and outs of the FOI/EIR act at the time that they made the 2009 refusals. The problem wasn’t a lack of training. It is clear (from their conduct) that none of the parties considered that there would be any consequences from making untrue assertions (even recklessly) as part of an FOI/EIR refusal either under the Act, under academic misconduct codes or professionally. Nor did making untrue or misleading or evasive statements seem to present a moral dilemma to any of the parties, when such statements were made to perceived adversaries. 

How to become a pirate

By the way, from the better-late-than-never-but-nonetheless-still-timely department, in honor of Martin Luther King day, go find a copy of his I-have-a-dream speech. If you obtain one, and you didn't pay for it, then you are a pirate. That speech is copyrighted.

Picking climate cherries

In this relation - I am getting more and more concern about our statement that the Early Holocene was cool in the tropics - this paper shows that it was, actually, warm - ice core evidences+glaciers were smaller than now in the tropical Andes. The glaciers in the Southern Hemisphere (Porter, 2000, review paper) were also smaller than at least in the Neoglacial. We do not cite Porter's paper for the reason that we actually do not know how to explain this - orbital reason does not work for the SH, but if we do cite it (which is fair) we have to say that during the Early to Mid Holocene glaciers were smaller than later in both Northen, and Southern Hemisphere, including the tropics, which would contradict to our statement in the Holocene chapter and the bullet.

Phil Jones "no evidence that there will be any increase in tropical storms"

1) From the climate scenarios we develop in CRU there is no evidence that there will be any increase in tropical storms. In the area with the best data - the tropical Atlantic, there has been a reduction in both the numbers and the severity of Atlantic Hurricanes over the last 50 years. There has been a lot of US work on this subject. Although only applying to the US area, the work shows that damage ( when normalized to a common point in $'s) and lives lost have both reduced. Claims are much higher because of greater insured areas and the much greater population living in affected areas (particularly in Florida).

2) A recent paper in Climatic Change by S. Ungar, 1999 called 'Is strange weather in the air? A study of US National Network News coverage of extreme weather events' shows that there hasn't been an increase in extreme events reporting (global areas) since the 1960s.

Most lay people beleive there has been an increase because the pictures make news stories. In the past there were reports but no pictures. The media also always like an explaination for an extreme, so the greenhouse effect or ENSO often gets the blame. There have, however, been few studies which have attempted to look at extreme events on a continental scale to se whether they have been increasing or decreasing in frequency.

Die Karl Popper, die!

So far, it's been fascinating to get a look at the climate hoax from the inside.  The data fudging, the demonization of doubters, the knee-jerk rejection of alternate hypotheses, the quest for funding, the travel to exotic locations, the pal review, the left-wing politics, the fear of debate, the swagger in the early days, then the panic as the skeptics closed in--it's all there.

Yes:

You can get much of the raw data from a web site in the US (NCDC Asheville) if you know what you're doing. This isn't an issue for almost all climate scientists around the world. They are happy with the products we put together. We've started getting requests from people in the last few years asking for the raw station data. We've always not made the raw data available.

and

I also don't see why I should help people, I don't want to work with and who spend most of their time critisising me.

Years ago I did send much paleo data to McIntyre but have also had nothing but criticism on his blog ever since. As I said, this criticism on blog sites is not the way to do science. If they want to engage, they have to converse in civil tones, and if people don't want to work with them, they have to respect that and live with it.

Scientific method my arse.

(via)

Bet on global warming? No, rather not.

During the “More or Less” interview the question arose of extending the bet to “double or quits” for the next five years. I was game for it with a proviso. Betting against a record for ten years raises a higher possibility that there might be a statistical fluctuation than betting for five years. Because of this I would like to see two annual datapoints, consecutively more than one sigma above the 2001 – date mean level. After all, that is the minimum statistical evidence one should accept as being an indication of warming. James Annan did not commit to such a bet during the programme.

It just has to start getting warmer soon.

Back in 2007 many commentators, activists and scientists, such as Lynas, said the halt in global temperatures wasn’t real. It is interesting that the Climategate emails showed that the certainty some scientists expressed about this issue in public was not mirrored in private. Indeed, one intemperate activist, determined to shoot my New Statesman article down but unable to muster the simple statistics required to tackle the statistical properties of only 30 data points, asked the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and the Met Office, to provide reasons why I was wrong, which they couldn’t.

"Google AdSense Display Ads Will Now Feature the +1 Button"

Don't be evil my arse, Google Adsense has added the +1 "Like" button to adverts. And to make it extra sleazy, they put the +1 button in YouTube adverts above the mute button – way to go, sleaze bags.

But I'll leave it to Bill Hicks to tell excactly how I feel about these advert pushers:

Bill Hicks on Marketing


Bill Hicks - Corporate Shills

The War on Medicaid

The biggest problem is that this policy doesn't actually do anything to keep these patients out of the ER. They pay nothing now, they will pay nothing under the new policy. And it's not like there is a huge network of private docs waiting and eager to accept Medicaid patients in their offices. So they will continue to come, and emergency providers will simply be obligated to care for them without reimbursement. It's a forced cramdown on hospital and physician reimbursement, and other, more urgent, patients will still suffer longer waits because of the ER crowding driven (in some part) by overuse.

"Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI)"

But did you know that in the 1980s, health activists actually promoted oils containing trans fats? They considered such oils a healthy alternative to the saturated fats found in palm oil, coconut oil, or beef fat. In 1986, for instance, the Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI), described Burger King's switch to partially hydrogenated oils as "a great boon to Americans' arteries."

Center for Science in the Public Interest (CSPI): Now that is a mouthful for a vegan policy outlet advising for politically motived unhealthy advise.

The male stereotype in the media

A couple of days ago, a feminist site posted a quick little rant that used Erwan Le Corre as a segue to talk about how this whole "paleo" trend was promoting some hyper-patriarchal masculine past, comparing it to the modern Republican conservatism. It was pretty clear that the author didn't know much about the Paleolithic (her citation to how bad the Paleolithic was for women linked to the author of The Clan of the Cave Bear, which is fiction) and after significant negative feedback, the piece was pulled (but lives on thanks to the internet).

I commented that I really don't think that the Paleolithic diet/lifestyle thing is a man thing. But I think it seems that way to outsiders because that's how the media portrays it. It's the media that's selling the caveman hunter-barbarian stereotype, not the movement.

I've experienced this first hand, but I really haven't said much about it because it brings up so many personal insecurities. After the NYtimes article I was featured in, the NY Paleo Meetup and I interacted with a large number of media outlets, both television and print. We even managed two glorious comped dinners at Takashi that were filmed for various TV programs in the US and Europe. Overall, I probably spent hours and hours talking to reporters and being filmed or photographed. But I honestly don't have much to show for it except the original article. I was cut out of almost all of the things I was involved with.

Funny that Erwan Le Corre attacks the media's steoreotypical portrayal of the Paleo movement, while thinking it is the Paleo movement that is at fault.

Destruction of IPCC's "Objective, Open and Transparent" Process – It's a long story

In December, the WG1 TSU of the IPCC sent me a formal notice asking me to remove Climate Audit discussion of the IPCC Zero Draft. In this notice, they stated:

It has come to our attention that several Chapters of the Zero Order Draft (ZOD) of WGI AR5 are being cited, quoted and discussed on the blog that you host, Climate Audit, despite the fact that each of these chapters is clearly marked “Do not cite, quote or distribute”. We would respectfully request that you remove the relevant parts with discussions of the ZOD from your blog and, furthermore, that this does not happen with the FOD.

I’ve been mulling over how to respond. I was not a reviewer of the Zero Draft and had not made any personal agreements with IPCC as a condition of receipt. I had registered as a First Draft reviewer but have not downloaded any documents in this capacity as yet.

In preparing a response, I’d been wondering what authority, if any, was possessed by WG1 or its TSU that entitled it to require or request removal of this discussion from Climate Audit. I’d looked at IPCC Policies and Procedures in connection with previous CRU requests. The procedures used in AR4 (see here) had said that the “review process should be objective, open and transparent” and did not contain any language that specifically granted authority to the TSU of a Working Group to prohibit discussion in public of its draft reports. If anything, the overriding objectives of openness and transparency would seem to support such discussion – a process that seems entirely healthy to me and one that would actually enhance the IPCC.

It turns out that Phil Jones and Thomas Stocker, Co-Chair of AR5 WG1, both agreed with my interpretation of IPCC rules on this point i.e. that the Working Groups lacked specific IPCC authority to insist on confidentiality of their drafts, and that they had, behind the scenes, taken steps to change IPCC rules to authorize Working Groups to do so. Jones’ initial contacts with Stocker on this matter are documented in Climategate 2 and arose from Jones’ reading of Climate Audit posts advocating openness and transparency by IPCC – efforts that both Jones and Stocker opposed.

I only became aware of their actions recently as a result of an IPCC cease-and-desist letter to Galloping Camel, which had posted an excellent collection of WG1 and WG2 sources. To my considerable surprise, the IPCC letter to Galloping Camel contained a quotation from IPCC Policies and Procedures here (bolded below) that contained an endorsement of confidentiality that was absent in the AR4 polices. They wrote:

The IPCC Procedures in Article 4.2 of the Principles Governing IPCC Work state that “The IPCC considers its draft reports, prior to acceptance, to be pre-decisional, provided in confidence to reviewers, and not for public distribution, quotation or citation.” (http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/ipcc-principles/ipcc-principles-appendix-a-final.pdf). We therefore request the immediate removal of the ZOD chapters from your website.

This language was definitely not in the AR4 version. Indeed the document linked in the Galloping Camel letter was time stamped January 10, 2012(!). When had the new language been introduced? And by what authority? Tracing the language led to a remarkable story.

The language was almost singlehandedly introduced by Stocker (after being involved by Phil Jones.) Complicating Stocker’s efforts to obtain official sanction for enhanced confidentiality was the lack of interest in this topic by the Interacademy Panel, which had been commissioned by IPCC to review its policies and procedures. Not only did its report not contain the recommendations sought by Stocker and Phil Jones, it re-iterated the importance of openness and transparency. Nor had the language sought by Stocker been recommended in any of the numerous documents on IPCC procedures up to the second week of April 2011, less than four weeks before Stocker’s language was adopted at the Abu Dhabi IPCC meeting in May 2011.

Despite these obstacles, Stocker emerged from the IPCC plenary with his objective. It’s a long story.

Cahokia

Our ignorance has deep roots. The first person to write a detailed account of Cahokia's mounds was Henry Brackenridge, a lawyer and amateur historian who came upon the site and its massive central mound while exploring the surrounding prairie in 1811. "I was struck with a degree of astonishment, not unlike that which is experienced in contemplating the Egyptian pyramids," he wrote. "What a stupendous pile of earth! To heap up such a mass must have required years, and the labors of thousands." But newspaper accounts of his discovery were widely ignored. He complained of this in a letter to his friend former President Thomas Jefferson, and with friends in such high places, word of Cahokia did eventually get around. Unfortunately it was not word most Americans, including subsequent Presidents, were very interested in hearing. The United States was trying to get Indians out of the way, not appreciate their history. Andrew Jackson's Indian Removal Act of 1830, which ordered the relocation of eastern Indians to land west of the Mississippi, was premised on the idea that Indians were nomadic savages who couldn't make good use of land anyway. Evidence of an ancient Indian city—one that rivaled the size of Washington, D.C., at the time—would have mucked up the story line.
…

Washington University's John Kelly, a longtime stalwart of Cahokian archaeology, sums up the present understanding of Cahokia nicely: "People aren't really sure what it is."

Nor do people know what happened to it. Cahokia was a ghost town by the time Columbus landed in the New World, and the American Bottom and substantial parts of the Mississippi and Ohio River Valleys were so depopulated they are referred to as the Vacant Quarter. Cahokia's demise is perhaps an even greater mystery than its emergence, but there are a few clues. The city grew to prominence during an especially favorable climate phase and began shrinking around the time the climate became cooler, drier, and less predictable. For an agricultural community dependent on regular crop yields, the changing conditions could have been anything from stressful to catastrophic.

(via)

How Climate Research is done

The [Michaels et al. manuscript] was reviewed initially by five referees. … The other three referees, all reputable atmospheric scientists, agreed it should be published subject to minor revision. Even then I used a sixth person to help me decide. I took his advice and that of the three other referees and sent the [manuscript] back for revision. It was later accepted for publication. The refereeing process was more rigorous than usual.

vs.

Much like a server which has been compromised as a launching point for computer viruses, I fear that “Climate Research” has become a hopelessly compromised vehicle in the skeptics’ (can we find a better word?) disinformation campaign, and some of the discussion that I’ve seen (e.g. a potential threat of mass resignation among the legitimate members of the CR editorial board) seems, in my opinion, to have some potential merit. This should be justified not on the basis of the publication of science we may not like of course, but based on the evidence (e.g. as provided by Tom and Danny Harvey and I’m sure there is much more) that a legitimate peer-review process has not been followed by at least one particular editor.

Libya: In the name of human rights and with the 'responsibility to protect'

If you want to know what happened in Libya, here is a blog I highly recommend: libyancivilwar.blogspot.com

PayPal, destroyer of antique violins

Just when you thought PayPal couldn't get any stupider, well, they get stupider. Erica sold an antique violin to someone who paid $2500 for it over PayPal. The buyer disputed the authenticity of the violin -- which had been authenticated by a top luthier -- and PayPal instructed him that he could have his money back if he destroyed the violin. He did, and sent the photo of the destroyed, one-of-a-kind, precious instrument to the seller and PayPal. PayPal took the $2500 back from Erica, gave it to the violin-smasher, and called it a day.

With a photo of the destroyed violin. Un. Be. Liev. Able.

The scientific method – How NOT to do it

We have 25 or so years 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.
…
I also don’t see why I should help people I don’t want to work with and who spend most of their time critisising me.

A instant classic over at Climate Audit about the long running theme about Phil Jones obstructions towards Steve McIntyre's access to data, who wants to replicate his research – with new findings from the 2011 ClimateGate release about the lopsided behavior of a reporter from Nature!

Why won’t Jones give McIntyre the data?
Jones says that he tried to help when he first received data requests from McIntyre back in 2002, but says that he soon became inundated with requests that he could not fulfill, or that he did not have the time to respond to.

This claim was a total fabrication. After my (successful) 2002 request, I had no further contact with Jones until 2004, when I requested some unavailable data used in Jones et al 1998 (a legitimate, unobtrusive and successful request.) In the Climategate correspondence between Jones and Heffernan (thus far), Jones himself did not advance the “inundation” legend. Perhaps Jones himself introduced the legend in a presently unavailable email or in a telephone interview and the legend was uncritically accepted by Heffernan. It also seems possible that Heffernan herself contributed to the development of an explanation of Jones’ conduct that was more dignified than Jones’ petulance. Although there wasn’t a shred of evidence for Heffernan’s “inundation” story, it quickly became a widely accepted legend in the climate “community”. 

The Warming Climate

Conclusion:
“Earth’s Temperature” appears to have increased during the last several decades, but there does not appear to be evidence that Earth’s climate is “warming rapidly”. Furthermore, there are no apparent signs of warming occurring “at an accelerating rate”.

Go there for a really exhausting overview of climate indices!

Adolf Hitler was a fan of Mickey Mouse

Who would have thought?

Zitat aus Goebbels’ Tagebuch, vom 20.12.1937:

Ich schenke dem Führer 12 Micky-Maus-Filme zu Weihnachten! Er freut sich sehr darüber. Ist ganz glücklich über diesen Schatz.

Goebbels's Diary from 20th December 1937:

I gave the Führer 12 Mickey-Mouse movies for christmas! He was very pleased about that. Is very happy about this treasure.

Well, the fascists know good propaganda for the masses, when they see it.

Kepler SETI finds candidate signals

Kepler SETI finds candidate signals

We know these signals are interference, but look similar to what we think might be produced from an extraterrestrial technology. They are narrow in frequency, much narrower than would be produced by any known astrophysical phenomena, and they drift in frequency with time, as we would expect because of the doppler effect imposed by the relative motion of the transmitter and the receiving radio telescope. Even though these signals are interference, detecting events with similar characteristics to what we expect from ET is a good indication that the first steps of our detection algorithms are working properly.

So this is just a test. No, SETI has not detected an alien signal from a Kepler planet.