I want to lead this post off with a reminder of two key events on the global warming front that occurred in the last 6 months. First were results from a Japanese space mission to measure Green House Gasses (GHGs), which showed America has an extremely low ‘carbon footprint’ compared to the rest of the world. We actually DO NOT produce  very much of the world’s GHGs at all, coming in last among modern and near modern regions with large populations.

Second was the publication of emails from NASA GISS, which openly admit (to the brain dead press no less) there is NO SIGN of global warming in the United States of America. None. The best these alarmists can claim is it should show up in 20-40 years! It is not here now, that much they can say – scientifically.

So with that context established, it is telling when our young (and apparently naive) president claims the science of global warming is settled and we need to cut CO2 levels. Talk about looking as if you are out of your depth and unfocused!

It boggles the mind when a fad based on ignorance goes running rampant through the masses like a virus. And I am not talking about harmless fads like pet rocks and pants that don’t stay up. Those kinds of fads are just an outlet for personal expression, they are not an indication of ignorance at all.

What I am talking about are snake oil fads that promise hope – and instead ruin lives. How many people stuffed themselves with margarine before realizing it was of no value to their health? How many people have been duped by the false promises of embryonic stem cells as they tried to battle serious and deadly diseases? How many people have been conned out of their hard earned money on promises of  get quick rich schemes?

When idiots like David Shuster, Keith Olberman, Chris Mathews and Al Gore are pawned off as experts in science they are actually being frauds. They have no business trying to even explain scientific topics, let alone advocating one side or the other. They tell falsehoods which then cause people in need to waste their precious time and money on a fool’s errand.

Case in point:

Kivalina, an Inupiat Eskimo village of 400 perched on a barrier island north of the Arctic Circle, is accusing two dozen fuel and utility companies of helping to cause the climate change that it says is accelerating the island’s erosion..

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In Mississippi, Gulf Coast property owners claim that industry-produced emissions that contribute to climate change increased the potency of Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

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Tracy D. Hester, who has taught a course in climate lawsuits at the University of Houston law school, said that with the issues “very much in play” in three circuits of the federal court system, “the game pieces are being set for eventual Supreme Court review.”

I find it astounding someone is actually teaching courses in bringing fraudulent cases. This Hester person should be disbarred – just for being greedy and stupid. This is how lawyers deservedly get a bad rap. Each of these cases is doomed because the science of global warming is crumbling under its own incompetence. Wasting time and money in courts with science fiction peddled as science fact IS illegal.

First off, it is now clear that those who were/are the supposed experts on the ‘settled’ science are actually below average mathematicians whose only expertise was in the suborning of the scientific method.

These ‘scientists’ came out of a backwater niche of science were there were no quality standards at all – no repeatable results, no documenting of methodology, no retaining of records. This backwater was so small these people controlled what was peer-reviewed and published. They ignorantly assumed if they could keep opposing views out of scientific publications reality would behave as they predicted. They were so arrogant they were blind to their own incompetence.

The whole reason the scientific process is a crucible of debate and countering views is to TEST theories and drive out the core truth about the physical world we exist in. It is under the acid of scrutiny and challenge that the true forces of nature become evident, clear of our emotion driven biases, ignorance and wishes.

By trying to hide from their peers and skip this needed scrutiny, these ‘scientists’ simply delayed the time their weak and unsubstantiated theories would crash and burn. Instead of being tested  in the crucible of the scientific method they went public, basking in the light of pretending to be white knights coming to save humanity!

So when their world finally succumbed to the real scientific method, the real scrutiny of thousands of well trained minds, the fall was ugly. These scientist have spent the last decade trying to prevent the walls of their little fantasies from crashing in on them – and we have them in their own words doing this.

In the end they were simply a bunch of thin skinned amateurs whose methods were taken from the Keystone Kops. I just finished reading this amazing review of the Climategate emails. It is long but I strongly recommend everyone read the whole thing.

It is a lesson in how not to go through life. It tells the story of how this backwater niche science was being strangled by a bunch of pretend scientists, who really did nothing more than pat themselves on each other’s backs using an endless cycle of cross referencing in their little publishing circle. No one ever even checked the others, they just manipulated the process of peer reviewing so they could be the big fish in this backwater puddle. Quality and real depth of knowledge was not required – they ran the kingdom.

Then global warming became the latest media craze and they all of sudden were thrust into the lime light. They travelled the world and pontificated profusely. But they also tried to keep control on the access to their data and methods, as they had when they lived in that backwater kingdom of pretend science. Only after the clarion cries that the end of the world was nigh drew out people who work in premiere, high profile, deadly serious fields of engineering, geology, space exploration, aerospace, physics, etc. did these ‘scientists’ start to realize how little they knew, how shaky were their prediction.

So they tried harder to hide their data and methods, and increasing number of mistakes. They doubled down. They were the best in the world (in their world at least), they could not be touched, no mortal law could bind these demigods. At least that seemed to be their plan.

The story this analysis weaves is on of incompetent people rising to the pinnacle of their incompetence. It also confirms what many of us could discern about the ‘science’ of global warming from glances (in my case) and detailed analyses (in the case of folks like Steve McIntyre).

I found it wonderfully delicious to see the ‘experts’ realize behind the scenes that their pronouncements of certainty were impossible given the known uncertainties and errors in their measurements and computations. For example, this tidbit on page 25:

Chick Keller, of the Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics at the University of California at San Diego, United States, writes to Mike Mann, Ray Bradley, Phil Jones, Keith Briffa, Tom Crowley, Jonathan Overpeck, Tom Wigley, and Mike MacCracken, pointing out problems in the historical temperature estimates obtained from individual “proxy” methods:

Anyone looking at the records gets the impression that the temperature variation for many individual records or sites over the past 1000 years or so is often larger than 1°Celsius. … And they see this as evidence that the 0.8°Celsius or so temperature rise in the 20th century is not all that special.

He then makes note of a trick that they have used to mask this effect:

The community of climate scientists, however, in making averages of different proxies gets a much smaller amplitude of about 0.5°Celsius, which they say shows that reasonable combinations of effects can indeed explain this and that the 20th century warming is unique.

Keller realizes the mistake inherent in this trick shortly. First, he provides an excellent summary of the debate:

Thus, the impasse—one side the skeptics pointing to large temperature variations in many records around the globe, and the other side saying, “Yes, but not at the same time and so, if averaged out, is no big deal.”

He then points out that this glib brush-off is simply not valid:

But, just replying that events don’t happen at the same time (sometimes by a few decades) is the reason might not be enough. It seems to me that we must go one step further. We must address the question: what effects can generate large … temperature variations over hundreds of years, regional though they may be (and, could these occur at different times in different regions due to shifting climate patterns)? If we can’t do this, then there might be something wrong with our rationale that the average does not vary much even though many regions see large variations. This may be the nub of the disagreement, and until we answer it, many careful scientists will decide the issue is still unsettled, and that indeed climate in the past may well have varied as much or more than in the last hundred years.

This remarkable statement—mailed to all of the key players in this scandal—shows that they knew, clearly, more than eight years before the Climategate whistle-blower released these emails, that the entire basis of their claims was on shaky ground.

In his last paragraph, Keller points out the elementary mathematical error in the “averaging trick”:

Also, I note that most proxy temperature records claim timing errors of … 50 years ahead or behind the correct date or so. What is the possibility that records are cancelling each other out on variations in the hundred-year timeframe due simply to timing errors?

There are, in fact, many more mathematical reasons why the “averaging trick” is completely wrong; but Keller’s observation is completely correct, and by itself discredits the entire discipline of work establishing these “multi-proxy” historical temperature estimates.

This one of an incredible number of smoking, smoldering guns found in the emails. The analysis simply pulls out a lot of the mathematical and scientific jargon for the reader to focus on the actions of the people – but each email is available in its entirety for anyone to verify the technical details.

The document, while long, reads like a mystery. A mystery on how such rank amateurs were allowed to fool themselves and the world for so long. It is quite enjoyable to read about one Ben Santers’ wake up call regarding tax payer funded data rights. These people were holding their positions by controlling access to their methods and raw data – they were not scientists. Santer was especially arrogant – until his bosses told him in no uncertain terms what the law required and what he must do to keep his job. His grudging acceptance to follow the law is a part of the story to savor.

What is not enjoyable to read is how long these people were able to skate scrutiny and continue their con. They played loose and afoul of the law. Laws which where broken, but which have also expired:

The University of East Anglia breached the Freedom of Information Act by refusing to comply with requests for data concerning claims by its scientists that man-made emissions were causing global warming.

The Information Commissioner’s Office decided that UEA failed in its duties under the Act but said that it could not prosecute those involved because the complaint was made too late, The Times has learnt. The ICO is now seeking to change the law to allow prosecutions if a complaint is made more than six months after a breach.

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Mr Holland said: “There is an apparent Catch-22 here. The prosecution has to be initiated within six months but you have to exhaust the university’s complaints procedure before the commission will look at your complaint. That process can take longer than six months.”

My guess is these scoundrels are not out of the legal woods yet. Only time will tell.

The IPCC has recently admitted it used unscientific statements in its conclusions (i.e., Himalayan Glaciers) to push politicians and policy makers to take action on the so called Global Warming. So we have evidence of incompetent science in the climategate emails and science fiction showing up in the IPCC reports. What’s next?

Well the real scientists are having a field day with the amateurish premises from NASA GISS and other outlets who have cooked the data. Check out this amazing review of how these ‘scientists’ have basically made up the global climate numbers they tout as settled:

For example, Canada’s reporting stations dropped from 496 in 1989 to 44 in 1991, with the percentage of stations at lower elevations tripling while the numbers of those at higher elevations dropped to one. That’s right: As Smith wrote in his blog, they left “one thermometer for everything north of LAT 65.” And that one resides in a place called Eureka, which has been described as “The Garden Spot of the Arctic” due to its unusually moderate summers.

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From KUSI’s Global Warming: The Other Side:

“There’s a wonderful baseline for Bolivia — a very high mountainous country — right up until 1990 when the data ends. And if you look on the [GISS] November 2009 anomaly map, you’ll see a very red rosy hot Bolivia [boxed in blue]. But how do you get a hot Bolivia when you haven’t measured the temperature for 20 years?”

Of course, you already know the answer:  GISS simply fills in the missing numbers – originally cool, as Bolivia contains proportionately more land above 10,000 feet than any other country in the world – with hot ones available in neighboring stations on a beach in Peru or somewhere in the Amazon jungle.

Is it any wonder the Earth appeared to warm since 1990? If all you do is look at hot places and ignore cool ones of course it will seem warmer? Duh – don’t need to be a rocket scientist to figure that one out!

This goes to exactly what I wrote about here and the decay of a temperature over short distances. 99.99+% of the global temperatures are made up – bringing a more enlightened meaning to ‘man-made global warming’! The fewer measurements you use the more you can make up, isn’t the cool (er, … hot, er ..)

The temperatures touted by alarmists are unproven fantasies from the minds of said alarmists. They have no clue what the global index is today, let alone 50 years ago. And don’t even pretend to think anyone could take the sparse and crude data from 1880 and create a global index accurate to tenths of degree. I doubt they could create a regional temperature hi/lo accurate to a tenth of a degree.

And just forget about knowing what it was like hundreds or thousands of years ago.

They don’t even know what is going on with their tree rings. We all should know a tree’s growth is dictated by more than just temperature. It is dictated by sustained nutrients, water, sunshine and temperature. I emphasize the word ‘sustained’ because a few days of very hot temperatures followed by many months of cold could look the same as many months of warm temps in the tree’s rings, all other things being steady. Trees cannot produce a temperature, only a range of temps over various durations of time. No tenth of a degree crap.

What the alarmist failed to learn in the late 20th century ‘divergence’ (the decline in tree ring growth as temperatures continued to rise over the  last 50 years) was that tree rings do not respond linearly to temperature. This period of enlightenment can be found starting on page 77 of the analysis, but the email I found most interesting was on page 80 and had this:

There are many hypotheses for non-temperature influences on tree-ring records, including:
(i) recent damage (as by ozone);
(ii) recent fertilization (as by CO2); and
(iii) decreasing sensitivity of tree-ring growth to temperature with increasing temperature (once it’s warm enough, the trees are primarily responsive to other things).

Most biologists will tell you it is more than likely (iii). But what these scientists admitted in private is NO ONE KNOWS what the cause is. They don’t know why trees stop following temperatures, but if it is (iii) then there could be dozens of warm periods hiding in those unpredictable tree rings. It is a fascinating part of the story, which destroys all the prior efforts by the alarmists to wipe out historically similar warm periods like the Medieval Warm Period.

I don’t know how many more ways we can destroy the AGW theory. It is now only kept alive in the minds of the ignorant or the obsessed.

In any event, we have learned a lot about the fool’s errand that is trying to limit CO2 emissions. We know the science is busted, the alarmists exposed has hacks, the GHG levels in the US are lower than any other place on the planet with similar technology, energy needs and density of people. We know that Obama’s own scientists have admitted to the press there is no sign of man-made global warming in America.

And yet there are those who just can’t let go of the fantasy …

Tags: Climategate, CRU, Global Warming