If people still think the science of man-made global warming is settled (er, hint, hint, Mr President) then they must be ignoring the destruction of the IPCC scientific foundation going on with incredible vigor and scope.

Leading the charge to find the truth and expose the serial exaggerators behind the ‘end of the Earth is nigh’ claims is the UK Guardian – one time bastion of the AGW theory. Now we see a string of strong articles calling out the IPCC and CRU and others on all aspects of their theories and ethics. For example, this article on fudging over the Urban Heat Island effect and hiding the truth:

But the argument over the weather stations, and how it affects an important set of data on global warming, has led to accusations of scientific fraud and may yet result in a significant revision of a scientific paper that is still cited by the UN’s top climate science body.

It also further calls into question the integrity of the scientist at the centre of the scandal over hacked climate emails, the director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU), Dr Phil Jones. The emails suggest that he helped to cover up flaws in temperature data from China that underpinned his research on the strength of recent global warming.

The urban heat island effect can be seen easily in this simple (informal) experiment done by a father-son team last year:

H/T Objectivist Individualist. The fact is there is heating in the regions around large human populations. Less vegetation and trees, less surface water, lots of asphalt and glass and concrete – all these things lead to heat being trapped during the day with less cooling at night. You can see this everyday by comparing city temps to nearby suburb and rural temps. This video shows how simple this effect is to detect. Jones, et al had to go to China and use dodgy stations to prove something you see all over the UK doesn’t exist.

This video also proves once again my assessment that a temperature measurement decays rapidly with uncertainty (or error) within 100 km. That means, with 99.99+ % of the global temperature made up from sparse measurements extended 100’s or even over a 1,000 km, 99.99+% of the supposed warming is a creation of unproven (and very shaky) math. It is not settled, is near mythical.

Then the Guardian came out with a review of the destruction of the peer-review process in science – which is now in shatters.  And this doesn’t even touch on the controversies of using unscientific references to make wild, exaggerated claims (see here for just one example). We now know that the Himalayan glaciers are not melting away (a stupid and naive claim if there ever was one), we know 40% of the Amazon is not a risk (but of the 10% logged, 40% – or 4%of the total – is at risk).

Bogus data covered up, the total manipulation and suborning of the peer-review checks, wild and false claims – what next? It seems what is next is some heads will roll, but an ’emergency response’ team needs to be called in to save the failing ship of AGW.

This is a tough time for climate science. The Guardian’s new revelations about the hacked emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia might help to explain the university’s utter failure to confront its critics. They could also explain why the head of the unit, Phil Jones, blocked freedom of information requests and proposed that material subject to those requests be deleted. He has been spared a criminal investigation only because the time limit for prosecutions has expired.

The emails I read gave me the impression that Phil Jones had something to hide. Now we know what it might have been. The Guardian has discovered that Jones appears to have suppressed data that undermines a paper he published in Nature in 1990. The paper claimed that Chinese weather stations show that local heating caused by urbanisation has very little effect on the temperature record. It now seems that much of the data they used is worthless and the documents required to validate it do not exist. The paper might be 20 years old, but in a way that makes the scandal worse: Phil Jones has had 20 years in which to issue a correction. Even after the hacking in October last year, he has still not done so.

I find this article humorous in its depth of denial. After listing a litany of obvious problems with the ‘science’ behind the AGW theory, Monbiot calls for help shoring up the response?

As the emails show, climate scientists at the university have been up against a well-armed public relations campaign for many years, but no one at UEA has developed a strategy for responding. Even now the university has failed to make the obvious move: to call in a crisis management team, or at least to hire someone who can show they know how to respond to an emergency.

Give it up man. It is time to jump the sinking ship, not bring more people on it. This is just the beginning of the end of AGW (as opposed to the warming and cooling of the planet which as gone on for millions and millions of years). The general approach used to create an globale temp index, and rewind it through sparse and in accurate temperature records going back to 1880, is a fool’s errand. There is no math that can fix that data to make it accurate to a tenth of a degree across the globe.

Climate is not that simple, and only the simpletons who want to believe think it is.

Tags: Climategate, CRU, Global Warming, UK Guardian