From the NFRA Staff :
Everyone (except the American media) is talking about Climategate — even the Australian Opposition Leader has been forced to resign over it — but not many Americans understand it yet. Here is a short summary that makes it clear as a bell how you’ve been scammed:
ClimateGate emails and computer programs were taken from a main server at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. It is not known if this was a theft or the actions of a whistleblower, disgusted with what the lead scientists at CRU were doing.
ClimateGate exposed the cabal of 20 – 30 scientists (not just at CRU) that peer reviewed each others papers, strong-armed scientific journals to only print their views, and then sat on the IPCC panels as authors judging which published studies go into the IPCC final reports. This is why they always keep shouting “peer reviewed studies, peer reviewed studies, peer reviewed studies”. They owned the peer review process.
ClimateGate exposed that this small group has been adding positive corrections to the raw global temperature data, inflating the amount of published temperature rise over the last 50 years. Both CRU in the UK and NASA-GISS in the US add these biases. At CRU, the programmers did not even know what and why some corrections were added every month. Only since satellite monitoring for comparison have the amounts of biasing leveled off.
ClimateGate exposed the leaders of this cabal instructing each other to delete emails, data files, and data analysis programs ahead of already filed Freedom Of Information Act requests for raw data and computer codes, clearly a crime.
ClimateGate exposed the “trick” about the Hockey stick figure and other studies that performed proxy construction of past temperatures. After all, reconstruction of the last 1,000 years of climate is the first step in predicting the future with super computer programs as explained below:
Everything about all 21 super computer programs used by the IPCC to determine future global warming rely on best-determined past sensitivities to solar and volcanic effects (climate forcings) from the proxy temperature record.
1. The elimination of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age (the handle of the hockey stick) was necessary so that past solar effects could be minimized, thereby allowing almost all of the warming in the last 75 years to be blamed on Greenhouse Gasses. Raw data (like tree-ring thickness, radioisotope of mud layers in a lake bottom, ice core analyses, etc.) are used as a proxy for reconstruction of the temperature record for 1000 AD to 1960 AD. To ensure desired results, statistical manipulation of the raw data and selecting only supporting data, cherry-picking, was suspected and later proved to make the hockey stick graph. Look closely at the plot here where the hockey stick is one of the plots:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/16/cern_cloud_experiment/
2. The slope of long-term 10-year running average global temperature using thermometers from 1900 to present (the blade of the hockey stick) was maximized with the sloppy gridding code, Urban Heat Island effects, hiding the declines, and even fabricating data (documented in the leaked source code comments revealed with ClimateGate). This ensured that the Greenhouse Gas sensitivity coefficients in all 21 of the super computers was maximized, and that maximizes the temperature result at year 2100 based on Greenhouse Gas increases. This thermometer data was used to replace the tree ring-divergence after 1960 and plot this over the climate history data of (1) above giving the false impression that the reconstructed 1000 AD to 1960 AD results are more accurate than they are.
3. Because tuning of the super computer programs uses back casting, the computer outputs could always replicate the 20th Century (by design); therefore it was assumed that the models had almost everything in them. Because of (1) and (2) above, nearly all climate change predicted by the models was due to CO2 and positive feedbacks and hardly any of the climate change was for other reasons like solar, understood or not.
4. Over the years, when better numbers for volcanic effects, black carbon, aerosols, land use, ocean and atmospheric multi-decadal cycles, etc. became available, it appears that CRU made revisions to refit the back cast, but could hardly understand what the code was doing due to previous correction factor fudging and outright fabricating, as documented in the released code as part of ClimateGate.
5. After the IPCC averages the 21 super computer outputs of future projected warming (anywhere from 2-degrees to 7-degrees, not very precise), that output is used to predict all manner of catastrophes. (Fires, floods, droughts, blizzards, hurricanes, tornadoes, earthquakes, insects, extinctions, diseases, civil wars, cats & dogs sleeping together, etc.)
So “shut-up or be called a denier,
live the way we tell you to live,
pay more for everything, and
just send money for my research on the effects of global climate change on horseshoe crabs” (which have been around for about 440 million years through all possible temperature ranges).
We hope that this makes the ClimateGate controversy easier to understand.
“Climategate” started out when there appeared on the Internet a collection of e-mails of a group of climatologists who work in the University of East Anglia in England. These documents reveal that some climatologists of international preeminence have manipulated the data of their investigations and have strongly tried to discredit climatologists who are not convinced that the increasing quantities of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere are the cause of global warming.
It is true that a majority of the scientists who study climatic tendencies in our atmosphere have arrived at the conclusion that the world’s climate is changing, and they have convinced a group of politicians, some of whom are politically powerful, of the truth of their conclusions.
A minority, however, is skeptical. Some believe that recent data that suggest that the average temperature of the atmosphere is going up can be explained by natural variations in solar radiation and that global warming is a temporary phenomenon. Others believe that the historical evidence indicating that the temperature of the atmosphere is going up at a dangerous rate is simply not reliable.
Such lacks of agreement are common in the sciences. They are reduced and eventually eliminated with the accumulation of new evidence and of more refined theories or even by completely new ones. Such debates can persist for a period of decades. Academics often throw invective at one another in these debates. But typically this does not mean much.
But the case of climate change is different. If the evidence indicates that global warming is progressive, is caused principally by our industrial processes, and will probably cause disastrous changes in our atmosphere before the end of the twenty-first century, then we do not have the time to verify precisely if this evidence is reliable. Such a process would be a question of many years of new investigations. And if the alarmist climatologists are right, such a delay would be tragic for all humanity.
The difficulty is that economic and climatologic systems are very complicated. They are not like celestial mechanics, which involves only the interaction of gravity and centrifugal force, and efforts to construct computerized models to describe these complicated systems simply cannot include all the factors that are influential in the evolution of these complicated systems.
All this does not necessarily indicate that the alarmist climatologists are not right. But it really means that if global warming is occurring, we cannot know exactly what will be the average temperature of our atmosphere in the year 2100 and what will be the average sea level of the world’s ocean in that year.
It also means that we cannot be confident that efforts by the industrialized countries to reduce the amount of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere will have a significant influence on the evolution of the world’s climate.
Alas, the reduction of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere would be very costly and would greatly change the lives of all the inhabitants of our planet–with the possibility (perhaps even the probability!) that all these efforts will be completely useless.
Harleigh Kyson Jr.
Harleigh,
You make a good argument assuming we don’t know if man-made global warming is a myth or not. But it is not necessary. There is no doubt.
And you have some of it entirely backwards.
It is not scientists who convinced politicians, but political activists who hired scientists. The only reason that a “majority” of scientists who “study climate” are Global Warming Alarmists is because of massive government funding: they were hired for that purpose, to find a crisis. (See: http://wp.me/p3Rqg-2O)
The “New Left” invented “Environmentalism” and, later, “Global Warming” for political purposes in the wake of the loss of the Viet Nam war as a recruiting device for radical socialism. Greenpeace and the Club of Rome have bragged about it.
Environmentalism is a potent mixture of socialism, paganism and junk science wrapped in the same dishonesty that gave us the world communist movement originally.
They began with a “new ice age” morphed to “global warming” and that, has, in the last 24 months or so, again re-morphed into “climate change” because the earth has been cooling and the data clearly shows it.
Science is not a democratic pursuit. One man, alone, can disprove a hypothesis, despite massive disagreement, because of the nature of the scientific method. “Majorities” are irrelevent. No number of opinions can make the world flat. And virtually all the assumptions undergirding Environmentalist dogma, the theory that fuels the grants and bends the data, have been disproved.
Carbon dioxide is not a pollutant.
There is no such thing as a “greenhouse gas”
If and when there is a global warming trend, mankind cannot possibly have started it.
The complete cessation of all human activity would not be enough to stop it.
And…
As everyone interested now knows, Global Warming scientists, the lap dogs of the World Socialist Movement, are lying. The computer models were constructed to get the results they yield and the data has been manipulated.
The sun warms and cools.
Measured by the same methodology, Mars has warmed parallel to Earth. And the Martians have no industry (to speak of).
Your assertions: “Academics often throw invective at one another…” and “… this does not mean much.” parallel the blueprinted talking points currently in use to cover up the exposure of SCIENTIFIC FRAUD at the center of leftist “Climate Science.” On one hand, of course, pointing out that Climate Change Scientists are LYING is a kind of “invective.” On the other hand, they’re LYING.
Your admission that “…efforts to construct computerized models to describe these complicated systems simply cannot include all the factors…” is somewhat to the point. The Climate Con-Artists have not been able to re-construct their models quickly enough to keep up with the rate at which their scams have been disproved.
As long as there is a shred of belief in the duped public, ambitious politicians, like Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and (Washington State Attorney General) Rob McKenna will continue to use it as a lever to empower big government.
Now that the fraud has been exposed at its center, we must not give it a shred of credibility. And the traitors to our nation and its freedom who continue to use it must not only be thrown out of office in elections and impeached (where that is a practical tool), but should also face massive fines AND jail time for the billions of our dollars they have expropriated by fraud.
Well put Doug, well put!
First hand story of what happened to my wife and I when we were crossing the North Atlantic in our airplane. While I understand this story is anticdotal in nature, it is supportive of the concept that global warming is all about money and not science. In 2006 we crossed the North Atlantic. On one stop we landed in Reykjavik, Iceland. While filing our flight plans for the next leg, we began talking with a couple of guys that were also refueling and on their way to Greenland. My wife asked what they were going to do in Greenland. They explained that they were researchers studying global warming. They said they take ice cores to determine if there is melting and how much. My wife asked what happens if they find out there isn’t melting. They responded with, “We zip our lips or we lose our funding.”