Here we are again with Littlejohn-style proto-Clarksonite denialism based on all but a cold snap.

These people just can’t see past the end of their nose. A cold freezing weekend and global warming is obviously a joke. Good gracious.

James Randi (!) has joined the sceptics:

http://www.randi.org/site/index.php/swift-blog/805-agw-revisited.html

I’m currently reviewing my scepticism of spoon bending.

The excellent PZ Myers is on the case:

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2009/12/say_it_aint_so_randi.php

Quick question – why is it a cold snap can’t be used to say global warming isn’t real but the flooding in Cumbria was used heavily by people to say how it shows the global warming is real?

They’re both simply examples of extreme weather – and as we all know, there is a difference between weather and climate

but the flooding in Cumbria was used heavily by people to say how it shows the global warming is real?

Because the flooding is part of a pattern. The snow doesn’t fall into any pattern given this was the hottest decade ever.

‘Quick question – why is it a cold snap can’t be used to say global warming isn’t real but the flooding in Cumbria was used heavily by people to say how it shows the global warming is real?’

The flooding can’t be used to prove global warming but it can be used to prove we aren’t PREPARED for global warming.

Lets face it, Britain can’t cope with cycles of mild heatwaves and drizzle that we’ve been getting every year without alternating hosepipe bans with flood warnings.

A pattern of what? Did London not have some of the heaviest snow for years in February 09? How many events does it take for severe weather to become a pattern? (All genuine questions)

Well how about look at temperature extremes over a decent area. A spring heatwave in Australia. See:

http://www.bom.gov.au/announcements/media_releases/sa/20091117recordsaheatfirsthalfNov.shtml
http://bravenewclimate.com/2009/11/14/three-record-heatwaves-seaust/

But I suppose we will get told that it didn’t really happen. Nobody lives there anyway, and we know what the Australian Bureau of Meteorology does to the temperature records at Darwin. (NOT!!!).

A more interesting piece of information showing that in the US an occasional record low would still be possible in the year 2100 even after average temperatures have risen a few degrees. See here:

http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2009/11/record_high_and_low_temps_an_i.php

Kevin

Claude,
Debate is not about name calling your opposing side. I suggest you people who imagine that only one creature on this planet can change the climate, are mad. (see, now I’m at it but you started it!) We cannot influence weather anymore than we can predict the future. The link below has some excellent facts which “religious” believers happily ignore. As for climate change, yes it has always been so. Human activity causes pollution is also a fact. Do not confuse the two. Without people, no pollution. If we as a creature, wish to save ourselves we need to reduce our demands on nature. How? Cut down on people and their inane ability to shit in their own nest. Don’t dress it us as science.

pttp://oldrightie.blogspot.com/2009/12/you-dont-get-this-in-copenhagen.html

oldrightie what a load of baloney.

Water vapour

Firstly, you are right it is the strongest greenhouse, but the amount of water vapour is dependent on temperature. Cool down the air and the water vapour condenses as rain or snow. Add carbon dioxide into the air and it warms allowing the air to hold more water vapour. It is called a feedback.

Secondly Carbon dioxide is well mixed in the atmosphere, but there is almost no water vapour at the high levels of the atmosphere for the reason just given. The impact of greenhouse gases high in the atmosphere is much more powerful than it is at lower levels. That is the reason why the impact of plane travel is so bad.

What is the relevancy of what are the CO2 levels in the atmosphere prior to the time that the climate was the one that has been so congenial for humans.

This seems to show a pretty good correlation between temperature and C02 for the last 450000 years.

http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Vostok-ice-core-petit.png

Geologically the land masses during that time are pretty much where they are now so that this correlation is relevant. Looking back further in time is less relevant as ocean and air currents would be quite different due to the different location of land masses and mountain ranges.

What do you mean there is no data that definitively relate carbon dioxide levels to temperature changes. Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. We can measure the effect in a lab.

Of course we know that the effect of CO2 is logarithmic. That is why when talking about the impact of CO2 we say that you get a 3 degree rise for every doubling of CO2. That has been clear and explicit the whole time.

So because the Earth temperature changes naturally somehow that precludes global warming due to increasing the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. A poor argument. If anything right now we should be in a cooling phase, the solar cycle is at a low point and solar output is lower and lasted longer than for the last few solar cycles before that. Instead we get the the hottest decade on record.

And exactly how much of the Earth surface does the US cover. The USA is not the Earth.

You lined them up and I knocked em down.

Go me.

Kevin

If you recall, the Cumbrian flooding was described by the Environment Agency as a once in a thousand years event. It thus fell into the category labelled “possible, but unlikely”, irrespective of climate change.

As Shatterface commented, we should take note of our unpreparedness for such events, whatever the cause.

“Carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. We can measure the effect in a lab”.

Which proves fuck all as the real environment is slightly more complex than a lab, …….

Of course the real environment is more complex than a lab. I was refuting the point made by oldright in his piece about the relationship between CO2 and temperature.

Kevin

Charlieman – it may have been a 1-in-1000 year event but it didn’t stop some people claiming victory for the MMGW camp. I agree with you that we ought to be preparing for a changing climate.

If temperatures are going to rise then let’s prepare ourselves for the consequences. It’s a better solution than spending all our money trying to lower CO2 emissions in the hope that temperatures will stop rising.

“For example, some argue that the Arctic is melting, with the warmest-ever temperatures. One should ask, “How long is ever?” The answer is since 1979. And then ask, “Is it still warming?” The answer is unequivocally “No.” Earth temperatures are cooling. Similarly, the word “unprecedented” cannot be legitimately used to describe any climate change in the last 8,000 years.”
By Lee C. Gerhard, IPCC Expert Reviewer .

A/C emissions. Here again the science is forced to fit the desired model. Water vapour is the most significant of the gases produced. CO2 and harmful particulates exist. Answer, stop moving unnecessary foodstuffs and goods around the globe. Self-sufficiency not globalisation.
Of course, as I mentioned earlier, pollution is a mess of human existence and is damaging. Living in a clean, decently managed home beats the opposite of living in filth and squalor. This applies to the planet and the ONLY solution is fewer people with less demand on resources. I do like the educated principle of learning to cope as against the dreadful waste of millions of pounds on talking shops that are designed to protect the rich and powerful.
As for “baloney” here we go again, don’t dare challenge the school lab science, doesn’t suit the needs of leftie control freaks. Goodnight.

Oldirghtie – Gerhard is making shit up. The earth is not cooling in any measure used by climatologists, which Gerhard would know if he was actually a real scientist involved in the business. The unprecedented is his opinion, but we can’t judge what he has based it on, and so it is irrelevant compared to the carefully complied IPCC report and numerous supporting papers. If anyone is carrying out school lab science it is him.

guthrie,
He’s making it up? Checked out CRU and IPCC data corruption and flawed programming. Your talking about man made computer models. Garbage in garbage out. Incidentally my 3 foot deep pond is frozen solid and I’ve only just saved the fish. Some warming.

But we’ve known for years that ultimately, climate change would result in hotter summers and colder winters in the UK.

If polar ice is melting due to an overall warming of the planet, it will have an impact on ocean currents, one of which the Gulf Stream is largely responsible for the Western edge of Europe having a much more moderate climate than it would otherwise have. (New York and Rome are at similar latitudes but only one can get through the winter without heavy snow)
A weakening of the Gulf Stream would well be expected to result in Britain having more regular cold winters and more intensely hot stormy summers.

@18 Benjamin: “But we’ve known for years that ultimately, climate change would result in hotter summers and colder winters in the UK.”

The expression should be : “But we’ve thought and argued…”, not “known”. It is all still theory.

For goodness sake,

Could we perhaps hold the next ‘Copenhagen’ in the middle of the summer in the middle of the Death Valley, or somewhere?

This is just giving cheap shots to fools….

Unlike most commentators, I have been to the Bella in Copenhagen. The Bella Centre is incapable of holding more than 15,000 people, I agree.

Is there a space anywhere for 50,000 people?

Oh good, another ‘100 reason why..’ list. If you ever want to find a blogger who has too much time on his hands, find one with a ‘100 reasons why…’ list. Do people never learn that you’re clutching at straws after 5 anyway?

Well, there we go. Its cold and oldrightie is right because his fish nearly died.

Well, there’s no evidence for CRU and IPCC data corruption and flawed programming, insofar as we take flawed to mean giving erroneous results. So he’s wrong on that for starters. Oh, and he’s also wrong about IPCC data in the first place, because the IPCC is the central clearing house using work done by opther people. It doesn’t run simulations or anything.
Finally we all know about GiGo, in fact I guarantee that most of the people incolved in GCM’s know about it. Thats why they’ve spent 20 years improving them. By the way, they work off basic physics, so its hard to put garbage in, unless the laws of the universe have changed somewhere.

“By the way, they work off basic physics, so its hard to put garbage in, unless the laws of the universe have changed somewhere.”

By your logic they have by mine climate is not altered by man only polluted.

Umm, what?

Bit of help for Guthrie other than the welfare of my fish. Condescending sod.

And here are the conclusions of the Wegman report:

Findings

In general, we found MBH98 and MBH99 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and
the criticisms of MM03/05a/05b to be valid and compelling. We also comment that they
were attempting to draw attention to the discrepancies in MBH98 and MBH99, and not to
do paleoclimatic temperature reconstruction. Normally, one would try to select a
calibration dataset that is representative of the entire dataset. The 1902-1995 data is not
fully appropriate for calibration and leads to a misuse in principal component analysis.
However, the reasons for setting 1902-1995 as the calibration point presented in the
narrative of MBH98 sounds reasonable, and the error may be easily overlooked by
someone not trained in statistical methodology. We note that there is no evidence that Dr.
Mann or any of the other authors in paleoclimatology studies have had significant
interactions with mainstream statisticians.

In our further exploration of the social network of authorships in temperature
reconstruction, we found that at least 43 authors have direct ties to Dr. Mann by virtue of
coauthored papers with him. Our findings from this analysis suggest that authors in the
area of paleoclimate studies are closely connected and thus ‘independent studies’ may not
be as independent as they might appear on the surface. This committee does not believe
that web logs are an appropriate forum for the scientific debate on this issue.

It is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though they rely
heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting with the statistical
community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of research materials, data and results
was haphazardly and grudgingly done. In this case we judge that there was too much
reliance on peer review, which was not necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has
been sufficiently politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public
positions without losing credibility. Overall, our committee believes that Mann’s
assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and
that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.

If the world was warmer then it would be too warm for cold records.
If 40 year + records for cold are being broken then the world isn’t warmer.
Still one has to love alarmists, all that passion totally replacing any rational thought or observation.

Guthrie,

Stick a comma in and it’s plain enough – ‘By your logic they have, by mine climate is not altered by man only polluted’.

The climate models do not just rely on physics they rely on assumptions about how the climate works. The biggest one being that more carbon dioxide = more warming. From that they have assumed certain positive and negative feedback mechanisms will then counteract or reinforce the warming from more CO2. Furthermore, the predictions about future climate rest entirely on a family of economic assumptions about population growth, energy usage, the cost of carbon credits etc. Literally. Honestly. The various predictions for temperature rises only come about through plugging in various demographic predictions first. Then after those two large hurdles of assumptions and predictions comes the not at all certain suggestion that a warmer climate will be a more catastrophic one.

The garbage going in can be two things:

1. Assuming that the climate works in a particular way when it doesn’t. Do aerosols cause cooling or warming? Does soot cause cooling or warming? Is it a given that aerosols *always* cause a net cooling or warming? etc etc. Science is continually investigating how the atmosphere works and past assumptions do get overturned. Due to limits on computing power the atmopshere is not modelled in intricated detail either.

2. The data from weather stations, proxy records etc. Data gets adjusted. Data gets hand picked. Data gets lost and made up.(See the Harry read me text file from the leaked documents for more information.) One particularly contentious issue over the data is how it accounts for the urban heat island effect.

Take Manchester airport for example – recent data is unadjusted but older data has been adjusted upwards to eliminate a UHI warming trend caused by increasing urbanisation over time. This does not eliminate the UHI effect. Recent temperatures are unadjusted but they are undeniably warmer due to UHI.

When weather stations get moved this can cause a change in the temperature record. One common move is from an urban area to a rural one to get away from tarmac and concrete that can skew the record upwards. The NOAA in the US appear to deal with this by factoring in an upwards adjustment to the cooler data from after the station move.* Shouldn’t it be the other way around?

The number of weather stations included in the temperature data blossomed from the 1880s onwards, until about the 1960s. From then the number of data stations used dropped substantially. There are thousands more stations than get included in the data used by places like CRU. Wouldn’t you want to use more stations? Wouldn’t you want as much global coverage as possible? Why aren’t they using all the possible data available to them? It cannot logically be a data quality issue – they are already using loads of data that they have adjusted because it was corrupted in someway.

* See the Station History Adjustment Procedure section here: ” Application of the Station History Adjustment Procedure (yellow line) resulted in an average increase in US temperatures, especially from 1950 to 1980. During this time, many sites were relocated from city locations to airports and from roof tops to grassy areas. This often resulted in cooler readings than were observed at the previous sites. When adjustments were applied to correct for these artificial changes, average US temperature anomalies were cooler in the first half of the 20th century and effectively warmed throughout the later half.”

The yellow line in question is the adjustment to the data and it goes upwards. If my interpretation of their statement is correct what they have done is export the urban heat island effect to rural stations. I sincerely hope I have misunderstood.

Oldrightie say’s to cut down on people.

Don’t worry Oldrightie the greens, venal politicans and vested interested parties are going to do that for you. But I do hope that the right-on global warming/climate change fanatics who are incapable of reasoned debate, can only denigrate those they know it’s a lscam/lie don’t start screaming when their families start to suffer under the policies being set by Brown et al, Cameron will also carry on where Brown left off if he wins the election. This country is skint, on its uppers and we have McSnot, gleefully pledging billions of our money he doesn’t have, but there’s the rub, it’s OUR money not his, he should have a referendum, put it to the people of this country whether they want their taxes spent on something they can’t control. Not global warming/climate, the weather.

Politicans are going to put millions upon millions in penury for carbon trading, a very lucrative business. Noting how Tony Blair has jumped onto the CT bandwagon, if anything, should tell people that GW/CC is just a money making scam. So as stated to the GW/CC supporters, don’t be upset when your families way of life is severely effected and they can’t afford to heat their homes etc. With the confidence of the warmists/changers, It won’t be I hear them say. You were warned, so no sympathy when it becomes fact.

I have no objections to the GW/CC supporters donating their own money to this fashionable cause, but please don’t donate my money, if I want to give to a charity I’ll pick it, because that’s what this boils down to. We’ll be forced into donating to something the majority don’t believe in, to give to this lucrative charity called global warming/climate change.

Sadly the rest of us are going to have to suffer for either your vested interest, inability to admit your wrong, you’ve nothing better to do than jump onto a fashionable cause or are just plain gullible.& naive.

“Up yours, Pachauri, you are a thief as well as a liar.”

Richard North responds to Pachauri’s claims of innocence:

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2009/12/its-all-lies.html

Nice selective quoting from Wikipedia, oldrightie. Since we are copying and pasting chunks of wikipedia following is the bit you missed out.

Kevin

Criticisms of the Wegman report:

The Wegman report has itself been criticized on several grounds:
The report was not subject to formal peer review.[46][47] At the hearing, Wegman listed 6 people that participated in his own informal peer review process via email after the report was finalized and said they had no objection to the subcommittee submitting it.[44]
Dr. Thomas Crowley, Professor of Earth Science System, Duke University, testified at the committee hearing, “The conclusions and recommendations of the Wegman Report have some serious flaws.”[44]
The result of fixing some of the alleged errors in the overall reconstruction does not change the general shape of the most recent part of the reconstruction.[48]
Similarly, studies that use completely different methodologies also yield very similar reconstructions[48].
The social network analysis is not based on meaningful criteria, does not prove a conflict of interest and did not apply at the time of the 1998 and 1999 publications. Such a network of co-authorship is not unusual in narrowly defined areas of science.[49] During the hearing, Wegman defined the social network as peer reviewers that had “actively collaborated with him in writing research papers” and answered that none of his peer reviewers had.[44]
Gerald North, chairman of the National Research Council panel that studied the hockey-stick issue and produced the report Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years, stated the politicians at the hearing at which the Wegman report was presented “were twisting the scientific information for their own propaganda purposes. The hearing was not an information gathering operation, but rather a spin machine.”[46] In testimony when asked if he disputed the methodology conclusions of Wegman’s report, he stated that “No, we don’t. We don’t disagree with their criticism. In fact, pretty much the same thing is said in our report. But again, just because the claims are made, doesn’t mean they are false.”[44]
Mann has himself said that the report “uncritically parrots claims by two Canadians (an economist and a mineral-exploration consultant) that have already been refuted by several papers in the peer-reviewed literature inexplicably neglected by Barton’s ‘panel’. These claims were specifically dismissed by the National Academy in their report just weeks ago.”

Sand,

See here about how cold records can still be broken even in a warming world.

http://scienceblogs.com/islandofdoubt/2009/11/record_high_and_low_temps_an_i.php

Also remember that even with our recent cold weather November was the warmest November on record. I’m not saying that having a global warmest monthly record proves climate change, just that records can be broken without proving anything.

Kevin

Harry readme.

That file is obviously just a notebook for someone piecing together legacy code made by other people. Messy for sure, but certainly not the ‘final version’ of the code. It was produced in moving from the CRU TS 2.1 to 3.0 version.

Anyone who has worked on debugging code tests things and sometimes find odd behaviours that are obviously wrong. You then fix them, as Harry goes on to do. No smoking gun in finding that debugging code finds bugs.

Harry was working on CRU TS 3.0, a completely different product than the HadCRUT? Have you never worked on old databases that bring together multiple sources of incompatible source data? Or ever debugged code over a long period, or occasionally got frustrated?

Kevin