CLIMATEGATE! (What ever happened to journalism?)
Where are the journalists? Remember how they hounded President Nixon and the aptly named members of CREEP?
Where are they now? It takes bloggers to investigate things these days, the lamestream media is too busy cranking out propaganda. Here are some blog-takes on the subject and all are linked!
Senator Steve Fielding recently asked the [Australian] Climate Change Minister Penny Wong why human emissions can be blamed for global warming, given that air temperatures peaked in 1998 and began a cooling trend in 2002, while carbon dioxide levels have risen five per cent since 1998. I was one of the four independent scientists Fielding chose to accompany him to visit the Minister.
The Minister's advisor essentially told us that short term trends in air temperatures are irrelevant, and to instead focus on the rapidly rising ocean heat content:
Figure 1: Wong's graph.
This is the new trend in climate alarmism. Previously the measure of global warming has always been air temperatures. But all the satellite data says air temperatures have been in a mild down trend starting 2002. The land thermometers preferred by the alarmists showed warming until 2006, but even they show a cooling trend developing since then.
(Land thermometers cannot be trusted because, even in the USA, 89 per cent of them fail siting guidelines that they be more than 30 meters from an artificial heating or radiating/reflecting heat source, and their data is forever being "corrected".)
Ocean temperatures were not properly measured until mid-2003, when the Argo network became operational.
Before Argo, ocean temperatures were measured with bathythermographs (XBTs)—expendable probes fired into the water by a gun from ships along the main commercial shipping lanes. Geographical coverage of the world's oceans was poor, XBTs do not go as deep as Argo, and their data is much less accurate.
The Argo network consists of over 3,000 small, drifting oceanic robot probes, floating around all of the world's oceans. Argo floats duck dive down to 1,000 meters or more, record temperatures, then come up and radio back the results.
Figure 2: The Argo network has floats measuring temperature in all of the oceans.
Figure 3: An Argo float descends to cruising depth, drifts for a few days, ascends while recording temperatures, then transmits data to satellites.
The Argo data shows that the oceans have been in a slight cooling trend since at least late-2004, and possibly as far back as mid-2003 when the Argo network started:
Figure 4: Ocean heat content from mid 2003 to early 2008, as measured by the Argo network, for 0-700 metres. There is seasonal fluctuation because the oceans are mainly in the southern hemisphere, but the trend can be judged from the highs and lows. (This shows the recalibrated data, after the data from certain instruments with a cool bias were removed. Initial Argo results showing strong cooling.)
Josh Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, in charge of the Argo data, said in March 2008: "There has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant".
The ocean data that the alarmists are relying on to establish their warming trends is all pre-Argo, from XBTs. Now that we are measuring ocean temperatures properly, the warming trend has disappeared. And by coincidence, it disappeared just when we started measuring it properly!
Notice how the Minister's graph above shows rising ocean heat content for 2004 through 2006, but the Argo data shows a cooling trend? There is a problem here.
The Argo data is extraordinarily difficult to find on the Internet. There is no official or unofficial website showing the latest ocean temperature. Basically the only way to get the data is to ask Josh Willis (above). The graph above come from Craig Loehle, who got the data from Willis, analysed it, and put the results in a peer reviewed paper available on the Internet. Given the importance of the ocean temperatures, don't you think this is extraordinary?
If the Argo data showed a warming trend, don't you suppose it would be publicised endlessly?
So what's going on? Our best data, from satellites and Argo, says that both the air and oceans have not warmed for at least five years now. In the short term, some cooling force is overpowering the warming due to human emissions.
Let's look at the long-term trend. The medieval warm period around AD 1000 - 1300 was a little warmer than now: crops grew in Greenland, and there were many signs around the world of extra warmth during that period. That gave way to the bitter cold of the little ice age from 1400 to 1800: animals in Europe died from cold even inside barns, and the River Thames in London would freeze over every winter (it last froze over in 1804).
Global air temperatures have been rising at a steady trend rate of 0.5°C per century since about 1750, as the world recovers from the little ice age:
Figure 5: Reasonable global air temperature data only goes back to 1880. This analysis into a steady rising trend and oscillations is simply an empirical observation, by Dr Syun Akasofu. The IPCC predictions are their widely publicised 2001 predictions.
On top of that trend are oscillations that last about 30 years in each direction:
1882 - 1910 Cooling
1910 - 1944 Warming
1944 - 1975 Cooling
1975 - 2001 Warming
In 2009 we are where the green arrow points in Figure 5, with temperature levelling off and beginning to fall slightly. The pattern suggests that the world has entered a period of cooling until about 2030.
The long-term trend suggests that the last warming period (1975-2001) was like the previous one (1910-1944), and that once the effects of the little ice age have finally passed, the temperature will get back to where it was in the medieval warm period (which is also where it was during the Roman Optimum, and in the Holocene optimum before that).
What about human influence? Human emissions of CO2 were virtually non-existent before 1850, and were insignificant compared to current levels until after 1945.
It is worth bearing in mind that there is no actual evidence that carbon dioxide was the main cause of recent warming—it's only an assumption, and the calculations of future temperature rises derive most of their warming from an assumed water vapor feedback for which there is only counter-evidence.
Dr David Evans worked for the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005, building the carbon accounting model that Australia uses to track carbon in its biosphere for the purposes of the Kyoto Protocol. He is a mathematician and engineer, with six university degrees including a PhD from Stanford University.
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Naturally the idea that scientists would accept real readings instead of data "massaged" to reflect a fake warming trend flies in the face of all the millions of dollars the Gores of this world have invested in this scam. There are thousands of environmentalists who will join arm-in-arm with socialists and eugenicists to turn the average man into serfs blindly obedient to the ruling elite. Are you really going to buy a share of that Brooklyn Bridge, chum? Watt's Up With That has a pdf document that details the fraud:
The Climategate Timeline: 30 years visualized
23 12 2009The always sharp Jo Nova tips us to this:
Here’s a Spectacular Poster of ClimateGate covering 3 decades
You have to see this to believe it. Look up close and admire the detail while you despair at how long science has been going off the rails. To better appreciate the past and what was exposed by the CRU emails, the time-line chart consolidates and chronologically organizes the information uncovered and published about the CRU emails by many researchers along with some related contextual events. That the chart exists at all is yet another example of how skilled experts are flocking in to the skeptics position and dedicating hours of time pro bono because they are passionately motivated to fight against those who try to deceive us.
This link takes you to projects that have exposed a blatant attempt to make temperature reading stations (weather stations) give artificially high readings. If they really ARE after you, you are not paranoid after all.
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You can keep up to date on the antics of those wacky global warming kooks on this site right here!
I suppose they would be funny if they did not intend to bring about changes to the world's economy that impoverishes and kills thousands, no millions of innocents for (guess what?) money and power. Gee, that is a new situation, right? History repeats itself in part because the average man doesn't bother to study it, so he gets pulled in by the same old scams. Thus we get Stalin and Hitler and Mao and Islamofascism and Al Gore...and currently the liberal Democrats. You think that the health care bill is intended to help you? Ha! It is intended to tax you blind! But now back to our movie...
Do you really want to know the truth? Polar Bears are thriving and, if it got warmer, they would be better off. Global warming kooks actually have kept the actual experts from giving their reports and here is a case in point.
Excerpt:
Dr Mitchell Taylor has been researching the status and management of polar bears in Canada and around the Arctic Circle for 30 years, as both an academic and a government employee. More than once since 2006 he has made headlines by insisting that polar bear numbers, far from decreasing, are much higher than they were 30 years ago. Of the 19 different bear populations, almost all are increasing or at optimum levels, only two have for local reasons modestly declined.
No! No! This wasn't what we wanted to hear. It just does not fit in with our preconceived notions.
He has also observed, however, how the melting of Arctic ice, supposedly threatening the survival of the bears, has rocketed to the top of the warmists' agenda as their most iconic single cause. The famous photograph of two bears standing forlornly on a melting iceberg was produced thousands of times by Al Gore, the WWF and others as an emblem of how the bears faced extinction – until last year the photographer, Amanda Byrd, revealed that the bears, just off the Alaska coast, were in no danger. Her picture had nothing to do with global warming and was only taken because the wind-sculpted ice they were standing on made such a striking image.
Correct, and NewsBusters' Noel Sheppard also reported on this "stranded polar bear" hoax two years ago.
Dr Taylor had obtained funding to attend this week's meeting of the PBSG, but this was voted down by its members because of his views on global warming. The chairman, Dr Andy Derocher, a former university pupil of Dr Taylor's, frankly explained in an email (which I was not sent by Dr Taylor) that his rejection had nothing to do with his undoubted expertise on polar bears: "it was the position you've taken on global warming that brought opposition".
Dr Taylor was told that his views running "counter to human-induced climate change are extremely unhelpful". His signing of the Manhattan Declaration – a statement by 500 scientists that the causes of climate change are not CO2 but natural, such as changes in the radiation of the sun and ocean currents – was "inconsistent with the position taken by the PBSG".
An inconvenient truth because it is inconsistent with preconceived global warming alarmist notions.
So, as the great Copenhagen bandwagon rolls on, stand by this week for reports along the lines of "scientists say polar bears are threatened with extinction by vanishing Arctic ice". But also check out Anthony Watt's Watts Up With That website for the latest news of what is actually happening in the Arctic. The average temperature at midsummer is still below zero, the latest date that this has happened in 50 years of record-keeping. After last year's recovery from its September 2007 low, this year's ice melt is likely to be substantially less than for some time. The bears are doing fine.
I could go on and on. Wasn't it funny that the US delegation to Copenhagen had to leave early to try to fly into Washington before being stopped by one of the biggest blizzards ever there? As New York and Philadelphia and the District of Columbia try to dig out from the snow and survive the freezing rain, the Democrats are hustling to hurry up and bribe enough people to pass the Obamacare bill that will throw the economy into a deep freeze...that may be the coldest fact in this entire Climategate scandal! Anyway, all this cooling is just part of global warming, they say...are you going to believe them?
Finally, eat your pet dog, save the world?!
Where's PETA when you need them
~The Vales, specialists in sustainable living at Victoria University of Wellington, analysed popular brands of pet food and calculated that a medium-sized dog eats around 164 kilos (360 pounds) of meat and 95 kilos of cereal a year.
Combine the land required to generate its food and a “medium” sized dog has an annual footprint of 0.84 hectares (2.07 acres) — around twice the 0.41 hectares required by a 4×4 driving 10,000 kilometres (6,200 miles) a year, including energy to build the car.
(excerpt, go to link to read entire article)