Hadley CRU files/emails hacked!

An answer to the above question, lifted from another blog. If anyone is interested I will post the link...

"Climate science is in its infancy, and every proposition is controversial. What climate scientists like those at East Anglia don't know dwarfs what they do know. They can produce a model for every occasion, but are the models any good? If so, which one? One thing we know for sure is that they don't generate reliable predictions. In every scientific field other than global warming, a scientific hypothesis that generates false predictions is considered disproved. When it comes to global warming, however, there is no such thing as falsification. Which is the ultimate evidence that the alarmist scientists are engaged in a political enterprise, not a scientific one."

 

Uh - do you want me to list them ALL? That would be quite a task. But here are a few more, courtesy of Bishop Hill's blog:

• Phil Jones writes to University of Hull to try to stop sceptic Sonia Boehmer Christiansen using her Hull affiliation. Graham F Haughton of Hull University says its easier to push greenery there now SB-C has retired.(1256765544)
• Michael Mann discusses how to destroy a journal that has published sceptic papers.(1047388489)
• Tim Osborn discusses how data are truncated to stop an apparent cooling trend showing up in the results (0939154709). Analysis of impact here. Wow!
• Phil Jones encourages colleagues to delete information subject to FoI request.(1212063122)
• Letter to The Times from climate scientists was drafted with the help of Greenpeace.(0872202064)
• Mann thinks he will contact BBC's Richard Black to find out why another BBC journalist was allowed to publish a vaguely sceptical article.(1255352257)
• Tom Wigley says that von Storch is partly to blame for sceptic papers getting published at Climate Research. Says he encourages the publication of crap science. Says they should tell publisher that the journal is being used for misinformation. Says that whether this is true or not doesn't matter. Says they need to get editorial board to resign. Says they need to get rid of von Storch too. (1051190249)
• Mann tells Jones that it would be nice to '"contain" the putative Medieval Warm Period'. (1054736277)
• Tom Wigley tells Jones that the land warming since 1980 has been twice the ocean warming and that this might be used by sceptics as evidence for urban heat islands.(1257546975)
• Kevin Trenberth says climatologists are nowhere near knowing where the energy goes or what the effect of clouds is. Says nowhere balancing the energy budget. Geoengineering is not possible.(1255523796)
• Mann discusses tactics for screening and delaying postings at Real Climate.(1139521913)
• Tom Wigley discusses how to deal with the advent of FoI law in UK. Jones says use IPR argument to hold onto code. Says data is covered by agreements with outsiders and that CRU will be "hiding behind them".(1106338806)
• Santer says he will no longer publish in Royal Met Soc journals if they enforce intermediate data being made available. Jones has complained to head of Royal Met Soc about new editor of Weather [why?data?] and has threatened to resign from RMS.(1237496573)

 

That is a very succinct and coherent statement. I like that!

 

When you think about it, it is absolutely nuts what was going on. AGW says "Oh, we noticed this anomaly that we can't currently explain. Let's just make up some crap and get it published to explain it away. If anyone calls us on our bullcrap we'll keep them from getting published." Let the money roll in!

 

Northern Hemisphere Sea Ice has rebounded from recent lows when, as NASA noted "Unusual atmospheric conditions set up wind patterns that compressed the sea ice, loaded it into the Transpolar Drift Stream and then sped its flow out of the Arctic":



Antarctic Sea Ice is near an all time high:



Sea Level rise is slowing from its fairly stable annual increase:

 

So I take it that you are claiming that sea ice will bounce back over the next decade? Besides, if you stopped cherry picking data points, you'd clearly see that your source of data is showing quite a dramatic decline in artic sea ice.

Arctic Sea Ice News & Analysis

I fail to see that from your data. Looks pretty constant to me.

Either way, sea ice extent does a poor job of actually measuring sea ice volume. And scientists have found that the ozone hole over the antarctic is actually contributing to any rise.

‘Antarctic sea ice is increasing’—Yes, but ...

One year does not a trend make.

 

Agreed - but we are not talking one year. It has been nearly a decade without any increasing temperature trend.

So tell me, how many years would there need to be without warming in order to falsify the AGW hypothesis? If 10 years is not enough, is it 15 years? 20 years? 25 years? Just how many years without warming falsifies AGW?

 

As long as they are getting their billions you can't falsify it.

 

We weren't talking about temperature (not that it matters), we were talking about sea-level rise, which according to your posted data has been rising very steadily at about 3.2mm/year - but the last two years has fallen slightly under the trend line and you then declared that sea levels have stopped rising.

But since you've changed the topic to temperature, the data clearly shows that temperatures are still rising, despite the fact that we are currently at a solar minimum. The next 11 years should provide plenty of warming, but I'm sure those who discredit AGW will still find a way to make it something else's fault.

It would take about 15 years of unsubstantiated stagnation of global temperatures for that to happen. IPCC scientists have stated this themselves!

 

Oh, so 4 more years? Nice

 

Perfect. May I direct your attention to the chart below.

40 years (1940 - 1980) of no temperature increases despite rapidly increasing CO2 during the post-war period. Or, if you really want to be picky, 1955-1980 (25 years) of declining temps.



AGW falsified. We can all breathe a sigh of relief!

 

Tim, is there anyway to overlay CO2 levels on that graphic so we can see the increasing CO2 while we see the absent temperature increase in that 40 year span.

 

Tim, have you found any new evidence to rule out rising aerosol levels as the main force, or a contributing force behind the cooling from for the period between 1940-1980 (ish)? I know J. Hansen and M. Miscshenko believe this could be a possible explanation. I've offered this as a possible explanation before and then I recently read about the Mischenko paper and Hansen's opinion on the idea. I'm just wondering if you can explain this a little bit better so I can let go of the idea. lol

For those who have not been following I'll summarize.

[ame="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aerosol"]Aerosols[/ame] in the atmosphere are understood to have a negative effect on land temperatures because of their ability to block incoming solar radiation before it reaches Earth's surface. So whereas greenhouse gases have a positive effect on temperature (temps increase), light -colored aerosols cause temps to decrease. This is especially true for sulfates which are a byproduct of fossil fuel combustion.

During and especially after World War II, The U.S. and industrial European countries engaged in a massive increase of fossil fuel-powered production. This increase in aerosols picked up sharply and along with natural forcing could have muted the forcing from greenhouse gases somewhat. In the 1970s countries started creating regulations to clean up the air and the production of sulfates slowed down and the concentration of sulfates started to decrease slightly while simultaneously greenhouse gas input increased dramatically. The sulfate concentration record and the fossil fuel consumption records bear this out. CO2 level records tell a similar story. I'm not saying this is the explanation for the cooling period between 1940-1980 (ish) but could it be possible?


Sulfur trapped in the Greenland Ice Sheet records the presence of reflective sulfate aerosols downwind of the United States and Canada. Emissions of the pollutants that form sulfate aerosols rose sharply in the United States and Europe during and after World War II. This rise may be responsible for the Northern Hemisphere cooling from 1940–1970. By the 1980s, oil embargos and environmental controls had reduced sulfate pollution in North America, but carbon dioxide continued to build up in the atmosphere. (Graph by Robert Simmon, based on data from McConnell et al., NOAA/NCDC Paleoclimatology Program.)


Clicking on the link below will show you U.S. energy consumption growth rates.

U.S Energy consumption 1950-2008 (multiple graphs)

 

Just to note, a lack of evidence ruling something out in no way makes that a valid explanation for something.

 

I wasn't talking to you. You obviously don't understand this stuff.

 

Right. I use the latest scientific evidence every day to save lives. Climate science is beyond me. I can't understand shoddy pseudoscience eh? lol You guys are really stretching things.

 

Well then show us something other than your pink pom poms. I study plants and ecosystems that doesn't make me an expert or even knowledgble in some other areas of science so I sure as hell don't expect the same from you. Especially if one considers how you've responded to science thus far talking about dancing and other weird stuff causing global warming and doing nothing but :cheer2: for your boy Tim.

 

This is a possibility. However, the effects of aerosols, to my knowledge, are not clearly understood. For instance, in some instances they appear to be associated with localized warming but overall are believed to be a cooling influence (at least from what I recall in the literature, but I could be wrong here). And I seem to recall the "scientific level of understanding" was pretty low for aerosols in the IPCC and/or NAS reports (can't find the chart at the moment). In addition, I seem to also recall the possible range of effects being from almost completely offsetting the believed effects of CO2 to barely making a dent.

But more importantly, I think the premise that aerosols have decreased is unlikely. Although it is true Western nations have passed legislation to reduce smokestack output and the like, these regulations were phased in over many years. Meanwhile, the rising Asian tigers rapidly ramped up productive output from the 80s through the '90s and of course China, Mexico, India, and other countries have also greatly increased production since the passing of the Clean Air Act and as a result - I suspect have offset (or more likely surpassed) the reductions in aerosols in Western countries.

But, I will allow for the fact that it is a possibility that should probably be further evaluated.

 

I don't have a chart with both, but here is CO2. So you can clearly see a dramatic change in slope just before the 1950s, when temperatures are declining except for a brief spike around 1952-53.

 

F8L - just found this new research on aerosols. I'm being lazy - there may be other research but this was my second result when I googled "aerosol cooling":

"The effect of aerosols on modulating the sun’s radiation has been one of the biggest uncertainties in understanding climate change — with satellite data showing more aerosol cooling than computer models. New research reconciles the two different approaches and shows that official estimates of aerosol cooling have been too large, suggesting that any masking of overall warming will be smaller than previously thought. "

In the interests of full disclosure, here was the first link google returned:

"Scientists have much to learn about the way aerosols affect regional and global climate. We have yet to accurately quantify the relative impacts on climate of natural aerosols and those of human origin. Moreover, we do not know in what regions of the planet the amount of atmospheric aerosol is increasing, is diminishing, and is remaining roughly constant. Overall, we are even unsure whether aerosols are warming or cooling our planet."


So the upshot seems to be that the cooling from the post-war period to about 1980 is still at odds with dramatically rising levels of CO2 and may indeed falsify AGW.