Is Global Warming Unstoppable?

Terence Corcoran has read through the first five years of the leaked E-mails from the CRU and has an article at Financial Post. I found the following interesting from the viewpoint of how policy, politics and science are comingled.

…At the time, as a top official at CRU, Mike Hulme was also a key player in moving the second track of the Climategate emails, the strange business of constructing economic, scientific and climate forecasting models for the next 100 years and beyond. The scientists appear to have been dragged into the economic prediction game by the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis in Austria, in turn assigned by the IPCC to construct economic outlooks for growth and carbon emissions. The exercise ultimately let to the production of one of the IPCC’s long-term climate gimmicks, a range of scenarios or story lines that produced different levels of greenhouse gas emissions by the year 2100.

The scientists, who wrangle with this project for a couple of years, were lured into participating in what from the start was a loaded ideological exercise. In March 1998, Mike Hulme at CRU received a draft version of these 100-year forecast scenarios. Four scenarios were developed: A1, B1, A2, and B2. The exercise turns out to be a set-up for a campaign to undermine free markets, globalization and free trade….

…The upshot of these scenarios, based on IPCC objectives of reducing carbon emission, is a deck stacked against free markets and globalization. In the emails, the scenarios make their way through a barrage of comment from scientists who, for the most part, balk at the process. In one small sample, Tom Wigley wrote to Mike Hulme telling him that “energy-economics models need to be revised” because they fail to take into account actual emissions between 1990 and 1999. In July, 1998, David Schimel, a climate scientist at the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research, wrote to Wigley: “I raised this issue at the scoping meeting ... where it was greeted with general agreement but it appeared to come as a complete surprise to many that scenarios should have a relationship to reality.”

From part II:

In the thousands of emails released last month in what is now known as Climategate, the greatest battles took place over scientists’ attempts to reconstruct a credible temperature record for the last couple of thousand years. Have they failed? What the Climategate emails provide is at least one incontrovertible answer: They certainly have not succeeded….
…The anti-skeptic campaign switched into overdrive with the arrival on the climate science scene of two Canadians, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick. In mid-2003, after many efforts, Mr. McIntyre and Mr. McKitrick finally published a paper titled “Corrections to the Mann et al Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemisphere Average Temperature Series.”

The public battles between Mr. Mann and the two Canadians are already on the record. The emails reinforce the worst of suspicions that the official scientific community did all they could to smear Mr. McIntyre and Mr. McKitrick, prevent publication of the work of skeptics, manipulate the peer-review process and isolate all skeptics as cranks….
…Mr. Mann meddled in other ways. In January 2005, he called the editor of Geophysical Research Letters, the official science publication of the American Geophysical Union, to try to head off a paper by Mr. McIntyre. The editor, Steve Mackwell, defends the decision to publish and tells Mr. Mann that the McIntyre paper has been thoroughly peer reviewed by four scientists. “You would not in general be asked to look it over,” Mr. Mackwell told Mr. Mann. Later in 2005, Mr. Mann wrote to Mr. Jones on their troubles with the GRL journal after Mr. Mackwell’s term as editor was up: “The GRL leak may have been plugged up now w/ new editorial leadership.”
Mr. McIntyre, a mining exploration expert based in Toronto, and Mr. McKitrick, an economics professor at the University of Guelph, continued to dog Mr. Mann’s view of climate history. First they wanted release of the data behind the hockey stick graph and the computer code that produced various trend lines. When Mr. Mann and CRU declined or resisted, Mr. McIntyre began filing Freedom of Information requests in the United States and Britain. The emails portray embattled scientists fighting desperately to interfere with official FOI processes. One now widely-circulated email, by Mr. Jones, asked Mr. Mann: “Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith [Briffa] will do likewise.”…
…The epic stories in the emails, in any honest reading, do not produce any concrete results or conclusions regarding the state of the science.
What exists now in the public domain is scientific conflict and uncertainty that goes to the heart of climate change science — past, present and future.
As recently as Nov. 28, a posting on the Mann-related website, RealClimate.org, continues to claim the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age never happened. If that is a scientifically provable, then it might be true that the last 50 years have been the hottest in a thousand years, offering some support to the idea that man-made climate change is changing the climate in a significant and unprecedented way. But if the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and the Little Ice Age did occur, then the Earth may have been just as warm today as it was 1,000 years ago. If that’s the case, the hockey stick graph and the official paleoclimate record is at best uncertain or, at worst, a scientific trick.
It is, in my view, not possible for a layman, or even an expert, to make any assessment of the tree ring data conflicts — to pick one issue — based on the emails. Masses of computer code and data are imbedded in the Climategate documents, enough to keep a full science inquiry busy for months, if not years. Exactly who did what with which data requires a full investigation by competent scientists and official bodies.

Read it all. It is fascinating for anyone truly interested in the subject.


Read more: http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/12/18/terence-corcoran-a-2-000-page-epic-of-science-and-skepticism-part-1.aspx#ixzz0aPGdndQE
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Can you be more specific. I've discussed the problem in a lot more detail in the past and even whatsupwithwatt has it right even though they discuss it out of context. Can you discuss in your own words what was meant by "hide the decline"?

 

I don't know. But there is no reason to think it was a god, or anything sentient.

 

Here is a nice brochure by NOAA that explains all the basic points of global warming. For those interested that want a good reference rather than wattsupwiththat, climateaudit or conservative newspaper editorial pages.

http://www.climate.noaa.gov/education/pdfs/ClimateLiteracyPoster-8.5x11-March09FinalLR.pdf

 

My problem with that argument is that it implies that God himself did not need a creator. If god didn't need a creator then neither did the universe. Or if god did need a creator, then a greater god created our god, and you end up in an infinite regression of greater gods.

But I think about the Universe almost every day. Just how vast it is. How mind boggling enormous it is. It blows my mind when I think about how we are just a crappy star on the edge of our galaxy, and the there are local clusters of galaxies, super clusters, etc, and just how much mass and space is out there. It's bizarre. It really blows my mind. And I get upset because I can't find a new bluray disc somewhere lol

 

Well, this absolutely sums it up for me. You are indeed a robot. If you are not, then you have some type of brain pathology that limits your memory to a single week.

Did you see the movie "50 First Dates"?



You've had the "hide the decline" explained to you multiple times. In fact, the first time you had it explained to you I seem to remember you copy-and-pasted your argument from another website and acted like it as your own.

 

No you haven't. You copied wattsupwiththat's explanation. It actually just takes a sentence once you understand the issue.

 

Very interesting!

See sunspots run Watts Up With That?

Perhaps the sun is making a return?

If so, in the future we may see a return in warming. I'm sure the AGWers prayers have been answered

 

From an anonymous friend re 'no reason':

[One who is unable to recognize the hand of God in creation and/or thinks that 'science' will provide all the answers is] "like the reader of a manuscript who, instead of reading and understanding the thought of the author, occupies himself with the letters and syllables. He believes that the letters wrote themselves and combined themselves into syllables, being moved by mutual attraction, which, in its turn, is the effect of chemical or molecular qualities of the ink as 'matter' common to all the letters, and of which the letters and syllables are epiphenomena."

Just sayin' Dr. Spencer is no fool (the point your one-word outburst implied) because he believes something you don't.

 

One sentence:

“Hide the decline†refers to the decline in the Briffa MXD temperature reconstruction in the last half of the 20th century, a decline that called into question the validity of the tree ring reconstructions.

 

How did it call into question the validity of tree ring reconstructions? The first part of your response is corrrect but how do you transition into the second part.

 

Here is a 'one graph' depiction of the Briffa data trending downward in a 'decline', so to speak.

 

Yes. But how does that "call into question the validity of tree ring reconstructions"? If you look at the graph all proxies and the instrumental record also trend downward. Only after that the instrumental record skyrockets.

 

This is so obvious. If a tree ring reconstruction is to be considered valid, it should comport with the data measured directly with thermometers, satellites and so forth. This is not the case with the Briffa data in the 2nd half of the 20th century, so the decline had to be hidden, which was done by truncating the Briffa data.

Now, it has been explained to you yet again.

 

It is not that simple. Proxies are not instruments. They are very good at showing change but not as good for absolute temperature. In fact Briffa himself has looked into this and published a paper explaining the difference:

Reduced sensitivity of recent tree-growth to temperature at high northern latitudes : Abstract : Nature

"The cause of this increasing insensitivity of wood density to temperature changes is not known, but if it is not taken into account in dendroclimatic reconstructions, past temperatures could be overestimated."

"During the second half of the twentieth century, the decadal-scale trends in wood density and summer temperatures have increasingly diverged as wood density has progressively fallen."

So all this has been reported and taken into account. Not to mention all the other proxies that do agree pretty well with the instrumental record.

 

From the Financial Post article cited in a previous post:

"It is, in my view, not possible for a layman, or even an expert, to make any assessment of the tree ring data conflicts — to pick one issue — based on the emails. Masses of computer code and data are imbedded in the Climategate documents, enough to keep a full science inquiry busy for months, if not years. Exactly who did what with which data requires a full investigation by competent scientists and official bodies."

And yet, those in the denial community are ready to condemn any and all evidence of global warming over a limited number of e-mails, without any of the investigation suggested. Seems kind of hypocritical to me.

 

You're changing the subject again. The question is if data was deceitfully presented by "hide the decline." It was. End of story. You've been shown to be wrong so many times, and each time you come back with some new thing you copy-pasted from somewhere and each time you get shot down.

P.S. You keep quoting an article abstract. I applaud you for finally trying to actually read a scientific paper, but you should know there is a lot more to them than just an abstract.

Absolutely ridiculous. No one is condemning all evidence (not that there is much evidence) of global warming just because of ClimateGate. You are too "black or white." You assume it's either all one way or another. You could't be further from the truth.

 

How is it deceitful and not a judgement call? Specially when the data has appropriately discussed and previously published. This is a summary table, it is not reporting new data.

Are going to actually argue that there could be something in the body of a paper that contradicts the abstract?

 

I believe that you yourself have said that the suspect e-mails call into question the veracity of all climate science by inferring there is some agenda.

"Absolutely ridiculous. No one is condemning all evidence (not that there is much evidence) of global warming just because of ClimateGate. You are too "black or white." You assume it's either all one way or another. You could't be further from the truth."

You are certainly getting pretty good at arguing out of both sides of your mouth.

 

I'm laughing at the sheer ridiculousness of "arguing by abstract." How much more anti-intellectual can you get? "Argument by paper title!" "But I found a paper titled xxxx! This proves u wrong1!1!"







Compare Briffa's reconstruction in all three graphs, and tell me that you think picture 3 conveys the same message about Briffa's reconstruction as picture 1.

Unfortunately you still argue out of your rear.