XDA

The editors go on to state that a review of Mann's infamous graph resulted in exoneration and the debunkers were debunked. Right. What the LAT admits is that the review found a "high degree of confidence only that recent years are the warmest they've been in 400 years." Well, no kidding. 1612 was deep in the Little Ice Age, almost at the nadir, of course we are warmer now than during a 300 year extended cold spell.

2) The La Times writes:

Mann's fame has lasted longer than 15 minutes, and it wasn't up when the hockey stick controversy died down. He was propelled back into the headlines in 2009, when hackers broke into the computer system at the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit and stole thousands of emails sent by and to some of the world's most prominent climate scientists -- including Mann. Dozens of them contained phrases that, when taken out of context, made it sound as if these scientists were purposely manipulating data or trying to prevent contrary research from being published, creating an ensuing scandal dubbed Climategate by the media. Some of the most explosive of these emails were written by Mann.

No one knows who released the e-mail between the scientists and received at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. There is no evidence of hacking. It is most likely a whistleblower revealing the anti-science practices of the CAGW crowd in their own words. In or out of context, the e-mails put the group in a very bad light, sunlight.

3) The LAT writes:

Peter Gleick, a MacArthur "genius" grant recipient for his work on global freshwater challenges and president of the Pacific Institute, admitted earlier this month to borrowing a page directly from the denialists' playbook. Posing as someone else, he obtained internal documents from the Heartland Institute and distributed them to journalists, a tactic little different from the hack attack at the University of East Anglia that has been decried by environmentalists.

Gleick, I believe, committed identity theft, wire fraud and theft by deception but he did not 'borrow' a page from the denialist's playbook. Unlike the publically funded CRU at East Anglia, the documents at the Heartland Institute were not subject to a Freedom of Information request, one of which was pending at CRU (but being ignored or evaded by the ethical scientists there) when the e-mail dump called Climategate occured.

No Denier has committed the crimes of Mr. Gleck. Not one.

And notice that the fact that one of the documents the LAT claims were obtained from the Heartland was not obtained from the Heartland but was received, according to Gleick, days to weeks earlier from an anynymous source. This document is almost certainly a fake and it is likely that Gleick forged it because the documents he did steal from the Hearland indicated no wrong doing. Perhaps this is a minor detail, but it is a telling one.

The empire is striking back, but it is a unpersuasive effort.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax: The Empire Strikes Back, Ineffectually

OK, despite the revelation of specific scientific frauds, one after another, since the release of the damaging e-mails and data sets from East Anglia U, the Global Warming Hoax retains its supporters, Warmie true believers, who are attempting to halt the free fall of AGW climatologists' reputations and credibility. I think they are failing.

Let's see.
Here is an opinion piece from the Philadelphia Inquirer. The WTB authors argue that the sea level is rising, so there must be AGW, human caused global warming. They say the sea is rising at more than 45 cm per century when the rate is actually 32cm (and lower than that if you look closely at the slope of the Jason/Argo buoy data since 2006), but let's forgive that 40% error, and look at the isolated examples they give in support (and recall that the plural of annecdote is not data).

The first annecdote is the outer bank islands of North Carolina and Albemarle Sound behind them. The sea is rising! Run for the hills! The outer bank sand islands shift and change as a result of storms and currents constantly. An old outer bank island is a few thousand years old, but the solid land nearby is billions of years old. Change is constant at the edge of the ocean but yes, yes, the seas are rising. The ocean always rises during an interglacial, which we are in now. It rose a lot about 15,000 years ago, but the rate has been pretty flat for the last 8,000 years. This example is not even close to evidence of alarming rates of warming or the alleged cause thereof. What else do you have?

They cite the local warming of an Alaskan village with bad beach erosion on the Chuckchi Sea coast. Yes, it is slightly warmer in Alaska recently. But is it an unprecedented and alarming rate of warming? Crickets chirping. Natural cycles of warming and cooling are not alarming. What causes you Warmies to believe the warming last century was not part of a natural cycle?

OK, many glaciers are melting (which is what they do during interglacials). Yawn. There is the melting of the icefields of Greenland which accelerated in 1995, near the end of the general warming in 2000 (and slowed back down again, the WTB authors fail to mention that inconvenient fact) and, according to these guys, Antarctica too is melting away.

That last one comes from NASA, who doubled down recently, and I think it is hooey. Here is a longer article on the suspect claims of Antarctic melting since 2002, which article raises a lot of healthy doubt about the claim. Antarctica is huge and hardly anyone lives there (maybe a few hundred people overwinter). There are very few reliable weather stations, with a concentration of them in the Antarctic Peninsula. There is no doubt that the sea ice around Antarctica has been increasing over the last 30 years. Does it make sense that the sea ice around the frozen continent is increasing but the land temperatures are decreasing? Satellite measurement of the South Pole area air temperature shows a slight decline over the last 3o years. How is there more melting when it is getting colder there? Satellite altimeter measurements shows a steady growth of the icefields of the interior in East Antarctica, the bulk of the continent. There is some minor melting in the Antarctic Peninsula but that's merely 3% of the continent and is not representative. I think the bulk of the icefield melting in Antarctica is a result of lava flows under the ice. To be fair, the GRACE satellites tell a tale of loss of ice mass both north and south but their results are counter to almost all the other measurements. I'll look into the methodology they use and get back on that.

In short, however, the WTBs are citing ambiguous annecdotes and suspect studies and it's not helping their cause with open minded readers. Free fall. Unraveling. Slouching towards insignificence. That's the future of the AGW hoax, while accurate measurements of global temperatures will almost certainly continue to fall for the next several decades.

Labels: Fails, Global Warming Hoax: The Empire Strikes Back

Another scientist joins the flat earth, deniers of anthropogenic global warming climate change and tells the truth about Al Gore's go-to chicken little, James Hansen. Money quotes from Hansen's former boss, Dr. John S. Theon:

...climate models are useless....My own belief concerning anthropogenic climate change is that the models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit. Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modified in the observations, nor explain how they did it. They have resisted making their work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists. This is clearly contrary to how science should be done. Thus there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy.

[...]

Hansen was never muzzled even though he violated NASA’s official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen thus embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claims of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress.

It was funny to note how characteristically Hansen played the bullying victim Ann Coulter describes so well by claiming he was "muzzled by the Bush administration despite doing 1,400 on-the-job media interviews!" Some muzzle.

Pre-industrialization levels of CO2, say, 280 ppm, produce 95% of the possible 'greenhouse' effect and any increase of CO2 above 280 has almost no effect on mean global temperature. That's an inconvenient rock of a fact on which Gore's and Hansen's fantasy ship of anthropogenic global warming has struck and is rapidly foundering.

Labels: Global Warming Hoax: The Empire Strikes Back