More defectors from the “consensus”

Remember when I noted that three scientists who were part of a paper decreeing a “consensus” on global warming told Watts Up With That that their positions had been misrepresented?

Well, Andrew at Popular Technology found four more who took issue with their classifications. Ironically, the one most sympathetic to AGW theory (Dr. Richard Tol) was the nastiest to one of the “consensus” paper’s authors (Dana Nuccitelli), telling Nuccitelli, “I think your data are a load of crap.”

For those who are keeping track (admittedly not easy given the numbers), we have now reached forty-four examples of data manipulation, errors, and other shenanigans from global warming alarmists, and that’s just from what I’ve been able to blog on this subject since Climategate broke in November of 2009, just under three and a half years ago…and they just keep on coming.

Cross-posted to Virginia Virtucon

Whoops! Scientists ask out of the global warming “consensus”

The latest attempt of the global warming alarmists to silence debate – by screaming, “Consensus!” – has hilariously come a-cropper.

As usual, the good folks at Watts Up With That have the details, from three paper authors who take great issue with the characterization of their papers as endorsing global warming.

For those who are keeping track (admittedly not easy given the numbers), we have now reached forty-four examples of data manipulation, errors, and other shenanigans from global warming alarmists, and that’s just from what I’ve been able to blog on this subject since Climategate broke in November of 2009, just under three and a half years ago.

More to the point, they don’t seem capable of stopping.

London Meteorological Office caught upping the temperature data – again

“The Met” – as it is known – didn’t bother to warn anyone that is had “updated” their temperature data for their HADCRUT4 and CRUTEM4 data sets, choosing instead to simply unleash them on the public.

The folks at WUWT couldn’t help but notice that the data “updated”….

…are concentrated in the last 16 years, a period that the Met Office is under scrutiny for the lack of warming in their data.

Also, some of the regional changes appear quite contrived, e.g. it looks like they found five hundredths of a degree of extra warming in the Northern Hemisphere in the last couple years.

South America they found almost a tenth of a degree of warming over the last decade;

Africa, had five hundredths of a degree of extra warming in the last few years;

and Australia/New Zealand a tenth of a degree of additional warming over the last few years.

I left out the accompanying graphs, you can find them here. The WUWT fellows also note how this is part of a pattern of “adjusting” recent temperature data upward.

For those who are keeping track (admittedly not easy given the numbers), we have now reached forty-four examples of data manipulation, errors, and other shenanigans from global warming alarmists, and that’s just from what I’ve been able to blog on this subject since Climategate broke in November of 2009, just under three and a half years ago. More to the point, they don’t seem capable of stopping.

In this case, however, it is especially important to remember that the “adjustments” come right smack in the period of the data that has given alarmists their worst headaches: the post-1996 temperature stability. It could very well be that the “solution” is to simply jack up the numbers to make the stability go away…

How the UN Covered Up a Cholera Epidemic in Zimbabwe

Title courtesy of The Atlantic, whose story (by Amin Rosen) details the how the United Nations chief official in Zimbabwe” decided that his own closeness with ZANU-PF overrode his responsibility to the UN’s missions and values.”

ZANU-PF is the criminal organization – errrrrr, political party – run by dictator Robert Mugabe. Apparently, Agostinho Zacarias (and his UN buddies back in New York) felt keeping Mugabe happy was worth letting hundreds of Zimbabweans die. When Georges Tadonki said otherwise, he was fired.

Under the bizarre nature of UN procedure – which exempts the organization from being sued – Tadonki had to search for recompense from a panel internal to the UN. As Rosen himself puts it:

Because the UN cannot be sued, tribunals convened by the UN itself deal with employment claims, pseudo-courts that don’t adhere to several important aspects of accepted U.S. and European legal procedure.

So it’s significant the tribunal’s 104-page ruling in this case is such a damning survey of misplaced priorities and institutional rot.

Significant indeed.

Of course, the UN is appealing the ruling, and Zacarias still has a cushy job with them.

I had always felt the UN was too incompetent, and its people too lacking in intelligence, to be a serious danger. In light of this, I may have to question that assumption: incompetence and stupidity combined with favoritism killed at least 4,000 in Zimbabwe alone.

Marcott’s update to his global warming paper: never mind everything I said

Shaun Marcott – the latest fellow to claim he’s discovered “unprecedented” warming in recent years – made a stunning admission to Steve McIntyre over the weekend. Ross McKittrick has the details in the Financial Post:

Meanwhile, in a private email to McIntyre, Marcott made a surprising statement. In the paper, they had reported doing an alternate analysis of their proxy data that yielded a much smaller 20th-century uptick, but they said the difference was “probably not robust,” which implied that the uptick was insensitive to changes in methodology, and was therefore reliable. But in his email to McIntyre, Marcott said the reconstruction itself is not robust in the 20th century: a very different thing. When this became public, the Marcott team promised to clear matters up with an online FAQ.

It finally appeared over the weekend, and contains a remarkable admission: “[The] 20th-century portion of our paleotemperature stack is not statistically robust, cannot be considered representative of global temperature changes, and therefore is not the basis of any of our conclusions.”

In other words, the most recent part of the data – the very part Marcott et al claimed “proved” the dramatic warming – was junk.

McKittrick also details how Marcott redated ice core tops (if that sounds like fudging data to you, that’s because it is) and grafted current temperature data (which can show variations annually at worst) on top of the past data reconstruction (which smoothed out centuries of variations).

For those who are keeping track (admittedly not easy given the numbers), we have now reached forty-three examples of data manipulation, errors, and other shenanigans from global warming alarmists, and that’s just from what I’ve been able to blog on this subject since Climategate broke in November of 2009, just under three and a half years ago.

I am amazed that anyone still believes this stuff.

Steve McIntyre sends another hockey stick alarmist to the penalty box

Steve McIntyre is the mathematician who destroyed Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph (which supposedly proved global warming) in the last decade. This year, he takes aim at the latest nonsense, from Marcott et al. On his blog (Climate Audit), he explains how the timing of  the data was manipulated – in one case, a dataset was moved over 1000 years - to get the desired effect.

For those who are keeping track (admittedly not easy given the numbers), we have now reached forty-two examples of data manipulation, errors, and other shenanigans from global warming alarmists, and that’s just from what I’ve been able to blog on this subject since Climategate broke in November of 2009, just under three and a half years ago.

FOIA (the Climategate whistleblower) reveals what caring about the poor really means

Watts Up With That found in his inbox the password to a slew of Climategate emails, courtesy of the anonymous whistleblower (who took the pseudonym Mr. FOIA).

Humor and political schadenfreude aside (well, almost – I particular like the part where “Reviewer B.” admits, “I don’t think we can say we didn’t do Mann et al because we think it is crap!”), FOIA explains his actions – and in so doing schools the lefties on what compassion for the impoverished really is (emphasis added):

That’s right; no conspiracy, no paid hackers, no Big Oil.  The Republicans didn’t plot this.  USA politics is alien to me, neither am I from the UK.  There is life outside the Anglo-American sphere.

If someone is still wondering why anyone would take these risks, or sees only a breach of privacy here, a few words…

The first glimpses I got behind the scenes did little to  garner my trust in the state of climate science — on the contrary.  I found myself in front of a choice that just might have a global impact.

Briefly put, when I had to balance the interests of my own safety, privacy\career of a few scientists, and the well-being of billions of people living in the coming several decades, the first two weren’t the decisive concern.

It was me or nobody, now or never.  Combination of several rather improbable prerequisites just wouldn’t occur again for anyone else in the foreseeable future.  The circus was about to arrive in Copenhagen.  Later on it could be too late.

Most would agree that climate science has already directed where humanity puts its capability, innovation, mental and material “might”.  The scale will grow ever grander in the coming decades if things go according to script.  We’re dealing with $trillions and potentially drastic influence on practically everyone.

Wealth of the surrounding society tends to draw the major brushstrokes of a newborn’s future life.  It makes a huge difference whether humanity uses its assets to achieve progress, or whether it strives to stop and reverse it, essentially sacrificing the less fortunate to the climate gods.

We can’t pour trillions in this massive hole-digging-and-filling-up endeavor and pretend it’s not away from something and someone else.

If the economy of a region, a country, a city, etc.  deteriorates, what happens among the poorest? Does that usually improve their prospects? No, they will take the hardest hit.  No amount of magical climate thinking can turn this one upside-down.

It’s easy for many of us in the western world to accept a tiny green inconvenience and then wallow in that righteous feeling, surrounded by our “clean” technology and energy that is only slightly more expensive if adequately subsidized.

Those millions and billions already struggling with malnutrition, sickness, violence, illiteracy, etc.  don’t have that luxury.  The price of “climate protection” with its cumulative and collateral effects is bound to destroy and debilitate in great numbers, for decades and generations.

Conversely, a “game-changer” could have a beneficial effect encompassing a similar scope.

If I had a chance to accomplish even a fraction of that, I’d have to try.  I couldn’t morally afford inaction.  Even if I risked everything, would never get personal compensation, and could probably never talk about it with anyone.

I took what I deemed the most defensible course of action, and would do it again (although with slight alterations — trying to publish something truthful on RealClimate was clearly too grandiose of a plan .

Even if I have it all wrong and these scientists had some good reason to mislead us (instead of making a strong case with real data) I think disseminating the truth is still the safest bet by far.

We may never know who this person is, but I think James Delingpole had it right in calling him “the man who saved the world”…

…unless Mr. FOIA is actually Ms. FOIA, of course. Either way, this is truly a heroic person.

Meanwhile, WUWT continues the fight by continuing to take apart the latest hockey-stick nonsense (Easterbrook and Eschenbach).

Another busted hockey stick

The latest attempt by the global warming alarmists to make the Medieval Warming Period disappear came into the crosshairs of Watts Up With That – and ended up looking a lot like the gel torsos on Deadliest Warrior.

First up is Don J. Easterbrook, who notices something about the data…

Eighty percent of the source data sites were marine, so temperatures from 80% of the data set used in this paper record ocean water temperatures, not atmospheric temperatures. Thus, they may reflect temperature changes from ocean upwelling, changes in ocean currents, or any one of a number of ocean variations not related to atmospheric climates. This in itself means that the Marcott et al. temperatures are not a reliable measure of changing atmospheric climate.

Making matters worse, one of the land datasets was a tree ring reconstruction from none other than Michael Mann himself (he of “Mike’s Nature Trick”). Keep in mind, Mann has already admitted to errors in his tree ring data.

Meanwhile, David Middleton reveals another problem with the data – time intervals. He graphically explains why using old data that measures by 140-years-plus along with new annual data can cause problems.

Back to the penalty box.

Will Michael Mann never learn?

The latest desperate attempt by global warming alarmists to seize the political initiative fell apart once again – due to exposure to the outside world.

Michael Mann, he of the Nature Trick, is trying to claim that the temperature models really haven’t been exposed as bunk after all. There are only two problems: he uses the wrong set of data, and he stops in 2005.

Steve MacIntyre has the details (Climate Audit or WUWT).

For those who are keeping track (admittedly not easy given the numbers), we have now reached forty-one examples of data manipulation,errors, and other shenanigans from global warming alarmists, and that’s just from what I’ve been able to blog on this subject sinceClimategate broke in November of 2009 just under three and a half years ago.

I am stunned that Mann really didn’t think he would get caught.

Everything you need to know about “global warming”

An excellent rundown of the myths and their debunkments from Friends of Science (via WUWT).

The only thing they missed was the past temperature data manipulation.

Cross-posted to Virginia Virtucon