Global warming?

[ZenGum]

Is the LA Times okay for you?
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-a...,3694292.story

Worth noting the correction paragraph about "carbon intensity" rather than overall emissions, though.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

. . . taking a large amount of energy that had been locked up as chemical (or nuclear) energy, and releasing it to turn into heat. That warms the atmosphere. While a warmer atmosphere will emit more heat to space (ceteris paribus), it is less than 100% pass through and so this alone would/should/will/already-has cause(d) warming.

Waste heat, and thermodynamics.

But there have definitely been enough problems predicting the climate as to suggest the models aren't right yet.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

Is the LA Times okay for you?
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-a...,3694292.story

Worth noting the correction paragraph about "carbon intensity" rather than overall emissions, though.

I guess we will see in 2020. History has shown us that the all governments make pledges to get concessions and rarely are they carried through as the govenment changes hands and international goals change. I am on the side of history; I have little faith in their promises.

[TheMercenary]

An interesting view, one I would tend to agree with.

Rigging a Climate 'Consensus'
About those emails and 'peer review.'

The climatologists at the center of the leaked email and document scandal have taken the line that it is all much ado about nothing. Yes, the wording of their messages was unfortunate, but they insist this in no way undermines the underlying science. They're ignoring the damage they've done to public confidence in the arbiters of climate science.

"What they've done is search through stolen personal emails—confidential between colleagues who often speak in a language they understand and is often foreign to the outside world," Penn State's Michael Mann told Reuters Wednesday. Mr. Mann added that this has made "something innocent into something nefarious."

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Associated Press

The Australian Antarctic research station Casey, where scientists study the effects of climate change.
Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, from which the emails were lifted, is singing from the same climate hymnal. "My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues," he said this week.

We don't doubt that Mr. Jones would have phrased his emails differently if he expected them to end up in the newspaper. He's right that it doesn't look good that his May 2008 email to Mr. Mann regarding the U.N.'s Fourth Assessment Report said "Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?" Mr. Mann says he didn't delete any such emails, but the point is that Mr. Jones wanted them hidden.

The furor over these documents is not about tone, colloquialisms or whether climatologists are nice people. The real issue is what the messages say about the way the much-ballyhooed scientific consensus on global warming was arrived at, and how a single view of warming and its causes is being enforced. The impression left by the correspondence among Messrs. Mann and Jones and others is that the climate-tracking game has been rigged from the start.

continues:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...googlenews_wsj

[Undertoad]

Massive fallout from East Anglia: 150 years of original, world-wide temperature measurements were unceremoniously thrown away. The implications of this are: the instrumental record is now officially not science. It's something else, because it's not peer-reviewable. EVER.

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

AGW skeptic Christopher Booker calls it "the worst scientific scandal of our generation".

[classicman]

Wow this is just getting more interesting all the time.

[glatt]

About ten years ago, my wife and I visited New Zealand. At the time, and maybe even still today, it was one of the few place on earth that had glaciers that were actually growing longer instead of receding. We visited those glaciers and heard numerous times from guides that their glaciers were growing. The glaciers are close to Hokitika, where the data manipulation appears to have occurred.

[ZenGum]

On the lighter side, I was just marking an essay on CC and had to pursue a Chinese source through babelfish to check for plagiarism. I found this gem:

Certainly also possibly has superimposed nature changing rate, but also has certain uncertainty.

Take that, you denialists

[casimendocina]

[Clodfobble]

"the worst scientific scandal of our generation".

Just wait until they figure out they've been defiantly brain-damaging babies for decades.

[classicman]

With no disrespect to sausages and laws, Bismarck’s most famous aphorism clearly requires updating. “Scientific research” is bidding furiously to make the global shortlist of things one should not see being made.
Understandably so. Sciences at the cutting edge of statistics and public policy can make blood sports seem genteel. Scientists aggressively promoting pet hypotheses often relish the opportunity to marginalise and neutralise rival theories and exponents.

The malice, mischief and Machiavellian manoeuvrings revealed in the illegally hacked megabytes of emails from the University of East Anglia’s prestigious Climate Research Unit, for example, offers a useful paradigm of contemporary scientific conflict. Science may be objective; scientists emphatically are not. This episode illustrates what too many universities, professional societies, and research funders have irresponsibly allowed their scientists to become. Shame on them all.
The source of that shame is a toxic mix of institutional laziness and complacency. Too many scientists in academia, industry and government are allowed to get away with concealing or withholding vital information about their data, research methodologies and results. That is unacceptable and must change.

Only recently in America, for example, have academic pharmaceutical researchers been required to disclose certain financial conflicts of interest they might have. On issues of the greatest importance for public policy, science researchers less transparent than they should be. That behaviour undermines science, policy and public trust.
Dubbed “climate-gate” by global warming sceptics, the most outrageous East Anglia email excerpts appear to suggest respected scientists misleadingly manipulated data and suppressed legitimate argument in peer-reviewed journals.

These claims are forcefully denied, but the correspondents do little to enhance confidence in either the integrity or the professionalism of the university’s climatologists. What is more, there are no denials around the researchers’ repeated efforts to avoid meaningful compliance with several requests under the UK Freedom of Information Act to gain access to their working methods. Indeed, researchers were asked to delete and destroy emails. Secrecy, not privacy, is at the rotten heart of this bad behavior by ostensibly good scientists.

Why should research funding institutions and taxpayers fund scientists who deliberately delay, obfuscate and deny open access to their research?
Why should scientific journals publish peer-reviewed research where the submitting scientists have not made every reasonable effort to make their work – raw data & sophisticated computer simulations – as transparent and accessible as possible?
Why should responsible policymakers in America, Europe, Asia and Latin America make decisions affecting people’s health, wealth and future based on opaque and inaccessible science?

Three very good questions. . .

Link

[Urbane Guerrilla]

I thought this para from Booker's Guardian article was notable:

But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to "adjust" recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Global warming is beginning to look as well founded as the learned seventeenth-century tracts on witchcraft.

Climate Change and the Death of Science

Damning.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

And my goodness: it shows a lifelong, avowed socialist doing something bad to make socialism look necessary. Gee, who'd've thought? Politics is bad for science.

[TheMercenary]

Why should research funding institutions and taxpayers fund scientists who deliberately delay, obfuscate and deny open access to their research?
Why should scientific journals publish peer-reviewed research where the submitting scientists have not made every reasonable effort to make their work – raw data & sophisticated computer simulations – as transparent and accessible as possible?
Why should responsible policymakers in America, Europe, Asia and Latin America make decisions affecting people’s health, wealth and future based on opaque and inaccessible science?

Damm good questions.