News: Conference Motion 3 - Global Warming

Clippo · 05-09-2008, 11:11 AM

Sponplague wrote:-

Quote:

NASA has admitted that the hottest decade of the 20ty century was the 1930s. The "hockeystick graph" has been disproved. Get real!

Incorrect on both counts.
There was some criticism of the data analysis on the original hockey stick but extensive investigation by the US congress showed that the results were hardly affected. Subsequently, the IPCC now use 9 ? variations of the Hockey stick in their ongoing analysis .
Furthermore, if you look in the E & E thread, you will see that I posted about a week ago :-
Take this you warming deniers

In this I give a link to a very recently published peer-reviewed paper by Mann et al. which has improved the ‘hockey stick’ data (at the behest of the US government sponsored National Research Council) and says unequivocally :-

Quote:

Researchers confirm that surface temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere were warmer over the last 10 years than any time during the last 1300 years, and, if the climate scientists include the somewhat controversial data derived from tree-ring records, the warming is anomalous for at least 1700 years.

So, as I was suggesting in my earlier post, it is you and UKIP who need to ‘get real’

And as for your immediately last post, anyone who goes around quoting Booker as an authentic source of scientitifc information needs their 'heads read'

SponPlague · 05-09-2008, 12:55 PM

I notice you didn't comment on:

NASA/MSFC Earth Science: Globally-Averaged Atmospheric Temperatures

and what about

Hockey stick controversy - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Quote:

It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries. This statement is justified by the consistency of the evidence from a wide variety of geographically diverse proxies.

Less confidence can be placed in large-scale surface temperature reconstructions for the period from A.D. 900 to 1600. Presently available proxy evidence indicates that temperatures at many, but not all, individual locations were higher during the past 25 years than during any period of comparable length since A.D. 900. The uncertainties associated with reconstructing hemispheric mean or global mean temperatures from these data increase substantially backward in time through this period and are not yet fully quantified.

Very little confidence can be assigned to statements concerning the hemispheric mean or global mean surface temperature prior to about A.D. 900 because of sparse data coverage and because the uncertainties associated with proxy data and the methods used to analyze and combine them are larger than during more recent time periods.

Quote:

The National Academy of Science Report from 2006 – all of which have helped to clarify that the hockey-stick methodologies lead indeed to questionable historical reconstructions.

SponPlague · 05-09-2008, 12:59 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Clippo

Incorrect on both counts.

Error in NASA climate data sparks debate

Quote:

Error in NASA climate data sparks debate

Due to an error in calculations of mean U.S. temperatures, 1934, not 1998 as previously reported, is the hottest year on record in the United States. NASA scientists contend that the error has little effect on overall U.S. temperature trends and no effect on global mean temperatures, with 2005 still the hottest year worldwide by far, followed by 1998. The data corrections have added new fuel to the climate change debate, however — and could spell more public relations woes for NASA.

The Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) at NASA measures long-term changes in global surface temperatures using raw data collected at thousands of stations around the world (called the Global Historical Climatology Network, or GHCN). The raw temperature data are then corrected to account for a number of factors, including differences in the time of day of measurements between stations, and differences between rural stations and urban stations (which tend to be hotter, due to the so-called "urban heat island" effect).

On Aug. 4, however, the well-known climate change skeptic and former mining executive Steven McIntyre — who previously challenged climatologist Michael Mann's 1998 finding that temperatures have increased rapidly since 1900 A.D., compared with the previous thousand years, forming a distinctive "hockey stick" temperature pattern — observed a strange jump in the U.S. data occurring around January 2000. He sent an e-mail to NASA about his observation, and the agency responded with an e-mail acknowledging a flaw in the calculations and thanking him for his help, he says. By Aug. 7, he says, the agency had removed the incorrect U.S. data from the GISS Web site and replaced it with corrected numbers for all 1,200 stations.

The issue didn't end there, however. The corrections made almost no difference to global temperature trends, NASA reported, while U.S. mean annual temperatures from 2000 to 2006 were all reduced by about 0.15 degrees Celsius. Most significantly for climate change skeptics, however, the year 1934 now edges out 1998 as the hottest year in the United States.

McIntyre wrote about his findings in his blog ClimateAudit, dubbing the incorrect data a "Y2K" error and setting off a heated back-and-forth debate that gained traction in the blogosphere. In addition to noting the altered U.S. data, McIntyre also cast doubts on NASA's methods of collecting data and on its transparency, claiming that the old data should have been kept up on the Web site for comparison, and NASA should have alerted the public to the changes. Furthermore, he says, he had asked repeatedly to see the "source code" NASA uses to calculate its numbers, and had been repeatedly denied. "Certainly I think the way they handled it was inappropriate," he says. "I've got experience in public companies and if you have some bad news or adverse results you have to announce them."

Climate scientists, however, are asserting that the uproar over the data corrections is nothing more than a tempest in a teapot. NASA GISS scientist Jim Hansen, who helped devise the algorithm used to correct for the various climate factors, wrote in an Aug. 10 e-mail that the errors were introduced when the U.S. stations switched between two different datasets in 2000, with the faulty assumption that the second dataset also included the necessary corrections, an error that was recognized and fixed, Hansen said. Acknowledging that 1934 now appears to have been slightly hotter than 1998 in the United States, he noted that the difference in the mean between the two years, of 0.02 degrees Celsius, was and always had been smaller than the uncertainty, although their relative positions are now flipflopped. Globally, however, the changes had no effect on rankings, and 1998 was still by far the warmest year on record before 2005, he says. "For two days I have been besieged by rants that I have wronged the president, that I must 'step down,' or that I must 'vanish,'" he wrote.

Gavin Schmidt, a NASA GISS scientist who created the blog RealClimate along with Michael Mann, posted in an Aug. 10 column that the furor is "ado over nothing." He says that despite the fact that the corrections don't alter the global trends, he has fielded hundreds of comments by confused and sometimes irate posters on his blog about the issue. "There are two factors that make it an interesting story," he says. "One is the little guy telling NASA that something is wrong — that has a lot of resonance. And then there's the more politicized issue, which is, 'how can we twist this to prove global warming is fake?'"

Although some people who have learned of the data errors are genuinely confused, Schmidt says, others "are being deliberately manipulative." The question of NASA releasing its source code is a case in point, he says, as both the raw data and the correction algorithms are actually freely available from NASA, and therefore anyone wanting to check NASA's numbers has all the necessary information to reproduce its results. As for McIntyre's question about whether NASA is concealing something by overwriting the old online data with the new, he says, "the whole analysis gets redone every month. That's a completely standard procedure."

McIntyre's Web site, meanwhile, is receiving more hits than ever as the controversy expands, and went down for a few days this week to move to a new server to accommodate the extra traffic. McIntyre says his goal is to push NASA to be more "forthcoming" about its adjustments. "What they should have done, what I would have done in their shoes, is say, 'we acknowledge this particular error, we don't think there are others, but we've put it all online and any interested parties can look at it,'" he says. "If they'd done that, they would have avoided much of the present controversy."

Schmidt, however, sees the situation differently. "If you can reframe this as a freedom of speech issue, or a nondisclosure issue, you can get people to say it's an outrage," he says. "That kind of stuff is a deliberate political tactic. There is a very vocal group of people who so desperately wish that global warming would just go away that any of these tactics are fair game."

Clippo · 05-09-2008, 02:23 PM

Sponplague wrote:-

Quote:

I notice you didn't comment on:

NASA/MSFC Earth Science: Globally-Averaged Atmospheric Temperatures

Funny?, I thought I did - earlier this am in the E & E section. But just in case I didn't I will now :-

For goodness sake Sponplague please keep up :-

Your first reference
a) is 9 years old
b) written by an Exxon supported contrarian
c) supported by the Marshall Institute (like the CEI an Exxon-spawned doubt -machine)
d) refers to ‘stratospheric’ temperatures and admits in the text that :-

Quote:

Surface thermometer measurements indicate that the temperature of the Earth is warming, while the satellite data show no significant long-term trends.

e) the measurement of stratospheric temperatures by satellites has been found to be flawed – when these flaws were corrected, the new results agree with GW.

So you want to play Wiki then

,
from your Wikipedia reference you will see this:-

Quote:

More recently, the National Academy of Sciences considered the matter. On June 22, 2006, the Academy released a pre-publication version of its report Report-Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2,000 Years,[27] supporting Mann's more general assertion regarding the last decades of the Twentieth Century, but showing less confidence in his assertions regarding individual decades or years, due to the greater uncertainty at that level of precision.
"The basic conclusion of Mann et al. (1998, 1999) was that the late 20th century warmth in the Northern Hemisphere was unprecedented during at least the last 1,000 years. This conclusion has subsequently been supported by an array of evidence that includes ...
Based on the analyses presented in the original papers by Mann et al. and this newer supporting evidence, the committee finds it plausible that the Northern Hemisphere was warmer during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period over the preceding millennium. The substantial uncertainties currently present in the quantitative assessment of large-scale surface temperature changes prior to about A.D. 1600 lower our confidence in this conclusion compared to the high level of confidence we place in the Little Ice Age cooling and 20th century warming. Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that "the 1990s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium" because the uncertainties inherent in temperature reconstructions for individual years and decades are larger than those for longer time periods, and because not all of the available proxies record temperature information on such short timescales." [28]

and

Quote:

National Research Council Report
At the request of the U.S. Congress, a special "Committee on Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Past 2,000 Years" was assembled by the National Research Council's Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate. The Committee consisted of 12 scientists from different disciplines and was tasked with explaining the current scientific information on the temperature record for the past two millennia, and identifying the main areas of uncertainty, the principal methodologies used, any problems with these approaches, and how central the debate is to the state of scientific knowledge on global climate change.
The panel published its report in 2006.[28] The report agreed that there were statistical shortcomings in the MBH analysis, but concluded that they were small in effect. The report summarizes its main findings as follows:[29]
…………………. It can be said with a high level of confidence that global mean surface temperature was higher during the last few decades of the 20th century than during any comparable period during the preceding four centuries….

& from :-http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming

Quote:

The average global air temperature near the Earth's surface increased 0.74 ± 0.18 °C (1.33 ± 0.32 °F) during the 100 years ending in 2005.[1] The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) concludes "most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic (man-made) greenhouse gas concentrations"[1] via an enhanced greenhouse effect. Natural phenomena such as solar variation combined with volcanoes probably had a small warming effect from pre-industrial times to 1950 and a small cooling effect from 1950 onward.[2][3]
These basic conclusions have been endorsed by at least 30 scientific societies and academies of science,[4] including all of the national academies of science of the major industrialized countries.[5][6][7] While individual scientists have voiced disagreement with some findings of the IPCC,[8] the overwhelming majority of scientists working on climate change agree with the IPCC's main conclusions.[9][10]

……………………………………………………..
I further suggest you actually read and analyse what you have cut & paste in your most recent post. If you were thinking this supported your anti-AGW views then you are deluded.

It really is time now to come out of your political conspiracy cocoon –

the world is warming and that is mainly caused by mankind’s activities and if we don’t do something about it soon, real disaster will strike.

…..

SponPlague · 05-09-2008, 02:31 PM

That's what they were saying about the next ice age, 30 years ago...

SponPlague · 05-09-2008, 02:34 PM

The catastrophe behind climate change - Telegraph

Quote:

By far the most influential player in putting climate change at the top of the global agenda has been the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), set up in 1988, not least on the initiative of the Thatcher government. (This was why the first chairman of its scientific working group was Sir John Houghton, then the head of the UK's Meteorological Office.)

Through a succession of reports and international conferences, it was the IPCC which led to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, soon to have an even more ambitious successor, to be agreed in Copenhagen next year.

The common view of the IPCC is that it consists of 2,500 of the world's leading scientists who, after carefully weighing all the evidence, have arrived at a "consensus" that world temperatures are rising disastrously, and that the only plausible cause has been rising levels of CO2 and other man-made greenhouse gases.

Read more by Christopher Booker
In fact, as has become ever more apparent over the past 20 years -not least thanks to the evidence of a succession of scientists who have participated in the IPCC itself - the reality of this curious body could scarcely be more different.

It is not so much a scientific as a political organisation. Its brief has never been to look dispassionately at all the evidence for man-made global warming: it has always taken this as an accepted fact.

Indeed only a comparatively small part of its reports are concerned with the science of climate change at all. The greater part must start by accepting the official line, and are concerned only with assessing the impact of warming and what should be done about it.

In reality the IPCC's agenda has always been tightly controlled by the small group of officials at its head.

As one recent study has shown, of the 53 contributors to the key Chapter 9 of the latest report dealing with the basic science (most of them British and American, and 10 of them associated with the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office), 37 belong to a closely related network of academics who are all active promoters of the official warming thesis. It is on the projections of their computer models that all the IPCC's predictions of future warming are based.

The final step in the process is that, before each report is published, a "Summary for Policymakers" is drafted by those at the top of the IPCC, to which governments can make input. It is this which makes headlines in the media, and which all too frequently eliminates the more carefully qualified findings of contributors to the report itself.

The idea that the IPCC represents any kind of genuine scientific "consensus" is a complete fiction. Again and again there have been examples of how evidence has been manipulated to promote the official line, the most glaring instance being the notorious "hockey stick".

Initially the advocates of global warming had one huge problem. Evidence from all over the world indicated that the earth was hotter 1,000 years ago than it is today. This was so generally accepted that the first two IPCC reports included a graph, based on work by Sir John Houghton himself, showing that temperatures were higher in what is known as the Mediaeval Warming period than they were in the 1990s.

The trouble was that this blew a mighty hole in the thesis that warming was caused only by recent man-made CO2.

Then in 1999 an obscure young US physicist, Michael Mann, came up with a new graph like nothing seen before. Instead of the familiar rises and falls in temperature over the past 1,000 years, the line ran virtually flat, only curving up dramatically at the end in a hockey-stick shape to show recent decades as easily the hottest on record.

This was just what the IPCC wanted, The Mediaeval Warming had simply been wiped from the record. When its next report came along in 2001, Mann's graph was given top billing, appearing right at the top of page one of the Summary for Policymakers and five more times in the report proper.

But then two Canadian computer analysts, Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, got to work on how Mann had arrived at his graph.

When, with great difficulty, they eventually persuaded Mann to hand over his data, it turned out he had built into his programme an algorithm which would produce a hockey stick shape whatever data were fed into it. Even numbers from the phonebook would come out looking like a hockey stick.

By the time of its latest report, last year, the IPCC had an even greater problem. Far from continuing to rise in line with rising CO2, as its computer models predicted they should, global temperatures since the abnormally hot year of 1998 had flattened out at a lower level and were even falling - a trend confirmed by Nasa's satellite readings over the past 18 months.

So pronounced has this been that even scientists supporting the warmist thesis now concede that, due to changes in ocean currents, we can expect a decade or more of "cooling", before the "underlying warming trend" reappears.

The point is that none of this was predicted by the computer models on which the IPCC relies. Among the ever-growing mountain of informed criticism of the IPCC's methods, a detailed study by an Australian analyst John McLean (to find it, Google "Prejudiced authors, prejudiced findings") shows just how incestuously linked are most of the core group of academics whose models underpin everything the IPCC wishes us to believe about global warming.

The significance of the past year is not just that the vaunted "consensus" on the forces driving our climate has been blown apart as never before, but that a new "counter-consensus" has been emerging among thousands of scientists across the world, given expression in last March's Manhattan Declaration by the so-called Non-Governmental Panel on Climate Change.

This wholly repudiates the IPCC process, showing how its computer models are hopelessly biased, based on unreliable data and programmed to ignore many of the genuine drivers of climate change, from variations in solar activity to those cyclical shifts in ocean currents.

As it was put by Roger Cohen, a senior US physicist formerly involved with the IPCC process, who long accepted its orthodoxy: "I was appalled at how flimsy the case is. I was also appalled at the behaviour of many of those who helped produce the IPCC reports and by many of those who promote it.

"In particular I am referring to the arrogance, the activities aimed at shutting down debate; the outright fabrications; the mindless defense of bogus science; and the politicisation of the IPCC process and the science process itself."

Yet it is at just this moment, when the IPCC's house of cards is crumbling, that the politicians of the Western world are using it to propose steps that can only damage our way of life beyond recognition. It really is time for that "counter-consensus" to be taken seriously.

Why don't your write in and point out what you see as Chris Booker's innacuracies?

Clippo · 05-09-2008, 03:07 PM

Sponplague wrote:-

Quote:

Why don't your write in and point out what you see as Chris Booker's innacuracies?

I noticed some time ago YOUR letter (assuming you are RW) to the Telegraph about the EU and I'm sure you will have tried unsuccessfully many times with other letters.

However, to answer your point I DID write to the DT some time ago - about Booker's falsities and they DID publish it.

However, I have found that the DT prefer 'punchy quips' rather than detailed analyses, especialy if those detailed analyses show up their regular writers as prats.

I am also a regular DT reader and it was noticeable to me that until about 6 months ago, the DT was promoting anti-AGW articles. However, since then then are reporting more widely - I think there were 2-3 news items, mostly about the melting Arctic ice, just this last week.
But, newspapers being newspapers, they know that controversy sells so they will always publish 'contrarian' ideas in all subjects.

I find it more reasonable to read the original research or science press journals like New Scientist or Scientific American for info on scientific matters.

Booker is simply a hack journalist who makes his living by writing. If you're completely honest, his exposes of the EU over the years, whilst insteresting, have not achieved a jot towards us leaving (bit like UKIP I would say), so now he's scented a nice little earner over AGW.

rjt · 05-09-2008, 06:01 PM

Well Clippo has been critical of the wording of this motion, and it might suprise him to know that I agree with him although it is for a different reason, i just think it seems a bit bland but it is good to see UKIP at least having a few tentative step at formng a wider range of policys.

I think Raymond Finch makes an excellent point in post 2 of this thread and given the direction UKIPS policy seems to be going it would seem sensible to incorporate such a view.

I am ammused by Clippo talking about nutters in UKIP, the other day he said he had voted for them, not sure what that syas about his judgement. However to be fair he understandbly says that he has not joined them because of the differing view taken on this issue.

I think at least this motion suggests there is more debate to be had. One of the pleasures of my new job has been to deal with reviews compilled by accademics on the sceptical side of the debate. These are growing lowly but growing nonetheless. i think this is a good thing.

In the mean while the task for UKIP and others is to ensure they carefully spell out their costings for any proposed policys to cut carbon emmissions.

Clippo · 05-09-2008, 08:20 PM

rjt wrote:-

Quote:

I am ammused by Clippo talking about nutters in UKIP, the other day he said he had voted for them, not sure what that syas about his judgement.

Obviously I meant the 'nutters' in UKIP who continue to close their eyes to the overwhelming evidence coming out daily/weekly in support of AGW.

I am genuinely pleased you have a new job - however, if you think that :-

Quote:

One of the pleasures of my new job has been to deal with reviews compilled by accademics on the sceptical side of the debate. These are growing lowly but growing nonetheless. (my bold)

keep your eye out continually for something new - like our current economy, these reports are likely to go into recession.

Jeff · 05-09-2008, 08:26 PM

Spon,please try to humour clippo,he will only tie everyone up with his LINKS again if given the chance,most avoid him on here these days,the poor old fart.

05-09-2008, 06:01 PM	#18 (permalink)
rjt Uber Member Join Date: Oct 2004 Location: Aldershot Posts: 5,767 Party: Other	Well Clippo has been critical of the wording of this motion, and it might suprise him to know that I agree with him although it is for a different reason, i just think it seems a bit bland but it is good to see UKIP at least having a few tentative step at formng a wider range of policys. I think Raymond Finch makes an excellent point in post 2 of this thread and given the direction UKIPS policy seems to be going it would seem sensible to incorporate such a view. I am ammused by Clippo talking about nutters in UKIP, the other day he said he had voted for them, not sure what that syas about his judgement. However to be fair he understandbly says that he has not joined them because of the differing view taken on this issue. I think at least this motion suggests there is more debate to be had. One of the pleasures of my new job has been to deal with reviews compilled by accademics on the sceptical side of the debate. These are growing lowly but growing nonetheless. i think this is a good thing. In the mean while the task for UKIP and others is to ensure they carefully spell out their costings for any proposed policys to cut carbon emmissions. __________________ 'And suddenly there was with the angel a multitude of the heavenly host praising God and saying " Glory to God in the highest, And on the earth peace, goodwill toward men". Luke 2: 13-14.

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05-09-2008, 02:31 PM	#15 (permalink)
SponPlague Uber Member Join Date: Aug 2005 Location: Zurich Posts: 3,400	That's what they were saying about the next ice age, 30 years ago...

05-09-2008, 08:26 PM	#20 (permalink)
Jeff Member Join Date: Aug 2006 Posts: 376 Party: Free England Party	Spon,please try to humour clippo,he will only tie everyone up with his LINKS again if given the chance,most avoid him on here these days,the poor old fart.