posted October 12, 2011 01:58 PM            

Since man made global warming is the root cause driving Solar and Wind power money pits, I couldn't think of a better place for this article.

Shedding Some Light on Solar Power
By Chris W. Bell
October 12, 2011

The government tells us that we need to subsidize renewable energy providers with taxpayer money. Global warming advocates tell us to turn to eco-friendly renewable energy sources like solar power. They insist that viable alternatives to fossil fuels (like solar) are being ignored because the energy industry is resisting conversion to clean power to protect profits -- at the expense of the planet. But before we padlock our coal- and natural gas-fueled power plants, let's take a look at the facts and figures regarding solar power.

First, let's take a look at the sources of our electricity. Solar power currently provides less than 0.07% of the United State's electricity. So if we increased our solar power capacity by a hundred times, it would still provide us with only 7% of our energy needs. Study the data in the graph and chart below form the U.S. Energy Information Administration. Solar power is included in "other renewables" -- it is so small that it does not rate a call-out.

There are two methods to harness the power of sunlight. One method works by focusing the rays of the sun to the point where enough heat is generated to boil water (solar thermal power). The resulting steam is used to power a turbine, which turns an electric generator and thereby produces electricity. The second type of solar power (photovoltaic) converts the energy of the sun directly into electricity. This second method is the focus of this article.

Photovoltaic solar cells are made of material very similar to the material used to make computer chips. When exposed to sunlight, the molecules in the solar cell interact with energy from the sun to produce a flow of electrical current.

Solar cells are rated at optimal conditions, which for a solar cell are a cloudless, cool day at noon at a place on the planet where the sun is directly overhead. If the sun is directly above the cell, the maximum amount of energy is produced. As the angle the cell makes with the sun deviates from straight-down, the cell's power output drops off. Cloudy and stormy days and places where the sun is low in the sky produce only a fraction of the rated power.

Prime time for solar power is from a few hours before noon to a few hours after. So even in the best of circumstances, the cell's output will be low in the mornings and evenings.

Solar cell power output will also vary with the time of year (unless you're at the equator); it is proportional to the hours of daylight and to the angle of the sun. In northern latitudes, the angle the sunlight makes with the earth varies throughout the year. Those who live in the north know that the sun is pretty low in the sky in December, and the hours of sunlight are few. The geographic location is very important to the output of a cell. The areas near the equator get sunlight at a much more direct angle more of the time than more northern areas such as Minnesota, so the equatorial areas can generate more power. Also some areas of the world have a lot more cloudy days than others. The map below shows that most of the photovoltaic power in our country is in the southwest.

We must also consider the fact that there is no practical way to store this intermittent energy, so we still need traditional power plants to keep our lights on when it's dark or cloudy, or during a storm. Batteries would be prohibitively large and expensive, and pumped-storage solutions (that pump water into an above-ground lake, and then release it into turbines later) require an elevated man-made lake for each solar plant.

Compare solar power to nuclear power: a typical nuclear power plant is capable of producing about a billion watts (one gigawatt) of electrical power. To replace this plant with typical commercially available solar panels, which are about 3 feet by 4.5 feet in size and are rated at 150 watts (less in overcast conditions), would require almost 7 million solar panels. If you were to stand these solar cells next to each other in a line, that line would be 3,295 miles long. That's enough to go from New York to Los Angeles, and one third of the way back again. To replace all of the coal, natural gas, and nuclear plants in America with these solar cells would require enough cells to wrap around the earth 120 times.

Solar power does work, though, in its own way, and it's clean and renewable. It should certainly be a part of our energy plan, but, like wind power, it has its limitations. Solar power will not be replacing coal, nuclear, and natural gas any time soon. For the time being, it is destined to remain a small contributor to our energy needs, relegated to easing peak power demand on sunny days in southern climates.

So the next time a pundit throws the solar power argument into the debate on where we should spend money to meet our energy needs, be forearmed with the fact that for the near future, solar can replace only a tiny fraction of the power we get from coal, natural gas, and nuclear power plants.
http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/10/shedding_some_light_on_solar_power.html

posted October 27, 2011 02:36 PM            

New Evidence Disproves Global Warming Theory
Monday, 24 Oct 2011 11:22 AM
By Marc Morano

The proponents of man-made global warming are now claiming that man-made climate change is worse than they predicted.

In an Oct. 18 Daily Climate article, global warming activists claim that the “evidence builds that scientists underplay climate impacts.”

The article by Daily Climate editor Douglas Fischer claims: “But as the impacts of climate change become apparent, many predictions are proving to underplay the actual impacts. Reality, in many instances, is proving to be far worse than most scientists expected.

"We're seeing mounting evidence now that the scientific community, rather than overstating the claim or being alarmist, is the opposite," said Naomi Oreskes, a science historian with the University of California, San Diego.

Oreskes adds that reporters "need to learn that, if they wish to discuss 'both sides' of the climate issue, the scientifically legitimate 'other side' is that, if anything, global climate disruption is likely to be significantly worse than has been suggested in scientific consensus estimates to date."

Climate Depot's A-Z Scientific Reality Check: The only thing “worse than we thought” was shoddy journalism like the Daily Climate's which parrots warmist activist Naomi Oreskes' worn chatter. Recent scientific data and developments reveal that Mother Nature is playing a cruel joke on the promoters of man-made climate fears.

The scientific reality is that on virtually every claim — from A-Z — the scientific case for man-made climate fears has collapsed.

The Antarctic sea ice extent has been at or near record extent in past few summers; the Arctic has rebounded in recent years since the low point in 2007; polar bears are thriving; sea level is not showing acceleration and is actually dropping; Cholera and Malaria are failing to follow global warming predictions; and Mount Kilimanjaro melt fears are being made a mockery by gains in snow cover.

Furthermore, global temperatures have been holding steady for a decade or more; deaths due to extreme weather are radically declining; global tropical cyclone activity is near historic lows, the frequency of major U.S. hurricanes has declined, the oceans are missing their predicted heat content; big tornados have dramatically declined since the 1970s, droughts are not historically unusual nor caused by mankind; and there is no evidence we in currently having unusual weather.

Meanwhile, scandals continue to rock the climate fear movement, the U.N. IPCC has been exposed as being a hotbed of environmental activists and scientists continue to dissent at a rapid pace.

Note: Climate Depot will soon publish an exhaustive and exclusive A-Z report on the scientific reality of the failure of man-made global warming claims.

The Daily Climate article also cited animal species as some sort of “proof” of the impact of man-made global warming.

posted October 27, 2011 02:43 PM            

Religious faith is a source of strength in many people's lives. But religious faith when taken too far can prove ludicrous -- or disastrous.

On Oct. 22, 1844, thousand of Millerites, having sold all their possessions, climbed to the top of hills in Upstate New York to await the return of Jesus and the end of the world. They suffered "the great disappointment" when it didn't happen.

In 1212, or so the legends go, thousands of Children's Crusaders set off from France and Germany expecting the sea to part so they could march peaceably and convert Muslims in the Holy Land. It didn't, and many were shipwrecked or sold into slavery.

In 1898, the cavalrymen of the Madhi, ruler of Sudan for 13 years, went into the Battle of Omdurman armed with swords, believing that they were impervious to bullets. They weren't, and they were mowed down by British Maxim guns.

A similar but more peaceable fate is befalling believers in what I think can be called the religion of the global warming alarmists.

They have an unshakeable faith that manmade carbon emissions will produce a hotter climate, causing multiple natural disasters. Their insistence that we can be absolutely certain this will come to pass is based not on science -- which is never fully settled, witness the recent experiments that may undermine Albert Einstein​'s theory of relativity -- but on something very much like religious faith.

All the trappings of religion are there. Original sin: Mankind is responsible for these prophesied disasters, especially those slobs who live on suburban cul-de-sacs and drive their SUVs to strip malls and tacky chain restaurants.

The need for atonement and repentance: We must impose a carbon tax or cap-and-trade system, which will increase the cost of everything and stunt economic growth.

Ritual, from the annual Earth Day to weekly recycling.

Indulgences, like those Martin Luther​ railed against: private jet-fliers like Al Gore​ and sitcom heiress Laurie David​ can buy carbon offsets to compensate for their carbon-emitting sins.

Corporate elitists, like General Electric​'s Jeff Immelt, profess to share this faith, just as cynical Venetian merchants and prim Victorian bankers gave lip service to the religious enthusiasms of their days. Bad for business not to. And if you're clever, you can figure out how to make money off it.

Believers in this religion have flocked to conferences in Rio de Janeiro, Kyoto and Copenhagen, just as Catholic bishops flocked to councils in Constance, Ferrara and Trent, to codify dogma and set new rules.

But like the Millerites, the global warming clergy has preached apocalyptic doom -- and is now facing an increasingly skeptical public. The idea that we can be so completely certain of climate change 70 to 90 years hence that we must inflict serious economic damage on ourselves in the meantime seems increasingly absurd.

If carbon emissions were the only thing affecting climate, the global-warming alarmists would be right. But it's obvious that climate is affected by many things, many not yet fully understood, and implausible that SUVs will affect it more than variations in the enormous energy produced by the sun.

Skepticism has been increased by the actions of believers. Passage of the House cap-and-trade bill in June 2009 focused politicians and voters on the costs of global-warming religion. And disclosure of the Climategate emails in November 2009 showed how the clerisy was willing to distort evidence and suppress dissenting views in the interest of propagation of the faith.

We have seen how the United Nations agency whose authority we are supposed to respect took an item from an environmental activist group predicting that the Himalayan glaciers would melt in 2350 and predicted that the melting would take place in 2035. No sensible society would stake its economic future on the word of folks capable of such an error.

In recent years, we have seen how negative to 2 percent growth hurts many, many people, as compared to what happens with 3 to 7 percent growth. So we're much less willing to adopt policies that will slow down growth not just for a few years but for the indefinite future.

Media, university and corporate elites still profess belief in global warming alarmism, but moves toward policies limiting carbon emissions have fizzled out, here and abroad. It looks like we'll dodge the fate of the Millerites, the children's crusaders and the Mahdi's cavalrymen.

posted October 27, 2011 04:54 PM            

quote:

---

Originally posted by Randall:
Global temperatures are falling

---

So should I jump on the old "ice age cometh" bandwagon?

quote:

---

Green activists should be happy to see CO2 levels rise, because it is indicative of a lush green planet teeming with plant life.

---

And thank the lord we still have a "lush, green planet", eh?

I miss the 70s when we all concentrated on simple things like pollution.

posted October 28, 2011 06:15 PM            

and those big ones recently have messed up the earth's gravitational field too. so maybe we are arguing about the wrong thing?

i would like my grandchildren to know what REAL food and water and air are, to be able to SWIM in the oceans and rivers not just look at them, and if they have to take a hit in the "lifestyle advances" stakes that would be okay too. unless technology is going to improve our lives beyond a zillion cheap toys piled in the corner and excess food for the underprivilege millions (that may make them extinct) who needs it?

posted October 30, 2011 06:33 PM            

Skeptic finds he now agrees global warming is real

WASHINGTON (AP) — A prominent physicist and skeptic of global warming spent two years trying to find out if mainstream climate scientists were wrong. In the end, he determined they were right: Temperatures really are rising rapidly.

The study of the world's surface temperatures by Richard Muller was partially bankrolled by a foundation connected to global warming deniers. He pursued long-held skeptic theories in analyzing the data. He was spurred to action because of "Climategate," a British scandal involving hacked emails of scientists.

Yet he found that the land is 1.6 degrees Fahrenheit (1 degree Celsius) warmer than in the 1950s. Those numbers from Muller, who works at the University of California, Berkeley, and Lawrence Berkeley National Lab, match those by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and NASA.

He said he went even further back, studying readings from Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Jefferson. His ultimate finding of a warming world, to be presented at a conference Monday, is no different from what mainstream climate scientists have been saying for decades.

What's different, and why everyone from opinion columnists to cable TV 's satirical "The Daily Show" is paying attention is who is behind the study.

One-quarter of the $600,000 to do the research came from the Charles Koch Foundation, whose founder is a major funder of skeptic groups and the conservative tea party movement. The Koch brothers, Charles and David, run a large privately held company involved in oil and other industries, producing sizable greenhouse gas emissions.

Muller's research team carefully examined two chief criticisms by skeptics. One is that weather stations are unreliable; the other is that cities, which create heat islands, were skewing the temperature analysis.

"The skeptics raised valid points and everybody should have been a skeptic two years ago," Muller said in a telephone interview. "And now we have confidence that the temperature rise that had previously been reported had been done without bias."

Muller said that he came into the study "with a proper skepticism," something scientists "should always have. I was somewhat bothered by the fact that there was not enough skepticism" before.

There is no reason now to be a skeptic about steadily increasing temperatures, Muller wrote recently in The Wall Street Journal's editorial pages, a place friendly to climate change skeptics. Muller did not address in his research the cause of global warming. The overwhelming majority of climate scientists say it's man-made from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal and oil. Nor did his study look at ocean warming, future warming and how much of a threat to mankind climate change might be.

Still, Muller said it makes sense to reduce the carbon dioxide created by fossil fuels.

"Greenhouse gases could have a disastrous impact on the world," he said. Still, he contends that threat is not as proven as the Nobel Prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says it is.

On Monday, Muller was taking his results — four separate papers that are not yet published or peer-reviewed, but will be, he says — to a conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, expected to include many prominent skeptics as well as mainstream scientists.

"Of course he'll be welcome," said Petr Chylek of Los Alamos National Lab, a noted skeptic and the conference organizer. "The purpose of our conference is to bring people with different views on climate together, so they can talk and clarify things."

Shawn Lawrence Otto, author of the book "Fool Me Twice" that criticizes science skeptics, said Muller should expect to be harshly treated by global warming deniers. "Now he's considered a traitor. For the skeptic community, this isn't about data or fact. It's about team sports. He's been traded to the Indians. He's playing for the wrong team now."

And that started on Sunday, when a British newspaper said one of Muller's co-authors, Georgia Tech climate scientist Judith Curry, accused Muller of another Climategate-like scandal and trying to "hide the decline" of recent global temperatures.

The Associated Press contacted Curry on Sunday afternoon and she said in an email that Muller and colleagues "are not hiding any data or otherwise engaging in any scientifically questionable practice."

The Muller "results unambiguously show an increase in surface temperature since 1960," Curry wrote Sunday. She said she disagreed with Muller's public relations efforts and some public comments from Muller about there no longer being a need for skepticism.

Muller's study found that skeptics' concerns about poor weather station quality didn't skew the results of his analysis because temperature increases rose similarly in reliable and unreliable weather stations. He also found that while there is an urban heat island effect making cities warmer, rural areas, which are more abundant, are warming, too.

Among many climate scientists, the reaction was somewhat of a yawn.

"After lots of work he found exactly what was already known and accepted in the climate community," said Jerry North, a Texas A&M University atmospheric sciences professor who headed a National Academy of Sciences climate science review in 2006. "I am hoping their study will have a positive impact. But some folks will never change."

Chris Field, a Carnegie Institution scientist who is chief author of an upcoming intergovernmental climate change report, said Muller's study "may help the world's citizens focus less on whether climate change is real and more on smart options for addressing it."

Some of the most noted scientific skeptics are no longer saying the world isn't warming. Instead, they question how much of it is man-made, view it as less a threat and argue it's too expensive to do something about, Otto said.

Skeptical MIT scientist Richard Lindzen said it is a fact and nothing new that global average temperatures have been rising since 1950, as Muller shows. "It's hard to see how any serious scientist (skeptical, denier or believer — frequently depending on the exact question) will view it otherwise," he wrote in an email.

In a brief email statement, the Koch Foundation noted that Muller's team didn't examine ocean temperature or the cause of warming and said it will continue to fund such research. "The project is ongoing and entering peer review, and we're proud to support this strong, transparent research," said foundation spokeswoman Tonya Mullins.

___

Online:

The Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature site: http://www.berkeleyearth.org/index.php

posted October 30, 2011 11:57 PM            

As I have said many times here...warming ended in the late 1900s...about 1998 and has been flat-lining ever since.

Btw, going back to the Little Ice Age...the times of Washington, Jefferson and Madison to attempt comparison to today's temperature is just pure fraud. Of course temperatures have risen after the Little Ice Age ended in the mid 1800s. Just exactly what one would expect to happen. But most of the temperature increases since the end of the Little Ice Age occurred before 1940.

What the man made global warming religion is whining, sobbing, wheezing and shrieking about amounts to about 7/10s of 1 degree of warming. That's .7 degrees. .7 degrees doesn't even register on my Heat/AC thermostat.

Scientist who said climate change sceptics had been proved wrong accused of hiding truth by colleague
David Rose
Last updated at 6:11 PM on 30th

It was hailed as the scientific study that ended the global warming debate once and for all – the research that, in the words of its director, ‘proved you should not be a sceptic, at least not any longer’.
Professor Richard Muller, of Berkeley University in California, and his colleagues from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures project team (BEST) claimed to have shown that the planet has warmed by almost a degree centigrade since 1950 and is warming continually.

Published last week ahead of a major United Nations climate summit in Durban, South Africa, next month, their work was cited around the world as irrefutable evidence that only the most stringent measures to reduce carbon dioxide emissions can save civilisation as we know it.
Hot topic: The plight of polar bears captures the hearts of many, but are the ice caps still shrinking?

It was cited uncritically by, among others, reporters and commentators from the BBC, The Independent, The Guardian, The Economist and numerous media outlets in America.
The Washington Post said the BEST study had ‘settled the climate change debate’ and showed that anyone who remained a sceptic was committing a ‘cynical fraud’.

But today The Mail on Sunday can reveal that a leading member of Prof Muller’s team has accused him of trying to mislead the public by hiding the fact that BEST’s research shows global warming has stopped.
Prof Judith Curry, who chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology, said that Prof Muller’s claim that he has proven global warming sceptics wrong was also a ‘huge mistake’, with no scientific basis.

Prof Curry is a distinguished climate researcher with more than 30 years experience and the second named co-author of the BEST project’s four research papers.
Her comments, in an exclusive interview with The Mail on Sunday, seem certain to ignite a furious academic row. She said this affair had to be compared to the notorious ‘Climategate’ scandal two years ago.

Like the scientists exposed then by leaked emails from East Anglia University’s Climatic Research Unit, her colleagues from the BEST project seem to be trying to ‘hide the decline’ in rates of global warming.
In fact, Prof Curry said, the project’s research data show there has been no increase in world temperatures since the end of the Nineties – a fact confirmed by a new analysis that The Mail on Sunday has obtained.

‘There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,’ she said. ‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.’

However, Prof Muller denied warming was at a standstill.

‘We see no evidence of it [global warming] having slowed down,’ he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme. There was, he added, ‘no levelling off’.

A graph issued by the BEST project also suggests a continuing steep increase.
But a report to be published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation includes a graph of world average temperatures over the past ten years, drawn from the BEST project’s data and revealed on its website.

This graph shows that the trend of the last decade is absolutely flat, with no increase at all – though the levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have carried on rising relentlessly.

‘This is nowhere near what the climate models were predicting,’ Prof Curry said. ‘Whatever it is that’s going on here, it doesn’t look like it’s being dominated by CO2.’

Prof Muller also wrote an article for the Wall Street Journal. It was here, under the headline ‘The case against global warming scepticism’, that he proclaimed ‘there were good reasons for doubt until now’.

Media storm: Prof Muller's claims received uncritical coverage in the media this week
This, too, went around the world, with The Economist, among many others, stating there was now ‘little room for doubt’.
Such claims left Prof Curry horrified.

‘Of course this isn’t the end of scepticism,’ she said. ‘To say that is the biggest mistake he [Prof Muller] has made. When I saw he was saying that I just thought, “Oh my God”.’
In fact, she added, in the wake of the unexpected global warming standstill, many climate scientists who had previously rejected sceptics’ arguments were now taking them much more seriously.

They were finally addressing questions such as the influence of clouds, natural temperature cycles and solar radiation – as they should have done, she said, a long time ago.

Yesterday Prof Muller insisted that neither his claims that there has not been a standstill, nor the graph, were misleading because the project had made its raw data available on its website, enabling others to draw their own graphs.

However, he admitted it was true that the BEST data suggested that world temperatures have not risen for about 13 years. But in his view, this might not be ‘statistically significant’, although, he added, it was equally possible that it was – a statement which left other scientists mystified.

‘I am baffled as to what he’s trying to do,’ Prof Curry said.
Prof Ross McKittrick, a climate statistics expert from Guelph University in Ontario, added: ‘You don’t look for statistically significant evidence of a standstill.
‘You look for statistically significant evidence of change.’

The BEST project, which has been lavishly funded, brings together experts from different fields from top American universities.

It was set up 18 months ago in an effort to devise a new and more accurate way of computing changes in world temperatures by using readings from some 39,000 weather stations on land, instead of adding sea temperatures as well.

Some scientists, Prof Muller included, believe that this should provide a more accurate indication of how the world is responding to carbon dioxide.
The oceans, they argue, warm more slowly and this is why earlier global measurements which also cover the sea – such as those from the Climatic Research Unit at East Anglia University – have found no evidence of warming since the Nineties.

The usual way a high-profile project such as BEST would publish its results would be in a scientific journal, following a rigorous ‘peer review’ by other experts in the field.

The more eminent journals that publish climate research, such as Nature And Science, insist there must be no leaks to the media until this review is complete and if such leaks occur, they will automatically reject the research.

Earlier this year, the project completed four research papers.
As well as trends in world temperatures, they looked at the extent to which temperature readings can be distorted by urban ‘heat islands’ and the influence of long-term temperature cycles in the oceans. The papers were submitted to the Journal of Geophysical Research.
But although Prof Curry is the second named author of all four papers, Prof Muller failed to consult her before deciding to put them on the internet earlier this month, when the peer review process had barely started, and to issue a detailed press release at the same time.

He also briefed selected journalists individually. ‘It is not how I would have played it,’ Prof Curry said. ‘I was informed only when I got a group email. I think they have made errors and I distance myself from what they did.

‘It would have been smart to consult me.’ She said it was unfortunate that although the Journal of Geophysical Research had allowed Prof Muller to issue the papers, the reviewers were, under the journal’s policy, forbidden from public comment.
Prof McKittrick added: ‘The fact is that many of the people who are in a position to provide informed criticism of this work are currently bound by confidentiality agreements.

‘For the Berkeley team to have chosen this particular moment to launch a major international publicity blitz is a highly unethical sabotage of the peer review process.’

In Prof Curry’s view, two of the papers were not ready to be published, in part because they did not properly address the arguments of climate sceptics.

As for the graph disseminated to the media, she said: ‘This is “hide the decline” stuff. Our data show the pause, just as the other sets of data do. Muller is hiding the decline.

‘To say this is the end of scepticism is misleading, as is the statement that warming hasn’t paused. It is also misleading to say, as he has, that the issue of heat islands has been settled.’

Prof Muller said she was ‘out of the loop’. He added: ‘I wasn’t even sent the press release before it was issued.’

Prof Muller defended his behaviour yesterday, saying that all he was doing was ‘returning to traditional peer review’, issuing draft papers to give the whole ‘climate community’ a chance to comment.

As for the press release, he claimed he was ‘not seeking publicity’, adding: ‘This is simply a way of getting the media to report this more accurately.’

posted November 01, 2011 09:00 AM            

Not only are the conclusions by one of BEST'S authors a total lie; the reason for the release of the report...which isn't yet finished...is an even bigger lie.

Of course the release of this BEST report and the nitwit conclusions were timed to coincide with the IPCC schedule.

Where ever you look in the man made global warming religion, you find lies, scams, fraud, hucksters and utterly flawed science...in most cases, deliberately flawed science.

Lying, cheating climate scientists caught lying, cheating again
By James Delingpole
October 30th, 2011

Oh dear. I really didn't want my first blog post in a week to be yet another one about global bloody warming. Problem is, if those lying, cheating climate scientists will insist on going on lying and cheating what else can I do other than expose their lying and cheating?

The story so far: ten days ago a self-proclaimed "sceptical" climate scientist named Professor Richard Muller of Berkeley University, California, managed to grab himself some space in the Wall Street Journal (of all places) claiming that the case for global warming scepticism was over. Thanks to research from his Berkeley Earth Surface Temperatures (BEST) project, Professor Muller stated confidently, we now know that the planet has warmed by almost one degree centigrade since 1950. What's more, he told the BBC's Today programme, there is no sign that this global warming has slowed down.

Cue mass jubilation from a number of media outlets which, perhaps, ought to have known better – among them, the Independent, the Guardian, The Economist and Forbes magazine. To give you an idea of their self-righteous indignation at the supposed ignorance of climate change deniers, here is the Washington Post's Eugene Robinson in full spate:

"We know that the rise in temperatures over the past five decades is abrupt and very large. We know it is consistent with models developed by other climate researchers that posit greenhouse gas emissions — the burning of fossil fuels by humans — as the cause. And now we know, thanks to Muller, that those other scientists have been both careful and honorable in their work.

Nobody’s fudging the numbers. Nobody’s manipulating data to win research grants, as Perry claims, or making an undue fuss over a “naturally occurring” warm-up, as Bachmann alleges. Contrary to what Cain says, the science is real."

Problem is, Eugene, almost every word of those two paragraphs is plain wrong, and your smugness embarrassingly misplaced.

As you know, I had my doubts about Muller's findings from the start. I thought it was at best disingenuous of him to pose as a "sceptic" when there is little evidence of him ever having been one. As for his argument that the BEST project confounds sceptics by proving global warming exists – this was never more than a straw man.

Now, though, it seems that BEST is even worse than I thought. Here is what Muller claimed on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme:

"In our data, which is only on the land we see no evidence of [global warming] having slowed down."

But this simply isn't true. Heaven forfend that a distinguished professor from Berkeley University should actually have been caught out telling a lie direct. No, clearly what has happened here is that Professor Muller has made the kind of mistake any self-respecting climate scientist could make: gone to press with some extravagant claims without having a smidgen of evidence to support them.

Here, to help the good professor out, is a chart produced by the Global Warming Policy Foundation's David Whitehouse. It was plotted from BEST's own figures.

Note how the 10 year trend from 2001 to 2010 – in flat contradiction of Muller's claims – shows no warming whatsoever.

What's odd that BEST appears to have gone to great trouble – shades of "hide the decline", anyone? – to disguise this inconvenient truth. Here is a graph released by BEST:

The GWPF's David Whitehouse is not impressed:

Indeed Best seems to have worked hard to obscure it. They present data covering more almost 200 years is presented with a short x-axis and a stretched y-axis to accentuate the increase. The data is then smoothed using a ten year average which is ideally suited to removing the past five years of the past decade and mix the earlier standstill years with years when there was an increase. This is an ideal formula for suppressing the past decade’s data.

Muller's colleague Professor Judith Curry – who besides being a BEST co-author chairs the Department of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at America’s prestigious Georgia Institute of Technology – is even less impressed.

There is no scientific basis for saying that warming hasn’t stopped,’ she said. ‘To say that there is detracts from the credibility of the data, which is very unfortunate.’

posted November 01, 2011 05:54 PM            

Posted by Brad Plumerat 05:14 PM ET, 11/01/2011

From a purely scientific standpoint, it wasn’t terribly exciting to hear that a team of researchers based in UC Berkeley had taken a poke at the global temperature record and found that the Earth has indeed been heating up over the past century, just like NASA and other agencies have been saying all along.

Still, the leader of the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) team, Richard Muller, had been critical of climate scientists in the past, and his team had been partly funded by the Koch Foundation, so there was a man-bites-dog quality to the whole affair. “Even the doubters were getting on board,” etc. Not surprisingly, then, there’s been a lot of pushback from other climate skeptics who aren’t thrilled with the glowing coverage that Muller’s group is getting. Let’s go through a few of the responses so far:

1) “Muller’s not really a skeptic.”
A bunch of conservative bloggers have criticized me for calling Muller a climate skeptic. They note that Muller has said before that he believes carbon dioxide is warming the planet. So let’s define terms. The phrase “climate skeptic” has frequently been used to characterize people who disagree with the mainstream scientific consensus on climate change. That’s broad enough to include a lot of different views. Some scientists who are widely considered skeptics, like MIT’s Richard Lindzen, also agree that CO2 can warm the Earth but sharply disagree with the vast majority of climatologists on how big the effect is. That’s what makes Lindzen a skeptic.

The fact that Muller agrees that CO2 can warm the planet doesn’t mean he’s in line with the mainstream consensus — it just means that he agrees with elementary facts about the greenhouse effect. Indeed, it’d be odd if he didn’t. Muller has, however, expressed a lot of doubts that the temperature record was reliable, especially after the Climategate affair broke. He told Science magazine that he considers noted skeptics like Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre “heroes.” He’s savaged climate scientists like Michael Mann over the reliability of well-established paleoclimate records — earning him accolades from places like the Heritage Foundation. Muller may not be an outright denier like, oh, Rick Perry, but his past statements put him in the skeptic camp.

2) “The BEST studies don’t prove humans are warming the planet.”
This much is true. Just because the Earth has been warming in the 20th century doesn’t, in itself, prove that humans are to blame. Though as I detailed in this post (or check out the IPCC’s 2007 report), there’s ample evidence that increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases are the main driver of the 20th-century temperature rise — indeed, there isn’t any other theory that can explain why the Earth has heated up to the extent that it has. But, agreed, Muller’s team doesn’t provide evidence either way here.

3) “The BEST studies show that global warming has stopped.”
One of the BEST researchers, climatologist Judith Curry, has been criticizing Muller for telling reporters that “We see no evidence of [global warming] having slowed down.” And the Daily Mail drew up a much-cited graph showing that, according to the BEST data, global warming appears to have stalled between 2001 and 2010.

There are a couple of problems with this line of argument. For one, as the BEST team noted in its FAQ, it’s just too hard to draw conclusions about long-term trends by looking at periods of less than 15 years. In the very short term, temperatures can fluctuate a fair bit due to natural variability, as, say, heat gets temporarily transferred to deeper ocean layers. (See the diagram on the right via Skeptical Science, which is purely for illustrative purposes, for an example of how very short-term trends can be misleading).

But perhaps more to the point, the “flat trendline” in the BEST data seems to be a statistical artifact due to two faulty data points in April and May of 2010 that were highly uncertain and based on readings from just 47 temperature stations (by contrast, the March 2010 temperature was based on 14,488 stations). When you remove these two suspicious outliers, the BEST record shows a 0.14°C warming trend since 2001. And when you look at longer time periods, the upward trend is even more pronounced. There’s little here to suggest that global warming has somehow stopped.

Washington Post

posted November 23, 2011 08:08 AM            

Now, more emails between the scientific fraud conspirators have appeared and it's more of the same. Attempts to hide temperature data, attempts to show only information which bolsters their viewpoint...and hides the rest AND, the acknowledgment that a political spin is being put on what is supposed to be pure scientific research.

This is not the "scientific method" taught in universities all over the world. This is an utter corruption of science.

November 23, 2011
Climategate 2.0: More trouble for Mann et al
Rick Moran

The same group that brought us the email dump last year from the East Anglia Climate Research Center have done it again.

Through a few blogs, they have made public about 5000 more emails from the warming advocates - and the emails show they are more than scientists in this regard - that reveal more attempts to hide bad news, more attempts to discredit critics and skeptics, and more arrogant assumptions that have dubious scientific value.

Here are a few samples compiled by the Telegraph:

/// The IPCC Process ///

<1939> Thorne/MetO:

Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical
troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a
wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the
uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these
further if necessary [...]

<3066> Thorne:

I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it
which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run.

<1611> Carter:

It seems that a few people have a very strong say, and no matter how much
talking goes on beforehand, the big decisions are made at the eleventh hour by
a select core group.

<2884> Wigley:

Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive [...] there have been a number of
dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC [...]

<4755> Overpeck:

The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what's
included and what is left out.

posted November 25, 2011 08:30 AM            

Your arguments...and those of the morons you choose to quote on most subjects are off point, fuzzy, obtuse and lacking in merit.

We've got the emails again acoustic and they confirm what I and Randall have been saying about the man made global warming nuts and their "political agenda".

Climategate 2.0: New E-Mails Rock The Global Warming Debate
11/23/2011
James Taylor

A new batch of 5,000 emails among scientists central to the assertion that humans are causing a global warming crisis were anonymously released to the public yesterday, igniting a new firestorm of controversy nearly two years to the day after similar emails ignited the Climategate scandal.

Three themes are emerging from the newly released emails: (1) prominent scientists central to the global warming debate are taking measures to conceal rather than disseminate underlying data and discussions; (2) these scientists view global warming as a political “cause” rather than a balanced scientific inquiry and (3) many of these scientists frankly admit to each other that much of the science is weak and dependent on deliberate manipulation of facts and data.

Regarding scientific transparency, a defining characteristic of science is the open sharing of scientific data, theories and procedures so that independent parties, and especially skeptics of a particular theory or hypothesis, can replicate and validate asserted experiments or observations. Emails between Climategate scientists, however, show a concerted effort to hide rather than disseminate underlying evidence and procedures.

“I’ve been told that IPCC is above national FOI [Freedom of Information] Acts. One way to cover yourself and all those working in AR5 would be to delete all emails at the end of the process,”writes Phil Jones, a scientist working with the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), in a newly released email.

“I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose” skeptical scientist Steve McIntyre, Mann writes in another newly released email.

These new emails add weight to Climategate 1.0 emails revealing efforts to politicize the scientific debate. For example, Tom Wigley, a scientist at the University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, authored a Climategate 1.0 email asserting that his fellow Climategate scientists “must get rid of” the editor for a peer-reviewed science journal because he published some papers contradicting assertions of a global warming crisis.

More than revealing misconduct and improper motives, the newly released emails additionally reveal frank admissions of the scientific shortcomings of global warming assertions.

“Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others. This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest. Phil, hopefully we can find time to discuss these further if necessary,” writes Peter Thorne of the UK Met Office.

“I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run,” Thorne adds.

“Mike, The Figure you sent is very deceptive … there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC,” Wigley acknowledges.

posted November 25, 2011 12:26 PM            

quote:

---

Who cares what you've previously mentioned here acoustic?

---

Apparently you and Randall.

quote:

---

Your arguments...and those of the morons you choose to quote on most subjects are off point, fuzzy, obtuse and lacking in merit.

---

Nope. As always mine are from the scientific community. The Berkeley project was run by physicists. They took the sceptics arguments into account, and still produced near identical results as those previously established...even after adding thousands of weather station's data.

quote:

---

We've got the emails again acoustic and they confirm what I and Randall have been saying about the man made global warming nuts and their "political agenda".

---

posted November 25, 2011 02:22 PM            

I'm not certain you can think.

As for your phony baloney fraud and con artists in the man made global warming religion, they've polluted science for a political and financial agenda; not advanced science in any way.

Those emails confirm the con artists of the man made global warming religion KNOW the reports they're putting out and the conclusions they've drawn are not supported by science.