BBC: Greenpeace Leader Gerd Leipold Admits Arctic Ice "Mistake"

We have seen recently that one of the errors made by the IPCC was that the Himalayian glaciers would melt by 2035. They based this on heresay and have now admitted their error. I stumbled across the then outgoing Greenpeace leader, Gerd Leipold, trying to spin a similar story about the artic ice melting by 2030. When pressed he eventually admits it is BS and that he was spinning the story as an activist. Gerd also clames in the video to be a climate scientist. These are the "scientists" we are to trust? Not bloody likely. I recommend this video if you want to see a lie exposed on camera. It is most entertaining.

Greenpeace had said in a July 15 2009 press release that there will be an ice-free Arctic by 2030 because of global warming. BBC reporter Stephen Sackur on “Hardtalk” pressed Leipold until he admitted the claim was wrong.



H/t to Frugal Cafe

ALERT: The Arctic is Melting! in November 1922

We hear often on the tube and read in the press that we need to worry about the weather because man made global warming is causing “unprecedented” changes such as melting ice in the arctic. I have written before here and here about precedents in the 20th and even 19th centuries where scientists were worried about global cooling, warming, cooling and back to warming again and each time the global thermometer swung down or up and the doomsdayers were predicting ... well, doomsday.

From WUWT and getting a lot of main stream press at the moment in the USA is a copy of an article (below) on the melting ice in the arctic. Only problem is that the article is from the Monthly Weather Review dated November, 1922.

The melting was extensive enough that tours were organised for the wealthy to see this “unprecedented” event.

There are thousands of examples of this if you care to look and I will be posting a few more for your entertainment. It is interesting that you could change the date on that article to 2009 and no one would bat an eyelid. Let’s dispense with this unscientific misstatement of the facts that the current climate is “unprecedented”. It is an “argument” used either by fools or liars when the scientific evidence is that such events are not unprecedented. We’ve seen this nonsense being promulgated with respect to droughts and heat waves here in Australia, with respect to shipping through the arctic and with respect to hurricanes and flooding as if this is somehow unusual. If you think it is unusual please do the gene pool a favour and abstain from having children.

UK MET Director Pawned in BBC Interview

This is a link to a BBC program absolutely slamming the head of the MET in the UK. The so called climatologist is ridiculed in the interview. I was surprised by the video for three reasons:

1. It was the climate doomsdayist BBC that showed it! Even the BBC seems to be jumping ship or at least entertaining the idea of a smidgen of balance.
2. The MET director is being held accountable for past alarmist predictions that were inaccurate – this is a first for main stream media such as the BBC.
3. The interview was brutal without the kid gloves and free rein normally given to alarmists.

The MET director then changed tack and lied about the MET predictions saying that he had predicted cooling when of course the only “prediction” the MET made of any cooling was after the snow started to fall. It seemed to this observer that the TV host knew more about the weather than the director of the MET! It would be a good thing if alarmist climatologists responsible for the massive misallocation of community resources were held responsible and purged from the climate industry populated by politicians and scientists expert in dodgy excel spreadsheets and leave the field to the boring, less glamorous but more valuable qualified practitioners of the good old scientific method.

Hide the Decline Revisited

"I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temp[erature]s to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) a[n]d from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline."

Prof Phil Jones (Director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) who has now stepped aside under investigation)

To investigate easily the actual text of the Climategate emails I recommend a site set up by Dr John Costella. He has set up the site with commentary to put emails into perspective for the uninitiated and all is linked to a data base containing all emails and computer code. Sure you can download all the files yourself but they can be difficult and time consuming to read. Set out cleanly on the web site it is a breeze to navigate.

Metastatistics on the Climategate emails - number of times words appear:

•Fraud: 79
•Falsify: 6
•Inflate: 14
•Conceal: 5
•Hide: 19

From: Phil Jones To: "Michael E. Mann" , "raymond s. bradley"
Subject: A couple of things
Date: Fri May 9 09:53:41 2008
Cc: "Caspar Ammann"

....

2. You can delete this attachment if you want. Keep this quiet also, but this is the person who is putting in FOI requests for all emails Keith and Tim have written and received re Ch 6 of AR4. We think we've found a way around this.

And then there's this...

From: Phil Jones To: "Michael E. Mann"
Subject: IPCC & FOI
Date: Thu May 29 11:04:11 2008

Mike,

Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise. He's not in at the moment - minor family crisis.

Can you also email Gene and get him to do the same? I don't have his new email address.

We will be getting Caspar to do likewise.

I see that CA claim they discovered the 1945 problem in the Nature paper!!
Cheers
Phil

Click the Read more link below for the full post.

Don’t fall for the MSM trick of trying to say the emails are harmless or insignificant or for Al Gore’s “misstatement” that they are ten years old. These emails discuss amongst other things, alteration of scientific data, and illegal deletion of data to avoid FOI demands. The most recent emails are dated October 2009. Just for a taste let us look at the notorious statement by Prof Phil Jones above on Dr Costella’s site. Commentary is by Dr Costella. Remember these people produced the data and graphs that fed straight into the IPCC reports. The IPCC was aware of what was going on or at least that there was a problem with the data because they wanted it fixed.

“September 22, 1999: email 0938018124

...In other words, tree rings had been proved to be completely unreliable thermometers.

It is with this scandal in mind that Keith Briffa writes to writes to Mike Mann, Phil Jones, Tom Karl, and Chris Folland, expression severe reservations about their contribution to the next Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, at that time in the revision stages:

“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the [temperature] proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. We don’t have a lot of [temperature] proxies that come right up to [today] and those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies) [have] some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming. I do not think it wise that this issue be ignored in the chapter.”

That is an understatement! Indeed, Briffa states his key opinion even more clearly:

“I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.”

This is a remarkable statement, which undermines the entire argument propounded by Briffa and his colleagues that global warming was “unprecedented”.

Mike Mann responds to this catastrophic development:

“[I w]alked into this hornet’s nest this morning! Keith and Phil [Jones] have both raised some very good points. And I should point out that Chris [Folland], through no fault of his own, but probably through me not conveying my thoughts very clearly to the others, definitely overstates any singular confidence I have in my own (Mann [and coworkers]) [results].”

In other words, Mann has no confidence in his own results!

Mann now engineers what became the infamous “green graph”—the green tree-ring line in the graph in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report that mysteriously passes behind the other lines at the year 1961—and never emerges on the other side. First, he needs to fiddle the data, to make sure that the lines all cross at right place:

“I am perfectly amenable to keeping Keith’s series in the [graph], and can ask Ian Macadam (Chris?) to add it to the [graph] he has been preparing (nobody liked my own color [and] [graph]ing conventions so I’ve given up doing this myself). The key thing is making sure the [lines] are vertically aligned in a reasonable way. I had been using the entire 20th century, but in the case of Keith’s, we need to align the first half of the 20th century w[ith] the corresponding [average] values of the other [lines], due to the late 20th century decline.”

Satisfied with that solution, he then turns to the problem of that bothersome “late 20th century decline”:

“So if Chris and Tom (?) are ok with this, I would be happy to add Keith’s [line] [to the graph]. That having been said, it does raise a conundrum: We demonstrate […] that the major discrepancies between Phil’s and our [line] can be explained in terms of [statistical excuses]. But that explanation certainly can’t rectify why Keith’s [data], which has similar [properties] to Phil’s [data], differs in large part in exactly the opposite direction that Phil’s does from ours. This is the problem we all picked up on[—]everyone in the room at [the] I[ntergovernmental] P[anel on] C[limate] C[hange] was in agreement that this was a problem and a potential distraction/detraction from the reasonably con[s]ensus viewpoint we’d like to show w[ith] the Jones [and coworkers] and Mann [and coworkers] [results].”

In other words, there was no consensus at all at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change—other than the participants’ universal agreement that there was a problem. Mann is here telling us, in his own words, that there was an agenda to present a “consensus viewpoint”, that simply didn’t exist in reality.

Mann now buries himself, by explaining what they should have done:

“So, if we show Keith’s [line] in this plot, we have to comment that “something else” is responsible for the discrepancies in this case. Perhaps Keith can help us out a bit by explaining the processing that went into the [data] and the potential factors that might lead to it being “warmer” than the Jones [and coworkers] and Mann [and coworkers] series? We would need to put in a few words in this regard. Otherwise, the skeptics [would] have a[] field day casting doubt on our ability to understand the factors that influence these estimates and, thus, can undermine faith in the []estimates [from paleological data]. I don’t think that doubt is scientifically justified, and I’d hate to be the one to have to give it fodder!”

In other words, Mann believes that all the lines should agree, but the actual data says otherwise; and he is loathe to give that “fodder” to the critics. He tries to pressure Briffa to come up with excuses why his data might not agree with the others.

Of course, we know that, ultimately, he gave up on this impossible task, and the troublesome “decline” was removed by an amazing technique, heretofore unknown in the history of science: white-out!

November 16, 1999: email 0942777075

That background now paves the way to our understanding the historic email that generations of schoolchildren to come will study as the catchphrase of the greatest scientific fraud in the history of mankind:

Phil Jones to Ray Bradley, Mike Mann, Malcolm Hughes, Keith Briffa, and Tim Osborn, regarding a diagram for a World Meteorological Organization Statement:

“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temp[erature]s to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) a[n]d from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Those thirty-three words summarize the hoax so magnificently succinctly that the Nobel Committee should consider retrieving their Peace Prize from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and Al Gore, and re-issuing it as a Literature Prize to Phil Jones.

This email was sent less than two months after the one analyzed above. Clearly, Mike Mann’s problems with Keith Briffa’s data—that it didn’t agree with the real temperature measurements from 1961 onwards—had by this time spread to the data for the other “temperature proxies”, albeit only from 1981 onwards. Jones reveals that Mann did not address this problem by making honest note of it in the paper that he and his co-authors pubished in Nature, but rather by fraudulently substituting the real temperature data into the graphs, for the past twenty or forty years as required.
That Mann did so would, in and of itself, disqualify him and all of his research from any future consideration in the annals of science; but here we have the other leader of the field, Phil Jones, bragging that he admired the “trick” so much that he adopted it himself. Moreover, his email was sent to the major players who dominated this field. It is the silence of these conspirators over the intervening decade that has forever damned the field of “climate science” to a state of irreversible ignominy...”

Now that you have read and understood that, go to another very thorough analysis of these few emails (there are a thousand more to deal with in total) found here by Steve McIntyre.

I hope you enjoy Dr Costella’s resource as much as I have as well as Steve McIntyre's analysis. Steve was aware of this problem well before the Climategate emails came to light and wrote tot he IPCC asking them to correct it - they did not of course correct it. Just out of interest is there anyone that would trust any reports or "consensus science" that these “scientists” produce? If so please contact me I some expired options I need to dump.

Post of the Week

Derek D over at WUWT made a good post putting earth's climate and our observation records into perspective. It is one of the best posts I have seen regarding data and climatology.

"The earth has major geologic events every 50-100 million years. It has a 100,000 year orbital precess in which the both the radius from the sun and axial tilt go from a maximum to a minimum. This causes ice ages and interglacials on a 20,000/80,000 year cycle. Within this time there are 800-1000 year warming and cooling cycles where temperature and CO2 levels rise and fall in oscillating intervals. The deep Atlantic ocean currents oscillate in multidecadal cycles while the Pacific oscillates on decade cycles. Typical sunspot cycles run ~11 years, El Ninos and La Ninas happen in ~4 year cycles, and cloud formation changes randomly by the minute. This in addition to the fact that the sun, our main energy input, goes through internal energy cycles that we cannot fully predict. To think that 100 years of sketchy temperature station data is going to lead to an accurate composite prediction of future climate and temperatures within fractions of a degree is pure foolishness. The complex and differential forces acting on the earth in different timescales deserve more than just an extrapolated straight line. Its an insult to our intelligence no matter what the conclusion.

Much ado about nothing."

Click the read more link for the full post.

***************************************

Derek D (18:57:49) :

john (16:52), I’ll explain. All statistics are junk science. They are laden with human assumption and never represent facts. Statistics are not needed to calculate the speed of an object in motion, determine if a building will stand, or tell you what you see in a microscope. That is science. Observation, measurement, mechanisms and reproducibility. What you’re seeing is the opposite and that is the precise reason why you question it.

What constitutes “the data” here is a choppy dataset from a hodge podge of weather stations, arranged in disproportionate number around the coasts of a continent the size of the US. A dozen different people have come along and applied their own unique set of assumptions to massage the data in a manner that they are sure is the ‘right’ way. And be they alarmists or skeptics each will claim the high ground, and a scientific ‘truth’ thus hinges on who can massage better or scream louder. Many have already pointed out that Eschenbach’s assertions about the proximity of other weather stations are embarrassingly and verifiably wrong, but the whole exercise ceased to be scientific long before that.

The earth has major geologic events every 50-100 million years. It has a 100,000 year orbital precess in which the both the radius from the sun and axial tilt go from a maximum to a minimum. This causes ice ages and interglacials on a 20,000/80,000 year cycle. Within this time there are 800-1000 year warming and cooling cycles where temperature and CO2 levels rise and fall in oscillating intervals. The deep Atlantic ocean currents oscillate in multidecadal cycles while the Pacific oscillates on decade cycles. Typical sunspot cycles run ~11 years, El Ninos and La Ninas happen in ~4 year cycles, and cloud formation changes randomly by the minute. This in addition to the fact that the sun, our main energy input, goes through internal energy cycles that we cannot fully predict. To think that 100 years of sketchy temperature station data is going to lead to an accurate composite prediction of future climate and temperatures within fractions of a degree is pure foolishness. The complex and differential forces acting on the earth in different timescales deserve more than just an extrapolated straight line. Its an insult to our intelligence no matter what the conclusion.

Much ado about nothing.

RAW v ADJUSTED GHCN Data

Those of you following the Smoking Gun at Darwin Zero post (from Watts Up With That web site) I made yesterday will have already noted that it is essential in order to scrutinise the data feeding into the IPCC and CRU climate models that we have access to the raw data, the adjustments to that raw data, and the reasons for the adjustments which I will assume have been documented in a professional and reproducible manner as all good scientists would do without question. We hear climate alarmists saying that yes the Climategate scientists at the CRU destroyed emails, and hid from Freedom of information Acts, messed with proxies, and fought to keep other scientists’ papers out of the journals … but that doesn’t affect the data, the data is still good. Well Willis Esenbach’s research shown over on Watts Up With That casts serious doubt on that belief.

Just out of interest I decided to plot the raw temperature data for my home city of Brisbane, Australia from the GISS (ie the raw GHCN data) against the homogenized or adjusted GISS GHCN data. The temperature sensor is located at the Brisbane Eagle Farm Airport which is now our busy main international airport. The data used is the series available from 1950 to 2008. I have animated the result to highlight the difference.

As you can see the raw data shows a downward trend of about -0.6 C per century. The adjusted data however shows an opposite trend of +0.6 C per century. Intuitively as the airport grew from a quiet strip to a busy international jet airport one would think the more recent data would be adjusted downwards for the heat island effect. Instead we see that the data prior to 1978 is adjusted down and the data in recent times was adjusted up. This is why it is essential that the relevant scientists disclose the reasons for each adjustment - the entire warming trend in the Brisbane data is due to the adjustments as the raw data clearly shows a cooling trend. Without being able to check the veracity of the adjustments used the trend cannot be relied upon. Our default position must be that until all data is made available to other scientists to scrutinize and test the data temperature data used to derive the graphs and models used by the IPCC is not to be relied upon for climate modeling or policy making. Now that the cat is out of the bag failure by the data keepers to disclose this data is in direct contravention to UN scientific procedures and indicates that the data has not been dealt with either in a competent or an honest manner.

Below are the individual plots of the Brisbane temperature anomaly used to construct the animation appearing above. All data was downloaded from the GISS website on 9 Dec 2009.

Darwin Temperature Data Adjustments

Jo Nova writes,

“If Darwin had some freak local conditions, then we would expect to see the raw data in graphs from other top-end towns as trending much higher. Here are the graphs for Wyndham, Derby, Halls Creek and Broome. The graphs are from WA Climate Net, an excellent data set. Direct, Broome is 1100 km from Darwin, or 690 miles. (By road, it’s 1876 km from Darwin). (Thanks to MapCrow for the distances). I thought I would post these graphs to give people a rough idea of the historical warming across the far tropical north of Australia.”

Jo Nova has quickly released her analysis of Willis Echenbach’s scoop on unexplained adjustments made to the historical temperature data for a key data set used by the IPCC to produce a warming trend. Read the details and examine the data plots on Jo Nova’s website as it raises some very interesting questions about the integrity of data and how it is “processed.” This could be settled very quickly if the IPCC and CRU released its data explaining the justifications to the actual temperature measurements recorded in Darwin over the last century. Somehow I think that we will have a very long wait.

The Smoking Gun At Darwin Zero by Willis Eschenbach

An interesting piece of work has been posted over on the Whats Up With That site with respect to adjustments made to Darwin data by GISS which was used vy the CRU and the IPCC. For the link to the article and my comments thereon please click Read More below. This article is absolutely essential reading and its importance cannot be overstated! Please read it carefully.

The link to the original article and comments is found here. My comments on this article follow.

The lack of transparency is the problem. The adjustments should be completely disclosed for all stations including reasons for those adjustments. You have to be careful drawing conclusions without knowing why the adjustments were made. It certainly looks suspicious. In Torok, S. and Nicholls, N., 1996, An historical temperature record for Australia. Aust. Met. Mag. 45, 251-260 which I think was the first paper developing a “High Quality” (not sure that is how I would personally describe it given the Australian data and station history but moving along…) one example of adjustments is given for 224 stations used in that paper and they are for Mildura. The adjustments and reasons (see p.257):

<1989 -0.6 Move to higher, clearer ground

<1946 -0.9 Move from Post Office to Airport

<1939 +0.4 New screen

<1930 +0.3 Move from park to Post Office

1943 +1.0 Pile of dirt near screen during construction of air-raid shelter

1903 +1.5 Temporary site one mile east

1902 -1.0 Problems with shelter

1901 -0.5 Problems with shelter

1900 -0.5 Problems with shelter

1892 +1.0 Temporary site

1890 -1.0 Detect

“Detect” refers to use of the Detect program (see paper). The “<” symbol indicates that the adjustment was made to all years prior to the indicated year. The above gives an idea of the type of adjustments used in that paper and the number of adjustments made to data. For the 224 candidate stations 2,812 adjustments were made in total. A couple of points, the adjustments are subjective by their very nature. Use of overlapping multi station data can assist. I have concerns about the size of the errors these multiple adjustments introduce but I am certainly no expert. I wonder what the error bar is on the final plot when we are talking of average warming in the tenths of a degree C over a century. The stations really never were designed to provide the data that it is being used for but that is well known. My point is without the detailed station metadata it might be too early to draw a conclusion. This is why we need to know what were the adjustments made to each station and the reasons. Surely this data exists (if it doesn’t then the entire adjusted data series is useless as it can’t be scrutinised by other scientists – maybe they did a CRU with it!?) and if they do why are they not made public or at the very least made available to researchers. Have the data keepers been asked for this? I am assuming they have.

Since writing that I see that the IPCC adjusted their data from a -0.7C downward trend per century for Darwin to +6C upward trend per century! There could be no possible reasonable explanation for such an "adjustment". It will be very interesting to see what detailed examinations of other IPCC data reveal.