Global warming

From this week's New Scientist:

Last week the Times Atlas announced that "For the first time, the new edition… has had to erase 15 per cent of Greenland's once permanent ice cover. This is concrete evidence of how climate change is altering the face of the planet forever.”

Glaciologists cried foul, saying the ice is definitely receding, but the 15 per cent figure is wildly inaccurate.

If what The Times Atlas has said were true, something like a metre of sea level rise would have occurred in the past decade. In fact, Greenland has contributed roughly 3 millimetres to sea level in that time.

So what went wrong? The Times Atlas team say they mapped the ice sheet from ice thickness data on the National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) in Boulder, Colorado website. But NSIDC says its scientists were not consulted. The data are complex and thickness maps are not intended to show the edge of the ice sheet, so it is possible the cartographers misinterpreted the data.

It is interesting how various media sources handled this piece of information. The Daily Mail assured us that the whole publication would have to be pulped, whereas the BBC passed it off as a trivial error with only the statement having to be withdrawn. The truth is somewhere in between. Publisher Harper Collins apologised for not consulting scientists and retracted the 15 per cent figure, but stood by its map, for now. A spokesperson said it may be modified in annual reprints.

No Pressure

I thought I ought to comment on Scattergate, or "No Pressure" the 10:10 promotional film produced by Richard Curtis to support the concept of global warming. Click on the link to watch the video though I do warn you that many will find it offensive.

10:10 is a charity that has attracted financial support from the British Government, O2 and Sony and has other corporate sponsors. None of the sponsors had editorial control over the video. 10:10 is suggesting that everybody should reduce his carbon footprint by 10%.

Having seen the video which was described as 'ironic' 10:10 has taken it down because some supporters felt it was offensive, and they have issued a sort of apology.

For myself, I think it was an honest attempt by Richard Curtis and his friends to state quite clearly that the eco-warriors are climate fascists. Curtis and his chums are subversives. Their output - Backadder, Four Weddings and Funeral, Notting Hill and The Boat that Rocked are all subversive. This is what they do. They took the money and made a film telling the world that Climate warmers are authoritarian blackguards. But they did it is an 'ironic' way so that everyone would get the joke except the blowhards themselves.

Insults.

Best insult for a man who believed in anthropogenic global warming:

Bet he wears wellies marked 'L' and 'R' .


Markfour in The Independent

Lack of Candour

There have now been three reports to try and exonerate the CRU from scientific dishonesty. That they have failed to do so is apparent from today's New Scientist. Hitherto this has been a strong supporter of anthropogenic global warming, but their comment today "Without candour, we can't trust climate science" demonstrates just how much damage has been done to the AGW cause.

Climate Change Profits

I came across these pictures of Al Gore's new mansion.



It seems as though all this climate change hoo-haa is very profitable.

And no. Those are not energy-saving lightbulbs, but they are all switched on.

More on crashing in ash

My son, David, the Formula 1 engineer is stuck in China following the Grand Prix in Shanghai. Theoretically, he won't be home until May 2nd. Meantime, as I predicted yesterday, questions are being asked about the over reaction of the aviation authorities. From today's Telegraph:

Giovanni Bisignani, director-general, the International Air Transport Association, the airlines' trade body was scathing about the European response to the ash cloud.

"This is a European embarrassment and it's a European mess,” he told the BBC Radio 4 Today programme. It took five days to organise a conference call with the ministers of transport. Europeans are still using a system that's based on a theoretical model, instead of taking a decision based on facts and risk assessment. This decision (to close airspace) has to be based on facts and supported by risk assessment. We need to replace this blanket approach with a practical approach."

European air control authorities have admitted that they have interpreted international guidelines “more rigorously” than US.

“I do not think that Europe needs to be stricter than a country such as America, where you have a lot of volcanoes erupting. Those people have a lot of experience and do not close the whole airspace,” Camiel Eurlings, the Dutch transport minister, admitted. If remain on the present source, then I predict we remain in this misery for a very long time. That will not help travellers or the air sector and it is probably not necessary.”

On Sunday Willie Walsh, BA’s chief executive, joined four crew in a test flight from London to Cardiff. The flight, which took the aircraft out over the Atlantic Ocean, lasted two hours and 46 minutes with flying conditions described as “perfect”. Engineers at the airline are studying the effects of the flight on engines before concluding whether it is safe to fly or not. A BA spokesman said: “We would not be doing this if we did not think it was safe and didn’t have the necessary permission. We would not do anything which would jeopardise our crew or aircraft.”

Lufthansa also flew 10 aircraft from Munich to Frankfurt on Saturday with the blessing of the safety authorities. A spokesman said: “We found no damage to the engines, fuselage or cockpit windows. This is why we are urging the aviation authorities to run more test flights rather than relying on computer models.”

Ulrich Schulte-Strathaus, the Secretary General of the Association of European Airlines, said: “Verification flights undertaken by several of our airlines have revealed no irregularities at all; this confirms our requirement that other options should be deployed to determine genuine risk”.

For my son, this will all be a bit of an adventure, but we shouldn't be blind to the difficulties that the flight ban is causing. This from today's Times:

A British toddler was in a critical condition last night after bone marrow needed for a transplant was held back in Canada. She was one of 16 patients said to be in “critical need” because of the lack of bone marrow supplies.

The International Civil Aviation Authority said that the disruption was worse than that caused by the shutdown of air travel after 9/11. Airlines are reported to be losing at least $200 million (£130 million) a day.

Added later:

My son has a friend at BA who sold him his chocolate Labrador. She has managed to get him on a flight to Los Angeles and thence to London. He should be home at the weekend.

Ash in the sky

Just how reliable are the warnings that flying is dangerous because of the black cloud from Iceland? I read this in today's Independent on Sunday:

"KLM, the Dutch subsidiary of Air France, says it has flown a plane through the cloud of volcanic ash covering Europe without suffering any damage. KLM carried out a test flight above Dutch air space yesterday. It says initial inspections afterward showed no damage or irregularities from the ash in the air that has led to a ban on air travel over much of Europe since Friday."

Bloggers have suggested that the ban might be an over-reaction from discredited meteorologists.

I picked up this from one of them:

"Today I made a flight over Europe with a twin engine plane, not a jet but a twin prop. Before take off I replaced the air filters and sprayed them with oil to be sure any particle would stick. I don’t tell you from which airport I departed but I flew over the eastern parts of the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg, France, Germany, Switzerland, Austria, and Germany, no traffic, no worries. The flight levels were between 2500 and 18000 ft. I flew under VFR conditions during the entire flight without any problems.

When I returned I took out the air filters, put them in a plastic bag and send them to a friend of mine for analysis. Yes, I am sure I scooped up some particles but I have seen much worse with Sahara dust clogged filters in the past!"

However, a light plane crashed a few miles north of here at 5.20 pm yesterday and two people were killed. I hear from friends at church that the pilot was Richard Wheeler, a member at Christ Church Westbourne, returning from Spring Harvest. An unconfirmed rumor suggests that the passenger was a local surgeon, a member of the same church. There is only one report so far, picked up by the BBC and the Guardian and no more details are given. It was thought that the volcano had nothing to do with it, but we must wait for a report from Air Accident Investigators.

Added later: It is confirmed. The passenger in the plane was Shorland Hosking, a surgeon from Poole. He had once been a member of my church, and I knew him.

Scientific Fraud

It is nearly thirty years ago that I wrote a piece for the Christmas edition of the British Medical Journal, entitled Fake! In it I detailed some well known fakes, frauds and mistakes made by scientists and doctors. Among them were the misconception that spinach was a good source of iron (a German chemist put the decimal point in the wrong place), the Piltdown fraud (and there are many others concerning ape-men) and Gregor Mendel's statistics (they were too perfect - he must have fiddled them).

At that time there had been a rash of scientific frauds, particularly from the North Eastern states of the USA, that had hit the headlines. The whole paper is available on line so I won't list them. The most remarkable concerned a Jordanian (or perhaps Iraqi) research fellow, called Elias A K Alsabti, who had plagiarized 63 papers. He made use of the fact that many scientific articles are hardly ever read. (I have to confess that of more than 700 articles that I have written, more than 100 have never been cited - though many of them like book reviews and polemical pieces were not written to be cited.) Alsabti used to raid his boss's filing cabinet at night and photocopy articles that had been sent for review. A new title and new authors, and it was apparently a new article, ready to be sent to an obscure journal. The amazing thing was that he went on for so long without being caught.

But the fraud that I want to draw attention to was that committed by Sir Cyril Burt. Burt was the doyen of educational psychologists. He was editor of a major psychology journal and an advisor to the British government. He believed that intelligence was inherited and set about to prove it. He reported on pairs of identical twins separated at birth by being adopted by families of different social class. He tested their IQs and demonstrated that they were virtually identical despite one being brought up by, say, a factory worker and the other by, say, an academic.

His conclusion encouraged the government to design an examination at the age of 11 which would segregate children into those who would benefit from an academic education and those who would not. Since intelligence was genetically determined there would be no need for multiple tests at different ages. In America his work was cited by those who believed that intelligence was racially determined.

Years later, a psychologist called Leo Kamin, a man of the Left who had different prejudices, investigated Burt's work. What he found was astonishing. At different stages Burt had reported on 21, more than 30, and 53 pairs of identical twins raised apart, but in each report the correlation factor was precisely 0.771, while the correlation for the twins raised together, no matter how many, was always 0.944. This is clearly an impossibility. A little later, in 1976, Oliver Gillie, a British journalist, sought out Burt's co-workers, Jane Conway and Margaret Howard. They could not be found. They were just as much inventions of Burt's fertile mind as his separated twins.

Why do I drag up these old cases? Because we may be witnessing a fraud of even greater proportions. The Climategate e-mails have shaken people's confidence in anthropogenic global warming. In the UK more people disbelieve it than believe it. I am not a climate scientist and I would not be any good at disentangling the data that has been presented, but have some experience of scientific fraud.

The e-mails seem to be saying that there was a conspiracy to deny doubters access to the raw data on climate measurements. Freedom of information requests can be troublesome for researchers. They may involve a good deal of time which would be better spent on getting on with the job. But the e-mails seem to be saying that data were destroyed rather than allowing them to be seen by sceptics. It wasn't only the University of East Anglia involved; other climate change researchers seem to have been collaborating in what must be called a cover-up. There seems to have been a conspiracy to 'peer-review' particularly harshly any papers suggesting an alternative explanation for the data so as to prevent their publication.

I find it hard to come to any other conclusion about what was going on.

On these two points alone I am extremely worried for the reputation of this field of science. The purpose of publication is to invite criticism. How ever much evidence you accumulate to support your hypothesis, it cannot be proved to be true. It may be contingently true; contingent on someone not coming up with contrary evidence. But if you refuse to look for that contrary evidence then your hypothesis is very weak indeed.

Consider the hypothesis that ALL SWANS ARE WHITE. You might travel up an down the land from Cornwall to the Shetland islands and demonstrate that every swan you see is white, but unless you travel to Australia, you really haven't tested your hypothesis. The climate conspiracy is worse. It is like they have seen early stamps form South Australia that were adorned with a black swan, but they refuse to go and look there, declaring that the picture was a figment of the artist's imagination.

Worse still is the hiding of data. Several frauds have involved fictitious or manipulated data. Publication of raw data in electronic form has become the norm in many scientific fields, and it should always be available to journals if a question is raised about the article. Malcolm Pearce, a British obstetrician reported that he had rescued an ectopic pregnancy by reimplanting the fetus in the womb. He was exposed as a fraud because he could not produce the patient's record. Imagine if he had said, "The records are confidential. I am not going to reveal them to those silly individuals who don't believe me."

Science involves two things: 1] imagining an explanation for an observation; 2] designing an experiment to prove the explanation wrong. I am worried that climate scientists are very good at 1] but instead of doing 2] they have become polemicists whose role is to convince others that their view is right. The Himalayan glaciers were an instance of polemicism rather than science.

More Climate Propaganda

From today's Telegraph

UN report on glaciers melting is based on 'speculation'
An official prediction by the United Nations that the Himalayan glaciers will melt by 2035 may be withdrawn after it was found to be based on speculation rather than scientific evidence.

Two years ago, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) made the claim which it said was based on detailed research into the impact of global warming.

But the IPCC have since admitted it was based on a report written in a science journal and even the scientist who was the subject of the original story admits it was not based on fact.

The article, in the New Scientist, was not even based on a research paper - it evolved from a short telephone interview with the academic.

Dr Syed Hasnain, an Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, said that the claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal research.

Professor Murari Lal, who oversaw the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC report, said he would recommend that the claim about glaciers be dropped.

The IPCC's reliance on Hasnain's 1999 interview has been highlighted by Fred Pearce, the journalist who carried out the original interview.

Mr Pearce said he rang Hasnain in India in 1999 after spotting his claims in an Indian magazine.

He said that Dr Hasnain made the assertion about 2035 but admitted it was campaigning report rather than an academic paper that was reviewed by a panel of expert peers.

Despite this it rapidly became a key source for the IPCC when Prof Lal and his colleagues came to write the section on the Himalayas.

It looks more and more as though global warming is falling apart. Ever since the Climategate e-males, journalists are becoming less and less cowed by the 'scientists'.

Weather

Yesterday, it actually snowed in Bournemouth. Not only that, it settled. Today I had to shovel snow from the drive and put down salt to clear the ice. All sorts of records for cold spells are being broken. It's nice to have a warm house.

I remember 1947. It was a Labour government then as well. Churchill said something like "On an island built of coal and surrounded by fish, you have contrived to produce a shortage of both."

I remember 1979. It was a Labour government then as well. The dead went unburied in the frozen ground and rats were feasting on the rubbish piled up on the street.

Very unlucky with the weather, Labour.

Global warming

In those days before jets, airplanes used to have propellers. Do you know what the propeller was for? Obviously it acted as a fan to keep the pilot cool. You don't believe me? Well, you should see how they start sweating when the propeller stops going round.

I remembered that story when I thought about those huge wind turbines that the Copenhagen lot have been erecting to try and keep the planet cool. Silly! It isn't going to work. What's more it isn't necessary.


I reproduce this graph from Lord Monkton's recent publication to demonstrate what has actually been happening to global temperature in the past 20 years. Everyone goes on about 1998 being the hottest year on record, but this graph shows it to have been an anomaly, not part of the general trend. The fuss of Copenhagen seems to have been an argument over whether future global warming should be kept at 2 degrees for the next century or at 1.5 degrees. The current graph suggests that for the past 5 years it has been running at 0.9 degrees per century.

Coupled with the recent Climategate e-mails, Monkton's publication (he is despised as an amateur by the AGW cabal) surely makes any true scientist suspicious that the carbon dioxide hypothesis might not be correct. Of course the alternate hypothesis is that all those huge propellers in the sky really have been cooling the planet.

Global warming e-mails

The debate about global warming has been enlivened by the release of e-mails to an from the University of East Anglia. This was an involuntary release - someone hacked into their computer.

The issue is whether or not global temperatures have been rising because mankind in all his activities is producing increasing amounts of carbon dioxide, which acts as a greenhouse gas. If this hypothesis is true (and only 41% of the UK population believes it) then the Copenhagen conference which aims to reduce carbon dioxide production is more important than even the current financial crisis. There is an alternative hypothesis which states that fluctuation in global temperature is a natural phenomenon and that it has happened in the past and may well happen in the future. Warming sceptics like Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit have held that the data being presented by various authorities (including NASA) have been doctored to produce graphs that support the warming hypothesis (the famous 'hockey-stick' graph).

The facts that the Thames froze over in the seventeenth century and that grapes were grown in northern England in Romans times are not reflected in the hockey stick graph. I have not read many of the e-mails and I don't intend to - it is outside my field of expertise - but those I have read are alarming. They seem to suggest that there has been a conspiracy to massage the data to eliminate the cold spell in the seventeenth century and make it appear that temperatures were stable until recently. There has certainly been a conspiracy to circumvent the Freedon of Information Act. Now this might have been that they genuinely did not want the data to be in the hands of someone like McIntyre for fear that he would cherry-pick from it, but from the tone of the e-mails that I have seen it appears that it was the climate scientists at East Anglia who were manipulating the data. There are a huge number of emails, so there may be more to come.

My own position on anthropogenic global warming is one of mild scepticism. Scientists are human and I have seen enough scientific fraud to believe that no-one is above manipulating data. When all the climate journals are controlled by people of the same opinion, a little healthy scepticism is not out of place. Carbon dioxide is released from solution by warming that solution - take a bottle of soda pop from a fridge and you will see what I mean. The graphs seem to me to show that CO2 levels rise after a rise in temperature, not before. This would be what one expects if there were a lot of CO2 dissolved in the sea. CO2 is also a growth factor for plant life. There are a lot of blue-green algy in the Pacific. So vast are the oceans of the earth that I would have thought that they had ample buffering capacity to deal with the small amount of CO2 produced by mankind, which is only 7% of the total production.

But then, I am not an expert in this field, just a bit scepticical about what scientists tell me.

More on global warming

Last week a report in Nature sought to undermine the case of the global-warming-deniers. Although there are certainly observations that suggest that, especially during the nineties the world was mostly warming up, the exception has always been Antarctica. The BBC continues to broadcast archive footage of great sheets of ice falling from Antarctica into the sea, without emphasizing that this is a particular area of the Peninsular that reaches up towards South America near to which volcanic activity is taking place undersea. It is a case of a picture being more powerful than 1000 words. In fact The vast mass of Antarctica, all satellite evidence has shown, has been getting colder over the past 30 years. Last year's sea-ice cover was 30 per cent above average.

The new paper from Eric Steig 'demonstrates' that Western Antarctica has also been warming up. At the moment I am reading a book by Ben Goldacre called 'Bad Science' in which the junior doctor and Guardian columnist takes apart the quack nutritionists and other perpetrators of media fraud, so I have my nonsense antennae primed. My suspicions are further raised when I see that one of Steig's co-workers is Michael Mann inventor of the notorious 'hockey stick' graph that has been so disparaged. So we need to examine the data.

It turns out that the data were produced by a computer model based on combining the satellite evidence since 1979 with temperature readings from surface weather stations. The problem is that there are very few surface weather stations, and those that there are are predominately on the warmer peninsular. Even arch-warmist Dr Kevin Trenberth expressed some surprise. He wryly observed "it is hard to make data where none exists". But perhaps the most telling comment comes in a letter sent to Steig by Ross Hays, an atmospheric scientist who has often visited the Antarctic for NASA.

Eric,

Let me first say that this is my own opinion and does not represent the agency I work for. I feel your study is absolutely wrong.

There are very few stations in Antarctica to begin with and only a hand full with 50 years of data. Satellite data is just approaching thirty years of available information. In my experience as a day to day forecaster that has to travel and do field work in Antarctica the summer seasons have been getting colder. In the late 1980s helicopters were used to take our personnel to Williams Field from McMurdo Station due to the annual receding of the Ross Ice Shelf, but in the past few years the thaw has been limited and vehicles can continue to make the transition and drive on the ice. One climate note to pass along is December 2006 was the coldest December ever for McMurdo Station. In a synoptic perspective the cooler sea surface temperatures have kept the maritime storms farther offshore in the summer season and the colder more dense air has rolled from the South Pole to the ice shelf.

There was a paper presented at the AMS Conference in New Orleans last year noting over 70% of the continent was cooling due to the ozone hole. We launch balloons into the stratosphere and the anticyclone that develops over the South Pole has been displaced and slow to establish itself over the past five seasons. The pattern in the troposphere has reflected this trend with more maritime (warmer) air around the Antarctic Peninsula which is also where most of the automated weather stations are located for West Antarctica which will give you the average warmer readings and skew the data for all of West Antarctica.

With statistics you can make numbers go to almost any conclusion you want. It saddens me to see members of the scientific community do this for media coverage.

Sincerely,

Ross Hays

The link is to an anti-global warming site so it has to be handled with care, but as someone with no expertise in climate science, but with a healthy scepticism about scientists, I conclude that the anthropogenic global warming case is not proven

Polar Bears Saved!

The shot of the polar bear marooned on a small piece of floating ice was the most potent weapon in the armory of the global warming zealots. Despite the fact that the shot was contrived and the fact that polar bear numbers are actually increasing, (from 5000 in 1950 to 25,000 now) in May concerns over disappearing sea ice led the U.S. to officially list the polar bear a threatened species, over objections from experts.

Earlier this year, predictions were rife that the North Pole could melt entirely in 2008. Instead, the Arctic ice saw a substantial recovery. Thanks to a rapid rebound in recent months, global sea ice levels now equal those seen 29 years ago, when the year 1979 also drew to a close. Ice levels had been tracking lower throughout much of 2008, but rapidly recovered in the last quarter. In fact, the rate of increase from September onward is the fastest rate of change on record, either upwards or downwards.

Bill Chapman, a researcher with the University of Illinois's Arctic Climate Research Center, claims that this was due in part to colder temperatures in the region. Chapman says wind patterns have also been weaker this year. Strong winds can slow ice formation as well as forcing ice into warmer waters where it will melt.

Why were predictions so wrong? Researchers had expected the newer sea ice, which is thinner, to be less resilient and melt easier. Instead, the thinner ice had less snow cover to insulate it from the bitterly cold air, and therefore grew much faster than expected, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center.

Global cooling

From rogerhelmermep.wordpress.com

Roger Helmer is Conservative MEP for the East Midlands. This increase in CO2 worries me. It seems to be making the world get colder!

Bad Science

For those who are still being taken in by the the Great Climate Change Fraud I recommend reading this essay by Lord Monkton. I am grateful to Seablogger for drawing my attention to it.

From it I have reprinted a small section that is nothing about climate change, but everything about the United Nations, Politicians who know no science and environmentalists. I don't know much about the climate but I know a lot about Public Health.

"DDT is the only effective agent against the mosquitoes that carry malaria. Its inventor won the Nobel Prize for Medicine because the use of DDT had reduced malaria deaths to 50,000 per year worldwide. DDT is entirely harmless to humans, who can eat it by the tablespoonful and not come to any harm. If sprayed in the interior of dwellings, it will not cause any harm to wildlife, except to mosquitoes.

Yet DDT was banned. The effect of the ban was murderous. Annual malaria deaths swiftly rose from 50,000 to 1 million. In a third of a century, the excess deaths caused by the ban on DDT amount - according to the scientific literature - to between 30 and 50 million. The "precautionary principle" is not a principle: nor do its advocates pray it in aid for any other reason than to provide a specious credibility for policies that would otherwise be self-evidently purposeless and cruel.

During the final stages of the case that led to the ban on DDT, the Board of the Environmental Defense Fund met with its lawyer. He said to the Chairman: "Sir, I beg you not to press for a total ban on DDT. If you succeed in getting it banned altogether, tens of millions of children will die of malaria. My advice is that, for pressing scientific reasons, you should allow it to be used indoors, so that children will not be bitten at home."

The lawyer carefully put before the Board the scientific evidence he had accumulated, and just as carefully - for he was scientifically literate and competent - he spelled out exactly why and how a total ban on DDT would kill tens of millions, and undo a malaria eradication program that had almost succeeded in wiping this curse from the Earth.

And what was the reaction of the Board of the Environmental Defense Fund? They dismissed their Counsel on the spot. As he left the room, he heard the Chairman say to the Board, "That's the last time we ever again employ a lawyer who knows anything about science."