The Excellence In Weather Network

By Joseph D’Aleo

The mainstream mediasphere and the alarmist blogosphere has been ignoring or dismissing the dominos of global warming collapsing as the fraudulent machinations of the IPCC are exposed, NOAA and NASA and CRU data manipulation is revealed and their heroes Michael Mann and Phil Jones are being investigated, and this incredible winter unfolds in many areas of the United States and Europe and Asia. 

China has had the coldest weather since 1971. Europe and Russia.experienced brutaldeadly cold and heavy snows. Snow and cold surprised delegates to the UN Copenhagen global warming conference and followed Obama and congress back to DC.

Florida and parts of the southeast had the longest stretch of cold weather in history. Florida citrus areas had the worst damage since 1989. Washington saw a heavy snowstorm in December and now a record breaking storm in early February. Another one is on the way and will likely affect other cities further north.

In recent years snows have fallen in unusual places like Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Buenos Aires, southern Brazil. Johannesburg, South Africa, southern Australia, the Mediterranean Coast and Greece. All-time record snows fell in many locales across the western and northern United States from Washington State and Oregon and Colorado to Iowa, Wisconsin, Michigan, Vermont and Maine. All-time records were also set in southern Canada.

Snow returned to the UK reminiscent of the Dickens winters the last few years.

Washington was oblivious to the wild weather, so nature has brought the wild weather to their backyard. This storm may bring 3 feet of snow to a few spots around the nation’s capitol, perhaps to estates of some of the nation’s political leaders or media brainiacs. It and following storms will ensure DC will have the All-TIME SNOWIEST WINTER ever going back to 1871. Expect the enviro wackos and their media lapdogs to come out and claim the storm and cold winter is the result of global warming.

The winter was not a surprise to many of the private industry forecasters, unencumbered by the global warming albatross. We expected the winter to be a harsh one (see here). The reasons we felt so was a developing stratospheric warming in the polar regions of the northern hemisphere favored in east QBO low solar years and east QBO low solar El Ninos and also in winters following high latitude volcanoes (Redoubt and Sarychev). It started in late November peaked in December then faded in mid January. Sometimes in years when it occurs early, it recurs later (2000-2001, 1995-1996, 1977-78).

The stratospheric warming leads to a negative arctic oscillation (exceeding 5 standard deviations in December and again in February) which pushed cold air to middle latitudes while surface temperatures in the higher latitude are cold but above normal under the warm ridging aloft.  This kind of pattern happened in the 1960s and 1970s and indeed the winter is very much like 1965/66, 1968/69, and 1977/78.

Enlarged here.

See how well through February 3rd, the upper level pattern has fit the expected pattern based on these natural factors.

Enlarged here.

Also we are back in the cold Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) phase which favors the colder El Ninos of the late 1950s to late 1970s (and again 2002/03.

Expect another storm this upcoming week with perhaps more snow for DC and this time further north, where less has fallen so far this season.
The SOI hit an amazing 8 STD negative last week. The water is especially warm in the central tropical Pacific. A cold pool northwest of Hawaii also favors a cold central and east. That argues for an active southern storm track. The warm central Pacific and cold east also favors the same pattern as the East QBO low solar El Ninos, cold PDO.

Once again natural oscillations provide a better indication of weather AND climate then the CO2, aerosol forcing dominated tinkertoy climate models.

Looking ahead, these stratospheric warming events last 4 to 6 weeks so since it began in late January, expect it to continue at least several more weeks. Cold air and snow returns to Europe too after the same January thaw we experienced here in the states before winters return. See full PDF here, Updates to come after the storms the next week.

By Doug L. Hoffman, The Resilient Earth

While climate skeptics have gleefully pointed to the past decade’s lack of temperature rise as proof that global warming is not happening as predicted, climate change activists have claimed that this is just “cherry picking” the data. They point to their complex and error prone general circulation models that, after significant re-factoring, are now predicting a stretch of stable temperatures followed by a resurgent global warming onslaught. In a recent paper, a new type of model, based on a test for structural breaks in surface temperature time series, is used to investigate two common claims about global warming. This statistical model predicts no temperature rise until 2050 but the more interesting prediction is what happens between 2050 and 2100.

David R.B. Stockwell and Anthony Cox, in a paper submitted to the International Journal of Forecasting entitled “Structural break models of climatic regime-shifts: claims and forecasts,” have applied advanced statistical analysis to both Australian temperature and rainfall trends and global temperature records from the Hadley Center’s HadCRU3GL dataset. The technique they used is called the Chow test, invented by economist Gregory Chow in the early 1960s. The Chow test is a statistical test of whether the coefficients in two linear regressions on different data sets are equal. In econometrics, the Chow test is commonly used in time series analysis to test for the presence of a structural break.

A structural break appears when an unexpected shift in a time series occurs. Such sudden jumps in a series of measurements can lead to huge forecasting errors and unreliability of a model in general. Stockwell and Cox are the first researchers I know of to apply this econometric technique to temperature and rainfall data (a description of computing the Chow test statistic is available here). They explain their approach in the paper’s abstract:

A Chow test for structural breaks in the surface temperature series is used to investigate two common claims about global warming. Quirk (2009) proposed that the increase in Australian temperature from 1910 to the present was largely confined to a regime-shift in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) between 1976 and 1979. The test finds a step change in both Australian and global temperature trends in 1978 (HadCRU3GL), and in Australian rainfall in 1982 with flat temperatures before and after. Easterling & Wehner (2009) claimed that singling out the apparent flatness in global temperature since 1997 is ‘cherry picking’ to reinforce an arbitrary point of view. On the contrary, we find evidence for a significant change in the temperature series around 1997, corroborated with evidence of a coincident oceanographic regime-shift. We use the trends between these significant change points to generate a forecast of future global temperature under specific assumptions.

The climatic effects of fluctuations in oceanic regimes are most often studied using singular spectrum analysis (SSA) or variations on principle components analysis (PCA). In other words, by decomposing rainfall and temperature into periodic components. Such approaches can capture short period phenomena like the effects of El Nino , and the potential impact of longer term phenomena such as the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) on variations in global temperature. These phenomena take place over a period of years or decades. For finding and testing less frequent regime-shifts different techniques are called for. According to the authors: “An F-statistic known as the Chow test (Chow, 1960) based on the reduction in the residual sum of squares through adoption of a structural break, relative to an unbroken simple linear regression, is a straightforward approach to modeling regime-shifts with structural breaks.” All the statistical details aside, the point here is that a sequence of data that contains sudden shifts or jumps is hard to model accurately using standard methods.

The Chow test since 1978 finds another significant breakpoint in 1997, when an increasing trend up to 1997 (0.13 plus/minus 0.02C per decade) changes to a practically flat trend thereafter (-0.02 plus or minus 0.05C per decade). Contrary to claims that the 10 year trend since 1998 is arbitrary, structural change methods indicate that 1997 was a statistically defensible beginning of a new, and apparently stable climate regime. Again, according to the authors: “The significance of the dates around 1978 and 1997 to climatic regimeshifts is not in dispute, as they are associated with a range of oceanic, atmospheric and climatic events, whereby thermocline depth anomalies associated with PDO phase shift and ENSO were transmitted globally via ocean currents, winds, Rossby and Kelvin waves .”

Perhaps most interesting is the application of this analysis to the prediction of future climate change, something GCM climate modelers have been attempting for the past 30 years with little success. Figure 3 from the paper illustrates the prediction for temperatures to 2100 following from our structural break model, the assumptions of continuous underlying warming, regime-shift from 1978 to 1997, and no additional major regime-shift. The projections formed by the presumed global warming trend to 1978 and the trend in the current regime predicts constant temperatures for fifty years to around 2050. This is similar to the period of flat temperatures from 1930-80.

Icecap Note: A good analysis. Actually, properly adjusted, the trends from the1940 to late 1970s and since 2001 were down. How far down we go between now and 2050 depends on whether we will be like the PDO- phase from 1947 to 1977 or the early 1800s due to a Dalton like Minimum. A Maunder like Minimum seems unlikely unless the projections of Livingston and Penn for the disappearance of spots after 2014 occurs. The following chart (enlarged here) from Don Easterbrook captures these scenarios.

 

Washington Times Editorial

Discredited climate theories make strange bedfellows. In his State of the Union address last week, President Obama said there was “overwhelming scientific evidence on climate change.” In his most recent message to the world, Osama bin Laden said that climate change “is not an intellectual luxury but an actual fact.” It’s nice to see these two leaders can agree on something.

The hitch is that the man-caused catastrophic global warming theory is dead, and it needs to be buried. Evidence had been mounting for years that there were problems with the global warming model; most telling was that the globe refused to warm up. Carbon emissions continued apace, but the world began cooling. This is why true believers abandoned the “global warming” brand name and tried to shift the debate to the more ambiguous label “climate change,” which is something the rest of us like to refer to as “weather.”

The dam broke with Climategate when hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit revealed that global warming advocates had for years attempted to hide conflicting data and silence their professional critics. British authorities have determined that the university broke freedom-of-information laws by denying information to scientists seeking to check claims that global warming was caused by human activity.

Evidence is emerging that the data had been rigged all along. Russian analysts noted that British temperature calculations excluded data from 40 percent of Russian territory, much of which showed no increase in temperature in the past 50 years. The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration also cherry-picked data, cutting Canadian data sources from 600 to 35 and relying on only one monitor for all of Canada above the Arctic Circle. This was done even though Canada operates 1,400 weather stations, 100 of which are in the Arctic.

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is having its own scandal regarding a finding in its Nobel Peace Prize-winning 2007 report that glaciers in India were rapidly disappearing. It is now revealed that this dramatic claim was based not on years of patient observation and research but anecdotes from a hiking magazine and a student’s master’s thesis. IPCC Chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri knew about the erroneous information before December’s Copenhagen climate summit but maintained the falsehood. He even denounced a report from India that showed the glaciers were in far less jeopardy as “unsubstantiated research.” Last month, Mr. Pachauri published a sexually explicit novel, further diminishing his professional reputation.

Climate scientists have to come to grips with some highly inconvenient truths. World temperatures continue to decline as carbon emissions increase. Chilly Scotland is facing its coldest winter in a century. Arctic sea ice is not vanishing. Polar bears are experiencing a baby boom. Water vapor appears to play as important a role in the climate as carbon emissions. Sunspot activity may be more important than both combined. Meanwhile, climate change fanatics seek to blame capitalism and productivity for global warming, global cooling, too much snow, not enough snow, hurricanes, tornadoes and even the Haiti earthquake.

The simplistic and increasingly discredited theory of carbon-based, man-caused global warming needs to be discarded, and the scientists who sought to squelch skeptics and artificially inflate their own reputations must be disciplined. Alas, Mr. Obama and Mr. bin Laden need to update their talking points. See more here.

By Colleen Boyle, Collegian Staff Writer

A panel of Penn State faculty and staff concluded the inquiry of Penn State meteorology professor Michael Mann this weekend and is slated to release its “Climategate” findings later in the week, university officials said.

The end of the two-month inquiry marks a major point in the worldwide climate debate. Penn State’s inquiry began after hundreds of illegally obtained e-mails were leaked last November from a private server in the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England, containing comments critics say suggest Mann and his colleagues may have distorted climate change evidence.

The inquiry’s findings will determine if the university will further investigate Mann’s work. Penn State President Graham Spanier addressed the inquiry and the panel’s work during the Board of Trustees meeting on Jan. 22. “I know they’ve taken the time and spent hundreds of hours studying documents and interviewing people and looking at issues from all sides,” Spanier said.

But conservative groups are already mobilizing to respond to the university’s findings. Young Americans for Freedom (YAF)—a Penn State student group working to “advance the principles of individual and economic freedom, limited government and traditional values”—has taken an interest in the Mann inquiry.  On Feb. 12, YAF will host a demonstration in front of the HUB to protest what the group feels is a violation of academic integrity, YAF member Samuel Settle said. The 9-12 Project of Central PA, a conservative group, will join the demonstration. Settle (sophomore-political science and history) said the university’s handling of the inquiry unsettles him. “What the university has done is they’ve taken three Penn State employees and assigned them to deciding whether or not Mann violated university policy,” he said. “That’s an awful lot of power in the hands of three with no external oversight.”
See post here.

The revelations have been nothing short of jaw dropping. Dozens – yes dozens – of claims made in the IPCC 2007 report on climate change that was supposed to represent the “consensus” of 2500 of the world’s climate scientists have been shown to be bogus, or faulty, or not properly vetted, or simply pulled out of thin air.

We know this because newspapers in Great Britain are doing their job; vetting the 2007 report item by item, coming up with shocking news about global warming claims that formed the basis of argument by climate change advocates who were pressuring the US and western industrialized democracies to transfer trillions of dollars in wealth to the third world and cede sovereignty to the UN.

Glaciergate, tempgate, icegate, and now, disappearing Amazon forests not the result of warming, but of logging. And the report the IPCC based their bogus “science” on was written by a food safety advocate according to this Christopher Booker piece in the Telegraph :

Dr North next uncovered “Amazongate”. The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report, again citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger “up to 40 per cent” of the Amazon rainforest – as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears. This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain’s two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging.

A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC’s report which cite similarly non-peer-reviewed WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority, and other researchers have been uncovering a host of similarly dubious claims and attributions all through the report. These range from groundless allegations about the increased frequency of “extreme weather events” such as hurricanes, droughts and heatwaves, to a headline claim that global warming would put billions of people at the mercy of water shortages – when the study cited as its authority indicated exactly the opposite, that rising temperatures could increase the supply of water.

This is a great story. It has everything a media outlet could desire; scandal, conflict of interest (IPCC head Pauchuri runs companies that benefited from climate scare stories), government cover ups – why then, has this unraveling of the basis of climate science that posited catastrophic man made warming not been making any news at all in the United States?

It’s too easy to simply claim “bias.” Media outlets don’t pass up juicy stories that could potentially increase their readership and revenue for ideological purposes (except the New York Times – and even they could spin all of this to show skeptics to be using flawed arguments like the liberal Guardian is doing in England).

Perhaps its time to ask why this story being revealed overseas with new revelations almost daily in the Daily Mail, the Telegraph, the Timesonline, and other Fleet Street publications can’t get any traction here. Blogs like Watts up with That and Climate Depot are keeping us informed of the latest from England but we hear crickets chirping when it comes to stories from major newspapers and – outside of Fox News – the cable nets.

As global warming the political movement is losing its scientific justification, the American people – who will be asked to foot the bill to the tune of trillions of dollars if Obama goes ahead with his “green” plans – are grossly uninformed about the state of the debate. Until the media starts to give this story the coverage it deserves, that state of affairs will not change.

See post here.

By E.M. Smith

What to make of THIS bizarre anomaly map?

What Have I Done?
I was exploring another example of The Bolivia Effect where an empty area became quite “hot” when the data were missing (Panama, posting soon) and that led to another couple of changed baselines that led to more ‘interesting red’ (1980 vs 1951-1980 baseline). I’m doing these examinations with a 250 km ‘spread’ as that tells me more about where the thermometers are located. The above graph, if done instead with a 1200 km spread or smoothing, has the white spread out to sea 1200 km with smaller infinite red blobs in the middles of the oceans.

I thought it would be ‘interesting’ to step through parts of the baseline bit by bit to find out where it was “hot” and “cold”. (Thinking of breaking it into decades… still to be tried…) When I thought:

Well, you always need a baseline benchmark, even if you are ‘benchmarking the baseline’, so why not start with the “NULL” case of baseline equal to report period? It ought to be a simple all white land area with grey oceans for missing data.

Well, I was “A bit surprised” when I got a blood red ocean everywhere on the planet.

You can try it yourself at the NASA / GISS web site map making page.

In all fairness, the land does stay white (no anomaly against itself) and that’s a very good thing. But that Ocean!

ALL the ocean area with no data goes blood red and the scale shows it to be up to 9999 degrees C of anomaly.

“Houston, I think you have a problem”.

Why Don’t I Look In The Code?

Well, the code NASA GISS publishes and says is what they run, is not this code that they are running.

Yes, they are not publishing the real code. In the real code running on the GISS web page to make these anomaly maps, you can change the baseline and you can change the “spread” of each cell. (Thus the web page that lets you make these “what if” anomaly maps). In the code they publish, the “reach” of that spread is hard coded at 1200 km and the baseline period is hard coded at 1951-1980.

So I simply can not do any debugging on this issue, because the code that produces these maps is not available.

But what I can say is pretty simple:

If a map with no areas of unusual warmth (by definition with the baseline = report period) has this happen; something is wrong.

I’d further speculate that that something could easily be what causes The Bolivia Effect where areas that are lacking in current data get rosy red blobs. Just done on a spectacular scale.

Further, I’d speculate that this might go a long way toward explaining the perpetual bright red in the Arctic (where there are no thermometers so no thermometer data). This “anomaly map” includes the HadCRUT SST anomaly map for ocean temperatures. The striking thing about this one is that those two bands of red at each pole sure look a lot like the ‘persistent polar warming’ we’ve been told to be so worried about. One can only wonder if there is some “bleed through” of these hypothetical warm spots when the ‘null data’ cells are averaged in with the ‘real data cells’ when making non-edge case maps. But without the code, it can only be a wonder:

With 250 km ‘spread’ and HadCRUT SST anomalies we get bright red poles.

The default 1200 km present date map for comparison:

GIS Anomaly Map for November 2009

I’m surprised nobody ever tried this particular ‘limit case’ before. Then again, experienced software developers know to test the ‘limit cases’ even if they do seem bizarre, since that’s where the most bugs live. And this sure looks like a bug to me.

A very hot bug… Read more here.

This is about when he first became aware of the false claim over the melting glaciers, Pachauri’s version on 22 January being that he had only known about it “for a few days” � i.e., after it had appeared in The Sunday Times.

However, Ben Webster writes that a prominent science journalist, Pallava Bagla – who works for the Science journal (and NDTV as its science correspondent) – claims that last November he had informed Pachauri that Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University and a leading glaciologist, had dismissed the 2035 date as being wrong by at least 300 years. Pachauri had replied: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”

Bagla interviewed Dr Pachauri again this week and asked him why he had decided to overlook the error before the Copenhagen summit. In the taped interview, he asked: “I pointed it out [the error] to you in several e-mails, several discussions, yet you decided to overlook it. Was that so that you did not want to destabilise what was happening in Copenhagen?”

Dr Pachauri replied: “Not at all, not at all. As it happens, we were all terribly preoccupied with a lot of events. We were working round the clock with several things that had to be done in Copenhagen. It was only when the story broke, I think in December, we decided to, well, early this month – as a matter of fact, I can give you the exact dates – early in January that we decided to go into it and we moved very fast.”

According to Pachauri, “… within three or four days, we were able to come up with a clear and a very honest and objective assessment of what had happened. So I think this presumption on your part or on the part of any others is totally wrong. We are certainly never – and I can say this categorically – ever going to do anything other than what is truthful and what upholds the veracity of science.”

Without even Bagla’s input, we know this to be lies. Apart from anything else, there was the crisis meeting under the aegis of UNEP – which we reported on Thursday – which concluded that the 2035 claim “does not appear to be based upon any scientific studies and therefore has no foundation”.

Separately, we have Syed Hasnain, while stressing that he was not involved in drafting the IPCC report, claiming that he noticed some of the mistakes when he first read the relevant section in 2008.

That was also the year he joined TERI in Delhi, headed by Dr Pachauri. Then, he says, he realised that the 2035 prediction was based on an interview he gave to the New Scientist magazine in 1999. But, he claims, he did not tell Pachauri because he was not working for the IPCC and was busy with his own programmes.

“I was keeping quiet as I was working here,” he said. “My job is not to point out mistakes. And you know the might of the IPCC. What about all the other glaciologists around the world who did not speak out?”

However, Hasnain’s assertions contrast rather sharply with a video interview given by him to NDTV (see clip above) on 9 November 2009 – the day that the Raina report on glaciers was published, challenging the claims made in the IPCC report. Then, he is seen to be defending the 2035 figure, and allowing himself to be styled as “author of the original IPCC report”.

According to The Guardian, V K Raina, formerly deputy director general of the Geological Survey of India, has joined calls for Pachauri’s resignation.

The Guardian cites India’s Economic Times from over a week ago, which criticised the IPCC for damaging its own credibility, noting that “it would now seem that Mr Pachauri’s steadfast unwillingness to consider an alternate position could well have given climate sceptics a stronger footing.”

But today, the Deccan Herald also weighs in, declaring: “The [glacier] incident reflects poorly on the professionalism and scientific rigour of the IPCC and has done damage to its credibility.” The writing is not so much on the wall as obliterating it.

Adding to the graffiti, in yet another development, the popular Indian magazine Open rips apart global warming, labelling it: “The Hottest Hoax in the World.” Indian blogger Gurmeet in Liberty News Central thinks this could be the most hard-hitting article in the Indian MSM on AGW fraud ever.

Given what is about to descend upon him on Sunday, by the time the Indian media have absorbed the detail, Pachauri will be history. See Richard North’s blog here.

25 01 2010

Anthony Watts

Climate change is real and man-made, explains University of Waterloo professor Qin-Bin Lu, author of a new study published this week in the peer-reviewed journal, Physics Reports.

Professor Lu also explains that the climate change crisis is over. Thanks to an international environmental treaty, the planet is no longer in peril. We have, in fact, begun a long cooling period that will bring Earth’s temperatures back to normal.

The man-made cause of global warming is not CO2 and the international treaty that saved the planet is not the Kyoto Protocol. Rather, says Dr. Lu, the true cause of global warming has been CFCs, or chlorofluorocarbons, a class of chemicals that was once widely used in aerosol cans and refrigeration. As CFC use soared in the decades following World War II, he explains, the globe started warming dramatically. The world stopped warming dramatically when government regulations began to phase out CFCs, an event that culminated in the western world in 2000. Almost immediately afterward, in 2002, the world began to cool as CFCs started to diminish in our atmosphere.

The heroes in this tale are environmentalists and world leaders such as U.S. President Ronald Reagan and Canadian Prime Minister Brian Mulroney, who got together to sign the Montreal Protocol of 1987. This protocol was designed to stop the Ozone Hole from developing above the Antarctic by ridding the planet of ozone-destroying CFCs. Little did either the environmentalists or the world leaders recognize at the time, explains Professor Lu, that their actions would also eliminate the threat to the planet of global warming.

Professor Lu, a path-breaking scientist in the field of ozone protection, made his CO2 discovery by accident — he was looking for culprits in the formation of the ozone hole over Antarctica. A chief suspect was CO2: Climate models produced by climatologists showed that CO2 would have devastating effects on the ozone layer, significantly enlarging the ozone hole over Antarctica and dramatically enlarging it over the Arctic. But when Dr. Lu compared the imagined output of the climate models with the actual measurements taken real-time by satellites and weather balloons, the models turned out to be soaring failures.

“I didn’t see any CO2 effect on temperature or ozone depletion over the South Pole from 1956 to 2008,” explained Dr. Lu, surprised at how totally different the real-world measurements were from those that the climate model predicted. The real-world measurements showed CO2 to be largely irrelevant – “the global warming on Earth’s surface between 1950 and 2000 is pretty much due to CFCs,” he concluded. “The models say that CO2 is a major greenhouse gas but the facts show otherwise.”

In contrast, CFCs have long been known to be a greenhouse gas that, on a molecule per molecule basis, is 10,000 times more potent than CO2. Professor Lu’s satellite and balloon measurements showed that factor of 10,000 to have been a gross underestimate!

Had CFCs never been widely used in our air conditioners and refrigerators, Dr. Lu believes, the Earth would not have warmed in the last century. And had CFCs not been banned, he would not be predicting a period of global cooling.

But with the CFC ban, and the subsequent phase-out of this ozone destroying chemical, global warming stopped and, early this decade, a period of global cooling began. This cooling will last “at least 50 years, and possibly 70 years” as the global temperatures return to their pre-CFC levels, he explains, barring the rise of an alternative to CFC, or the introduction of another greenhouse gas into the atmosphere.

The cooling, he predicts, will be gentle – “after 2010 or so, the globe temperature will experience a small bounce back but a general declining tendency will not change.” Neither will the new levels be worrisome – Earth will find itself back at the levels of the 1950s, which themselves hadn’t changed much over the previous century.

Dr Lu’s study is now published and the reviews he has received to date have been favourable but he may find himself writing a postscript in three year’s time. Like hundreds of other scientists around the world, Dr. Lu may have unwittingly relied on invalid data for a portion of his study. His real-time satellite and balloon data, which shows CO2 does not cause climate change, is not in dispute. Not so for the historical temperature data, on which he based his estimates of how much global cooling we face as Earth’s temperatures return to their historic pre-CFC levels. “My temperature data comes from the UK – the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University,” he reveals when questioned.

As a result of the Climategate Scandal, this temperature data is now in doubt. Investigations into the Climategate emails are underway at East Anglia and the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. More significantly, CRU’s data is so suspect that the UK Met Office, which partnered with the Climate Research Unit in producing datasets for researchers, is undertaking a mammoth three-year investigation during which it will re-examine 160 years of original temperature data to determine to what extent, if any, CRU cooked the books.

Because of all this uncertainty, “I cannot say how reliable their data is,” states Professor Lu, who has done his best to reassure himself that all is in order. When the Climategate scandal erupted as his study was being completed, he cross-checked the CRU data to that of NOAA, another prominent organization, and then he cross-checked his data again when CRU’s partner, the UK Met Office, released more data. “All of them look similar,” Professor Lu says.  Professor Lu’s cross-checks provide scant reassurance, however, because all these data-handling agencies had drawn their data from the same tainted pool. Although Professor Lu declines to comment on the Climategate scandal, he cannot be confident that his study will not need to be redone in three year’s time, when the UK Met Office completes its re-examination.

One calculation in his study that may change with revised CRU data: His 50-70 year estimate of the coming global cooling may change by two or three decades. One calculation that won’t change: CO2’s contribution to global warming remains approximately nil.

Lawrence Solomon is executive director of Energy Probe and Urban Renaissance Institute and author of The Deniers: The world-renowned scientists who stood up against global warming hysteria, political persecution, and fraud.

By Marc Morano, Climate Depot featuring Dr. John Christy

Alabama State Climatologist Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, served as a UN IPCC lead author in 2001 for the 3rd assessment report and detailed how he personally witnessed UN scientists attempting to distort the science for political purposes.

“I was at the table with three Europeans, and we were having lunch. And they were talking about their role as lead authors. And they were talking about how they were trying to make the report so dramatic that the United States would just have to sign that Kyoto Protocol,” Christy told CNN on May 2, 2007. – (For more on UN scientists turning on the UN years ago, see Climate Depot’s full report here.)

Christy has since proposed major reforms and changes to the way the UN IPCC report is produced. Christy has rejected the UN approach that produces “a document designed for uniformity and consensus.” Christy presented his views at a UN meeting in 2009. The IPCC needs “an alternative view section written by well-credentialed climate scientists is needed,” Christy said. “If not, why not? What is there to fear? In a scientific area as uncertain as climate, the opinions of all are required,” he added.

‘The reception to my comments was especially cold’

[The following is excerpted from Andrew Revkin’s January 26, 2009 New York Times blog Dot Earth. For full article go here.]

Excerpt: Last March, more than 100 past [UN IPCC] lead authors of report chapters met in Hawaii to chart next steps for the panel’s inquiries. One presenter there was John R. Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, who has focused on using satellites to chart global temperatures. He was a lead author of a section of the third climate report, in 2001, but is best known these days as a critic of the more heated warnings that climate is already unraveling under the buildup of heat-trapping gases.

At the Hawaii meeting, he gave a presentation proposing that future reports contain a section providing the views of credentialed scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature whose views on particular points differ from the consensus. He provided both his poster and summary of his three-minute talk. In an e-mail message to me, he described the reaction this way (L.A. is short for lead author; AR5 is shorthand for the next report, coming in 2013-14.):

Christy: “The reception to my comments was especially cold … not one supporter, though a couple of scientists did say I had a “lot of guts” to stand up and say what I said before 140 L.A.s. I was (and still am) calling for the AR5 to be a more open scientific assessment in which those of us who are well-credentialed and have evidence for low climate sensitivity (observational and theoretical) be given room to explain this. We should have the same standards of review authority too. When a subject is excruciatingly complicated, like climate, we see that opinion, overstatement, and appeal-to-authority tend to reign as those of a like-mind essentially take control in their self-constructed echo-chamber. The world needs to see all sides of the evidence. We in the climate business need to understand humility, not pride, when looking at a million degrees-of-freedom problem. It’s just fine to say, ‘We don’t know,’ when that is the truth of the matter.”

I (Revkin) also asked Christy, “Do you see a way forward for this enterprise (presuming you see these recent issues as serious problems but not a fatal indictment)?”

Christy said: “I think people would read AR5 if it were a true scientific assessment, complete with controversies [described] by the experts themselves. Policymakers will find it uncomfortable, because the simple fact remains that our ignorance of the climate system is enormous. Otherwise, it will be a repeat of what we are now seeing (and what many folks like me knew years ago), that the process has morphed into an agenda-approving exercise.”

Can the IPCC Allow a Section of Alternative Views Authored by Equally Credentialed Climate Scientists? – March 2009 – Presented to UN IPCC Scientists

By Dr. John R. Christy – University of Alabama in Huntsville

I want you all to understand this: No one is holding a gun to my head and no one is paying me money either above or under the table to arrive at the conclusions I (and others) have come to.

I propose that the IPCC allow for well credentialed climate scientists to craft a chapter on an alternative view presenting evidence for low climate sensitivity to greenhouse gases than has been the IPCC’s recent message – all based on published information. In other words, I am proposing that the AR5 be a true Scientific Assessment, not a document designed for uniformity and consensus. In a scientific area as uncertain as climate, the opinions of all are required. Three quick examples are on the poster.

First, the iconic mean surface temperature is a poor proxy for detecting greenhouse gas influences for reasons shown. And, this metric is not well-observed in any case.

Secondly, many of the so-called metrics of human-induced climate change are not changing at rates policymakers have assumed and the media promotes with the indulgence of the IPCC Leadership. And, other variables showing change are still within the magnitudes of long-term natural variations.

Thirdly, confidence that the climate system is highly sensitive to greenhouse gases can been shown to be overstated due to assumptions about how the sensitivity is calculated. Latest measurements clearly suggest a strong negative feedback in the short wave � in other words, in warming episodes, clouds respond to cool the climate. Another problem with popular sensitivity estimates is the dependence on essentially one century of an oblique greenhouse-proxy (mean surface temperature) combined with the notion that all of the natural, multi-decadal variability can be defined so accurately that the left-over warming is assumed to be human-induced. The investigation rather should examine all levels of natural variability that have been observed and seek to defensibly eliminate those as possible causes.

An alternative view is necessary, one that is not censured for the so-called purpose of consensus. This will present to our policymakers an honest picture of scientific discourse and process. I submit this proposal because our level of ignorance of the climate system is still enormous and our policymakers need to know that. We have much work to do. See Marc’s post and much more here.

[Also see: Shock Revelation: UN scientist admits fake data was used in IPCC report ‘purely to put political pressure on world leaders’]