By “global warming”, I mean the wider orthodoxy not only that warming is happening, but that it is caused by human activity, that it will lead to catastrophic consequences, that action to change the climate is urgent, that said action consists largely of limiting CO2 emissions and reducing energy use, that such action will be effective, that such action is required of developed and developing countries alike, and that it can only be achieved by using taxation, legislation or other forcible, government-imposed means to make people comply.

A while ago, I listed ten reasons to reject global warming. I’d have to be wrong on all of them before I could rationally consider measures such as cap-and-trade, carbon-tax or other elaborate, invasive and expensive government measures to combat climate change.

A comment by a retired geology Ph.D. on this well-considered piece on the irrationality of the climate change debate (from the felicitously named Rightwing Nuthouse) lists ten more reasons to be skeptical of anthropogenic global warming:

1. It has all the marks of a religion; skeptics are treated like heretics and the spokesman is a Baptist lay preacher.
2. Global warming is now called climate change so it can embrace global cooling, also.
3. It is anti-American since America is biggest producer of CO2.
4. I’ve been through this before in the 1970’s with Global Cooling.
5. As I geologist I know that climate changes take a long time since the earth has a very large thermal mass.
6. Humans have adapted to colder and warmer conditions. Manhattan’s average temperature has increased 7°F in the last 50 years but New Yorkers are not wilting.
7. The data for the earth’s temperature for more than 100 years in the past are very sparse and unreliable.
8. The data for the earth’s temperature for the last 100 years is not much better and practically all of it has to be compensated for the urban heat island effect, vide Manhattan.
9. Other measurements of the earth’s thermal condition, for example, shrinking growing season lengths, are not consistent with global warming.
10. Concomitance is not causation.

I don’t agree with all of them. Point three, for example, should in my opinion read, “It’s anti-development, since development, poverty reduction and prosperity growth are big producers of CO2,” but it makes some good points, especially about the quality of the climate record, the selectivity of factors considered in the overall models, the assumption that correlation implies causation, and the failure to adjust correctly for urban heat islands.

Steve McIntyre’s Climate Audit site has been documenting many of these data and statistical problems, prompting in some cases corrections to the official records. See this post on urban heat island adjustments, and see these posts on temperature record errors and corrections, for example. (I covered some of his work inter alia here and here.)

So while Rick Moran makes some good points about our ability to evaluate the scientific basis for climate change theory, even the notion that we just don’t know enough suggests that expensive programmes of enforced action are imprudent, at best. Not to mention that they’re philosophically repulsive to anyone who values individual freedom and bases their views of how best to minimise poverty and maximise prosperity on the vitality of free markets and innovation.

In a new paper, published in the journal Energy & Environment, Craig Loehle reconstructs the 2000-year temperature record without using tree rings as a proxy. He gets the following trend. Note the prominence of the medieval warm period and the little ice age, both of which are conspicuously absent from Mann’s hockey stick and various other reconstructions favoured by alarmists such as Al Gore.

He discusses in detail the reasons for omitting the abundant tree ring proxies. Here’s the abstract:

Historical data provide a baseline for judging how anomalous recent temperature changes are and for assessing the degree to which organisms are likely to be adversely affected by current or future warming. Climate histories are commonly reconstructed from a variety of sources, including ice cores, tree rings, and sediment. Tree-ring data, being the most abundant for recent centuries, tend to dominate reconstructions. There are reasons to believe that tree ring data may not properly capture long-term climate changes. In this study, eighteen 2000-year-long series were obtained that were not based on tree ring data. Data in each series were smoothed with a 30-year running mean. All data were then converted to anomalies by subtracting the mean of each series from that series. The overall mean series was then computed by simple averaging. The mean time series shows quite coherent structure. The mean series shows the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) and Little Ice Age (LIA) quite clearly, with the MWP being approximately 0.3°C warmer than 20th century values at these eighteen sites.

A lengthy and forthright discussion by people considerably more qualified than I am, and with participation from Loehle himself, can be found at Steve McIntyre’s ClimateAudit site. It’s worth reading before picking holes in the paper.

Update: Something just occurred to me. The pronounced warm period prior to the year 1000 is missing from most reconstructions I’ve seen, because they all cover only the last 1000 years. Those charts, when they haven’t been piped through Michael Mann’s hockey stick maker, include the medieval warm period around 1200-1300 and little ice age around 1700-1800. Turns out if you go back just a little bit more, you get an even higher temperature peak than the medieval warm period. One wonders if the data endpoint selection for the “usual” charts is deliberate.

If you want to know how “scientific consensus” is cooked up, look no further than the speaker lists at climate change conferences. Actually, do look further: to who doesn’t get invited to such shindigs.

Last week, the American Statistical Association sponsored a workshop on climate change. The goal, according to David Marker, one of the organisers and facilitators, was to “delineate a statistical science perspective on understanding climate change and to develop a consensus statement on the areas of clear knowledge, as well as those areas in which great uncertainty remains”.

Of course, developing a “consensus statement” is easy if you neglect to invite people like Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, who famously broke Michael Mann’s infamous hockey stick temperature chart (right). Showing Mann’s methodology to be so badly broken that it turns even random data into a hockey stick, is one of the more significant statistical contributions to climate research in the last decade. Considering that the question of how to use proxy data to reconstruct a historic temperature record, and whether this record does or doesn’t show warm and cool periods corresponding to solar activity, remains a hot topic of discussion within the ASA (PDF newsletter), this on its own would appear to qualify them for invitations to such a workshop.
McIntyre has also been swimming against the tide of obstructionism and even secrecy by government scientists to audit US temperature measurement stations. Though the focus of the research is the siting of these stations and how “bad data” gets “corrected”, a surprise discovery forced James Hansen, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies, to correct the benchmark temperature record which — like Mann’s Hockey Stick — the politicians on the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change use to scare us into give them more powers to tax and regulate. Again, the significance of McIntyre’s work on the statistical treatment of climate change data appears to be substantial. His comments on some of the topics raised at the ASA workshop show insight and familiarity with the issues.

This isn’t the first time that McIntyre and McKitrick have been omitted from speaker lists. Shortly after McIntyre’s discovery that NASA GISS had been cooking the books, a conference on integrity in scientific research likewise overlooked the Canadian, even though he’d raised red flags over the secrecy with which NASA GISS treats its data collection sites and its statistical methods.

Understanding climate change requires the combined skills of atmospheric scientists and statisticians, said Marker. The former understand the physical relationships being investigated, while the latter know how to determine which hypotheses are strongly supported and which are still subject to uncertainty.

And here I thought the consensus of the people that get invited to consensus-development workshops is that the science is settled.

• This was first published as a column in print in Maverick magazine in South Africa on 6 September 2007. If the denial machine reads this, I am still waiting to be well-funded, so at least consider subscribing, please.
  

You can relax. The hottest year in recorded US history was not 1998, and 2001 isn’t even in the top ten anymore. Hey, facts change, you know.

The news couldn’t have come at a worse time for Newsweek. It had just published a cover emblazoned with the headline “Global Warming is a Hoax*” The footnote reads: “Or so claim well-funded naysayers who still reject the overwhelming evidence of climate change. Inside the denial machine. By Sharon Begley.”

Contributing editor Robert J Samuelson repudiated the story in the very next issue, however. He calls it a “moral crusade”, “righteous indignation” that “undermines good journalism”, “a vast oversimplification of a messy story” and “a wonderful read, marred only by its being fundamentally misleading.” Wow. With friends like these…

Then there’s Steve McIntyre, already infamous in climate change circles for revealing the fatal flaws in the Michael Mann “hockey stick” chart adopted by the UN’s International Panel for Climate Change. His original aim had been to verify the adequacy of the US network of temperature sensors, many of which were being influenced by encroaching urbanisation. Some of them sit in the middle of hot tar parking lots, or near the hot exhaust fans of air conditioning units, for example.

The NASA official in charge of the most cited database of US temperatures, James Hansen, not only refused to disclose the adjustments that were being made to correct for bad siting of sensors, but also removed public access to the locations of meteorological stations. McIntyre had to reconstruct both. He did.

In The American Spectator, Michael Fumento wrote: “In retrospect, you knew there would be trouble when you put the people responsible for the Space Shuttle program in charge of tracking US temperatures.”

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So the European Science Foundation holds a conference on research integrity, to “foster responsible research”. And guess who’s not invited?

Granted, he’s Canadian, but since their research found he is British and his work to foster responsible research did get a mention, you’d have thought he’d crack an invite too. As a commenter at the ClimateAudit site writes: “How can you trust the integrity of a conference that lacks the integrity to include the person who discovered the very errors they are discussing?”

A statistical researcher who worked on the same issue, might have had some contribution to make on the subject of research disputes, and is really British, didn’t get a nod either. Neither did this Danish statistician, of whom the organisers of a conference on research integrity must at least have heard.

Omitting some of the most visible and public critics of research integrity — on whatever grounds — does nothing to allay suspicions that it was just a one-sided public relations exercise for the status quo, does it?

I’ve made several updates to my original post on the errors in NASA’s GISS database for US temperatures. After half a dozen, another major inline update seemed immoderate.

Since Steve McIntyre’s site, Climate Audit, remains down, he borrowed Anthony Watts’ blog to explain in considerable detail why the error isn’t trivial, and to forward a response to a letter by GISS warmer-in-chief James Hansen (link in PDF).

Hansen’s letter appears defensive, argumentative and not a little arrogant:

No need to read further unless you are interested in temperature changes to a tenth of a degree over the U.S. and a thousandth of a degree over the world. <…>

My apologies if the quick response that I sent to Andy Revkin and several other journalists, including the suggestion that it was a tempest inside somebody’s teapot dome, and that perhaps a light was not on upstairs, was immoderate. It was not ad hominem, though.

From McIntyre’s reply to the letter:

Hansen may have been for 1934 before he was against it. But now that he’s for 1934 once again, he can’t say that he was for it all along.

Hat tip: Kriek Jooste.

The science is settl… oops! This couldn’t have come at a worse time for the original Global Cooling alarmist, Newsweek. It just published a screed against climate change skeptics, containing this quote:

This sounded what would become a recurring theme for naysayers: that global temperature data are flat-out wrong. For one thing, they argued, the data reflect urbanization (many temperature stations are in or near cities), not true global warming.

CNN Money carries a rebuttal of the Newsweek piece. So does Marc Morano at the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, as well as NewsBusters Noel Sheppard and Amy Ridenour.

But it gets better. Much, much better.

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