More Global warming fibs are revealed

kaya

Found this on another forum, interesting readiing


Hansen's "coldest October figures" promoting MMGW shown up as glaring error

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/opinion/main.jhtml?

The world has never seen such freezing heat By Christopher Booker Last Updated: 12:01am GMT 16/11/2008 A surreal scientific blunder last week raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

A sudden cold snap brought snow to London in October This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and

115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years. So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

The error was so glaring that when it was reported on the two blogs - run by the US meteorologist Anthony Watts and Steve McIntyre, the Canadian computer analyst who won fame for his expert debunking of the notorious "hockey stick" graph - GISS began hastily revising its figures. This only made the confusion worse because, to compensate for the lowered temperatures in Russia, GISS claimed to have discovered a new "hotspot" in the Arctic - in a month when satellite images were showing Arctic sea-ice recovering so fast from its summer melt that three weeks ago it was 30 per cent more extensive than at the same time last year.

A GISS spokesman lamely explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)

Yet last week's latest episode is far from the first time Dr Hansen's methodology has been called in question. In 2007 he was forced by Mr Watts and Mr McIntyre to revise his published figures for US surface temperatures, to show that the hottest decade of the 20th century was not the 1990s, as he had claimed, but the 1930s.

Another of his close allies is Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, who recently startled a university audience in Australia by claiming that global temperatures have recently been rising "very much faster" than ever, in front of a graph showing them rising sharply in the past decade. In fact, as many of his audience were aware, they have not been rising in recent years and since 2007 have dropped.

Dr Pachauri, a former railway engineer with no qualifications in climate science, may believe what Dr Hansen tells him. But whether, on the basis of such evidence, it is wise for the world's governments to embark on some of the most costly economic measures ever proposed, to remedy a problem which may actually not exist, is a question which should give us all pause for thought.

vivatifosi

In reading the above, you need to bear in mind that Christopher Booker has a clear position as a global warming naysayer. I don't think this is clear from the article.

While I think it is right that people continue to challenge the global warming situation as ultimately it will lead to better scientific understanding and this is arguably the most important issue the planet is facing, I don't like it when journalists publish articles like this which can be taken as independent without knowing the context in which it has been written.

Ben84

Something interesting is happening with both the climate and our climate models, if what I have read is true.

Water has a large heat store potential, and the ocean is a massive heat sink capable of both adsorbing and releasing heat, and if this water sinks in to deeper layers and currents, hiding it away for years. In the recent past many of these currents were in a positive cycle and were releasing heat it would seem, but now they have reversed and are adsorbing heat.

If this is all correct, the next few years, even decades will see global cooling. Perhaps quite significantly.

The trend will not disprove global warming, but it will no doubt be presented in this way. "How can there be global warming when the earth is cooling?" the papers will say. Everyone who supports global warming will be countered with these graphs of declining average temperatures, which look so solid and logical, but might be nothing more than the representation of a short lived trend, a trend that will up and leave one day as fast as it came.

Global warming can still be happening, even when the Earth is cooling. Sounds weird at first perhaps, but if anyone can't see this I recommend they go read more and think about the numbers. An upwards trend can be counteracted and even hidden by a downwards trend, but hidden is different to not being there.

Anyway, regardless if climate change is real or not, if the influence of these ocean cycles is to be believed, the true answer to global warming is going to escape for a bit longer it seems. Which potentially is very dangerous as it probably means less will be done about it.

vivatifosi

Ben84 wrote: »

Anyway, regardless if climate change is real or not, if the influence of these ocean cycles is to be believed, the true answer to global warming is going to escape for a bit longer it seems. Which potentially is very dangerous as it probably means less will be done about it.

I agree that things are more complex than we can possibly know, but its a shame that less will be done about it, particularly as governments will already be minded to hide GW under the carpet to focus on the economic crisis.

A_fiend_for_life

The graph above is a six year range so hardly representative of the last 100, 1000 whatever number of years.

As mentioned above - thoroughly agree with having critics / devils advocates - they are essential for improving understanding not to mention insurance against 'groupthink'.

A_fiend_for_life

vivatifosi wrote: »

I agree that things are more complex than we can possibly know, but its a shame that less will be done about it, particularly as governments will already be minded to hide GW under the carpet to focus on the economic crisis.

There are good reasons for doing something about it. We have poor storage capacity for gas, poor extra capacity for electricity generation, and increasingly uncertain energy supply, retail energy prices are expensive and a lot of unemployed people and possibly more so in the building trade.

A cold winter and high energy prices means full hospital beds so there is an added cost there. Cold weather increases the blood pressure so there is an additional risk of strokes, heart attacks etc. The problems of 'heat or eat' probably creates additional health problems.

A government push for more insulation would create jobs, reduce energy consumption, reduce the effects of an uncertain supply and reduce strain on the NHS.

Focusing on all electric houses first may well be a more effective approach as space heating takes a lot of energy and electricity produces more carbon emissions per kilowatt hour.

So for some things there are good social, political, economic and environmental reasons for doing something.

vivatifosi

I hope you're right "fiend". I was over in the States when Obama got in and there was talk of improving efficency of cars, reducing reliance on oil, upping renewables. All good steps in the right direction from a country that needs to do more than most, but I just get increasingly cynical about anything Gordon Brown says. Not that any of the others do anything more for me...

A_fiend_for_life

@vivatifosi

I agree - I can't quite get Gordon Brown's thinking. He seems to have flown in the face of advisers, flipped in mid air on 80% etc and then belly flopped on the runway. I at least expected him to keep running with his army in the attic talk.

moonrakerz

vivatifosi wrote: »

In reading the above, you need to bear in mind that Christopher Booker has a clear position as a global warming naysayer.

Does that make what he has to say incorrect ??

Cardew

A_fiend_for_life wrote: »

There are good reasons for doing something about it. We have poor storage capacity for gas, poor extra capacity for electricity generation, and increasingly uncertain energy supply, retail energy prices are expensive and a lot of unemployed people and possibly more so in the building trade.

The same lobby who are now Eco warriors have been the ones vehemently campaigning against building nuclear generating plant - which would have solved the generating capacity problem.

20 years too late nuclear will be the solution.

We had excellent storage for gas - under the North Sea. We looted that gas to produce electricity, because it was politically expedient to destroy [strike]Arthur Scargil[/strike] the coal industry.

A_fiend_for_life

Cardew wrote: »

We had excellent storage for gas - under the North Sea. We looted that gas to produce electricity, because it was politically expedient to destroy [strike]Arthur Scargil[/strike] the coal industry.

Speaking to ex miners we also began importing high SOx coal form Argentina no less too.