Warbird Information Exchange

"Instead, we believe the problem resides in the computer models and in our past assumptions that the atmosphere is so well behaved. These models just don't handle processes like clouds, water vapor, and precipitation systems well enough to accurately predict how strong global warming will be, or how it will manifest itself at different heights in the atmosphere," remarked Spencer.

These poorly modeled processes are all related to convection. This is the continual overturning of the atmosphere that occurs as water, evaporated from the Earth's surface, carries excess heat energy into the upper atmosphere where it can be more efficiently radiated to outer space. This convective redistribution, the scientists theorize, may be part of what causes the interesting height-dependent structure in the temperature variations seen in the MSU data. Spencer says that the models also suffer from "numerical diffusion," wherein water vapor in the lower atmosphere is allowed to unrealistically diffuse into the upper atmosphere, where it acts as a greenhouse blanket. "All of these effects together make the computer-modeled atmosphere look much more vertically uniform than it probably is," Spencer concluded.

Data extrapolated from tree ring, ice core and lake sediment indicate that in the 18th Century the average world sea and surface temperatures were 71 degrees F. Climatologists refer to this period as "The Little Ice Age." Such data also show that in 1000 BCE the average global temperature was over 25 degrees Celsius or 77 degrees F. By comparison, the average global temperature in 1999 was 73.5 degrees F. The conclusion to reach about the claim of dramatically rising global temperatures in the latter half of the 20th Century is clear. First, it depends on where you stick your thermometer, on the surface, (whose reading will be highly inaccurate due to urban hot spots) or in the atmosphere (the most accurate readings). Second, the significance of the data depend upon the historical climate record of the planet. Here, as with any kind of scientific data, context and perspective is everything.

Of the second claim, that the cause of global warming is man-made, environmental activists point to the correlation between recent global industrialization and the sweltering summers of 1998 and 1999. A correlation, though, is not proof of cause. If global industrialization were the cause of planetary warming, the satellite and balloon temperature record from 1940 to 1980 -- a period of far greater worldwide

industrialization -- would show a marked increase in average global temperatures, which it does not. Indeed, such data show temperatures declining.

A cause and effect relationship, though, has been discovered between solar activity and global temperatures. Danish climatologists Friis-Christensen and K. Lassen (in the 1991 issue of Science) and Douglas V. Hoyt and Dr. Kenneth H. Schatten (in their book, The Role of the Sun in Climate Change) found that "global temperature variations during the past century are virtually all due to the variations in solar activity."

What about carbon dioxide levels? Scientists have found that past carbon dioxide levels, based, again, on historical and pre-historical tree ring, ice core and lake sediment samples, have changed significantly without human influence. Note, too, that between 1940 and 1980, when man-made levels of CO2 swelled rapidly, there was a decline in temperatures.

If scientific temperature records belie global warming; if scientists conclude that global temperatures are minimally affected by man; where, then, is scientific consensus -- the third claim supporting the notion of global warming? The answer is: there isn't any.

In 1996 the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- the IPCC -- released a document titled, "Summary for Policy Makers," which supported the notion of global warming. Environmentalists crowed that 15,000 scientists had signed the document.

However, the report was doctored without the knowledge of most of those 15,000 scientists, whose protests became so vocal that the lead authors backed off their conclusions, disavowing the document as "a political tract, not a scientific report."

In 1998, 17,000 scientists, six of whom are Nobel Laureates, signed the Oregon Petition, which declares, in part: "There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of greenhouse gasses is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate. "

In 1999 over ten thousand of the world's most renowned climatologists, astrophysicists, meteorologists, etc., signed an open letter by Frederick Seitz, NAS Past President, that states, in part: the Kyoto Accord is "based upon flawed ideas."

Finally, in a paper in June of 2001, aptly titled, GLOBAL WARMING: The Press Gets It Wrong -- our report doesn't support the Kyoto treaty, Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, wrote: "Science, in the public arena, is commonly used as a source of authority with which to bludgeon political opponents and propagandize uninformed citizens."

In light of these facts, if the continual resurrection of the issue of global warming in the media is not a consummate example of the Big Lie, I'd be hard pressed to find a better one.

Inconvenient Truths
by Patrick J. Michaels

Patrick Michaels is senior fellow and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media.


This Sunday, Al Gore will probably win an Academy Award for his global-warming documentary An Inconvenient Truth, a riveting work of science fiction.

The main point of the movie is that, unless we do something very serious, very soon about carbon dioxide emissions, much of Greenland's 630,000 cubic miles of ice is going to fall into the ocean, raising sea levels over twenty feet by the year 2100.

Where's the scientific support for this claim? Certainly not in the recent Policymaker's Summary from the United Nations' much anticipated compendium on climate change. Under the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's medium-range emission scenario for greenhouse gases, a rise in sea level of between 8 and 17 inches is predicted by 2100. Gore's film exaggerates the rise by about 2,000 percent.

Even 17 inches is likely to be high, because it assumes that the concentration of methane, an important greenhouse gas, is growing rapidly. Atmospheric methane concentration hasn't changed appreciably for seven years, and Nobel Laureate Sherwood Rowland recently pronounced the IPCC's methane emissions scenarios as "quite unlikely."

Nonetheless, the top end of the U.N.'s new projection is about 30-percent lower than it was in its last report in 2001. "The projections include a contribution due to increased ice flow from Greenland and Antarctica for the rates observed since 1993," according to the IPCC, "but these flow rates could increase or decrease in the future."

According to satellite data published in Science in November 2005, Greenland was losing about 25 cubic miles of ice per year. Dividing that by 630,000 yields the annual percentage of ice loss, which, when multiplied by 100, shows that Greenland was shedding ice at 0.4 percent per century.

"Was" is the operative word. In early February, Science published another paper showing that the recent acceleration of Greenland's ice loss from its huge glaciers has suddenly reversed.

Nowhere in the traditionally refereed scientific literature do we find any support for Gore's hypothesis. Instead, there's an unrefereed editorial by NASA climate firebrand James E. Hansen, in the journal Climate Change — edited by Steven Schneider, of Stanford University, who said in 1989 that scientists had to choose "the right balance between being effective and honest" about global warming — and a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that was only reviewed by one person, chosen by the author, again Dr. Hansen.

These are the sources for the notion that we have only ten years to "do" something immediately to prevent an institutionalized tsunami. And given that Gore only conceived of his movie about two years ago, the real clock must be down to eight years!

It would be nice if my colleagues would actually level with politicians about various "solutions" for climate change. The Kyoto Protocol, if fulfilled by every signatory, would reduce global warming by 0.07 degrees Celsius per half-century. That's too small to measure, because the earth's temperature varies by more than that from year to year.

The Bingaman-Domenici bill in the Senate does less than Kyoto — i.e., less than nothing — for decades, before mandating larger cuts, which themselves will have only a minor effect out past somewhere around 2075. (Imagine, as a thought experiment, if the Senate of 1925 were to dictate our energy policy for today).

Mendacity on global warming is bipartisan. President Bush proposes that we replace 20 percent of our current gasoline consumption with ethanol over the next decade. But it's well-known that even if we turned every kernel of American corn into ethanol, it would displace only 12 percent of our annual gasoline consumption. The effect on global warming, like Kyoto, would be too small to measure, though the U.S. would become the first nation in history to burn up its food supply to please a political mob.

And even if we figured out how to process cellulose into ethanol efficiently, only one-third of our greenhouse gas emissions come from transportation. Even the Pollyannish 20-percent displacement of gasoline would only reduce our total emissions by 7-percent below present levels — resulting in emissions about 20-percent higher than Kyoto allows.

And there's other legislation out there, mandating, variously, emissions reductions of 50, 66, and 80 percent by 2050. How do we get there if we can't even do Kyoto?

When it comes to global warming, apparently the truth is inconvenient. And it's not just Gore's movie that's fiction. It's the rhetoric of the Congress and the chief executive, too.


This article appeared in the National Review (Online) on February 23, 2007.

Global warming turns people 'gay'
By Larry Elder
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Posted: February 8, 2007
1:00 a.m. Eastern

Global warming alarmists – despite their best efforts – seem incapable of convincing the Bush administration. So here's my suggestion. Make the scientists tell the president that global warming turns people gay.

The idea came to me after seeing a Super Bowl Snickers commercial and learning of the "controversy" that followed it. In the ad, two guys chewing on either end of the candy bar inadvertently touch lips. Shocked, they decide to do something "manly" and demonstrate their heterosexuality. How? They pull down their shirts and rip off their chest hairs. A pro-gay-rights group called the ad homophobic and demanded the Snickers people stop showing it. Clearly, America runs rampant with gay-haters.

So, imagine if scientists simply told Bush that global warming made people gay.

Al Gore's documentary, "An Inconvenient Truth," scared more people than the shower scene in Alfred Hitchcock's "Psycho." The former vice president tells us the debate within the scientific community concerning the consequences of global warming is over. But the Bush administration yawned. And just last week, something called the IPCC – Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change – a group sponsored by the United Nations, also sounded the alarm. But, again, the Bush administration remains unconvinced.

But, the gay thing might work. That is, assuming you can get everybody on board. Unfortunately, some pesky, politically incorrect scientists are telling the global-warming alarmists, "Calm down." Who are these wing-nuts?

A professor of meteorology at MIT, Richard Lindzen, for example, says, "I think it's mainly just like little kids locking themselves in dark closets to see how much they can scare each other and themselves. And there's a lot of confusion in this and, you know, at the heart of it, we're talking of a few tenths of a degree change in temperature. None of it in the last eight years, by the way. ... [I]f there's anything that there is a consensus on, [it is that we] will do very little to affect climate. ... And I think future generations are not going to blame us for anything except for being silly, for letting a few tenths of a degree panic us. And I think nobody is arguing about whether our climate is changing. It's always changing. Sea level has been rising since the end of the last ice age. The experts on it in the IPCC have freely acknowledged there's no strong evidence it's accelerating."

Then there's Chris Landsea, the scientist who resigned from the IPCC last year, accusing the organization of being "subverted, its neutrality lost." "It is beyond me why my [IPCC] colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming," wrote Landsea. "My view is that when people identify themselves as being associated with the IPCC and then make pronouncements far outside current scientific understandings that this will harm the credibility of climate change science and will in the longer term diminish our role in public policy."

What to do about the author of "The Andromeda Strain," Dr. Michael Crichton? No climatology specialist, Crichton recently wrote a book of fiction called "State of Fear." The protagonist challenges the "conventional wisdom" of the global warming alarmists. In preparation for his book, Crichton researched scientific literature on global warming. His conclusion? A lot of it is hype.

"I do claim that open and frank discussion of the data, and of the issues, is being suppressed," writes Crichton. "Leading scientific journals have taken strong editorial positions on the side of global warming, which, I argue, they have no business doing. Under the circumstances, any scientist who has doubts understands clearly that they will be wise to mute their expression. ... [T]he intermixing of science and politics is a bad combination, with a bad history."

The alarmists want the United States to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol. This requires spending gobs of money to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. But during the Clinton administration, the Senate voted 95-0 to refuse to ratify the Kyoto accord if it excluded emissions from countries like China and India. It does.

Sixty Canadian scientists wrote a letter to their country's prime minister, urging an "independent climate-science review," because "billions of dollars earmarked for implementation of the [Kyoto] protocol in Canada will be squandered without a proper assessment of recent developments in climate science."

Others, like economist Julian Morris, suggest that spending all this money on Kyoto impoverishes the planet with very little gain. "But the same people who predict massive climate changes," says Morris, "also predict that in order for those climate changes to occur, we would have had enormous amounts of economic growth. So, the poorest people in the world will no longer be poor. ... The reality is that in the future, people will be wealthy enough to adapt to pretty much any change that is likely to happen."

Confused? Me, too. So let's put all this uncertainty and speculation to rest, and get moving: Global warming turns people gay.

"Testimony of Michael Crichton before the United States Senate"

Committee on Environment and Public Works

Washington, DC
September 28, 2005

Thank you Mr. Chairman, and members of the Committee. I appreciate the opportunity to discuss the important subject of politicization of research. In that regard, what I would like to emphasize to the committee today is the importance of independent verification to science.

In essence, science is nothing more than a method of inquiry. The method says an assertion is valid-and merits universal acceptance-only if it can be independently verified. The impersonal rigor of the method means it is utterly apolitical. A truth in science is verifiable whether you are black or white, male or female, old or young. It's verifiable whether you like the results of a study, or you don't.

Thus, when adhered to, the scientific method can transcend politics. And the converse may also be true: when politics takes precedent over content, it is often because the primacy of independent verification has been overwhelmed by competing interests.

Verification may take several forms. I come from medicine, where the gold standard is the randomized double-blind study, which has been the paradigm of medical research since the 1940s.

In that vein, let me tell you a story. It's 1991, I am flying home from Germany, sitting next to a man who is almost in tears, he is so upset. He's a physician involved in an FDA study of a new drug. It's a double-blind study involving four separate teams---one plans the study, another administers the drug to patients, a third assesses the effect on patients, and a fourth analyzes results. The teams do not know each other, and are prohibited from personal contact of any sort, on peril of contaminating the results. This man had been sitting in the Frankfurt airport, innocently chatting with another man, when they discovered to their mutual horror they are on two different teams studying the same drug. They were required to report their encounter to the FDA. And my companion was now waiting to see if the FDA would declare their multi-year, multi-million dollar study invalid because of this chance contact.

For a person with a medical background, accustomed to this degree of rigor in research, the protocols of climate science appear considerably more relaxed. In climate science, it's permissible for raw data to be "touched," or modified, by many hands. Gaps in temperature and proxy records are filled in. Suspect values are deleted because a scientist deems them erroneous. A researcher may elect to use parts of existing records, ignoring other parts. But the fact that the data has been modified in so many ways inevitably raises the question of whether the results of a given study are wholly or partially caused by the modifications themselves.

In saying this, I am not casting aspersions on the motives or fair-mindedness of climate scientists. Rather, what is at issue is whether the methodology of climate science is sufficiently rigorous to yield a reliable result. At the very least we should want the reassurance of independent verification by another lab, in which they make their own decisions about how to handle the data, and yet arrive at a similar result.

Because any study where a single team plans the research, carries it out, supervises the analysis, and writes their own final report, carries a very high risk of undetected bias. That risk, for example, would automatically preclude the validity of the results of a similarly structured study that tested the efficacy of a drug.

By the same token, any verification of the study by investigators with whom the researcher had a professional relationship-people with whom, for example, he had published papers in the past, would not be accepted. That's peer review by pals, and it's unavoidably biased. Yet these issues are central to the now-familiar story of the "Hockeystick graph" and the debate surrounding it.

To summarize it briefly: in 1998-99 the American climate researcher Michael Mann and his co-workers published an estimate of global temperatures from the year 1000 to 1980. Mann's results appeared to show a spike in recent temperatures that was unprecedented in the last thousand years. His alarming report formed the centerpiece of the U.N.'s Third Assessment Report, in 2001.

Mann's work was immediately criticized because it didn't show the well-known Medieval Warm Period, when temperatures were warmer than they are today, or the Little Ice Age that began around 1500, when the climate was colder than today. But real fireworks began when two Canadian researchers, McIntyre and McKitrick, attempted to replicate Mann's study. They found grave errors in the work, which they detailed in 2003: calculation errors, data used twice, data filled in, and a computer program that generated a hockeystick out of any data fed to it-even random data. Mann's work has since been dismissed by scientists around the world who subscribe to global warning.

Why did the UN accept Mann's report so uncritically? Why didn't they catch the errors? Because the IPCC doesn't do independent verification. And perhaps because Mann himself was in charge of the section of the report that included his work.

The hockeystick controversy drags on. But I would direct the Committee's attention to three aspects of this story. First, six years passed between Mann's publication and the first detailed accounts of errors in his work. This is simply too long for policymakers to wait for validated results.

Second, the flaws in Mann's work were not caught by climate scientists, but rather by outsiders-in this case, an economist and a mathematician. They had to go to great lengths to obtain data from Mann's team, which obstructed them at every turn. When the Canadians sought help from the NSF, they were told that Mann was under no obligation to provide his data to other researchers for independent verification.

Third, this kind of stonewalling is not unique. The Canadians are now attempting to replicate other climate studies and are getting the same runaround from other researchers. One prominent scientist told them: "Why should I make the data available to you, when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it."

Even further, some scientists complain the task of archiving is so time-consuming as to prevent them from getting any work done. But this is nonsense.

The first research paper I worked on was back in the 1960s, when all data were on stacks of paper. When we received a request for data from another lab, I had to stand at a Xerox machine, copying one page a minute, for several hours. Back then, it was appropriate to ask another lab who they were and why they wanted the data. Because their request meant a lot of work.

But today we can burn data to a CD, or post it at an ftp site for downloading. Archiving data is so easy it should have become standard practice a decade ago. Government grants should require a "replication package" as part of funding. Posting the package online should be a prerequisite to journal publication. And there's really no reason to exclude anyone from reviewing the data.

Of course, replication takes time. Policymakers need sound answers to the questions they ask. A faster way to get them might be to give research grants for important projects to three independent teams simultaneously. A provision of the grant would be that at the end of the study period, all three papers would be published together, with each group commenting on the findings of the other. I believe this would be the fastest way to get verified answers to important questions.

But if independent verification is the heart of science, what should policymakers do with research that is unverifiable? For example, the U.N. Third Assessment Report defines general circulation climate models as unverifiable. If that is true, are their predictions of any use to policymakers?

I would argue they are not. Senator Boxer has said we need more science fact. I agree-but a prediction is never a fact. In any case, if policymakers decide to weight their decisions in favor of verified research, that will provoke an effort by climate scientists to demonstrate their concerns using objectively verifiable research. I think we will all be better for it.

In closing, I want to state emphatically that nothing in my remarks should be taken to imply that we can ignore our environment, or that we should not take climate change seriously. On the contrary, we must dramatically improve our record on environmental management. That is why a focused effort on climate science, aimed at securing sound, independently verified answers to policy questions, is so important now.

I would remind the committee that in the end, it is the proper function of government to set standards for the integrity of information it uses to make policy. Those who argue government should refrain from mandating quality standards for scientific research-including some professional organizations-are merely self-serving. In an information society, public safety depends on the integrity of public information. And only government can perform that task.

Thank you very much.

I saw a recording from CNN "Modern Living: Green Homes" showing a toilet with 2 buttons and a programmable thermostat like it's something new. Come on my 20 year old house has those things!

So when you vote for "Yes, but is out of our control and occurs naturally" you are saying for example that if you stood in a room full of smoking people and you are a non-smoker that you would not even cough? And that you can not get lung cancer from years and years of smoking?