Alleged CRU Emails - 25 results below

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From: Fred Pearce <100713.1311@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: keith briffa <k.briffa@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Subject: new sciwentist feature
Date: 13 Oct 96 10:32:49 EDT

Keith,

This is my first draft of the dendrochronology feature. I wonder if you have time to go through look. I hope you recognise the quotes, but please makes changes if they think they misrepresent you. And if you can answer any of the questions in square brackets that would be most useful.

Ideally, can you not change the full text but make notes, remarks, answers referring to it.

As ever, haste is of the essence.

Regards

--Fred Pearce

It was one of the largest volcanic eruptions of the past xxx xxxx xxxxyears. Mount Changbai [correct?] in China blasted 50 cubic kilometres of rock into the air and deluged much of the far east with hot pumice. Radiocarbon dated the explosion at early in the 11th century. But it took Keith Briffa, sitting in his office in Norwich and juggling data from tree rings round the world, to pinpoint the precise year: 1032.

Volcanoes scatter the atmosphere with dust that deflects sunlight and cools the world beneath for a year or more. And when the world cools, trees grow less. That year's growth rings are smaller and less dense.

By analysing those rings, Briffa and his colleagues at the Climatic Research Unit in the University of East Anglia have charted these sudden and dramatic shocks to the climate system, from Changbai to Pinatubo in 1991. Larches in the forests of the northern Urals, for instance, have revealed that 1032 was the coldest summer there in a thousand years, more than 6 degrees cooler than the long-term average. Four of the five coldest summers in Europe and North America during the past four centuries (1601, 1641, 1669, and 1912) coincided with known major volcanic events. "We are pretty certain the fifth one, in 1699, did too," says Briffa. "But the geologists haven't found the volcano yet."

It is clever work. But the science of tree-ring analysis, dendrochronology, is more than just a party piece for botanists. Every ring in every tree round the world contains a memory of the climate the year it was formed. Reading these rings holds the potential, Briffa believes, to answer one of the most vital questions of our time: has human activity started to warm the planet?

With colleagues in laboratories and field stations from Dublin to eastern Siberia, he has within the past year [correct?] begun an attempt to construct a history, year by year, of temperatures across northern Europe and Asia over the past xxx xxxx xxxxyears, right back to the waning of the last ice age. The tam, funded by the European Union, hope to help show whether the warming seen across the planet in the past century, and especially since around 1980, is within the limits of normal natural variability, or the start of man-made global warming.

For climatologists, the search for an irrefutable "sign" of anthropogenic warming has assumed an almost Biblical intensity. The leading figures of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), claim that, in all probability, they have seen it. Last summer [ed: 1996], the IPCC's scientific working group, chaired by former UK Meteorological Office boss Sir John Houghton, concluded that "the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate". But it is like the "balance of evidence" suggesting BSE causes CJD. The judgment is far from "beyond reasonable doubt". The case remains "not proven".

Many researchers most intimately involved in the search are still far from sure how the probabilities balance. And some of the sharpest concerns are coming from the places where the original early warnings of global warming emerged in the mid-1980s. Places such as Briffa's base at the Climatic Research Unit in Norwich, and the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in California.

Few investigators doubt that the world has warmed recently. Nor that the enhanced "greenhouse effect" of pollution from gases such as carbon dioxide, will warm the planet. But in the past five years, climate researchers have growing increasingly aware of how little they really know about the natural variability from which they must pick out the "signal" of human influence.

One prominent IPCC researcher concerned about this gap in knowledge is Simon Tett from the Hadley Centre for climate modelling at the Meteorological Office, home to one of the world's five leading global circulation models, capable of recreating a mathematical version of how the atmosphere works and of running simulations of climatic changes over decades or even centuries. He says that "in the past, our estimates of natural variability have been based on climate models." But this autumn [date?], he says, those estimates have been thrown into turmoil by a paper published in the journal The Holocene. In it, Tim Barnett of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, part of the University of California at San Diego, compared model estimates of natural temperature fluctuations over the past 400 years with the best evidence from the real world -- from instruments in the past century and "proxy data", such as Briffa's tree rings, from before that.

The result was bad news for the modellers. The two models examined -- one German, the other American -- generated a natural variability of around 0.1 degree C per century. This was less than half that revealed in the proxy data. "Of course we don't have to believe the proxy data. They certainly have problems attached to them. But my belief is that they both models, and proxy data too, underestimate real variability," says Barnett

The models' error was not, perhaps, too surprising. As Barnett points out, they do not include vital "forcing" mechanisms that alter temperature, such as solar cycles and volcanic eruptions. Nor can they yet mimic the strength of the largest year-on-year variability in the natural system, the El Nino oscillation in the Pacific Ocean, which has a global impact on climate.

Nonetheless, the findings should serve as a warning, Barnett says, that "the current models cannot be used in rigorous tests for anthropogenic signals in the real world". If they are they "might lead us to believe that an anthropogenic signal had been found when, in fact, that may not be the case."

Barnett knows how easily this can happen. He was a lead author for a critical chapter in the last IPCC scientific assessment, which investigated "the detection of climate change and attribution of causes". It formulated the IPCC case that the evidence points towards a human influence on climate, but it warned repeatedly that great uncertainties remained. "We wrote a long list of caveats in that chapter," says Barnett. "We got a lot of static from within IPCC, from people who wanted to water down and delete some of those caveats. We had to work very hard to keep them all in." Even so, when the findings were first leaked to the New York Times, it was under the headline "Scientists finally confirm human role in global warming".

Suggestive though the evidence may be, Barnett and his co-authors insist that the uncertainties, especially concerning natural variability, have to be answered. And so, suddenly, the modellers are queuing at Briffa's door to find out what his tree-ring data shows about the real world beyond the computer simulations. "Five years ago, climate modellers wanted nothing to do with the palaeo community," says Briffa with a grin. "But now they realise that they need our data. We can help them to define natural variability." He has already collaborated with Barnett. Tett paid his first visit to the dendrochronology lab in November [1996].

And so to the forests of Europe and Asia where, over the next [how many?] years Briffa will coordinate the work of colleagues in a dozen countries who hope to dramatically increase the available proxy data on past climate change. Much of the best data so far has come from the forests round Lake Tornetrask, on the northern border of Sweden, deep inside the Arctic Circle. This is near the northern limit for Scots pine, a place where their growth rate of the trees can be massively altered by small perturbations in summer temperatures. The result is dramatic differences in the thickness and density of tree rings.

The head of this work is Professor W [full first name?] Karlen [ed: acute on e], a geographer at the University of Stockholm, who over many years has taken cores from living trees and from logs and stumps hauled from old peat bogs. Despite the harsh climate, there are living trees here up to 600 years old. And the chronology can be extended ever further by analysing the dead trees. So far the climate reconstruction is complete for more than 1400 years before the present; the aim now is to extent it up to 8000 years.

The best data, says Briffa, comes from analysing both ring width and the maximum density of wood in each ring. By firing X-rays through the wood, researchers can now analyse the density of rings as little as 30 microns across -- the equivalent of a tree's girth growing by a centimetre every century. The growth of cell walls late in the growing season creates the densest wood and, says Briffa, "appears to depend directly on the average mean temperature".

Even so, ring growth is a product of many factors, including the genetics of the tree, past climate, the age of the tree and soil moisture. The relationships between ring growth and summer temperature are not a precise. But comparisons between the recent rings and known climatic data show that the rings can capture at least half of the summer temperature variability.

The temperature graphs produced at Tornetrask show "pronounced variability on all timescales, from year-on-year variations right up to century-on-century," says Briffa. On the longer timescales, for instance, they show 20 major cooling periods during the past two millenia, including long spells between 500 and 850, between 1100 and 1350 and between 1580 and 1750, the little ice age. There were also long warm spells between 900 and 1100, known as the medieval warm period, and 1360 to 1560. [ed: show graph from NERC paper].

Further back, early results suggest a strong warm era from 4000 to 3300 BC, and a cool period ending around 5070 BC. But there are intriguing gaps, for which no tree rings can be found. These, says Briffa, "suggest some major calamity that destroyed trees. Volcanoes, perhaps, or a rapid rise in the water tables." A 19-year gap between 1130 and 1111 BC, for instance, coincides with volcanic ash showing up in Greenland ice.

"What all this means," says Briffa, "is that the old image of the xxx xxxx xxxxyears since the end of the last ice age -- the Holocene era -- as climatically tranquil looks increasingly inaccurate." Hence the intense interest in the EU project, which will attempt to reconstruct those xxx xxxx xxxxyears of climate right across northern Europe and Asia, from Ireland to the Sea of Okhotsk, from the borders of Mongolia to shores of the Arctic Ocean.

During the past summer, helicopters flying low over the tundra have spotted logs in hundreds of small lakes in the Tornetrask region of northern Sweden. Karlen has donned his diving suit to help remove samples of timber from the freezing waters [did he?]. In northern Finland, local diving clubs picked some 3000 samples from lakes.

In the Arctic wastes of northern Siberia, a major survey is being conducted on the Taimyr peninsula, the largest stretch of frozen tundra in Eurasia and far north of today's tree line. There are well-preserved logs buried in river sediments here that grew between 5000 and 8000 years ago. On the Yamal Peninsula, just east of the Ural mountains on the shores of the Arctic Ocean, wood dug from the permafrost grew in conditions so cold that some summers temperatures never exceeded the threshold for growth of about 5 degrees C, so no growth rings formed. Nonetheless Yamal is the only site so far found that yields tree rings right through a gap at 300 BC. "Interestingly, the Yamal rings show this to have been the coldest period in the entire run," says Briffa.

Other, less detailed, surveys are being carried out across the whole of the north of the two continents. And this winter the timber is being analysed at laboratories in Copenhagen and Birmensdorf -- the Swiss home of Fritz Schweingruber, one of the world's top tree-ring analysts. The project will also carry out new analysis on the large numbers of samples of ancient oak already stored in laboratories in Ireland, Britain, Germany, Poland, the Netherlands and Sweden. The oak has been dragged from bogs and river beds, or liberated from archaeological sites and even the beams of old houses over the past 30 years.

"There is a massive amount of data on existing European oak rings. But much of it was done in the 1970s, and then not updated," says Briffa. One of Britain's biggest collections, at Sotterley Park near Lowestoft in Suffolk [Keith: who runs this?], has ring data going back to 1580. "But it stops in the 1980s, missing the recent major droughts. We have got to update that information."

Already, the first long data sets are starting to emerge from Siberia. Last summer [ed: 13 July 1995], Briffa, Schweingruber and Stepan Shiyatov of the Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology at Ekaterunburg in the Russian Urals published a paper on "unusual 20th-century summer warmth in a 1000-year temperature record from Siberia". A complete tree-ring chronology from AD 914, pieced together from larches on the Yamal peninsula, suggested that average summer temperatures since 1901 have been higher than for any similar length of time during the chronology. It estimated that from 1600, the depth of the little ice age, to the present day there has been a 1.14 degrees C warming. The first eight decades of the 20th century were 0.13 degrees C warmer than the next warmest period, nine centuries before in1202-91.

The chronology also showed that Europe's "little ice age" extended east of the Urals, but that the medieval warm period did not. But these long trends disguise sharp short-term anomalies. The 11th century seems to have been a particularly turbulent time in the Urals. 1032, the year of the Changbai eruption, yielded the coldest summer in a thousand years. But the following year was the second warmest of the millenium, at 2.11 degrees above the mean.

Tree rings are not the only source of proxy temperature data. Layers of ice laid down annually in permanent ice sheets, such as those in Greenland and Antarctica, carry a temperature record in the isotopic composition of the ice. Corals also have a temperature imprint, and even sediments on continental shelves can be mined for climate information. The most work, so far, has been done on ice sheets. American and European researchers in the Greenland Ice Sheet Project (GISP), for instance, have drilled for 3 kilometres into the ice pack, going back more than xxx xxxx xxxxyears. Besides plotting the course of the last ice age, they have found evidence of constant climate shifts during the past xxx xxxx xxxxyears.

Briffa says tree rings and ice cores "complement each other, focusing best at different timescales." Tree rings show annual and decade-to-decade variations very clearly. But they do not go back so far, and are not so good at spotting change from millenium to millenium. Ring analysis seems to smooth out long-term trends, probably because trees slowly adapt to these changes, disguising them." On the other hand, ice-core data shows up long-term trends very clearly, but is poor at showing single-year changes. The melting and refreezing of ice in the surface of ice packs means that the ice from individual years tends to mingle together.

The patterns of temperature change revealed by these different methods will probably always remain too fragmented to reveal unambiguous trends in global average temperatures. But this may not matter. "Frankly, global averages are not central to the issue of attributing climate change," says Barnett. "What will ultimately prove whether or not we are altering the climate will be the patterns of temperature change -- geographical patterns, seasonal patterns and vertical patterns." It is not how much it warms, but where, that will be vital.

Under the IPCC umbrella, Barnett and Phil Jones of the CRU have formed a small "detections group", to look for these tell-tale patterns. "We are systematically looking at the patterns, past and present, of all the main forcings on climate," Barnett says. They will investigate how the world's climate systems respond to volcanoes, to changes in the ocean circulation, to solar cycles and so on. "Then we will compare those patterns with what we are seeing today. What we hope is that the current patterns of temperature change prove distinctive, quite different from the patterns of natural variability in the past." And if that turns out to be the case, he says, "we will be able to close down this issue of attribution, perhaps within three to five years."

Here, the climate models will again come into play. If current climate change also accords with what the models predict from global warming, then the "hand of man" will indeed look to be on the planet's thermostat.

The models all suggest that anthropogenic global warming will show a very distinctive pattern. For instance, they predict that anthropogenic warming will be greatest in the northern latitudes of the great continental land masses, such as Eurasia. And that makes the finding of Briffa's team that summer temperatures in northern Siberia are higher than for a millenium potentially extremely important. And the prospect of further data from this region to confirm that finding so intriguing.

Briffa grins at the prospect. "The trend seems to be accelerating. We are getting reports back from Stepan, our man in the Urals, that it was warmer this spring on the Yamal peninsula there than ever before, and tree growth has been absolutely fantastic. It is a major warming, like nothing seen there for a thousand years -- and it is what the climate models predict." Caution prevails, but the elusive pattern of man-made global warming may just be emerging amid the larch groves on the sunny hills of northern Siberia.

ends

Original Filename: 1254751382.txt | Return to the index page | Permalink | Later Emails

From: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: Tom Wigley <wigley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Subject: Re: [geo] Re: CCNet: A Scientific Scandal Unfolds
Date: Mon Oct 5 10:03:xxx xxxx xxxx

Tom,
Thanks for trying to clear the air with a few people. Keith is still working on a
response. Having to contact the Russians to get some more site details takes time.
Several things in all this are ludicrous as you point out. Yamal is one site and isn't
in most of the millennial reconstructions. It isn't in MBH, Crowley, Moberg etc. Also
picking trees for a temperature response is not done either.
The other odd thing is that they seem to think that you can reconstruct the last
millennium from a few proxies, yet you can't do this from a few instrumental series for the
last 150 years! Instrumental data are perfect proxies, after all.
[1]http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/10/un_climate_reports_they_lie.html
This one is wrong as well. IPCC (1995) didn't use that silly curve that Chris Folland or
Geoff Jenkins put together.
Cheers
Phil
At 02:59 05/10/2009, you wrote:

David,
This is entirely off the record, and I do not want this shared with
anyone. I hope you will respect this. This issue is not my problem,
and I await further developments.
However, Keith Briffa is in the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), and I was
Director of CRU for many years so I am quite familiar with Keith and
with his work. I have also done a lots of hands on tree ring work, both
in the field and in developing and applying computer programs for
climate reconstruction from tree rings. On the other hand, I have not
been involved in any of this work since I left CRU in 1993 to move to
NCAR. But I do think I can speak with some modicum of authority.
You say, re dendoclimatologists, "they rely on recent temperature data by which to
*select* recent tree data" (my emphasis). I don't know where you get this idea, but I
can assure you that it is entirely wrong.
Further, I do not know the basis for your claim that "Dendrochonology
is a bankrupt approach". It is one of the few proxy data areas where rigorous
multivariate statistical tools are used and where reconstructions are carefully tested
on independent data.
Finally, the fact that scientists (in any field) do not willingly share their
hard-earned primary data implies that they have something to hide
has no logical basis.
Tom.
++++++++++++++++++++++++
David Schnare wrote:

Tom:

Briffa has already made a preliminary response and he failed to explain his selection
procedure. Further, he refused to give up the data for several years, and was forced to
do so only when he submitted to a journal that demanded data archiving and actually
enforced the practice.

More significantly, Briffa's analysis is irrelevant. Dendrochonology is a bankrupt
approach. They admit that they cannot distiguish causal elements contributing to tree
ring size. Further, they rely on recent temperature data by which to select recent tree
data (excluding other data) and then turn around and claim that the tree ring data
explains the recent temperature data. If you can give a principled and reasoned defense
of Briffa (see the discussion on Watt's website) then go for it. I'd be fascinated, as
would a rather large number of others.

None of this, of course, detracts for the need to do research on geoengineering. David
Schnare
On Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 8:50 PM, Tom Wigley <wigley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx <mailto:wigley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>>
wrote:
Dear all,
I think it would be wise to let Briffa respond to these
accusations before compounding them with unwarranted
extrapolations.
With regard to the Hockey Stick, it is highly unlikely that
a single site can be very important. M&M have made similar
accusations in the past and they have been shown, in the
peer-reviewed literature, to be ill-founded.
Two recent papers you should read are those in the attached
Word document (first pages only).
Tom.
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
Eugene I. Gordon wrote:
David:

I concede all of your points but add one other thought. It is my
grandchildren I worry about and I suspect their grand children
will find it exceedingly warm because sunspots will return and
carbon abatement is only a game; It wont happen significantly
in their lifetime AND IT WONT BE ENOUGH IN ANY CASE. HENCE _WE
WILL NEED A GEOENGINEERING SOLUTION_ COME WHAT MAY!
-gene


/Eugene I. Gordon/
/(9xxx xxxx xxxx/
/euggordon@xxxxxxxxx.xxx/ <[2]http://euggordon@xxxxxxxxx.xxx/>
/[3]www.germgardlighting.com/ <[4]http://www.germgardlighting.com/>


*From:* geoengineering@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
<[5]mailto:geoengineering@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
[mailto:geoengineering@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
<[6]mailto:geoengineering@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>] *On Behalf Of *David
Schnare
*Sent:* Sunday, October 04, 2009 10:49 AM
*Cc:* Alan White; geoengineering@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
<[7]mailto:geoengineering@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
*Subject:* [geo] Re: CCNet: A Scientific Scandal Unfolds

Gene:

I've been following this issue closely and this is what I take
away from it:

1) Tree ring-based temperature reconstructions are fraught with
so much uncertainty, they have no value whatever. It is
impossible to tease out the relative contributions of rainfall,
nutrients, temperature and access to sunlight. Indeed a single
tree can, and apparently has, skewed the entire 20th century
temperature reconstruction.

2) The IPCC peer review process is fundamentally flawed if a
lead author is able to both disregard and ignore criticisms of
his own work, where that work is the critical core of the
chapter. It not only destroys the credibility of the core
assumptions and data, it destroys the credibility of the larger
work - in this case, the IPCC summary report and the underlying
technical reports. It also destroys the utility and credibility
of the modeling efforts that use assumptions on the relationship
of CO2 to temperature that are based on Britta's work, which is,
of course, the majority of such analyses.

As Corcoran points out, "the IPCC has depended on 1) computer
models, 2) data collection, 3) long-range temperature
forecasting and 4) communication. None of these efforts are
sitting on firm ground."

Nonetheless, and even if the UNEP thinks it appropriate to rely
on Wikipedia as their scientific source of choice, greenhouse
gases may (at an ever diminishing probability) cause a
significant increase in global temperature. Thus, research,
including field trials, on the leading geoengineering techniques
are appropriate as a backstop in case our children find out that
the current alarmism is justified.

David Schnare
On Sun, Oct 4, 2009 at 8:35 AM, Eugene I. Gordon
<euggordon@xxxxxxxxx.xxx <[8]mailto:euggordon@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
<[9]mailto:euggordon@xxxxxxxxx.xxx <mailto:euggordon@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>>>
wrote:
Alan:

Thanks for the extensive and detailed e-mail. This is terrible
but not surprising. Obviously I do not know what gives with
these guys. However, I have my own suspicions and hypothesis. I
dont think they are scientifically inadequate or stupid. I
think they are dishonest and members of a club that has much to
gain by practicing and perpetuating global warming scare
tactics. That is not to say that global warming is not occurring
to some extent since it would be even without CO2 emissions. The
CO2 emissions only accelerate the warming and there are other
factors controlling climate. As a result, the entire process may
be going slower than the powers that be would like. Hence, (I
postulate) the global warming contingent has substantial
motivation to be dishonest or seriously biased, and to be loyal
to their equally dishonest club members. Among the motivations
are increased and continued grant funding, university
advancement, job advancement, profits and payoffs from carbon
control advocates such as Gore, being in the limelight, and
other motivating factors I am too inexperienced to identify.

Alan, this is nothing new. You and I experienced similar
behavior from some of our colleagues down the hall, the Bell
Labs research people, in the good old days. Humans are hardly
perfect creations. I am never surprised at what they can do. _I
am perpetually grateful for those who are honest and fair and
thankfully there is a goodly share of those._

-gene

*From:* Alan White [mailto:adwhite99@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
<[10]mailto:adwhite99@xxxxxxxxx.xxx> <[11]mailto:adwhite99@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
<[12]mailto:adwhite99@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>>]
*Sent:* Saturday, October 03, 2009 8:28 PM
*To:* Gene Gordon
*Subject:* Fw: CCNet: A Scientific Scandal Unfolds

more of the same. what gives with these guys?


----- Original Message -----
*From:* Peiser, Benny <[13]mailto:B.J.Peiser@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
<[14]mailto:B.J.Peiser@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>>
*To:* CCNetMedia <[15]mailto:CCNetMedia@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
<[16]mailto:CCNetMedia@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>>
*Sent:* Friday, October 02, 2009 6:36 AM
*Subject:* CCNet: A Scientific Scandal Unfolds

CCNet 153/2xxx xxxx xxxxOctober 2xxx xxxx xxxxAudiatur et altera pars
CRU'S HIDDEN DATA AND THE IPCC: A SCIENTIFIC SCANDAL UNFOLDS
------------------------------------------------------------
A scientific scandal is casting a shadow over a number of recent
peer-reviewed climate papers. The scandal has serious
implications for
public trust in science. The IPCC's mission is to reflect the
science,
not create it. As the IPCC states, its duty is "assessing the
scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the
understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change. It
does not
carry out new research nor does it monitor climate-related
data." But as
IPCC lead author, Briffa was a key contributor in shaping the
assessment. When the IPCC was alerted to peer-reviewed research that
refuted the idea, it declined to include it. This leads to the more
general, and more serious issue: what happens when peer-review
fails -
as it did here?
--Andrew Orlowski, The Register, 29 September 2009
Over the next nine years, at least one paper per year appeared in
prominent journals using Briffa's Yamal composite to support a
hockey
stick-like result. The IPCC relied on these studies to defend
the Hockey
Stick view, and since it had appointed Briffa himself to be the IPCC
Lead Author for this topic, there was no chance it would
question the
Yamal data. Despite the fact that these papers appeared in top
journals
like Nature and Science, none of the journal reviewers or
editors ever
required Briffa to release his Yamal data. Steve McIntyre's repeated
requests for them to uphold their own data disclosure rules were
ignored.
--Ross McKitrick, Financial Post, 1 October 2009
The official United Nation's global warming agency, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is a four-legged
stool that
is fast losing its legs. To carry the message of man-made global
warming theory to the world, the IPCC has depended on 1) computer
models, 2) data collection, 3) long-range temperature
forecasting and 4)
communication. None of these efforts are sitting on firm ground.
--Terence Corcoran, National Post, 1 October 2009
Media reaction to the Yamal story has been rather limited so
far. I'm
not sure whether this is because people are trying to digest what it
means or whether it's "too hot to handle". None of the global
warming
supporters in the mainstream media have gone near it. The
reaction of
the Guardian - to delete any mention of the affair from their
comment
threads - has been extraordinary.
--Bishop Hill, 1 October 2009
Britain will have to stop building airports, switch to electric
cars and
shut down coal-fired power stations as part of a 'planned
recession' to
avoid dangerous climate change. A new report from the Tyndall
Centre for
Climate Change Research says the only way to avoid going beyond the
dangerous tipping point is to double the target to 70 per cent
by 2020.
This would mean reducing the size of the economy through a "planned
recession".
--Louise Gray, The Daily Telegraph, 30 September 2009
Tokyo governor Shintaro Ishihara warned on Wednesday the 2016
Olympics
could be the last Games, with global warming an immediate threat to
mankind. "It could be that the 2016 Games are the last Olympics
in the
history of mankind," Ishihara told reporters at a Tokyo 2016
press event
ahead of the vote. "Global warming is getting worse. We have to
come up
with measures without which Olympic Games could not last long.
"Scientists have said we have passed the point of no return," said
Ishihara.
--Karolos Grohmann, Reuters, 30 September 2009
(1) TREEMOMETERS: A NEW SCIENTIFIC SCANDAL
Andrew Orlowski, The Register, 29 September 2009
(2) ANALYSIS: DEFECTS IN KEY CLIMATE DATA ARE UNCOVERED
Ross McKitrick, Financial Post, 1 October 2009
(3) OPINION: CLIMATE DATA BUSTER
Terence Corcoran, National Post, 1 October 2009
(4) OPINION: COOLING DOWN THE CASSANDRAS
George F. Will, The Washington Post, 1 October 2009
(5) U.S. THROWS SPANNER INTO CLIMATE TALKS
Times of India, 2 October 2009
(6) CAP AND TRADE MAY SINK OPPOSITION LEADER DOWN UNDER
Lenore Taylor, The Australian, 2 October 2009
(7) THE MET OFFICE AND CRU'S YAMAL SCANDAL: EXPLAIN OR RESIGN
Jennifer Marohasy <jennifermarohasy@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
<[17]mailto:jennifermarohasy@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
<[18]mailto:jennifermarohasy@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
<[19]mailto:jennifermarohasy@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>>>
(8) COOLING?
Rodney Chilton <maberrd@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
<[20]mailto:maberrd@xxxxxxxxx.xxx> <[21]mailto:maberrd@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
<[22]mailto:maberrd@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>>>
(9) RESOURCES DEPLETION WORRIES
Steven Zoraster <szoraster@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
<[23]mailto:szoraster@xxxxxxxxx.xxx> <[24]mailto:szoraster@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
<[25]mailto:szoraster@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>>>
(10) COPENHAGEN SUMMIT: DO SCIENCE AND ECONOMICS SUPPORT GOVERNMENT
ACTION ON GLOBAL WARMING?
Peter Kidson <peterdkidson@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
<[26]mailto:peterdkidson@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
<[27]mailto:peterdkidson@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
<[28]mailto:peterdkidson@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>>]
(11) A DEATH SPIRAL FOR CLIMATE ALARMISM?
Robert Bradley <rbradley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
<[29]mailto:rbradley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx> <[30]mailto:rbradley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
<[31]mailto:rbradley@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>>>
(12) AND FINALLY: 'PLANNED RECESSION' COULD AVOID CATASTROPHIC
CLIMATE
CHANGE
Louise Gray, The Daily Telegraph, 30 September 2009
===========
(1) TREEMOMETERS: A NEW SCIENTIFIC SCANDAL
The Register, 29 September 2009
<[32]http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/29/yamal_scandal/>
By Andrew Orlowski
A scientific scandal is casting a shadow over a number of recent
peer-reviewed climate papers.
At least eight papers purporting to reconstruct the historical
temperature record times may need to be revisited, with significant
implications for contemporary climate studies, the basis of the
IPCC's
assessments. A number of these involve senior climatologists at the
British climate research centre CRU at the University East
Anglia. In
every case, peer review failed to pick up the errors.
At issue is the use of tree rings as a temperature proxy, or
dendrochronology. Using statistical techniques, researchers take the
ring data to create a "reconstruction" of historical temperature
anomalies. But trees are a highly controversial indicator of
temperature, since the rings principally record Co2, and also record
humidity, rainfall, nutrient intake and other local factors.
Picking a temperature signal out of all this noise is
problematic, and a
dendrochronology can differ significantly from instrumented data. In
dendro jargon, this disparity is called "divergence". The process of
creating a raw data set also involves a selective use of samples - a
choice open to a scientist's biases.
Yet none of this has stopped paleoclimataologists from making bold
claims using tree ring data.
In particular, since 2000, a large number of peer-reviewed climate
papers have incorporated data from trees at the Yamal Peninsula in
Siberia. This dataset gained favour, curiously superseding a
newer and
larger data set from nearby. The older Yamal trees indicated
pronounced
and dramatic uptick in temperatures.
How could this be? Scientists have ensured much of the
measurement data
used in the reconstructions remains a secret - failing to fulfill
procedures to archive the raw data. Without the raw data, other
scientists could not reproduce the results. The most prestigious
peer
reviewed journals, including Nature and Science, were reluctant to
demand the data from contributors. Until now, that is.
At the insistence of editors of the Royal Society's Philosophical
Transactions B the data has leaked into the open - and Yamal's
mystery
is no more.
>From this we know that the Yamal data set uses just 12 trees
from a
larger set to produce its dramatic recent trend. Yet many more were
cored, and a larger data set (of 34) from the vicinity shows no
dramatic
recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the middle ages.
In all there are 252 cores in the CRU Yamal data set, of which
ten were
alive 1990. All 12 cores selected show strong growth since the
mid-19th
century. The implication is clear: the dozen were cherry-picked.
Controversy has been raging since 1995, when an explosive paper
by Keith
Briffa at the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia
asserted that that the medieval warm period was actually really
cold,
and recent warming is unusually warm. Both archaeology and the
historical accounts, Briffa was declaring, were bunk. Briffa
relied on
just three cores from Siberia to demonstrate this.
Three years later Nature published a paper by Mann, Bradley and
Hughes
based on temperature reconstructions which showed something similar:
warmer now, cooler then. With Briffa and Mann as chapter editors
of the
UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), this
distinctive
pattern became emblematic - the "Logo of Global Warming".
IPCC's Assessment Report from 2001 - with the error bars in grey
emphasised
Hokey hockey sticks
Mann too used dendrochronology to chill temperatures, and rebuffed
attempts to publish his measurement data. Initially he said he had
forgotten where he put it, then declined to disclosed it. (Some of
Mann's data was eventually discovered, by accident, on his ftp
server in
a directory entitled 'BACKTO_1400-CENSORED'.)
Tree data was secondary in importance to Mann's statistical
technique,
which would produce a dramatic modern upturn in temperatures - which
became nicknamed the "Hockey Stick" - even using red noise.
Similarly, all the papers that used the Yamal data have the same
point
to make. All suggest recent dramatic warming. Having scored a
global hit
with a combination of flawed statistics and dubious
dendrochronology,
the acts repeated the formula.
"Late 20th century warmth is unprecedented for at least roughly
the past
two millennia for the Northern Hemisphere," wrote the two authors of
Global Surface Temperatures over the Past Two Millennia published in
Geophysical Research Letters in 2003 - Mann, and Phil Jones of CRU.
For example, Briffa's 2008 paper concludes that: "The extent of
recent
widespread warming across northwest Eurasia, with respect to 100- to
200-year trends, is unprecedented in the last 2000 years."
The same authors in 2004:
It continues to this day. A study purporting to show the Arctic was
warmer now than for 2,000 years received front-page attention last
month. Led by Northern Arizona University professor Darrell S
Kaufman,
and including dendro veteran Mann, this too relied heavily on
Yamal, and
produced the signature shape.
Now here's Yamal.
And when Yamal is plotted against the wider range of cores, the
implications of the choice is striking:
A comparison of Yamal RCS chronologies. red - as archived with
12 picked
cores; black - including Schweingruber's Khadyta River, Yamal
(russ035w)
archive and excluding 12 picked cores. Both smoothed with 21-year
gaussian smooth. y-axis is in dimensionless chronology units
centered on
1 (as are subsequent graphs (but represent age-adjusted ring width).
"The majority of these trees (like the Graybill bristlecones) have a
prolonged growth pulse (for whatever reason) starting in the 19th
century," wrote Canadian mathematician Steve McIntyre on his blog on
Sunday. "When a one-size fits all age profile is applied to these
particular tries, the relatively vigorous growth becomes monster
growth
- 8 sigma anomalies in some of them."
McIntyre's determination to reproduce the reconstructions has
resulted
in the Yamal data finally coming to light.
All the papers come from a small but closely knit of scientists who
mutually support each other's work. All use Yamal data.
What went wrong?
The scandal has serious implications for public trust in
science. The
IPCC's mission is to reflect the science, not create it.
As the panel states, its duty is "assessing the scientific,
technical
and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of
the risk
of human-induced climate change. It does not carry out new
research nor
does it monitor climate-related data." But as lead author,
Briffa was a
key contributor in shaping (no pun intended) the assessment.
When the IPCC was alerted to peer-reviewed research that refuted the
idea, it declined to include it. This leads to the more general, and
more serious issue: what happens when peer-review fails - as it did
here?
The scandal has only come to light because of the dogged
persistence of
a Canadian mathematician who attempted to reproduce the results.
Steve
McIntyre has written dozens of letters requesting the data and
methodology, and over 7,000 blog posts. Yet Yamal has remained
elusive
for almost a decade. (r)
Bootnote
The Royal Society's motto from the enlightenment era is Nullius in
verba. "On nobody's authority" or colloquially, "take nobody's
word for
it". In 2007, the Society's then president suggested this be
changed to
"respect the facts".
Copyright 2009, ElReg
==========
(2) ANALYSIS: DEFECTS IN KEY CLIMATE DATA ARE UNCOVERED
Financial Post, 1 October 2009

<[33]http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fpcomment/archive/2009/10/01/r>
oss-mckitrick-defects-in-key-climate-data-are-uncovered.aspx>
By Ross McKitrick
Beginning in 2003, I worked with Stephen McIntyre to replicate a
famous
result in paleoclimatology known as the Hockey Stick graph.
Developed by
a U.S. climatologist named Michael Mann, it was a statistical
compilation of tree ring data supposedly proving that air
temperatures
had been stable for 900 years, then soared off the charts in the
20th
century. Prior to the publication of the Hockey Stick,
scientists had
held that the medieval-era was warmer than the present, making
the scale
of 20th century global warming seem relatively unimportant. The
dramatic
revision to this view occasioned by the Hockey Stick's
publication made
it the poster child of the global warming movement. It was featured
prominently in a 2001 report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC), as well as government websites and countless
review reports.
Steve and I showed that the mathematics behind the Mann Hockey Stick
were badly flawed, such that its shape was determined by suspect
bristlecone tree ring data. Controversies quickly piled up: Two
expert
panels involving the U.S. National Academy of Sciences were asked to
investigate, the U.S. Congress held a hearing, and the media
followed
the story around the world.
The expert reports upheld all of our criticisms of the Mann Hockey
Stick, both of the mathematics and of its reliance on flawed
bristlecone
pine data. One of the panels, however, argued that while the
Mann Hockey
Stick itself was flawed, a series of other studies published
since 1998
had similar shapes, thus providing support for the view that the
late
20th century is unusually warm. The IPCC also made this argument
in its
2007 report. But the second expert panel, led by statistician Edward
Wegman, pointed out that the other studies are not independent.
They are
written by the same small circle of authors, only the names are in
different orders, and they reuse the same few data climate proxy
series
over and over.
Most of the proxy data does not show anything unusual about the 20th
century. But two data series have reappeared over and over that
do have
a hockey stick shape. One was the flawed bristlecone data that the
National Academy of Sciences panel said should not be used, so the
studies using it can be set aside. The second was a tree ring
curve from
the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, compiled by UK scientist Keith
Briffa.
Briffa had published a paper in 1995 claiming that the medieval
period
actually contained the coldest year of the millennium. But this
claim
depended on just three tree ring records (called cores) from the
Polar
Urals. Later, a colleague of his named F. H. Schweingruber
produced a
much larger sample from the Polar Urals, but it told a very
different
story: The medieval era was actually quite warm and the late 20th
century was unexceptional. Briffa and Schweingruber never published
those data, instead they dropped the Polar Urals altogether from
their
climate reconstruction papers.
In its place they used a new series that Briffa had calculated
from tree
ring data from the nearby Yamal Peninsula that had a pronounced
Hockey
Stick shape: relatively flat for 900 years then sharply rising
in the
20th century. This Yamal series was a composite of an
undisclosed number
of individual tree cores. In order to check the steps involved in
producing the composite, it would be necessary to have the
individual
tree ring measurements themselves. But Briffa didn't release his raw
data.
Over the next nine years, at least one paper per year appeared in
prominent journals using Briffa's Yamal composite to support a
hockey
stick-like result. The IPCC relied on these studies to defend
the Hockey
Stick view, and since it had appointed Briffa himself to be the IPCC
Lead Author for this topic, there was no chance it would
question the
Yamal data.
Despite the fact that these papers appeared in top journals like
Nature
and Science, none of the journal reviewers or editors ever required
Briffa to release his Yamal data. Steve McIntyre's repeated
requests for
them to uphold their own data disclosure rules were ignored.
Then in 2008 Briffa, Schweingruber and some colleagues published
a paper
using the Yamal series (again) in a journal called the Philosophical
Transactions of the Royal Society, which has very strict
data-sharing
rules. Steve sent in his customary request for the data, and
this time
an editor stepped up to the plate, ordering the authors to
release their
data. A short while ago the data appeared on the Internet. Steve
could
finally begin to unpack the Yamal composite.
It turns out that many of the samples were taken from dead
(partially
fossilized) trees and they have no particular trend. The sharp
uptrend
in the late 20th century came from cores of 10 living trees
alive as of
1990, and five living trees alive as of 1995. Based on scientific
standards, this is too small a sample on which to produce a
publication-grade proxy composite. The 18th and 19th century
portion of
the sample, for instance, contains at least 30 trees per year.
But that
portion doesn't show a warming spike. The only segment that does
is the
late 20th century, where the sample size collapses. Once again a
dramatic hockey stick shape turns out to depend on the least
reliable
portion of a dataset.
But an even more disquieting discovery soon came to light. Steve
searched a paleoclimate data archive to see if there were other tree
ring cores from at or near the Yamal site that could have been
used to
increase the sample size. He quickly found a large set of 34
up-to-date
core samples, taken from living trees in Yamal by none other than
Schweingruber himself! Had these been added to Briffa's small
group the
20th century would simply be flat. It would appear completely
unexceptional compared to the rest of the millennium.
Combining data from different samples would not have been an unusual
step. Briffa added data from another Schweingruber site to a
different
composite, from the Taimyr Peninsula. The additional data were
gathered
more than 400 km away from the primary site. And in that case the
primary site had three or four times as many cores to begin with
as the
Yamal site. Why did he not fill out the Yamal data with the
readily-available data from his own coauthor? Why did Briffa
seek out
additional data for the already well-represented Taimyr site and
not for
the inadequate Yamal site?
Thus the key ingredient in most of the studies that have been
invoked to
support the Hockey Stick, namely the Briffa Yamal series,
depends on the
influence of a woefully thin subsample of trees and the exclusion of
readily-available data for the same area. Whatever is going on
here, it
is not science.
I have been probing the arguments for global warming for well over a
decade. In collaboration with a lot of excellent coauthors I have
consistently found that when the layers get peeled back, what
lies at
the core is either flawed, misleading or simply non-existent. The
surface temperature data is a contaminated mess with a
significant warm
bias, and as I have detailed elsewhere the IPCC fabricated
evidence in
its 2007 report to cover up the problem. Climate models are in gross
disagreement with observations, and the discrepancy is growing
with each
passing year. The often-hyped claim that the modern climate has
departed
from natural variability depended on flawed statistical methods and
low-quality data. The IPCC review process, of which I was a
member last
time, is nothing at all like what the public has been told:
Conflicts of
interest are endemic, critical evidence is systematically
ignored and
there are no effective checks and balances against bias or
distortion.
I get exasperated with fellow academics, and others who ought to
know
better, who pile on to the supposed global warming consensus without
bothering to investigate any of the glaring scientific
discrepancies and
procedural flaws. Over the coming few years, as the costs of global
warming policies mount and the evidence of a crisis continues to
collapse, perhaps it will become socially permissible for people to
start thinking for themselves again. In the meantime I am
grateful for
those few independent thinkers, like Steve McIntyre, who
continue to ask
the right questions and insist on scientific standards of
openness and
transparency.
Ross McKitrick is a professor of environmental economics at the
University of Guelph, and coauthor of Taken By Storm: The Troubled
Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming.
Copyright 2009, FP
EDITOR'S NOTE: More on the CRU's Yamal scandal and its impact, see:
<[34]http://www.climateaudit.org/>

<[35]http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/10/01/response-from-briffa-on-the-yamal>
-tree-ring-affair-plus-rebuttal/>

<[36]http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/9/29/the-yamal-implosion.ht>
ml>

<[37]http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2009/10/1/yamal-the-debate-conti>
nues.html>
============
(3) OPINION: CLIMATE DATA BUSTER
National Post, 1 October 2009

<[38]http://network.nationalpost.com/np/blogs/fullcomment/archive/2009/10/01>
/terence-corcoran-climate-data-buster.aspx>
By Terence Corcoran
The official United Nation's global warming agency, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is a four-legged
stool that
is fast losing its legs. To carry the message of man-made global
warming theory to the world, the IPCC has depended on 1) computer
models, 2) data collection, 3) long-range temperature
forecasting and 4)
communication. None of these efforts are sitting on firm ground.
Over the past month, one of the IPCC's top climate scientists, Mojib
Latif, attempted to explain that even if global temperatures were to
cool over the next 10 to 20 years, that would not mean that man-made
global warming is no longer catastrophic. It was a tough case to
make,
and it is not clear Mr. Latif succeeded. In a presentation to a
world
climate conference in early September, Mr. Latif rambled
somewhat and
veered off into inscrutable language that is now embedded in a
million
blog posts attempting to prove one thing or another.
A sample: "It may well happen that you enter a decade, or maybe even
two, you know, when the temperature cools, all right, relative
to the
present level...And then, you know, I know what's going to
happen. You
know, I will get, you know, millions of phone calls, you know
-'What's
going on?' 'So is global warming disappearing, you know?' 'Have
you lied
on us, you know?' So, and, therefore, this is the reason why we
need to
address this decadal prediction issue."
The decadal prediction issue appears to be a combination of computer
model problems, the unpredictability of natural climate
variation, and
assorted uncertainties. Making all this clear to the average global
citizen will not be easy and climate scientists need to be able
to make
it clear, said Mr. Latif. "We have to ask the nasty questions
ourselves,
all right, or some other people will do it."
All this is still swirling around the global climate issue
today. But
now along comes another problem. Canadian data buster Steve
McIntyre has
spend most of the last three years deconstructing the IPCC's famous
claim that the last couple of decades of the 20th century were the
hottest in a thousand years. Using what was called The Hockey Stick
graph, the IPCC claimed to have the smoking gun that showed a
sharp run
up in global temperatures through to 1997. The validity of the
IPCC data
began to crumble when Mr. McIntyre and Ross McKitrick of Guelph
University found serious data problems that raised doubts about the
graph and the claims of record high temperatures.
As Ross McKitrick explains in his op-ed, Steve McIntyre has
uncovered
another data distortion that further undermines the original graphic
claim that the world has set temperature records in recent years. If
world temperatures may have been just as hot in the past as they
have
been recently, and if the the next two decades could be cooler
than they
have been recently, the theory of climate change becomes an even
tougher
case to make.
The IPCC is now on wobbly legs at all four corners. Its models are
inadequate and need overhaul, data integrity is at issue, the
climate is
not quite following the script, and the communication program
for the
whole campaign is a growing struggle.
Copyright 2009, NP
==========
(4) OPINION: COOLING DOWN THE CASSANDRAS
The Washington Post, 1 October 2009

<[39]http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/09/30/AR20090>
93003569.html>
By George F. Will
"Plateau in Temperatures Adds Difficulty to Task Of Reaching a
Solution"
--New York Times, Sept. 23
In this headline on a New York Times story about the difficulties
confronting people alarmed about global warming, note the word
"plateau." It dismisses the unpleasant -- to some people -- fact
that
global warming is maddeningly (to the same people) slow to vindicate
their apocalyptic warnings about it.
The "difficulty" -- the "intricate challenge," the Times says -- is
"building momentum" for carbon reduction "when global
temperatures have
been relatively stable for a decade and may even drop in the
next few
years." That was in the Times's first paragraph.
In the fifth paragraph, a "few years" became "the next decade or
so,"
according to Mojib Latif, a German "prize-winning climate and ocean
scientist" who campaigns constantly to promote policies
combating global
warming. Actually, Latif has said he anticipates "maybe even two"
decades in which temperatures cool. But stay with the Times's
"decade or
so."
By asserting that the absence of significant warming since 1998 is a
mere "plateau," not warming's apogee, the Times assures readers
who are
alarmed about climate change that the paper knows the future and
that
warming will continue: Do not despair, bad news will resume.
The Times reported that "scientists" -- all of them? -- say the
11 years
of temperature stability has "no bearing," none, on long-term
warming.
Some scientists say "cool stretches are inevitable." Others say
there
may be growth of Arctic sea ice, but the growth will be "temporary."
According to the Times, however, "scientists" say that "trying to
communicate such scientific nuances to the public -- and to
policymakers
-- can be frustrating."
The Times says "a short-term trend gives ammunition to skeptics of
climate change." Actually, what makes skeptics skeptical is the
accumulating evidence that theories predicting catastrophe from
man-made
climate change are impervious to evidence. The theories are
unfalsifiable, at least in the "short run." And the "short run" is
defined as however many decades must pass until the evidence
begins to
fit the hypotheses.
The Post recently reported the theory of a University of Virginia
professor emeritus who thinks that, many millennia ago, primitive
agriculture -- burning forests, creating methane-emitting rice
paddies,
etc. -- produced enough greenhouse gases to warm the planet at
least a
degree. The theory is interesting. Even more interesting is the
reaction
to it by people such as the Columbia University professor who
says it
makes him "really upset" because it might encourage opponents of
legislation combating global warming.
Warnings about cataclysmic warming increase in stridency as
evidence of
warming becomes more elusive. A recent report from the United
Nations
Environment Program predicts an enormous 6.3 degrees Fahrenheit
increase
by the end of the century even if nations fulfill their most
ambitious
pledges concerning reduction of carbon emissions. The U.S. goal
is an 80
percent reduction by 2050. But Steven Hayward of the American
Enterprise
Institute says that would require reducing greenhouse gas
emissions to
the 1910 level. On a per capita basis, it would mean emissions
approximately equal to those in 1875.
That will not happen. So, we are doomed. So, why try?
America needs a national commission appointed to assess the evidence
about climate change. Alarmists will fight this because the first
casualty would be the carefully cultivated and media-reinforced
myth of
consensus -- the bald assertion that no reputable scientist
doubts the
gravity of the crisis, doubts being conclusive evidence of
disreputable
motives or intellectual qualifications. The president, however,
could
support such a commission because he is sure "there's finally
widespread
recognition of the urgency of the challenge before us." So he
announced
last week at the U.N. climate change summit, where he said the
threat is
so "serious" and "urgent" that unless all nations act "boldly,
swiftly
and together" -- "time . . . is running out" -- we risk
"irreversible
catastrophe." Prince Charles agrees. In March, seven months ago,
he said
humanity had 100 months -- until July 2xxx xxxx xxxxto prevent
"catastrophic
climate change and the unimaginable horrors that this would bring."
Evidently humanity will prevent this.
Charles Moore of the Spectator notes that in July, the prince
said that
by 2050 the planet will be imperiled by the existence of 9 billion
people, a large portion of them consuming as much as Western
people now
do. Environmental Cassandras must be careful with their
predictions lest
they commit what climate alarmists consider the unpardonable
faux pas of
denying that the world is coming to an end.
Copyright 2009, WP
==============
(5) U.S. THROWS SPANNER INTO CLIMATE TALKS
Times of India, 2 October 2009

<[40]http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/news/environment/global-warming/US-t>
hrows-spanner-into-climate-talks/articleshow/5079332.cms>
Nitin Sethi, TNN
NEW DELHI: The promise of a deal at Copenhagen seem to be
turning into a
pipedream as the US has refused to put down hard numbers for
mitigation
under the second phase of Kyoto Protocol at the ongoing climate
negotiations at Bangkok. EU too seems to be taking a deal-breaking
condition saying, "environmental integrity" was central to the
UN treaty
and "equity" of different countries' rights was just one element.
The negotiations at various levels seem to be grinding into a logjam
with US determined not to sign on to the Kyoto Protocol. The US
negotiators fought hard at different forums within the UN talks
to block
any progress on industrialized countries' commitments to reduce
emissions in the mid-term under the second phase of Kyoto Protocol.
India stood steadfast in demanding that the rich countries put
up their
offers in terms of hard numbers for emission reductions over
2xxx xxxx xxxx
under the existing protocol. But, US and many other developed
countries
seemed determined to do away with the Kyoto Protocol entirely.
This is not the first time that US has voiced its opposition to the
Kyoto Protocol which demands quantified targets from rich
countries. US
had not signed on to Kyoto earlier and it continues to oppose
the only
tool the global treaty has for making measurable and comparable
reductions in the dangerous greenhouse gases.
The protocol is also seen by a select band of industrialized
countries
such as US and Japan as a wall of differentiation constructed in the
convention. The parent treaty -- UN Framework Convention on Climate
Change -- lays most of the burden of mitigation on the
industrialized
countries that caused it in the first place. The Kyoto Protocol
activates this principle of burden sharing into hard actions and
targets. The protocol in its first phase sets fixed percentages
by which
countries reduce their emissions by 2012 below 1990 levels.
Many of the industrialized countries have not moved on a
trajectory to
achieve the targets for 2012. Part of the discussions in the UN
talks
have been to set a higher level targets for the second phase of
Kyoto
Protocol between 2xxx xxxx xxxx.
But the US, not keen to take on any commitments in the mid-term, has
always shown interest in disbanding with Kyoto Protocol and instead
taking on a series of actions that are decided by countries on
their own
-- say energy efficiency targets -- and merely presented to the UN
forum. India and developing countries have pointed out that
would make
the targets incomparable and render it impossible to figure out
if any
significant reductions have been made in emissions to prevent a
climate
calamity.
Other industrialized countries too have so far shown little
interest in
offering credible and robust targets for the second phase of the
protocol. The offers so far on the table from the industrialized
countries, if implemented, would only bring in reductions in the
range
of 11-18% by 2020 below 1990 levels. India and other developing
countries have demanded that the industrialized countries follow the
recommendations of the UN climate science panel -- IPCC -- and
take cuts
in the range of 25-40% below 1990 levels by 2020 which would put the
world on a trajectory to avoid temperatures reaching dangerous
levels in
the decades to come.
Copyright 2009, TOI
=============
(6) CAP AND TRADE MAY SINK OPPOSITION LEADER DOWN UNDER
The Australian, 2 October 2009

<[41]http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26153xxx xxxx xxxx,00.htm> l>
Lenore Taylor, National correspondent | October 02, 2009
MALCOLM Turnbull is on a collision course with his own back
bench after
staking his leadership on a demand that they back his climate change
strategy. Several MPs immediately refused to do so.
If the partyroom refused to back his strategy of negotiating
amendments
to the government's emissions trading scheme, Mr Turnbull said
yesterday, the Coalition would "literally be a party with
nothing to say
... a party with no ideas", and that was "not the party I am
prepared to
lead".
Throwing down the gauntlet to his internal critics, Mr Turnbull
said: "I
am asserting my authority as the leader of the Liberal Party and the
Leader of the Opposition."
"If the partyroom were to reject my recommendation to them, that
would
obviously be a leadership issue. That's perfectly plain, perfectly
clear," he told ABC Radio in Adelaide.
"I could not possibly lead a party that was on a
do-nothing-on-climate-change platform."
His critics were not cowed, despite the fact that both mooted
leadership
alternatives -- Joe Hockey and Tony Abbott -- support Mr Turnbull's
stance.
West Australian backbencher Wilson Tuckey said: "Mr Turnbull has
made
the ETS a leadership issue and we will now treat it as such." His
leader's ultimatum did not alter his "total opposition to an ETS
and to
the suggestion that we might amend it".
Victorian Liberal senator Julian McGauran said he stood by his
vow to
vote against the ETS in November, no matter what amendments were
negotiated.
Nationals senators also remain implacably opposed to the scheme. "He
hasn't got the partyroom with him on this one ... we are going
to stand
up for what we believe in," said senator Ron Boswell.
"This is not just another issue. This is not one we can let go
through
to the keeper," said senator Barnaby Joyce.
Mr Tuckey appeared to suggest Mr Turnbull's deputy, Julie
Bishop, as an
alternative leader, saying there were "many good potential
leaders in
the Liberal Party ... and perhaps some people who have had their
reputations tarnished by backgrounding from our side now deserve
reconsideration for the top job".
FULL STORY at

<[42]http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,26153xxx xxxx xxxx,00.htm> l>
======== e-mails to the editor =====
(7) THE MET OFFICE AND CRU'S YAMAL SCANDAL: EXPLAIN OR RESIGN
Jennifer Marohasy <jennifermarohasy@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
<[43]mailto:jennifermarohasy@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
<[44]mailto:jennifermarohasy@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
<[45]mailto:jennifermarohasy@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>>>
Leading UK Climate Scientists Must Explain or Resign, Jennifer
Marohasy

<[46]http://jennifermarohasy.com/blog/2009/09/leading-uk-climate-scientists->
must-explain-or-resign/>
MOST scientific sceptics have been dismissive of the various
reconstructions of temperature which suggest 1998 is the warmest
year of
the past millennium. Our case has been significantly bolstered
over the
last week with statistician Steve McIntyre finally getting access to
data used by Keith Briffa, Tim Osborn and Phil Jones to support
the idea
that there has been an unprecedented upswing in temperatures
over the
last hundred years - the infamous hockey stick graph.
Mr McIntyre's analysis of the data - which he had been asking
for since
2003 - suggests that scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the
United Kingdom's Bureau of Meteorology have been using only a small
subset of the available data to make their claims that recent
years have
been the hottest of the last millennium. When the entire data set is
used, Mr McIntyre claims that the hockey stick shape disappears
completely. [1]
Mr McIntyre has previously showed problems with the mathematics
behind
the 'hockey stick'. But scientists at the Climate Research
Centre, in
particular Dr Briffa, have continuously republished claiming the
upswing
in temperatures over the last 100 years is real and not an
artifact of
the methodology used - as claimed by Mr McIntyre. However, these
same
scientists have denied Mr McIntyre access to all the data.
Recently they
were forced to make more data available to Mr McIntyre after they
published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society - a
journal which
unlike Nature and Science has strict policies on data archiving
which it
enforces. This week's claims by Steve McInyre that scientists
associated with the
UK Meteorology Bureau have been less than diligent are serious and
suggest some of the most defended building blocks of the case for
anthropogenic global warming are based on the indefensible when the
methodology is laid bare.
This sorry saga also raises issues associated with how data is
archived
at the UK Meteorological Bureau with in complete data sets that
spuriously support the case for global warming being promoted while
complete data sets are kept hidden from the public - including from
scientific sceptics like Steve McIntyre.
It is indeed time leading scientists at the Climate Research Centre
associated with the UK Meteorological Bureau explain how Mr
McIntyre is
in error or resign.
[1] Yamal: A "Divergence" Problem, by Steve McIntyre, 27
September 2009
[47]http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=7168
Jennifer Marohasy BSc PhD
================
(8) COOLING?
Rodney Chilton <maberrd@xxxxxxxxx.xxx <mailto:maberrd@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
<[48]mailto:maberrd@xxxxxxxxx.xxx <mailto:maberrd@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>>>
Dear Benny:
Recently, there has been considerable discussion concerning the
slight
cooling of the earth's overall climate since about 2005. The
result of
the cooling has brought some scientists into the forefront to be
openly
critical of the still prominent view that climate changes over the
century or so have predominately been man caused. The proponents of
human initiated climate changes are of the opinion that the recent
cooling is but a temporary interruption in what soon again will be a
rapid climate warming.
I think one of the keys to alleviate some of this discussion is to
attempt to determine the triggers for two other climate shifts in
earlier times. The first of these, the "Little Ice Age" is generally
regarded by most scientists as resulting from a reduced output
of energy
from the sun. Coinciding as it did with an interval of very
little to
almost no sunspot activity, a time known as the "Maunder
Minimum", many
solar scientists suggest that as little as 0.25% decrease in solar
output initiated this cold climate period. Similarily, during
the mid
20th Century during the years from the end of the 1940's to
about the
mid 1970's, the sun was in one of its quiet modes (very few
sunspots).
The cause for what was a slightly cooler interval could logically be
linked to decreased energy from the sun. However, the quite recent
thirty year period is more commonly linked to increased dust in the
earth's atmosphere. Consistent with this view is the idea that
perhaps
the Little Ice Age too, was forced not by a decrease in the sun's
output, but by an increase in dust, not that produced by man, but by
extraterrestrial dust from a comet encounter. More details of this
particular scenario can be seen at the following website:
<[49]http://www.bcclimate.com <[50]http://www.bcclimate.com/>
<[51]http://www.bcclimate.com/>>
All of this raises the questions, what drove both the Little Ice
Age and
the thirty year interval in the middle of the last century? It is
possible that they were driven by the two different causes
outlined. It
is vital I think that the reason(s) for the two climate shifts be
determined. This would go along way to settle the recent debate
as to
the importance of solar minima in initiating climate changes
over more
than just a few years. Further to this, the picture of the
future will
be clarified. If for example, decreases in solar output is
proven to be
of less importance during the past, then surely the present climate
downturn will be likely only a temporary respite from the inexorable
upward trend in temperatures worldwide. If on the other hand the
solar
cycles accompanied by low sun activity over decades and even
longer can
be proven as significant, then I believe we must re-examine the
increased carbon dioxide scenario.
Rodney Chilton
============
(9) RESOURCES DEPLETION WORRIES
Steven Zoraster <szoraster@xxxxxxxxx.xxx
<[52]mailto:szoraster@xxxxxxxxx.xxx> <[53]mailto:szoraster@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
<[54]mailto:szoraster@szo