However, I think there has been a lot of unseasonal weather all over the world, which clearly points to a shift in weather patterns. And that's fine too...weather patterns do shift. It's just that this time round, such a shift might have a bigger impact than ever before.
I thought we were all Columbine.Cail wrote:And two years ago, people were blaming GW because we'd had so many mild winters. Now we get an actual winter like we used to when I was a kid, and that's because of global warming too.Kil Tyme wrote:All this snow in DC area with 10-20 inches more to come within 48 hours can be blamed on GW, according to my brother. We almost got into a heated fight so we agreed to disagree and never speak if this GW with each other again.
Federal Gov't shut down again tomorrow and prob Wed with the coming global warming snow storm.
Reminds me of a tent revival.
"And when you see a stranger on the side of the road.....That stranger is Jesus."
"And when you look in your child's face.....That child is Jesus."
************** Data for vital 'hockey stick graph' has gone missing
* There has been no global warming since 1995
* Warming periods have happened before - but NOT due to man-made changes
**************The United Nations climate panel faces a new challenge with scientists casting doubt on its claim that global temperatures are rising inexorably because of human pollution.
The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.
These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.
Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.
“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”
Untold billions of pounds have been spent on turning the world green and also on financing the dubious trade in carbon credits. Countless gallons of aviation fuel have been consumed carrying experts, lobbyists and politicians to apocalyptic conferences on global warming.
Every government on Earth has changed its policy, hundreds of academic institutions, entire school curricula and the priorities of broadcasters and newspapers all over the world have been altered – all to serve the new doctrine that man is overheating the planet and must undertake heroic and costly changes to save the world from drowning as the icecaps melt.
You might have thought that all this was based upon well-founded, highly competent research and that those involved had good reason for their blazing, hot-eyed certainty and their fierce intolerance of dissent.
But, thanks to the row over leaked emails from the Climatic Research Unit, we now learn that this body’s director, Phil Jones, works in a disorganised fashion amid chaos and mess.
linkQ - Let's talk about the e-mails now: In the e-mails you refer to a "trick" which your critics say suggests you conspired to trick the public? You also mentioned "hiding the decline" (in temperatures). Why did you say these things?
This remark has nothing to do with any "decline" in observed instrumental temperatures. The remark referred to a well-known observation, in a particular set of tree-ring data, that I had used in a figure to represent large-scale summer temperature changes over the last 600 years.
The phrase 'hide the decline' was shorthand for providing a composite representation of long-term temperature changes made up of recent instrumental data and earlier tree-ring based evidence, where it was absolutely necessary to remove the incorrect impression given by the tree rings that temperatures between about 1960 and 1999 (when the email was written) were not rising, as our instrumental data clearly showed they were.
This "divergence" is well known in the tree-ring literature and "trick" did not refer to any intention to deceive - but rather "a convenient way of achieving something", in this case joining the earlier valid part of the tree-ring record with the recent, more reliable instrumental record.
I was justified in curtailing the tree-ring reconstruction in the mid-20th Century because these particular data were not valid after that time - an issue which was later directly discussed in the 2007 IPCC AR4 Report.
This is important, for most people still don't understand what the decline they were trying to hide was.
As Marc Sheppard wrote in December, "[T]he decline Jones so urgently sought to hide was not one of measured temperatures at all, but rather figures infinitely more important to climate alarmists -- those determined by proxy reconstructions." He continued:
Jones was working on a cover chart for a forthcoming World Meteorological Organization report [PDF], "WMO Statement on the Status of the Global Climate in 1990," when he wrote the e-mail. As the graph would incorporate one reconstruction of his own plus one each from Michael Mann and Keith Briffa, Jones was informing them that he had used the trick on Mann's series at the same 1980 cutoff as MBH98, but found it necessary to use 1960 as the cutoff on the Briffa series.
Now, Jones has admitted this to the BBC: "[It] was absolutely necessary to remove the incorrect impression given by the tree rings that temperatures between about 1960 and 1999 (when the email was written) were not rising, as our instrumental data clearly showed they were."
In simple terms, Briffa's tree-ring data showed a decline in temperatures between 1960 and 1999 that weather stations around the world disagreed with. So, Jones spliced into Briffa's data set the real "instrumental" numbers for that period thereby hiding the decline.
This should raise eyebrows for a number of reasons. First, Jones and Company gave no notification to folks receiving this data -- including the Intergovernmental Panel and Climate Change -- that Briffa's numbers included instrumental data.
But more importantly, as the tree-ring numbers deviated so demonstrably from the observed temperature data between 1960 and 1999, why should anyone believe they're accurate for any periods in the past that can't be confirmed with instrumentation?
The entire global warming myth depends on tree-ring data that was grossly errant for forty years in the last century. This makes the decline ClimateGate scientists were trying to hide FAR MORE serious than most people believe.
Moving backward in the Q&A, there was another issue addressed by the BBC readers will find interesting:
N - When scientists say "the debate on climate change is over", what exactly do they mean - and what don't they mean?
It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don't believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well.
So, the scientist at the heart of the ClimateGate scandal doesn't think the debate is over.
Given what he's now confirmed about significant flaws in the tree-ring data, the only thing surprising is that he'd admit it.
Are you listening Mr. Gore?
Or......(So) the scientist at the heart of the ClimateGate scandal doesn't think the debate is over
I doubt Gore can hear anything he's too busy laughing at the absurdity and ineptitude of his detractors...... really stuff like this makes him look good!If A is B and B is C and D is A then we have..alphabet soup which therefore means that anything you read is edible!
--ACopenhagen Accord May Be Dead
Less than two months after it was hastily drafted to stave off a fiasco, the Copenhagen Accord on climate change is in a bad way, and some are already saying it has no future.
The deal was crafted amid chaos by a small group of countries, led by the US and China, to avert an implosion of the UN's December 7 - 18 climate summit.
Savaged at the time by green activists and poverty campaigners as disappointing, gutless or a betrayal, the Accord is now facing its first test in the political arena - and many views are caustic.
Veterans say the document has little traction and cannot pull the 194-nation UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) toward a new global pact by year's end.
Political momentum is so weak that so far only two negotiating rounds have been scheduled in 2010, one among officials in Bonn in mid-year, the other in Mexico at ministerial level in December.
Disowned
Worse, the Accord itself already seems to have been quietly disowned by China, India and other emerging economies just weeks after they helped write it, say these sources.
"Publicly, they are being bubbly and supportive about the Copenhagen Accord. In private, they are urinating all over it," said one observer, speaking on condition of anonymity.
The Accord's supporters said it is the first wide-ranging deal to peg global warming to 2°C and gather rich and poor countries in specific pledges for curbing carbon emissions.
And it promises money: $30bn for climate-vulnerable poor countries by 2012, with as much as $100bn annually by 2020.
Critics said there is no road map for reaching the warming target and point out the pledges are voluntary, whereas the Kyoto Protocol - which took effect five years ago next Tuesday - has tough compliance provisions for rich polluters.
Anger among small countries sidelined from the crazed huddle in Copenhagen was so fierce that the paper failed to get approval at a plenary session.
That meant the Accord's credibility rating is based on what happened on January 31, a self-described "soft" deadline set by the UNFCCC.
Glaring gaps
Under it, countries would register their intended actions for tackling carbon emissions and say if they wish to be "associated" with the agreement.
The roster on actions is nicely filled, but there are glaring gaps in the "association" side.
China (the world's No. 1 polluter), India, Brazil and SA, as well as Russia among the developed countries, have all failed to make this endorsement.
The US sees this as backsliding which could return negotiations to the finger-pointing and textual nitpicking that brought Copenhagen so close to disaster. Its climate point-man, Todd Stern, said last that he believed the big four developing countries "will sign on".
"The consequences of not doing so are so serious - in a word, leaving the accord stillborn, contrary to the clear assent their leaders gave to the accord in Copenhagen."
The Chinese and Indian governments, questioned by AFP, declined to comment on specifics of their positions.
Michael Zammit Cutajar, former chair of a UNFCCC negotiating group, said the Copenhagen Accord was flawed by "incoherence" as to how it should dovetail with the overall UNFCCC forum and parallel talks on extending Kyoto.
Messy
"Beyond the lack of clarity in its drafting, its main weakness is the lack of ambition and identifying responsibilities," he said in an interview.
"Who should do what, and when, in order to limit warming to 2°C?"
Saleemul Huq with the International Institute for Environment and Development (IIED) in London, said the developing majors, by refusing to endorse the Accord, "are clearly signalling their view that the UNFCCC process is still the only game in town".
"This means that any impressions that anyone might have had that the Accord had succeeded in hiving off the 'main players' into a separate process to the UNFCCC are just a delusion."
So does the Copenhagen Accord have any real future? Or is it doomed to be consigned to a desk drawer?
"It's still too early to know," said Elliot Diringer of US think tank, the Pew Centre on Global Climate Change.
Seeking to breathe life into its provisions, the US and others may launch a "friends of the Accord" process, running in parallel to the UN negotiations.
But in the likelihood that China and India will snub this move, the document may end up as "a political reference point" within the UN process, said Diringer, who summarised: "It's a messy situation."
.............who are these scientists? Jones doesn't believe there are huge numbers of scientists saying this....perhaps the interchangebility of Global Climate Change and Global Warming in some quotes might have something to do with it ................ or perhaps not let's stay above the level of this moron who posited such (or should that be polished for if ever there were an example of such....!).When scientists say "the debate on climate change is over",
...in the text linked to, means that the answers Jones gave were the selected words of a fuller more contextualised answer?[...]
Hell yes. Like Cail, I've been saying so for ages. All this argument (on the part of governments and lobbies) is just an excuse not to actually do anything. If we'd put this effort into cleaning up pollution, improving waste production/management problems, it would already be helping a lot of things.Kalkin wrote:Let's say, for the moment, that Global warming is all crap. Would everyone agree that most of the suggestions for reducing global warming would be good to do anyway?
No, no, NO!! Absolutely not! Why would we restrain the global economy by trillions (in the middle of a global recession) to reduce something that isn't happening? It's madness. CO2 is not pollution. It's vital to plant life. That's like calling O2 pollution.Kalkin wrote:Let's say, for the moment, that Global warming is all crap. Would everyone agree that most of the suggestions for reducing global warming would be good to do anyway?
Hmm . . . you didn't seem to have a problem when Avatar quoted exactly the same portion, and then agreed.Kalkin wrote:Please add my next sentence from my previous post and re-respond, Z.
I'm right there with ya man. Non-renewable energy sources are not solutions, they are temporary steps. We have sat on fossil fuels way, way past anything resembling temporary. The fact it is non-renewable creates all of the problems even if we choose to believe releasing more CO2 doesn't actually do anything (despite algebra's claims to the contrary...).Kalkin wrote:Let's say, for the moment, that Global warming is all crap. Would everyone agree that most of the suggestions for reducing global warming would be good to do anyway? I mean, not the crazy, Kyoto, Ed Begley-Danny Glover one's anyway?
