Monday 20 August 2007

Bad news: It's nearly as warm as the 1930s!

Despite the hundreds of millions of taxpayer dollars spent worldwide to find and manufacture evidence of worldwide catastrophe, that recalcitrant evidence just resolutely refuses to surface. Instead, the bad news for warmists just continues to mount. Christopher Brooker summarises the latest four pieces of bad news for catastrophists:
  • As I mentioned here in my weekend ramble, NASA's admission that their collection of temperature data was 'merely good enough for government work' and their subsequent correction of their surface temperature record has confirmed that the hottest decade over the last century is (envelope please) the 1930s.
    Instead of temperatures reaching their highest level in the past decade, ... the hottest year of the 20th century was not 1998 but 1934. Of the 10 warmest years since 1880, it turns out that four were in the 1930s and only three in the past decade.The significance of this is that James Hansen, the head of [NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies], has been Al Gore's closest scientific ally for nearly 20 years in promoting the global warming scare. The revised figures relate only to temperatures in North America but the fact that the pre-eminent scientific champion of the orthodoxy has been promoting erroneous data has considerable implications...
    Sure does. Looks like all that CO2 produced since the war has made the world ... nearly as hot now as it was before all that carbon was pumped out. Can someone please point me to the catastrophe?
The other three pieces of bad news that Brooker highlights are all related to measures insisted upon by governments (at huge expense) to counter the catastrophe that isn't.
  • A study reported in Science finds that "the increasing production of biofuels to combat climate change will release between two and nine times more CO2 into the atmosphere in the next 30 years than generating the same energy from fossil fuels." Oops!
  • John Boy Key wants NZ to cut carbon emissions by fifty percent by 2050. Good luck: a leaked memorandum has confirmed "that the UK will not be able to comply with a European Council decision last March that the EU must derive 20 per cent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020." The target, say officials charged to make it happen "is not remotely achievable," and the attempt to do so "could cost UK electricity users alone an additional £22 billion a year, nearly £1,000 a year for every household. This is 2 per cent of GDP, and double Sir Nicholas Stern's estimate for the entire cost of halting global warming." Oops again!
  • And it just keeps getting worse for warmists. Notes Brooker again:
    A final awkward finding comes from the world's leading expert on the financial costs of tackling global warming. Prof William Nordhaus, of Yale, has just published calculations showing that cuts in greenhouse gas emissions on the scale proposed by Gore might possibly save $12 trillion (£12,000bn) - but that their cost would be nearly three times as much, $34 trillion, more than half the world's GDP. Even for those who still believe the likes of Gore and Hansen, it hardly sounds like the bargain of the century.
Proof not just that hundreds of millions of dollars doesn't necessarily buy good science, but as Libertarianz leader Bernard Darnton says, "if socialist central planning doesn't work at seventeen degrees, then why would it work at nineteen?" Turns out it doesn't.

Read: Christopher Broooker's Notebook - Daily Telegraph (UK). [Hat tip, Marcus]

UPDATE: Dr Vincent Gray's recent paper 'Faking the Figures' throws much-needed light on Hansen's recent embarrassment, and on where and how that "global average temperature" figure is produced from a record in no such thing as a global average actually exists. Great background.

6 comments:

Anonymous said...

PC: With all due respect, you should probably attempt to make more of the fact that the anomaly extends only to the US, and doesn't affect the global mean. That really does change the complexion of your post - context is everything, after all!

I don't want to minimise the fact that NASA clearly fucked up. However, we should be careful exactly how much importance is ascribed to it - after all, in an acknowledgement of the anomalies function in the overall picture, McIntyre described as 'a micro-change. But it was kind of fun.'

DenMT

(PS: My apologies for dipping out of the Islam thread last week just when it was getting interesting - I will run my eye over it later on tonight and see if I can't add anything further. Family bereavement and things.)

Anonymous said...

Dam, there are some sucker believers around! Even when the fraud is revealed they still want to believe in it.

You can tell them the sky aint fallin' down but they'll still want to believe it is. Fools.

LGM



Yo

Peter Cresswell said...

Hi Den,

Sorry to hear about your bereavement.

Just to clarify your point, i was careful to include that point in Brooker's quote. And I note too that Vincent Gray deals with the importance of the North American temperature record in forming the so called global temperature.

Put simply, the so called global metereological system which gathers and records surface temperatures--Hansen's system--applies only to the 29% of the earth's surface that is land, and only to a small part of that.

And of the stations that do exist and are included in Hansen's system, a large proportion of those are US stations, which are considered more reliable than most other stations, thus their records are given added prominence in producing the global average calculation.

So yes, the record is amended only in North America. But that record is doing duty for more than just America.

Anonymous said...

Damn the facts.

Algore Akbah!

Anonymous said...

The problem is the warming in the 1930s is consistent with the solar activity explanation whereas the most recent warming isn't. In fact the carbon connection shows up much more clearly when solar activity is accepted as valid rather than rejected as irrelevant.

Brian S said...

I just love this:

While inspecting historical temperature graphs, he [McKintyre] noticed a strange discontinuity, or "jump" in many locations, all occurring around the time of January, 2000.

These graphs were created by NASA's Reto Ruedy and James Hansen (who shot to fame when he accused the administration of trying to censor his views on climate change). Hansen refused to provide McKintyre with the algorithm used to generate graph data, so McKintyre reverse-engineered it. The result appeared to be a Y2K bug in the handling of the raw data.

McKintyre notified the pair of the bug; Ruedy replied and acknowledged the problem as an "oversight" that would be fixed in the next data refresh.

NASA has now silently released corrected figures, and the changes are truly astounding. The warmest year on record is now 1934.


A y2k bug!!