Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?

Some hackers broke into the computers at a leading global-warming-is-killing-us-all think tank in the United Kingdom. Apparently, the so-called scientists were doing their very best to make sure their conclusions were sound in spite of the data.

See yesterday’s post. Today’s post just shows the motivation isn’t real science at all.

OK, so I have taken a little blogging hiatus lately. But something always pulls me back. And this is the headline.

Climatologists Baffled by Global Warming Time-Out

None of these climatologists, you know the allegedly smart people telling us if we don’t ruin our economy and revert to hunter gatherer status we are all going to die soon, seem to be willing to revise the hypothesis.

Perhaps global warming is taking a time-out because man-made global warming is a myth. Just this week, in the same source, the United States (well Obama anyhow) was taking heat for not being the leader in reducing carbon emissions. Nevermind the fact that the United States doesn’t have the socialized transportation network that Europe has, or that our culture is different, or that roughly half of American think global warming is a load of crap.

“When the facts change, I change my opinion. What do you do, sir?” – John Maynard Keynes

The philosophy advanced by Keynes is one all scientists should adopt. Indeed, the scientific method requires that scientists adopt theories that are supported by the evidence. When the the evidence no longer supports the theory in question, intellectually honest scientists create a new hypothesis that accounts for all the facts, including those that were the counterexample to the prior hypothesis or theory.

The problem in the global warming arena is that the proponents are dishonest intellectually. They start with the desired conclusion and work backwards to find data to support the conclusions, otherwise known as data mining. Counter evidence is debunked by any manner of logically fallacious argument ,e.g., alleging bias of the groups that perform the counter evidence, attacking the way in which the evidence was gathered, etc. Intellectually honest scientists don’t attack counter evidence, even if they suspect the evidence to be fraudulent. Rather, the seek to verify or refute the findings by trying to reproduce them or improve upon them. This is how science should be done, in the lab, not in the political forum.

The simplest explanation tends to be the correct explanation – Occam’s Razor

Ten years data show a decrease in the temperature of the earth while carbon emissions continue to increase. The global warming hypothesis hold that global temperature increases as man made emissions, particularly carbon dioxide emissions, increase.

However, rather the accept the simplest explanation, which is that the hypothesis linking man-made carbon emission and temperature is incorrect, global warming scientists are evolve ever convoluted theories to account for what seems like a pretty obvious explanation. In an effort to retain the current global warming hypothesis, they continue to tweak the confounding factors in an increasingly into an increasingly complex tangle of arguments supporting their position.

The simplest explanation with respect to the evidence of the last ten years is that there is no correlation between man-made carbon emissions and the temperature of the earth. This is what the data says in its simplest form.

Duh.

I am ending my subscription to National Geographic this year because of the magazine’s insistence on shoving global warming down my throat.

Today’s article about global cooling by National Geographic Online caught my attention:

A prolonged lull in solar activity has astrophysicists glued to their telescopes waiting to see what the sun will do next—and how Earth’s climate might respond.

The sun is the least active it’s been in decades and the dimmest in a hundred years. The lull is causing some scientists to recall the Little Ice Age, an unusual cold spell in Europe and North America, which lasted from about 1300 to 1850.

The coldest period of the Little Ice Age, between 1645 and 1715, has been linked to a deep dip in solar storms known as the Maunder Minimum.

During that time, access to Greenland was largely cut off by ice, and canals in Holland routinely froze solid. Glaciers in the Alps engulfed whole villages, and sea ice increased so much that no open water flowed around Iceland in the year 1695.

To summarize, the first part of this article explains how the Little Ice Age corresponds to a lack of solar activity. Then this:

But researchers are on guard against their concerns about a new cold snap being misinterpreted.

“[Global warming] skeptics tend to leap forward,” said Mike Lockwood, a solar terrestrial physicist at the University of Southampton in the U.K. []

He and other researchers are therefore engaged in what they call “preemptive denial” of a solar minimum leading to global cooling.

Even if the current solar lull is the beginning of a prolonged quiet, the scientists say, the star’s effects on climate will pale in contrast with the influence of human-made greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2).

“I think you have to bear in mind that the CO2 is a good 50 to 60 percent higher than normal, whereas the decline in solar output is a few hundredths of one percent down,” Lockwood said. “I think that helps keep it in perspective.” (emphasis added.)

Since when do real scientists form “preemptive” conclusions? The scientific model requires hypothesis, followed by experimentation to confirm or deny the hypothesis. Moreover, a hypothesis is only good until a single a single counterexample is found, at which time a new hypothesis is formed to account for the new observation.

For example, in the 17th century Newton proposed a set of laws of physics termed, appropriately, Newtonian Physics. The laws were based on observation. However, Einstein’s work disproved the Newtonian laws. Turns out, Newtonian Physics are a reasonable approximation for low speed mechanical systems. At high speed (i.e., approaching the speed of light), Newton Physics break down and do not behave as Newton’s model predicts. Einstein revised the Newtonian hypothesis and suggested that the Newtonian model needed to account for relativity. In the face of conflicting evidence, Einstein revised the hypothesis.

Compare that to these so-called researchers. In the face of conflicting evidence, they are standing by the old model and preemptively coming up with reasons (not experimental results) to support the old hypothesis. Is that how we conduct science now? This activity is referred to as data mining by honest researchers. Data mining starts with the conclusion and builds evidence to support it (real science works the opposite direction). In so doing, a data miner typically throws out data that doesn’t support the conclusion or rationalizes why the data understates or overstates their desired position.

What is the evidence that these researchers are missing? The article spells it out in a simple syllogism. First, the article points out the lack of solar activity over the last few years (see my prior post in support of this hypothesis). It is then pointed out that a solar minimum likely contributed to the Little Ice Age. The logical conclusion then, is that because low solar activity is observed now, then we should observe a period of cooling (which we are), supporting a reasonable hypothesis that the sun has a strong effect on global climate change.

Note, the so-called National Geographic researchers point out that the sun’s activity is only “a few hundredths of one percent down,”  compared with the doubling of CO2. They fail to mention that CO2 in our atmosphere makes up 0.0383% of the atmospheric gasses. Double that, and you get an astounding 0.0766% of our atmosphere, an increase of a few hundredths of one percent!

Notice that by framing the decrease in solar output in terms of “a few hundredths of one percent” and the purported increase in CO2 in terms of “double,” it seems as thought the CO2 phenomena is a more pronounced change, even though the relative amount of both the purported change of CO2 in the atmosphere and the change in solar output can be reduced to the same, meaningless pile of words that don’t say anything about anything unless they are placed in the proper context, together with other influencing variables.

To wit, these researchers should spend more time in the lab revising the global warming hypothesis and testing it, than arguing why the prior hypotheses are still valid in the face of evidence that appears to be providing the single counterexample to invalidate the old hypothesis.

Of course, the real motivation is money. Without money they can’t do science, and the money doesn’t flow freely to those who question the religion of global warming, especially now that it appears our Federal Government is pushing the pro-global warming agenda wholeheartedly. As I have said before, science and politics arewater and oil — if we are going to do science like this, let’s make up whatever scientific conclusions are politically expedient in the day and save the money that would otherwise be used to produce the data-mined results that support whatever preconceived conclusions that put the most money and influence into the pockets of the pols.

I recently debated some guys on my biking forum (STR) regarding the merits of global warming. Unfortunately, I was moderated and my posts were deleted as being off topic. I will therefore post here where I cannot be moderated.

I recently found the article copied below. In the coming days, I would like to post a number of references that call into question man-made global warming.

To a point in the article, however, I assert that ten years is too short a time say whether global warming is or isn’t happening. Moreover, it is important to note that pre-2001 there is little dispute that global warming was occurring. But as those proponents of global warming don’t hesitate to use one hurricane, or even a really hot day to interject that it must be global warming, the rules of the argument have been framed: use of irrelevantly short periods for making your point is permitted.

It should also be noted that the critics of global warming do not dispute global warming per se, rather they dispute that global warming is due to man-made carbon emissions. A number of sources are suggesting that carbon emissions have almost nothing to do with global warming or cooling.

I DEVOTED six years to carbon accounting, building models for the Australian Greenhouse Office. I am the rocket scientist who wrote the carbon accounting model (FullCAM) that measures Australia’s compliance with the Kyoto Protocol, in the land use change and forestry sector.

FullCAM models carbon flows in plants, mulch, debris, soils and agricultural products, using inputs such as climate data, plant physiology and satellite data. I’ve been following the global warming debate closely for years.

When I started that job in 1999 the evidence that carbon emissions caused global warming seemed pretty good: CO2 is a greenhouse gas, the old ice core data, no other suspects.

The evidence was not conclusive, but why wait until we were certain when it appeared we needed to act quickly? Soon government and the scientific community were working together and lots of science research jobs were created. We scientists had political support, the ear of government, big budgets, and we felt fairly important and useful (well, I did anyway). It was great. We were working to save the planet.

But since 1999 new evidence has seriously weakened the case that carbon emissions are the main cause of global warming, and by 2007 the evidence was pretty conclusive that carbon played only a minor role and was not the main cause of the recent global warming. As Lord Keynes famously said, “When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?”

(more…)

For a long time, I believed the core principle of the environmental movement was population control. Don’t get me wrong, I am about as conservationist as it comes. I love the outdoors, and I believe in good stewardship (i.e., we can still both protect certain areas of the forest, while at the same time allowing responsible logging).

But this …

COUPLES who have more than two children are being “irresponsible” by creating an unbearable burden on the environment, the government’s green adviser has warned.

Jonathon Porritt, who chairs the government’s Sustainable Development Commission, says curbing population growth through contraception and abortion must be at the heart of policies to fight global warming . He says political leaders and green campaigners should stop dodging the issue of environmental harm caused by an expanding population.

First, the science supporting global warming is suspect. Politics and science have never made good allies if we want to get to the heart of the science. More and more officials and studies are finally coming out questioning the science of global warming.

I digress. Here, in all its unabashed glory, is a person spouting the central theme of the environmental movement. Contraception and abortion?!? Heart of the fight?!?

Another post will have to get into detail about the faulty assumptions here. Suffice to say, depopulation is a much graver problem than global warming or environmentalism. Our economies, our lifestyles, and modern day society is dependent upon population growth. With 6 billion plus people, has anybody starved because we can’t produce enough? No. The world produces plenty of food, and always has. So what exactly is the "unbearable burden?"