This paragraph describes the basis of his investigation:

The effect on the IPCC’s reputation, and that of its chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri, has been devastating, but at every stage of this scandal we have been assured that the core science underpinning concern about anthropogenic climate change has remained unscathed. The IPCC and its supporters have been able to undertake this damage limitation exercise because attention so far has focused on only one of the three sections of the most recent assessment report: Working Group II: Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability. This deals with the symptoms and perceived consequences of climate change. The core scientific evidence that the climate is changing and that human influence is playing a part in this is contained in another section of the report, Working Group I: Climate Change 2007: the Physical Basis. But can we be confident that the same problems of sloppy authorship and exaggeration do not extend to this part of the IPCC’s assessment too?

The article goes on to look at how the IPCC authors assign words like “likely,” “very likely,” “extremely likely” and so on, to probabilities, in percentage ranges, of the likelihood of certain events occurring. It’s fascinating. And it begs comparison to how climate scientists are characterizing the chances of catastrophic events.

He introduces some common sense questions:

The conclusion that the IPCC draws from this is that, although there is a significant level of uncertainty as to whether the frequency of heat waves has increased during the last half century, and there is even more uncertainty as to whether, if the frequency has in fact increased, this can be attributed to human influence, a prediction can be made that heatwaves will increase during the next ninety years as a result of anthropogenic global warming. The ‘likelihood’ assigned to this is of 90-94%. Therefore according to the IPCC, confidence in the prediction is higher than confidence in either the observations or the hypothesis that the prediction is based on.

This makes no sense to me, but then I am not a scientist, let alone a climate scientist. It would be very interesting to hear the views of researchers from other disciplines, not on the merits of the scientific evidence, but as to whether this table does in fact defy logic.

This could be a simple, but very important analysis of the IPPC Report, and I’m interested to hear your thoughts on it. And so is the author.

Read the complete article: Harmless Sky

No. Too much of a reduction could actually be quite — to use their the warmers second favorite word (the first is “settled”) — catastrophic.

David Archibald, writing for Watts Up With That today, tells us that the relationship isn’t linear, it’s logarithmic:

The greenhouse gasses keep the Earth 30° C warmer than it would otherwise be without them in the atmosphere, so instead of the average surface temperature being -15° C, it is 15° C. Carbon dioxide contributes 10% of the effect so that is 3° C. The pre-industrial level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was 280 ppm. So roughly, if the heating effect was a linear relationship, each 100 ppm contributes 1° C. With the atmospheric concentration rising by 2 ppm annually, it would go up by 100 ppm every 50 years and we would all fry as per the IPCC predictions.

But the relationship isn’t linear, it is logarithmic. In 2006, Willis Eschenbach posted this graph [charts at WUWT] on Climate Audit showing the logarithmic heating effect of carbon dioxide relative to atmospheric concentration. I recast Willis’ first graph as a bar chart to make the concept easier to understand to the layman:

Lo and behold, the first 20 ppm accounts for over half of the heating effect to the pre-industrial level of 280 ppm, by which time carbon dioxide is tuckered out as a greenhouse gas. One thing to bear in mind is that the atmospheric concentration of CO2 got down to 180 ppm during the glacial periods of the ice age the Earth is currently in (the Holocene is an interglacial in the ice age that started three million years ago).

Plant growth shuts down at 150 ppm, so the Earth was within 30 ppm of disaster. Terrestrial life came close to being wiped out by a lack of CO2 in the atmosphere.

There is much more to this article, so head over to WWUT and read it all. I perused the comments and see that not all readers seem so sure that this theory holds water. What’s your opinion?

From the fabulous WattsUpWithThat.com:

Geologists have found evidence that sea ice extended to the equator 716.5 million years ago, bringing new precision to a “snowball Earth” event long suspected of occurring around that time.

Led by scientists at Harvard, the team reports on its work in the latest edition of the journal Science . The new findings — based on an analysis of ancient tropical rocks in remote northwestern Canada — bolster the theory that the planet has, at times in the past, been covered with ice at all latitudes.

“This is the first time that the Sturtian glaciation [the name for that ice age] has been shown to have occurred at tropical latitudes, providing direct evidence that this particular glaciation was a ‘snowball Earth’ event,” said lead author Francis A. Macdonald, an assistant professor in Harvard’s Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences. “Our data also suggests that the Sturtian glaciation lasted a minimum of 5 million years.”

Full story: Watts Up With That?.

Round of applause for Russia Today. They always seem to feed us the nitty-gritty that most American media is afraid to cover.

In this video, Pat Michaels of the CATO Institute states: IPCC doesn’t do research; it picks and chooses from scientific reports and environmental organizations “in order to create the reports that it wants to create.”

Happy to hear someone giving it to us straight.

Carbon is going missing. We know to a reasonable approximation how much carbon is being emitted to the atmosphere by burning fossil fuel and land use changes. But the concentration in the atmosphere isn’t going up as fast as expected. Where is it going and what will be the long term effect? I don’t have the answer, but I’ve learned some things by looking at the data that weren’t obvious in relation to what I’ve previously read about the carbon cycle. This is important, because any strategy for stabilization of atmospheric CO2 is completely dependent on our understanding of the carbon cycle.

Read it all: Where Has All the Carbon Gone? « the Air Vent.

The Royal Statistical Society (RSS) recently made some statements about data needing to be available to the public to have its validity proven, because we can’t just trust data from “peer reviewed journals.” If you’re not familiar with the RSS, a memorandum they submitted (CRU 47) provides a little background on themselves before diving into the nitty-gritty:

The Royal Statistical Society (RSS) is the UK’s only professional and learned society devoted to the interests of statistics and statisticians. Founded in 1834 it is also one of the most influential and prestigious statistical societies in the world. The Society has members in over 50 countries worldwide and is active in a wide range of areas both directly and indirectly pertaining to the study and application of statistics. It aims to promote public understanding of statistics and provide professional support to users of statistics and to statisticians.

Knowing how different scientific organisations operate in competing hierarchies must be causing a lot of teeth grinding at the University. It’s like being taught how to count all over again.

The RSS believes that the debate on global warming is best served by having the models used and the data on which they are based in the public domain. Where such information is publicly available it is possible independently to verify results. The ability to verify models using publicly available data is regarded as being of much greater importance than the specific content of email exchanges between researchers.

The submission does include some conditional and limited exceptions but further adds:

More widely, the basic case for publication of data includes that science progresses as an ongoing debate and not by a series of authoritative and oracular pronouncements and that the quality of that debate is best served by ensuring that all parties have access to the facts. It is well understood, for example, that peer review cannot guarantee that what is published is ‘correct’. The best guarantor of scientific quality is that others are able to examine in detail the arguments that have been used and not just their published conclusions. It is important that experiments and calculations can be repeated to verify their conclusions. If data, or the methods used, are withheld, it is impossible to do this.

The RSS believes that a crucial step in improving the quality of the debate on global warming will be to place the data, the analysis methods and the models in the public domain.

This leads to the conclusion that the University should have published their data as a priority, and for anything they couldn’t publish for whatever reason, then it should have been excluded, otherwise it formed the foundation of unsubstantiated and untestable theories.

Source: Parliament UK

Now that we have reached the end of the meteorological winter (December-February,) Rutgers University Global Snow Lab numbers (1967-2010) show that the just completed decade (2001-2010) had the snowiest Northern Hemisphere winters on record. The just completed winter was also the second snowiest on record, exceeded only by 1978. Average winter snow extent during the past decade was greater than 45,500,000 km2, beating out the 1960s by about 70,000 km2, and beating out the 1990s by nearly 1,000,000 km2. The bar chart below shows average winter snow extent for each decade going back to the late 1960s.

Continue reading at Watts Up With That?.

Hanuman’s statement reads:

“From my experience as a former postgraduate student of the UEA, I have documentary evidence that the UEA as an institution and it’s agents have often indulged in falsifications, distortions, and misrepresentations.”

The former post-graduate now working as an Independent Legal Services Professional, claims to have submitted physical evidence that proves systemic fraud that “was manifestly in compliance with the University’s policies and practices.” If confirmed by the inquiry that such evidence relates to conduct of researchers inside the CRU, it would ensure a full-scale police investigation far greater than anyone might have anticipated.

This revelation adds further woe to the CRU on top of the damning submission to the Parliamentary Committee last week from the 36,000 scientists of the Institute of Physics agreeing with climate skeptics that the leaked emails prove:

“prima facie evidence of determined and co-ordinated refusals to comply with honourable scientific traditions and freedom of information law.”

This scandal has now opened up a can of worms for a British Labour Government eager to play down the climate controversy so close to the country’s general election this Spring.

The full text of Lalu Hanuman’s submission reads as follows:

Memorandum submitted by Lalu Hanuman (CRU 07)

1. As a former postgraduate student of the University of East Anglia [UEA], and a British Citizen, I would like to comment on your committee’s planned review of the disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit [CRU] at the UEA. In particular the issue of : “Are the terms of reference and scope of the Independent Review announced on 3 December 2009 by UEA, adequate”.

2. The current furore that the UEA has created by it’s falsifying of climate change information, has undermined global climate change action at the recent Copenhagen talks, with some countries relying on these UEA revelations to question the validity of climate change. The resultant catastrophic effect of the UEA’s actions on future generations, cannot be exaggerated, as it has helped delay united action against looming climate change. A robust and thorough transparent inquiry is called for. Sir Muir Russell’s review is inadequate at least as far as point 3 of his remit goes ie “Review CRU’s compliance or otherwise with the University’s policies and practices regarding requests under the Freedom of Information Act and the Environmental Information Regulations for the release of data”.

3. From my experience as a former postgraduate student of the UEA, I have documentary evidence that the UEA as an institution and it’s agents have often indulged in falsifications, distortions, and misrepresentations. Hence the CRU in distorting information was manifestly in compliance with the University’s policies and practices. There is an urgent need for a wider remit, namely to look into the institutional failings of the UEA itself.

4. Declaration of interests: None.

5. DPA: I give permission for my name, and contact details, to be released.

Lalu Hanuman
January 2010

University of East Anglia Professor Phil Jones

Finally, after all this time we start hearing the truth out of a government inquiry.

Next to him, holding a metaphorical hand, was Professor Edward Acton, his vice-chancellor, who interrupted at intervals to tell the committee what a splendid fellow Jones was and how his unit was doing magnificent work warning the world.

Acton conceded that not everything pointed in the same direction. It’s acknowledged that several hundred years ago Earth became much warmer. If we knew why, we could explain a lot. “The early medieval period is something we should spend more time researching,” he mused.

The infamous ‘hockey stick graph’ is now debunked even by those who used to worship it.

If you use a graph as evidence, then the data you used to make it up is therefore equally exposed as being faulty.

All around it was a bad day for warmism and Dr Phil Jones.

The sight of another scientist being skewered makes for painful viewing. Whatever your view on man-made global warming, you had to feel sorry for Professor Phil Jones, the man behind the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia

Feel bad? You’ve got to be kidding me.

Source: UK Guardian

That’s right — and I’m not making it up — unlike some other institutions we know.

Finnish researchers have called for a revision of climate change estimates after their findings showed emissions from soil would contribute more to climate warming than previously thought.

The research, which appears in the February issue of the journal Ecology, shows that “the present standard measurements underestimate the effect of climate warming on emissions from the soil.”

The researchers from the Finnish Environment Institute write that, “The error is serious enough to require revisions in climate change estimates.”

So, you’re suggesting that the IPCC got their figures wrong again?

So now compost heaps are bad (methane gas) and concreting your garden is good (CO2)?

I’m not sure the IPCC is going to be able to dig their way out of this one.

Source: ABC Science