Global warming?

[Undertoad]

Nobody said scandal.

And a mile away and up the hill is 0.8°C (~1.5°F) cooler? I don't find that level of fudge factor reassuring.

[Griff]

I wonder what the lay of the land is at the two sites? I sited my house on a hillside for a number of reasons including increased solar gain and because cold air drains into low lying areas lowering average temperatures.

We've known about the manipulation of data for a long time. I'd say it has more to do with a fear that they won't be taken seriously without clear trends than any socialist conspiracy that the Beckrushites are selling. It is political so truth will suffer.

[Undertoad]

Originally Posted by Griff

I wonder what the lay of the land is at the two sites

The move was from Thorndon to Kelburn.

[Undertoad]

The less reassuring factor is that all of New Zealand's temperature is measured by seven locations. From those sites, an average temperature of all of New Zealand is extrapolated. Similarly an average temperature of the world is extrapolated from only the measuring sites. That's the instrumental record. But now, we see that it has been fraught with problems: mistakes, fraud, fudging, and stuff like urban heat islands which have not been accounted for.

Redux you should be happy to throw out this method of measuring anyway. It has not shown any global warming for ten years. And anyway, as I said before, there are other measurement methods that show warming, just not as extreme.

UT....my only point was not to jump on any bandwagon before knowing the facts...particularly when the allegations are made by a group called the NZ Climate Science Coalition, a skeptic organization with NO climate scientists.

More on how the CSC misrepresented the data. (biased? sure....just like the CSC)

As I said before, I would like to see the extremists on both ends -- the alarmists and the deniers - go away so that reasonable people might come together to discuss what, IMO, is the issue......whether it is in our best interest to continue to belch billions of tons of anthropogenic CO2 into the atmosphere every year or the time to make a serious commitment to energy conservation and renewable energy in a manner that is both environmentally and economically sustainable.

[TheMercenary]

More importantly should we belch billions of dollars into a problem that may or may not exist when countries with lables of "developing" get a pass.

[ZenGum]

when countries with lables of "developing" get a pass.

China? India? Watch the news, man.

I am presently marking another pile of essays on the Climate Debates. Ho fucking hum, but one interesting source pointed out that all the burning of fossil fuels (and the use of uranium etc) - completely apart from any CO2/greenhouse stuff - is taking a large amount of energy that had been locked up as chemical (or nuclear) energy, and releasing it to turn into heat. That warms the atmosphere. While a warmer atmosphere will emit more heat to space (ceteris paribus), it is less than 100% pass through and so this alone would/should/will/already-has cause(d) warming.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

China? India? Watch the news, man.

Oh I do/have/will. And both of those countries have been in the news a lot lately. It does not mean they are actually taking any concrete steps to fix their problems. I didn't hear anything about China slowing or stopping the building of coal fired plants or adding expensive scrubbers to their factories and power plants. And India is in the same boat. Meanwhile we are full steam ahead at a plan to bankrupt our country trying to fix a problem that will have little to no effect on global warming.

[Urbane Guerrilla]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

. . . taking a large amount of energy that had been locked up as chemical (or nuclear) energy, and releasing it to turn into heat. That warms the atmosphere. While a warmer atmosphere will emit more heat to space (ceteris paribus), it is less than 100% pass through and so this alone would/should/will/already-has cause(d) warming.

Waste heat, and thermodynamics.

But there have definitely been enough problems predicting the climate as to suggest the models aren't right yet.

[ZenGum]

Is the LA Times okay for you?
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-a...,3694292.story

Worth noting the correction paragraph about "carbon intensity" rather than overall emissions, though.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by ZenGum

Is the LA Times okay for you?
http://www.latimes.com/news/nation-a...,3694292.story

Worth noting the correction paragraph about "carbon intensity" rather than overall emissions, though.

I guess we will see in 2020. History has shown us that the all governments make pledges to get concessions and rarely are they carried through as the govenment changes hands and international goals change. I am on the side of history; I have little faith in their promises.

[TheMercenary]

An interesting view, one I would tend to agree with.

Rigging a Climate 'Consensus'
About those emails and 'peer review.'

The climatologists at the center of the leaked email and document scandal have taken the line that it is all much ado about nothing. Yes, the wording of their messages was unfortunate, but they insist this in no way undermines the underlying science. They're ignoring the damage they've done to public confidence in the arbiters of climate science.

"What they've done is search through stolen personal emails—confidential between colleagues who often speak in a language they understand and is often foreign to the outside world," Penn State's Michael Mann told Reuters Wednesday. Mr. Mann added that this has made "something innocent into something nefarious."

View Full Image

Associated Press

The Australian Antarctic research station Casey, where scientists study the effects of climate change.
Phil Jones, director of the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, from which the emails were lifted, is singing from the same climate hymnal. "My colleagues and I accept that some of the published emails do not read well. I regret any upset or confusion caused as a result. Some were clearly written in the heat of the moment, others use colloquialisms frequently used between close colleagues," he said this week.

We don't doubt that Mr. Jones would have phrased his emails differently if he expected them to end up in the newspaper. He's right that it doesn't look good that his May 2008 email to Mr. Mann regarding the U.N.'s Fourth Assessment Report said "Mike, Can you delete any emails you may have had with Keith re AR4?" Mr. Mann says he didn't delete any such emails, but the point is that Mr. Jones wanted them hidden.

The furor over these documents is not about tone, colloquialisms or whether climatologists are nice people. The real issue is what the messages say about the way the much-ballyhooed scientific consensus on global warming was arrived at, and how a single view of warming and its causes is being enforced. The impression left by the correspondence among Messrs. Mann and Jones and others is that the climate-tracking game has been rigged from the start.

continues:

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000...googlenews_wsj

[Undertoad]

Massive fallout from East Anglia: 150 years of original, world-wide temperature measurements were unceremoniously thrown away. The implications of this are: the instrumental record is now officially not science. It's something else, because it's not peer-reviewable. EVER.

SCIENTISTS at the University of East Anglia (UEA) have admitted throwing away much of the raw temperature data on which their predictions of global warming are based.

It means that other academics are not able to check basic calculations said to show a long-term rise in temperature over the past 150 years.

The UEA’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) was forced to reveal the loss following requests for the data under Freedom of Information legislation.

The data were gathered from weather stations around the world and then adjusted to take account of variables in the way they were collected. The revised figures were kept, but the originals — stored on paper and magnetic tape — were dumped to save space when the CRU moved to a new building.

The admission follows the leaking of a thousand private emails sent and received by Professor Phil Jones, the CRU’s director. In them he discusses thwarting climate sceptics seeking access to such data.

AGW skeptic Christopher Booker calls it "the worst scientific scandal of our generation".

[classicman]

Wow this is just getting more interesting all the time.

[glatt]

About ten years ago, my wife and I visited New Zealand. At the time, and maybe even still today, it was one of the few place on earth that had glaciers that were actually growing longer instead of receding. We visited those glaciers and heard numerous times from guides that their glaciers were growing. The glaciers are close to Hokitika, where the data manipulation appears to have occurred.