Media cheer leading of welfare recipient climate scientists is another reminder that without media whitewashing, the multi-trillion dollar global warming movement would not exist. It's an efficient distraction, a joke, and probably a crime if it were closely examined. The Kyoto Treaty was passed in 1997, before the so-called climate 'hockey stick' graph was first published in 1998, quietly nurtured behind the guarded walls of the UN, hedge fund thugs and other 'climate' profiteers and
- well before the 2001 and 2007 UN Climate Reports. Trillions of dollars have stood behind this fantasy. It is irrelevant to them whether climate science proved anything.
All they know, and urged by Obama, is US citizens are guilty of climate crimes and must pay billions in reparations. The city of London would cease to exist without carbon trading, and can't afford light to shine on the climate crime family or even the largely superfluous welfare recipients at the ClimateGate University of East Anglia. Only because the people found out about it this cancer at the 11th hour has it cooled. Last October, a central ClimateGate scientist wrote that they can't prove what they're claiming. It's there in black and white. But the media refuses to report it, and the official "reviews" ignored it. This is an obvious crime. There is only one logical reason the NY Times has not had this on the front page every day. Money. The climate industry is now the biggest in the world, and is all based on nothing, a myth.
- Kevin Trenberth on October 12, 2009, said in a ClimateGate email that the CRU had no proof for the claims they were making. It's in black and white. And these guys are still making money, getting taxpayer grants, off this joke. US elected officials have not pointed to this and similar emails (except Mr. Inhofe) and no one listens to him:
Trenberth: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't," adding that "we can't definitively explain why surface temperatures have gone down in the last few years.
The official "reviews" by bodies with financial interests at stake simply ignore this and other official statements. The larger part is that the legacy media sells this as a major vindication. This is no different than, for example, if Dick Cheney had been accused of crimes while at Halliburton, and Halliburton conducted a 'review' declaring Cheney 'innocent.' Would they cheer that?
- John Palmisano (December 12, 1997) from Kyoto, Japan. Quoted in Bradley, Capitalism at Work, p. 307 ****
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What did the CRU crew do? The Climatic Research Unit is one part of the picture, an important one, but not at the heart of climate theory. They're not physicists, and they don't do the physics upon which competing explanations of how the climate works stand or fall, once measured against observation. So in that sense, 'Climategate' isn't a 'Climategate' - it isn't a Scopes Trial of the global warming theory.
But CRU does two important things that shape our understanding of the present and the past. CRU is one of a small number of bodies that calculates global temperature readings (of where we are today), and is probably the pre-eminent body that performs historical temperature reconstructions, quite literally writing or re-writing history. And its importance is magnified since the leading academics are also lead authors of the UN's IPCC reports - the vast volumes policy makers like to cite as their scientific justification, but rarely read.
In the absence of a strong physics story, this temperature work became hotly contested. The biggest bone of contention is whether modern, post-1850 warming is anomalous. If it is, then the likelihood that we were in strange and uncharted territory is much greater. If it isn't, then consequently, the need for "urgent political action" - involving sweeping changes to industrial policy and social policy - became weaker.
The father of modern climatology, HH Lamb, founded CRU in 1972, and the building the academics work in takes his name. When Lamb contributed to the first IPCC report in 1990 the historical temperature record looked like this.
By 2001, it looked like this:
What Climategate is largely about, then, is whether the academics were justified in making that Medieval Warm Period disappear.
Unfortunately, none of the three 'independent' reviews have grappled with this. The absence of anomalous warming doesn't, as some skeptics say, make the problem go away. But it takes the issue back onto the blackboard, back into realms of the potential threats. It certainly removes much of the impetus for a sweeping and urgent political program of mitigation.
Yet in the academics' own words, we learn that the recent burst of warming, while real, is far from unusual.
One of the leading CRU academics, Keith Briffa, wrote that:
“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. We don’t have a lot of proxies that come right up to date and those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies ) some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming. I do not think it wise that this issue be ignored in the chapter...
"For the record, I do believe that the proxy data do show unusually warm conditions in recent decades. I am not sure that this unusual warming is so clear in the summer responsive data. I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.”
In an interview in February, CRU director Phil Jones agrees that recent warming isn't statistically significant, and is matched by previous periods in the instrumental record - such as 1860 to 1880.
The sensible end of the climate debate hinges on how much of a lasting consequence an increase in CO2 has on the climate system. Some prominent scientists who as recently as 2001 were lead authors for the IPCC don't dispute there's an effect, but maintain that once it's worked itself out, the effect is small.
Proponents of large positive CO2 feedbacks have pointed to various 'fingerprints' which are absent, or refuse to manifest themselves. Greenhouse gas warming was supposed to create a telltale warming of the troposphere, but instrumental readings show no such evidence. More recently, they have posited that CO2 must have caused warming, but this is still trapped in the oceans. This "missing heat" has yet to be found, and in the Climategate archive we find US scientist Kevin Trenberth expressing frustration: "The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't," adding that "we can't definitively explain why surface temperatures have gone down in the last few years. That's a travesty!"
For Trenberth, if we had better instruments, we'd find the heat. For skeptics, the heat might not be there.
By the mid-2000s the issue had become so politicised the academics were acting like a "priesthood", in the words of environmental writer Fred Pearce, no friend of the skeptics. As Jones wrote in an email: “Many of us in the paleo field get requests from skeptics (mainly a guy called Steve McIntyre in Canada) asking us for series. Mike and I are not sending anything, partly because we don't have some of the series he wants, also partly as we've got the data through contacts like you, but mostly because he'll distort and misuse them."
In a sense the
CRU team are carrying the can for the physicists' failure to do the science." via Climate Depot
- The issue is not the climate scientists. It is that the media will not report the truth. It simply ignores facts, hides facts, distorts facts, etc. It is entirely the fault of the media. ed.
P.S.
The NY Times features Siemens advertising on their
Green page (7/9). Ceasing to patronize the NY Times advertisers is the only recourse a citizen has. ed.
Labels: Climate scientists are superfluous to the money behind the climate industry
