The IPCC Is Underwater

It appears that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has some seriously wrong figures for the Netherlands.

A United Nations report wrongly claimed that more than half of the Netherlands is currently below sea level.

In fact, just 20 percent of the country consists of polders that are pumped dry, and which are at risk of flooding if global warming causes rising sea levels. Dutch Environment Minister Jacqueline Cramer has ordered a thorough investigation into the quality of the climate reports which she uses to base her policies on.


Climate-sceptic MPs were quick to react. Conservative MP Helma Neppérus and Richard de Mos from the right-wing Freedom Party want the minister to explain to parliament how these figures were used to decide on national climate policy. "This may invalidate all claims that the last decades were the hottest ever," Mr De Mos said.


The incorrect figures which date back to 2007 were revealed on Wednesday by the weekly Vrij Nederland. The Dutch Environmental Assessment Agency told reporters that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) added together two figures supplied by the agency: the area of the Netherlands which is below sea-level and the area which is susceptible to flooding. In fact, these areas overlap, so the figures should not have been combined to produce the 55 percent quoted by the IPCC.

The discovery comes just a week after a prediction about glaciers in the Himalayas proved wrong. Rather than disappearing by 2035, as IPCC reports claim, the original research underlying the report predicted the mountain ice would last until 2350.

I have reports like this backed up in a queue five or ten reports long. The revelations are coming up so fast I can't keep up.

Take this latest bit of news.

Editor of Nature forced to resign from climate review panel

Within hours of the launch of an independent panel to investigate claims that climate scientists covered up flawed data on temperature rises, one member has been forced to resign after sceptics questioned his impartiality.

// In an interview last year with Chinese State Radio, enquiry panel member Philip Campbell, editor-in-chief of Nature said: “The scientists have not hidden the data. If you look at the emails there is one or two bits of language that are jargon used between professionals that suggest something to outsiders that is wrong.”

He went on: “In fact the only problem there has been is on some official restrictions on their ability to disseminate data otherwise they have behaved as researchers should.”

Dr Campbell, was invited to sit on the enquiry panel because of his expertise in the peer review process as editor of one of the world’s leading science journals.

The journal has published some of the leading papers on climate change research, including those supporting the now famous “hockey stick” graph, the subject of intense criticism by climate sceptics.

Dr Campbell has now withdrawn his membership of the panel, telling Channel 4 News: “I made the remarks in good faith on the basis of media reports of the leaks.

You believed the media? You fool. If you haven't caught on to the Failing Media game by now you deserve what you are getting. And that goes double for ANY pronouncements by the United Nations.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Mercy Me, Another One

There is trouble brewing in Africa. Climate Trouble. It seems to be another case of a not wholly disinterested party hyping fears based on less than adequate sources. It seems to be a theme over at the IPCC.

Following an investigation by this blog (and with the story also told in The Sunday Times), another major "mistake" in the IPCC's benchmark Fourth Assessment Report has emerged.

Similar in effect to the erroneous "2035" claim – the year the IPCC claimed that Himalayan glaciers were going to melt – in this instance we find that the IPCC has wrongly claimed that in some African countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 percent by 2020.

At best, this is a wild exaggeration, unsupported by any scientific research, referenced only to a report produced by a Canadian advocacy group, written by an obscure Moroccan academic who specialises in carbon trading, citing references which do not support his claims.

Unlike the glacier claim, which was confined to a section of the technical Working Group II report, this "50 percent by 2020" claim forms part of the key Synthesis Report, the production of which was the personal responsibility of the chair of the IPCC, Dr R K Pachauri. It has been repeated by him in many public fora. He, therefore, bears a personal responsibility for the error.

What is it now? The third or fifteenth report of major anomalies in the IPCC record? Well what ever the number they are starting to add up.

"Will the overall fall in agricultural production be very large or relatively small?" Conway asked, noting that: "Part of our ignorance comes from a growing but, nevertheless, poor understanding of the drivers of the African climate and their complex interactions."

"Part is due to a severe lack of local weather data, particularly for central Africa," he continued. "This lack of knowledge makes it difficult to validate climate models and hence predict with any degree of accuracy what will happen as a result of climate change at a country, or even sub-regional level in Africa."

What? The models are unvalidated? I have to tell you I am shocked. But wait. Climate is a chaotic system. And in such a system errors can multiply out of control. And because of a lack of data the climate "scientists" can't be sure they have it right. For a continent. And that uncertainty could propagate. It could also mean the other better known areas have their parameters set wrong because of the unknowns. Which could make the models good for predicting the known past and useless for predicting the future. Nice work if you can get it.

H/T Watts Up With That

Pull Out, Pull Out!!!

Yeah it sounds like one of those old World War 2 movies where the pilot is about to do a cork screw into the ground and his friends try to save him by emotion alone. But this is not a war movie. At least not in the traditional sense. It is India threatening to pull out of the IPCC.

India has threatened to pull out of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and set up its on climate change body because it "cannot rely" on the group headed by its own Nobel Prize-winning scientist Dr R K Pachauri.

The Indian government's move is a snub to both the IPCC and Dr Pachauri as he battles to defend his reputation following the revelation that his most recent climate change report included false claims that most of the Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035. Scientists believe it could take more than 300 years for the glaciers to disappear.

The body and its chairman have faced growing criticism ever since as questions have been raised on the credibility of their work and the rigour with which climate change claims are assessed.

In India the false claims have heightened tensions between Dr Pachauri and the government, which had earlier questioned his claims. In Autumn, its environment minister, Jairam Ramesh, said that while glacial melting in the Himalayas was a real concern, there was evidence that some were actually advancing despite global warming.

Dr Pachauri had dismissed the government's claims as "voodoo science", but last night Mr Ramesh effectively marginalised the IPC chairman even further.

He announced that the Indian government will establish a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor the effects of climate change on the world's "third ice cap", and an "Indian IPCC" to use "climate science" to assess the impact of global warming throughout the country.

"There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism. I am for climate science. I think people misused [the] IPCC report ... [the] IPCC doesn't do the original research which is one of the weaknesses ... they just take published literature and then they derive assessments, so we had goof-ups on Amazon forest, glaciers, snow peaks.

Now if only the American EPA would get the message.

Politics aside this is more evidence that the consensus is (how should I put it?) melting. Now maybe CO2 is the climate driver some scientists say it is. Or maybe it is not as other scientists claim. But with the science as botched as it currently is we have no way of knowing. Only a few days ago New Zealand claimed that the dog ate their weather station data. Well really. The dog didn't eat it. But the data is missing. And the CRU data is missing. How about the missing Chinese weather stations? What else is missing? In my estimation honest science is missing. That can be fixed over time. But what we have now is not nearly good enough to make trillion dollar decisions on.

H/T Watts Up With That

Dear God Please Not Another One

James Delingpole appears to have found another hole in the IPCC "science". You can check out his view of the holes in the science of the Amazon rain forest. I'd rather look at personalities.

It gets even better. The two expert authors of the WWF report so casually cited by the IPCC as part of its, ahem, “robust” “peer-reviewed” process weren’t even Amazon specialists. One, Dr PF Moore, is a policy analyst:

My background and experience around the world has required and developed high-level policy and analytical skills. I have a strong understanding of government administration, legislative review, analysis and inquiries generated through involvement in or management of the Australian Regional Forest Agreement process, Parliamentary and Government inquiries, Coronial inquiries and public submissions on water pricing, access and use rights and native vegetation legislation in Australia and fire and natural resources laws, regulations and policies in Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand, South Africa and Malaysia.

And the lead author Andy Rowell is a freelance journalist (for the Guardian, natch) and green activist:

Andy Rowell is a freelance writer and Investigative journalist with over 12 years’ experience on environmental, food, health and globalization issues. Rowell has undertaken cutting-edge investigations for, amongst others, Action on Smoking and Health, The Campaign for Tobacco-Free Kids, Friends of the Earth, Greenpeace, IFAW, the Pan American Health Organization, Project Underground, the World Health Organization, World in Action and WWF.

But the IPCC’s shamelessness did not end there. Dr North has searched the WWF’s reports high and low but can find no evidence of a statement to support the IPCC’s claim that “40 per cent” of the Amazon is threatened by climate change.

Oh. Dear God No. They are just making shit up.

Here is what I think IPCC now stands for:

I Pretend (you) Cough (up the) Coin.

A Disaster Of Biblical Proportions

The UN's IPCC has just taken a few more torpedoes below the water line.

Well it turns out that the WWF is cited all over the IPCC AR4 report, and as you know, WWF does not produce peer reviewed science, they produce opinion papers in line with their vision. Yet IPCC’s rules are such that they are supposed to rely on peer reviewed science only. It appears they’ve violated that rule dozens of times, all under Pachauri’s watch.

A new posting authored by Donna Laframboise, the creator of NOconsensus.org (Toronto, Canada) shows what one can find in just one day of looking.

Here’s an extensive list of documents created or co-authored by the WWF and cited by this Nobel-winning IPCC AR4 report:

I'm not going to reprise the long list. You can find it at the links provided.

I would like to touch on a few things. First off WWF stands for the World Wildlife Fund. Second I'd like to look at the connection between the WWF and the UK Meteorological Office.

What is not generally realised is that the UK Met Office has been, since 1990, at the very centre of the campaign to convince the world that it faces catastrophe through global warming. (Its website now proclaims it to be "the Met Office for Weather and Climate Change".) Its then-director, Dr John Houghton, was the single most influential figure in setting up the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the chief driver of climate alarmism. Its Hadley Centre for Climate Change, along with the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit (CRU), was put in charge of the most prestigious of the four official global temperature records. In line with IPCC theory, its computers were programmed to predict that, as CO2 levels rose, temperatures would inevitably follow. From 1990 to 2007, the Department of the Environment gave the Met Office no less than £146 million for its "climate predictions programme".

But in the past three years, with the Met Office chaired by Robert Napier, a former global warming activist and previously head of WWF UK, its pretensions have been exposed as never before. The "Climategate" leak of documents from the CRU, along with further revelations from Russian scientists, have shown the CRU/Met Office alliance systematically manipulating temperature data, past and present, to show the world growing warmer than the evidence justified. And those same computers used to predict temperatures 100 years ahead for the IPCC have also been used to produce those weather forecasts that prove so consistently wrong.

Scientific method has gone out of the window, to support a theory that looks more questionable than ever.

And what is the WWF telling its Internet readers?

The U.K. Met Office says "it is more likely than not that 2010 will be the warmest year in the instrumental record, beating the previous record year which was 1998."

The Met Office said the record temperatures likely will be driven by "a combination of man-made global warming and a moderate warming of the tropical Pacific Ocean, a phenomenon known as El Niño." It noted that this year is the fifth warmest year, based on records extending back to 1850.

"Looking further ahead, our experimental decadal forecast confirms previous indications that about half the years 2010–2019 will be warmer than the warmest year observed so far — 1998," the Met Office said.

Ah yes the experimental models. What he means is computer programs. Unverified computer programs with dodgy codes and corrupted data.

And about the floods and hurricanes that are supposed to descend on mankind if he doesn't mend his ways? Made up.

THE UN climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to a rise in natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny - and ignored warnings from scientific advisers. The report's author later withdrew the claim because the evidence was too weak.

The link was central to demands at last month's Copenhagen climate summit by African nations for compensation of $US100 billion from the rich nations.

However, the IPCC knew in 2008 that the link could not be proved but did not alert world leaders, who have used weather extremes to bolster the case for action on climate change.

And they knew it was bad and did nothing. You know, that is not the only fraud uncovered. We may now be in possession of tens of them. So far. In fact it is looking like the whole IPCC enterprise is a fraud. And that doesn't even get to the bottom of the CO₂ emissions trading fraud.

I'd like to go back to Watts Up With That and look at a few comments on the subject.

Evidently the WWF is removing articles they had formerly posted. That is pretty good evidence on its face that they were fraudulent.

Jer (18:34:30) :

I find that most of the links are now inactive. Wondering if this is happening because of the attention. It seems like IPCC referenced material ought to be available.

Jer

This one is amusing:

PaulH (18:34:53) :

@Patrick Davis: It might be easier to list what the IPCC got right.

Frankly, if the IPCC were to declare that water is wet I would insist on independent verification from a non-UN/non-WWF affiliated organization before believing it.

Another joker.

Halfwise (18:49:58) :

It is easy to get confused between the World Wildlife Fund and World Wrestling Entertainment. Here is how to tell them apart: One gets crowds wildly excited with staged antics, bizarre plot lines and unbelievable hype. The other stages wrestling exhibitions.

Here is one about the fraud connections. It refers to a rather long comment with links up thread.

Andrew30 (19:04:30) :

pat (18:37:29) : ;

Yes, pat I put that there.

This list of documents goes beyond just one carbon trader.

So was the money and influence from more then one carbon trader being channeled through the WWF to both the CRU and the IPCC?

Has the WWF become no more than and money and influence launderer for Big Carbon?

Here is an excerpt from a comment from A Jones.

a jones (19:30:42) :

Yes

As I observed elsewhere this is a great scientific, financial and political fraud. And as with all frauds once the dominoes start to topple the collapse accelerates with terrifying speed.

So fast that I at least can hardly keep up.

And although there is immense inertia in those who have invested so heavily in the fraud, from the political activists to the Meeja to the politicians themselves once there is sufficient impetus in the avalanche they have to give way. The politicians will say they were deceived but acted in good faith, the Meeja never apologises for anything, and the activists will say they were only trying to get a point across, see WWF announcement over glaciers.

Yet possibly for the first time we are seeing what t’internet and the WWW can really do.

The Indian press is hot on the story, something we would have never known even a few years ago.

Isn’t modern technology a wonderful thing?

Yes it is.

Here is a rather long one about conjecture in science.

yonason (19:34:37) :

Shrinking Glaciers, Shrinking Arctic; Science so simple that even Mark Twain could do it.

http://www.online-literature.com/view.php/life_mississippi/18

“Therefore, the Mississippi between Cairo and New Orleans was twelve hundred and fifteen miles long one hundred and seventy-six years ago. It was eleven hundred and eighty after the cut-off of 1722. It was one thousand and forty after the American Bend cut-off. It has lost sixty-seven miles since. Consequently its length is only nine hundred and seventy-three miles at present.
……….
In the space of one hundred and seventy-six years the Lower Mississippi has shortened itself two hundred and forty-two miles. That is an average of a trifle over one mile and a third per year. Therefore, any calm person, who is not blind or idiotic, can see that in the Old Oolitic Silurian Period,’ just a million years ago next November, the Lower Mississippi River was upwards of one million three hundred thousand miles long, and stuck out over the Gulf of Mexico like a fishing-rod. And by the same token any person can see that seven hundred and forty-two years from now the Lower Mississippi will be only a mile and three-quarters long, and Cairo and New Orleans will have joined their streets together, and be plodding comfortably along under a single mayor and a mutual board of aldermen. There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact.”

I think Mark Twain ia as good a place as any to put a halt to this amusement. It is hard to get more amusing than that. The good news is that the whole fraud is unraveling. It will be interesting to see what the Watermelons try next.

Green is the new Red!


Cross Posted at Classical Values

Someone Turned The Heat Off

As you can see from the above graph the heat stored in the ocean does not match global warming predictions. Normally this would mean the death of a theory or at minimum some serious adjustments of it. But you know what we are dealing with is not real science. It is climate change science.

Albert Einstein once said, “No amount of experimentation can ever prove me right; a single experiment can prove me wrong.” Einstein’s words express a foundational principle of science intoned by the logician, Karl Popper: Falsifiability. In order to verify a hypothesis there must be a test by which it can be proved false. A thousand observations may appear to verify a hypothesis, but one critical failure could result in its demise. The history of science is littered with such examples.

A hypothesis that cannot be falsified by empirical observations, is not science. The current hypothesis on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), presented by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is no exception to this principle.

That would be true if we were dealing with real science. When what you are dealing with is politics disguised as science no amount of falsification short of economic/political collapse is sufficient.

We are rather fortunate (in a very unfortunate way) that the recent economic collapse has slowed the carbon tax schemes. Jim Hansen (yeah THAT Jim Hansen) explains how Washington works in the context of the current Cap and Trade Bill.

Why is this cap-and-trade temple of doom worshipped? The 648 page cap-and-trade monstrosity that is being foisted on the U.S. Congress provides the answer. Not a single Congressperson has read it. They don’t need to – they just need to add more paragraphs to support their own special interests. By the way, the Congress people do not write most of those paragraphs – they are “suggested” by people in alligator shoes.

So true. What he fails to add is that Congress works this way on every single project it tackles.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Problems in Asia

It has come to my attention that there are problems with the the temperature record in Asia.

At virtually the same time NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies was correcting historical climate data with the assistance of Climate Audit's Steve McIntyre, a British mathematician discovered serious flaws in papers used and cited by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in its most recent Assessment Report.

Douglas J. Keenan, a former Morgan Stanley arbitrageur and current independent mathematical researcher, identified "fabrications" in such studies that suggest a "marked lack of integrity in some important work on global warming that is relied upon by the IPCC" and that "the insignificance of urbanization effects on temperature measurements has not been established as reliably as the IPCC assessment report assumes."

The errors are so glaring that one might conclude fraud was involved. Such a conclusion would be premature.

There are links to the studies involved and other links at the above url.

H/T Reliapundit

Update: 11 Aug 007 1711z

Questions about the Russian data.

Anthony Watts has some thoughts on the China problem.

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Record Highs

Sacramento California has been reporting record highs this summer.

Don't tell Al Gore, but global warming is taking a holiday in Sacramento this week. The maximum temperatures Sunday and Monday set records each day -- as the coolest "highs" for the dates since record-keeping began in 1877.

Forecasters credit a deep marine layer and a potent low-pressure trough with funneling the cool air this way. It's as if Mother Nature cut herself a wedge of Santa Barbara weather and plopped it down on Sacramento's plate.

We're talking, for once, about the all-time lowest maximums, instead of the all-time highest. Monday's downtown high was just 74 degrees, 3 degrees cooler than the previous record of 77 degrees set in 1906, according to the National Weather Service. Sunday's downtown high of 76 frosted the previous low maximum of 78, set in 1962.

I'm wondering if like the Gore effect there might not also be a Newsweek effect.

Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change. Through advertisements, op-eds, lobbying and media attention, greenhouse doubters (they hate being called deniers) argued first that the world is not warming; measurements indicating otherwise are flawed, they said. Then they claimed that any warming is natural, not caused by human activities. Now they contend that the looming warming will be minuscule and harmless.

So what I want to know is: why isn't my check in the mail?

However, I'm not a true denialist. The IPCC projection of sea level rise has gotten me seriously worried. My advice to people living close to the shore? “Run for your lives before it is too late” the IPCC predicts a 3 mm per year rise in sea level. That is one foot in a century. Think of the devastation that wave would cause if it happened all at once. A one foot wave is unprecedented. It will be the end of civilization as we know it. OTOH “dude, surf’s up”.

OK so could a 5 deg F temperature change could be deadly to the flora and fauna on earth. You are telling me that a system that varies over a range of 120 deg F in a year’s time is going to be seriously disturbed by a predicted 5 deg F change? And is already out of whack from a 1 deg F change? You are telling me that the biota will not adapt? That adjustments will not be made?

You are telling me that we must assume a signal which is much less than the noise will have big effects on the system? Doubtful. That 120 F yearly variation and 20 F daily variation tends to anneal out the effects of very small very low frequency variations at least until they get significant relative to the yearly variations.

Well any way, I'm willing to become a full fledged denialist if it pays well. I think $2,500 a month would be sufficient to start. Just let me know the check is in the mail.

Several sites have suggested this Marc Morano article:

The only problem is -- Newsweek knew better. Reporter Eve Conant, who interviewed Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the Ranking Member of the Environment & Public Works Committee, was given all the latest data proving conclusively that it is the proponents of man-made global warming fears that enjoy a monumental funding advantage over the skeptics. (A whopping $50 BILLION to a paltry $19 MILLION for skeptics – Yes, that is BILLION to MILLION - see below)

Mann. I'm on the wrong side in this argument. I guess the check will not be in the mail.

There are also some good links here.

H/T papertiger

Cross Posted at Classical Values

Model Prediction

Disasters are coming so the climate modelers tell us.

OK models predict. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says there are serious shortcomings in the models. I could build a computer model that PROVES you are going to win the lottery. Send me some cash now.

What we are finding is that the data the models are built on is not very good. In fact the noise in the data exceeds the .6 deg C warming supposedly already in evidence. When the noise exceeds the signal the data is not to be trusted for small changes.

New experiments show the solar magnetic field is likely to have a large effect on clouds. Not in the model.

Sunspot cycles have a large effect on solar output. Not in the model.

Solar output can vary by more than .2% on any given day. Not in the model.

Ocean circulation and air circulation - not well modeled.

Human caused global warming is religion - not science.

Cross Posted at The Astute Bloggers