THIS PAGE HAS BEEN ACTIVATED AS THE NEW STATESMAN BLOG IS NOW CLOSED FOR COMMENTS
At 10am this morning, the New Statesman finally closed the Mark Lynas thread on their website after 1715 comments had been added over a period of five months. I don’t know whether this constitutes any kind of a record, but gratitude is certainly due to the editor of of the New Statesman for hosting the discussion so patiently and also for publishing articles from Dr David Whitehouse and Mark Lynas that have created so much interest.
This page is now live, and anyone who would like to continue the discussion here is welcome to do so. I have copied the most recent contributions at the New Statesman as the first comment for the sake of convenience. If you want to refer back to either of the original threads, then you can find them here:
Dr David Whitehouse’s article can be found here with all 1289 comments.
Mark Lynas’ attempted refutation can be found here with 1715 comments.
Welcome to Harmless Sky, and happy blogging.
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10,000 Responses to “Continuation of the New Statesman Whitehouse/Lynas blogs.”
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tonyb
Will check out the link you provided and see if ther is anything more up-to-date.
Max
Max
Thanks for your help. I have looked at some 500 data sets of which around 20 are pre 1850. It is astonishing how many show no warming -and even a cooling- from 1850,when many more stations became available.
Composite ‘Global temperatures’ are disguising a lot of interesting data which is being revealed in the individual national records.
Thought you would be amused by this. It is the temperature data set for Mauna loa which shows no warming for 30 years!
http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/RS_Hawaii.htm
tonyb
TonyB
On your query about up-dated temperature records for German (and other European) cities, I could not find an up-date to the site you cited.
There are data for the current month, but no up-dates beyond 1993 of the long historical record from your site.
Strange.
Max
TonyB
The Hawaii study is very interesting.
No increase in temperature since around 1968.
No correlation whatsoever between CO2 and temperature, but a close correlation with PDO swings.
Decrease instead of increase in rate of sea level rise.
Hmmm…
How can Hawaii be representative for global CO2 levels when it is not at all representative of the supposed global climate changes?
A dilemma.
Max
Max
Thanks for your help.
That is rather surprising-Germany has many good temperature records and I would have thought someone would keep them updated in this useful format.
However, I still have around 35 pre 1850 datasets gleaned (with great difficulty) from a variety of sources. These clearly show considerable natural temperature variabilty over the years, and in this they closely resemble the CET figures, and if you look over the entire history (rather than a snapshot)it is difficult to see much evidence of any noticeable warming, let alone of the ‘catastrophic’ variety.
Bearing in mind the figures start in the depths of the Little Ice Age this seems surprising. I will publish my article on these datasets shortly.
I have now identified a very considerable number of datasets from 1850 onwards (some of them will be the ones that DR Jones appears to have mislaid) and even in this relatively short time scale it is fascinating to see how many places have cooled from a peak of around 1910-1940. The IPCC increase can only be obtained by producing a composite of global temperatures-undoubtedly some places will have warmed for a variety of reasons.
Perhaps these warm ones do overwhelm the cooling ones, but surely EVERYWHERE should be warming? This is clearly-and surprisngly- not so. I think someone has been playing with averages and statistics here.
I will be writing on this instrumental evidence for cooling when I have finished the pre 1850 datasets project.
tonyb
TonyB, Bob_FJ and others
Here is an interesting study on the Validity of Climate Change Forecasting for Public Policy Decision Making
http://kestencgreen.com/naiveclimate.pdf
The Abstract starts off with
The report concludes
Interesting.
Max
Max
That is an interesting report, particularly the bit about long term trends. It is something we have been saying for years. Obviously the author is paid by big oil.
The ‘global'(aarrgghh!)temperatures are completely obscuring this variability factor over the longer term, which is very evident in individual country or city data sets.
I shall give you a preview of my new article which highlights this very aspect. Hope to do that later this evening.
Tonyb
JZ
You are certainly not banned and the spam filter doesn’t seem to have eaten any of your comments while I’ve been away.
Peter M:
#7676 – you may have thought that you did ……… see now.
Tony B:
Have you seen this?
http://randd.defra.gov.uk/Document.aspx?Document=GA01012_6499_FRP.doc
TonyN
I have not seen it directly but the findings have been leaked over the years and absorbed into official DEfra policy.(remember Margaret Beckett headed this dept for some years!)
I challeged the sea level rises that arose from the evolving study some four years ago and asked for data to support it but they couldn’t provide it and cited the IPCC.
Two things particularly strike me.
Firstly-Is that cost right? Should there be a decimal point point somewhere?
Second point concerns this extract from the paper;
5.1 Alignment of the Climate Prediction Programme with Defra’s business and science objectives
The Climate Prediction Programme was not an academic research programme; its work plan and deliverables was driven by Defra’s requirements for science to inform UK government policy on climate change mitigation and adaptation. As the policy requirements changed, so did the research programme objectives. In this section we show how the work described in the CPP Annexes contributed to one or more of the science and business objectives and issues, as published in the Global Atmosphere section of the current strategy for the Climate, Energy and Environmental Risk (CEER) Directorate for 2003-2006. The full strategy can be seen at http://www.defra.gov.uk/science/s_is/directorates/asp.
The climate prediction programme was not academic??!! From my experiece I would agree but surely it should have been?
Curiously, it was one of the scientists involved in the latter stages of this report that I debated with at a meeting a couple of months ago, and reported on here.
The person was very poorly informed on such aspects as the PDO, NAO, Historic cycles, jet stream, and the effects of melting ice on sea levels. You remember I posted a job advert here from the Met office admitting to lack of knowledge in this latter aspect and asking for someone to provide it?
I will have a more thorough read of it later.
tonyb
A UK Government advertising campaign started last night on ITV1 in a prime slot during Coronation Street. It targets “climate change sceptics” by stating unequivocally that mankind is the cause of climate change endangering life on Earth? See this article (featuring a video of last night’s ad) in the Times. Also see the Government website here.
As the Times says,
A scary development.
In contrast to my last post, this BBC article may represent an interesting development. An extract:
It goes on to include some quite sensible stuff about, for example, ocean cycles and concludes:
Heretical thinking by one of AGW’s high priests?
Robin, re your 7711 and 7712, I agree – very interesting BBC article. I had to chuckle though when I read “This headline may come as a bit of a surprise, so too might that fact that the warmest year recorded globally was not in 2008 or 2007, but in 1998.”
Well, I suppose it would come as a surprise for those people who have relied solely on the BBC for their climate news over the last decade! Otherwise, not really.
Is it a shift in editorial policy, though, or are they up to something?
Very ironic that this article comes out at the very same moment that the government launches its unabashedly scare-mongering £6 million children’s-story advert with rising floodwater, realistic (not) black clouds of CO2 and drowning doggies. Ouch, the dissonance.
Robin and Alex Cull
Yep. As Bob Dylan used to wail:
“the times they are a’changin'”
Is even BBC going to become rationally skeptical of the AGW craze?
CNN (with its continuing adulation of US President Obama) has apparently not yet caught on, but it looks like the wheels are coming off the AGW bandwagon in more places than one.
But don’t count it out yet. There are just too many hundreds of billions of dollars (or Pounds or Euros) involved for this gravy train to go away overnight, in my opinion.
Max
Max
Tonyn
Are you still able to access your 7709 link. My copy now says ‘system locked’
Tonyb
Hi all, just to say I’ve now written a letter of complaint to the Advertising Standards Agency (ASA) re the most recent “Act on CO2” advert (Robin’s 7711), and have posted the content on my blog here.
I’m not sure if my complaint will be upheld or will have much of an impact, but here we go, anyway.
Re complaints to the ASA (my 7711), I’d be interested in views on my recent posts on WUWT. They’re here – starting at 07:08:18 today.
Sorry I omitted the WUWT link – it’s here.
Robin, I think you may well be right in saying there’s a likelihood the ASA will brush off complaints about this one. I made my own transcript of the voice-over, and they have left quite a bit of wiggle-room in there.
“There were awful heat waves…” Yes, there have been (many times during history.) “Scientists said it was caused by too much CO2” Yes some indeed have (and other scientists have said different things.) Etc.
Oh well, I think it’s worth a try. Others seem to have complained as well, so it does send a message, hopefully. And I thought Phillip Bratby made some good points too – e.g., “Advertising must not take advantage of children’s inexperience or their natural credulity and sense of loyalty.”
I don’t know what I find more infuriating, the fact that my tax money has contributed to this unpleasant propaganda, or the sheer nastiness of the way they are trying to exploit the vulnerability and innocence of young children.
Pete Martin!
This seems to be (virtually) a zero temperature anomoly. Please, tell us if the Global Mean Temperature should be 56.8 degrees or 57.4 degrees averaged over the entire globe.
Brute #7720
As I continually tell Peter, there is no such thing as a global mean temperature in any meaningful sense. We have many places that are warming-(partly due to UHI) and we have many that are actually cooling- and have been for decades-enough to form a meaningful climatic trend.
‘Warming bits mixed in with lots of cooling bits’ does not have the same ring as ‘global warming’ does it?
However even Hansen and Hadley recognise that this term is a misnomer and demonstrably untrue if anyone bothered to look properly. Hence the phrase ‘climate change’ with which no one can disagree. Its the ‘catastrophic man made’ bit that is appended that is obviously wrong when you study the lomg term cycles.
Tonyb
Max,
I know……I was just attempting to point out the ridiculousness of entire global warming argument and Peter’s fantasy of controlling the weather…….maybe have him commit to a mean global temperature that was “just right”.
He’s far to clever to fall for it.
I work with Direct Digital Controls that have a difficult time controlling temperature in a sealed chamber……and he believes that he can control the temperature of the atmosphere within a few 1/10ths of a degree.
I wonder how much CO2 a machine with that capacity would emit?
As a side note: The temperature here yesterday was 67° (High)……today it was 57°, tomorrow 47°
……a 30° “anomaly” in three days.
I’m just waiting for the next shift in the climate scare timeline back to “Cataclysmic Global Cooling”………..
1895 – Geologists Think the World May Be Frozen Up Again – New York Times, February 1895
1902 – “Disappearing Glaciers…deteriorating slowly, with a persistency that means their final annihilation…scientific fact…surely disappearing.” – Los Angeles Times
1912 – Prof. Schmidt Warns Us of an Encroaching Ice Age – New York Times, October 1912
1923 – “Scientist says Arctic ice will wipe out Canada” – Professor Gregory of Yale University, American representative to the Pan-Pacific Science Congress, – Chicago Tribune
1923 – “The discoveries of changes in the sun’s heat and the southward advance of glaciers in recent years have given rise to conjectures of the possible advent of a new ice age” – Washington Post
1924 – MacMillan Reports Signs of New Ice Age – New York Times, Sept 18, 1924
1929 – “Most geologists think the world is growing warmer, and that it will continue to get warmer” – Los Angeles Times, in Is another ice age coming?
1932 – “If these things be true, it is evident, therefore that we must be just teetering on an ice age” – The Atlantic magazine, This Cold, Cold World
1933 – America in Longest Warm Spell Since 1776; Temperature Line Records a 25-Year Rise – New York Times, March 27th, 1933
1933 – “…wide-spread and persistent tendency toward warmer weather…Is our climate changing?” – Federal Weather Bureau “Monthly Weather Review.”
1938 – Global warming, caused by man heating the planet with carbon dioxide, “is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power.”– Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
1938 – “Experts puzzle over 20 year mercury rise…Chicago is in the front rank of thousands of cities thuout the world which have been affected by a mysterious trend toward warmer climate in the last two decades” – Chicago Tribune
1939 – “Gaffers who claim that winters were harder when they were boys are quite right… weather men have no doubt that the world at least for the time being is growing warmer” – Washington Post
1952 – “…we have learned that the world has been getting warmer in the last half century” – New York Times, August 10th, 1952
1954 – “…winters are getting milder, summers drier. Glaciers are receding, deserts growing” – U.S. News and World Report
1954 – Climate – the Heat May Be Off – Fortune Magazine
1959 – “Arctic Findings in Particular Support Theory of Rising Global Temperatures” – New York Times
1969 – “…the Arctic pack ice is thinning and that the ocean at the North Pole may become an open sea within a decade or two” – New York Times, February 20th, 1969
1969 – “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000? — Paul Ehrlich (while he now predicts doom from global warming, this quote only gets honorable mention, as he was talking about his crazy fear of overpopulation)
1970 – “…get a good grip on your long johns, cold weather haters – the worst may be yet to come…there’s no relief in sight” – Washington Post
1974 – Global cooling for the past forty years – Time Magazine
1974 – “Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age” – Washington Post
1974 – “As for the present cooling trend a number of leading climatologists have concluded that it is very bad news indeed” – Fortune magazine, who won a Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics for its analysis of the danger
1974 – “…the facts of the present climate change are such that the most optimistic experts would assign near certainty to major crop failure…mass deaths by starvation, and probably anarchy and violence” – New York Times Cassandras are becomingincreasingly apprehensive,for the weatheraberrations they arestudying may be theharbinger of anotherice age1975 – Scientists Ponder Why World’s Climate is Changing; A Major Cooling Widely Considered to Be Inevitable – New York Times, May 21st, 1975
1975 – “The threat of a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war as a likely source of wholesale death and misery for mankind” Nigel Calder, editor, New Scientist magazine, in an article in International Wildlife Magazine
1976 – “Even U.S. farms may be hit by cooling trend” – U.S. News and World Report
1981 – Global Warming – “of an almost unprecedented magnitude” – New York Times
1988 – I would like to draw three main conclusions. Number one, the earth is warmer in 1988 than at any time in the history of instrumental measurements. Number two, the global warming is now large enough that we can ascribe with a high degree of confidence a cause and effect relationship to the greenhouse effect. And number three, our computer climate simulations indicate that thegreenhouse effect is already large enough to begin to effect the probability of extreme events such as summer heat waves. – Jim Hansen, June 1988 testimony before Congress, see His later quote and His superior’s objection for context
1989 -”On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but – which means that we must include all doubts, the caveats, the ifs, ands and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists but human beings as well. And like most people we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we need to get some broad based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, means getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This “double ethical bind” we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.” – Stephen Schneider, lead author of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Discover magazine, October 1989
1990 – “We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing – in terms of economic policy and environmental policy” – Senator Timothy Wirth
1993 – “Global climate change may alter temperature and rainfall patterns, many scientists fear, with uncertain consequences for agriculture.” – U.S. News and World Report
1998 – No matter if the science [of global warming] is all phony . . . climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.” —Christine Stewart, Canadian Minister of the Environment, Calgary Herald, 1998
2001 – “Scientists no longer doubt that global warming is happening, and almost nobody questions the fact that humans are at least partly responsible.” – Time Magazine, Monday, Apr. 09, 2001
2003 – Emphasis on extreme scenarios may have been appropriate at one time, when the public and decision-makers were relatively unaware of the global warming issue, and energy sources such as “synfuels,” shale oil and tar sands were receiving strong consideration” – Jim Hansen, NASA Global Warming activist, Can we defuse The Global Warming Time Bomb?, 2003
2006 – “I believe it is appropriate to have an over-representation of factual presentations on how dangerous it is, as a predicate for opening up the audience to listen to what the solutions are, and how hopeful it is that we are going to solve this crisis.” — Al Gore, Grist magazine, May 2006
Brute
It was me not Max who commented on your 7720 with my tongue in cheek (but factual 7721)
I agree with your 7722. The idea we can control the climate is absurd as is the idea that we know the global average of the globe or that it means anything apart from to those using statistics to prove a point.
As I posted on the Peter Taylor thread many parts of the world have been cooling for many years if you look at the individual records. However the ‘ Global temperature’ bias is towards UHI affected urban areas (where most of the world now lives)which shows a warming trend which overwhelms the coooling trend.
Global warming is a complete misnomer hence the subtle alteration to ‘climate change’ which no rational sceptic (a sceptic is by nature rational) would disagree with.
Using a global temperature, as both Max and Peter Martin like doing obscures the reality of what is happening locally-which is where we all live! That is up to them of course but we can’t parse it to fractions of a degree to prove one thing or the other.
Where did your 7723 come from? It is an interesting resumee of the periodic catastrophes that are supposed to overwhelm the world.
tonyb (Not Max)
Brute
I like your chronological list of “imminent climate disasters”.
Looks like there have been global “chicken littles” for over 100 years.
I, too, wonder how many more years of cooling (“local”, as TonyB writes, but “all over the place”) it will take before the next “global ice age” scare comes out.
The AGW scare is a bit different than the others in that it has become a billion dollar big business.
So many climatologists, computer nerds, corporations, scientific organizations, environmental lobby groups and politicians are counting on personal gain from the current craze that it might have a hard, slow death.
But I am convinced that there will be a new “imminent disaster” bandwagon, and many who climb aboard will be the same individuals and groups that are now riding on the AGW gravy train.
Max