Climategate

http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB10001424052748703499404574562123968802420-lMyQjAxMDA5MDMwMDEzNDAyWj.html

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There is always the temptation to gloat when one sees pompous, self serious and self important people proved wrong. Fortunately for those of us who are like-minded on the subject of "global cooling", both pure data and efforts to "cover up" data (on the part of what were thought to be world class scientists) lead to the inevitable conclusion that little, if any, science supports global warming.

Perhaps that's a start. As Bjorn Lomborg points out (attached), the lack of water for the poor in the shadow of the Himalayas (in this case, Nepal), has been used by Al Gore and others to argue for short term cuts in carbon emissions. Climate activists argue that there is a "link" between melting glaciers in the Himalayas and water shortages elsewhere.

This hypothesis has not been supported by a new report released in November by the Indian government which indicates that the majority of these glaciers are stable or have even advanced. Jeffery Kargel, a glaciologist at the University of Arizona, declared in a November 13 article in "Science" that these extremely provocative findings were consistent with what he has learned independently.

Two things: (1) there is a growing body of knowledge from respected scientists that the world's glaciers are NOT melting; and (2) spending money on helping the poor to keep them from going hungry comes ahead of fancy schemes to get the carbon.

Now, moving on, we find that some of the world's leading scientists have worked in tandem to block freedom of information requests, blackball dissenting scientists, manipulate the peer-review process, and obscure, destroy or massage "inconvenient" temperature data - this after the disclosure of thousands of emails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, or CRU. This is the heart of "Climategate" (attached).

To put it bluntly, there was a direct correlation between the research money brought in to the CRU and their conclusions that global warming was occurring from various sources. According to estimates by the HSBC Bank, $94 billion will be spent globally this year on what is called "green stimulus" - largely ethanol and other alternative energy schemes - of the kind from which Al Gore and his partners at Kleiner Perkins hope to profit from handsomely.

Relying on the "dismal science" ("Economics", for those of you who have not heard the term) for a moment, supply creates its own demand. So, for every additional billion in government-funded grants, universities, research institutes, advocacy groups and their various spin-offs have emerged from the woodwork to receive them. And, as the WSJ "Climategate" article so aptly points out, these groups form a kind of "ecosystem" of their own. So, while the Sierra Club and Greenpeace (and so many others) are sincere in their beliefs about what needs to be changed (and soon), the very "science" that backs them up is, to quote one of their own scientists: "garbage".

Here's the best we can say about "climate science": it isn't settled and claims that climate change is accelerating are bizarre. Richard Lindzen is a meteorologist at MIT. His perspective makes sense and it is well expressed in the article attached (WSJ Opinion). Lindzen points out that there is reason to be concerned about what global warming measures are being used because those measures are imprecise: the Global Average Temperature Anomaly (GATA) is always changing. There is general support for the assertion that GATA has increased by about 1.5 degrees Fahrenheit since the middle of the 19th century. But, the quality of the data is poor. Several of the emails from the CRU dealt with how to manipulate the data to maximize apparent warming changes.

The general support for warming, according to Lindzen, is based not so much on the quality of the data, but on the fact that there was a "little ice age" from about the 15th to the 19th century. Thus, it is not surprising that temperatures should increase as we emerged from this episode. With the advancement of the modern industrial age, CO2 has added to warming but not to any major extent.

And, the "environmental models" that did not predict the "...absence of warming for the past dozen years..." are now being modified to justify what they missed and they now predict warming will resume in 2009 (aren't we in 2009?), 2013 and 2030, respectively.

The temptation here is to be sarcastic because it is just not a fair fight but we won't be. Rather, we will follow Lindzen's perspective as he points out that the East Anglia scandal is greater than just the hacked emails from the CRU: namely the suggestion that the very existence of warming, or the greenhouse effect, is tantamount to catastrophe. To Lindzen, it is the grossest of "bait and switch" scams. To him, the notion that complex climate "catastrophes" are simply a matter of response to a single number, GATA, represents a gigantic step backward in the science of climate: many disasters associated with warming are simply normal occurrences whose existence is falsely claimed to be evidence of warming. And, all these phenomena are dependent on the confluence of many factors.

So, what do we have? We have a bunch of scientists looking to manipulate their data to show global warming is the cause of of my aunt's headaches so they can get research grants. And, the mere fact that the scientists think they need to manipulate the data to show warming trends kind of shows, as one of them so correctly stated, that their data is "garbage."

Is there a return policy on Al Gore's Nobel?