War with the IPCC
Canada’s role
Dissenting scientists have been told the war is over. The science is settled –unequivocal is the word that is used. But some scientists refuse to take a pat on the head and quit the fray. Among them are two Canadians; Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, hereafter called M&M. What are these people thinking that inspires them to carry on against such impossible odds?
A video presentation by Australian scientist Bob Carter will give a quick overview of some of the topics in dispute. See here for part one of four. Steve McIntyre is introduced in the video as a dragon slayer in the war against the IPCC. Someday a book will be written about the battles in this war. The first battle is the battle over the “hockey stick graph”. One telling of the story is by Ross McKitrick here. Additional insights and an independent version of this battle are told here. Remember that the “hockey stick graph” was sent to every Canadian home as definitive proof that humans were responsible for global warming. The Canadian government did not inform the public later that M&M had “broken” the “hockey stick”. The IPCC quietly stopped using the “hockey stick graph” as the main icon of global warming.
Steve McIntyre moved on to host the popular Climate Audit blog. NASA once proclaimed 2005 the warmest year in over a century, and claimed the five warmest years over the last century were 2005, 1998, 2002, 2003, and 2004. You don’t hear that as much lately. Not after Steve McIntyre discovered a mistake in the US temperature history. When the mistake was corrected the 1930’s “moved up the ladder board” to use the golf metaphor that McIntyre used in his blog. See the blog entry here.
In one blog entry McIntyre expresses puzzlement over a graphic used by Al Gore in the movie “An Inconvenient truth”. At about the 23 comment it is finally realized the incredible mistake Gore has made. Notice the tone of the comments after this blunder is exposed. Check out that entry here.
In a recent op ed, Ross McKitrick discussed the reliability of temperature data used in climate studies. He says that global surface temperatures in IPCC reports are unreliable due to flawed data. “If the contamination were removed, we estimated the average measured warming rate over land would decline by about half. Dutch meteorologists using different data and a different testing methodology had come to the same conclusions.”
And so another battle is joined. Winning battles and winning a war are not the same and winning a war with the IPCC seems almost as remote a posibility as ever.
Talk to the green 
The warmest years on record are now 2005, 2007/1998 (tie), 2002 and 2003. I still hear it, likely because it\’s still true. One thing to ponder is why you think it\’s no longer true. The link you provided in no way backs you up, although it allows for an nice little bait and switch to occur for the unwary. It looks to me like you are either misunderstanding or deliberately trying to mislead. Care to explain?
The US Historical Climate Network (USHCN) reports about a 0.6C temperature increase in the lower 48 states since about 1940. There are two steps to reporting these historic temperature numbers. First, actual measurements are taken. Second, adjustments are made after the fact by scientists to the data. Would you like to guess how much of the 0.6C temperature rise is from actual measured temperature increases and how much is due to adjustments of various levels of arbitrariness? Here it is, for the period from 1940 to present in the US:
Actual Measured Temperature Increase:
0.1C
Adjustments and Fudge Factors:
0.5C
Total Reported Warming:
0.6C
Yes, that is correct. Nearly all the reported warming in the USHCN data base, which is used for nearly all global warming studies and models, is from human-added fudge factors, guesstimates, and corrections.
Late adjustments have rearranged the leader board! I\’m glad you are able to point this out.That\’s what happens when the fox is in charge of the hen house.
BTW the source is:
http://www.coyoteblog.com/coyote_blog/2007/07/an-interesting-.html
The
warmest years on record are now 2005, 2007/1998 (tie), 2002 and 2003. I
still hear it, likely because it\’s still true. One thing to ponder is
why you think it\’s no longer true. The link you provided in no way
backs you up, although it allows for an nice little bait and switch to
occur for the unwary. It looks to me like you are either
misunderstanding or deliberately trying to mislead. Care to explain?
I\’m going to keep asking the question until you answer it.
Let me know if you\’re not able to understand the question.
Since the debate over man-made global warming is \’over\’ and a \’consensus\’ has been achieved, how hot was last year anyway?
Here\’s what three of the world\’s leading agencies monitoring climate change say.
NASA\’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, headed by James Hansen who is an advisor to Al Gore, says 2007 was the second warmest year on record.
Meanwhile, the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says it was the fifth warmest.
And Britain\’s Meteorological Office (the MET), which does its analysis in conjunction with the University of East Anglia, and which at the start of the year predicted 2007 would likely be the warmest on record, says it was the seventh warmest.
NASA says 2005 is the warmest year on record and 2007 tied for second with 1998.
The MET says 1998 is the warmest year on record and 2007, in terms of warming trends, isn\’t statistically different from any year going back to 2001.
In August, NASA grudgingly rejigged its ranking for the hottest years in the U.S. after Canadian blogger Steve McIntyre (www.climateaudit.org), pointed out a calculating error. That resulted in 1934 nudging out 1998 as the hottest year on record in the U.S., although NASA says the change is statistically insignificant.
What it all means is that taking the Earth\’s temperature is not an exact science. It\’s also a relatively new science, going back no more than 150 years on a 4.5 billion-year-old planet.
Best, then, to take each new prediction or claim that one year or another was the hottest, or hotter, or less hot, with a grain of salt.
For the source and the rest of the article:
http://www.thedailyobserver.ca/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=872529
When you look at the graphs in this post you can see the temperature differance between rural and urban sites. The temperatures you quote do not properly account for the urban heat island effect. See suporting evidence here:
http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=1859
Not only is the current temperature data wrong but two recent studies have quantified how wrong. The first study examines in detail the UHI effect. See from the original post:
In a recent op ed, Ross McKitrick discussed the reliability of temperature data used in climate studies. He says that global surface temperatures in IPCC reports are unreliable due to flawed data. “If the contamination were removed, we estimated the average measured warming rate over land would decline by about half. Dutch meteorologists using different data and a different testing methodology had come to the same conclusions.”
Q: How many UN-sponsored scientists does it take to measure the annual temperature?
A: Two. One thousand to read and record the measurements and another one thousand to order a new set of rectal thermometers for the next annus.
Did you pull an Orwell on your original post\’s content?
Please, if you really want to have an honest discussion, do a few things.1. If you update your posts, leave the original and ADD an update. Orwellian changes make for bad communication.2. Answer questions instead of jumping all over the place to your favourite tangents-of-the-moment.3. Quote quotes. Make it obvious when your words are yours and someone else\’s are someone else\’s.Here\’s one question you could maybe, possibly, hopefully actually answer: Did the mistake that McKitrick discover have a noticeable impact on the ranking of global temperatures, as you hint it did?Another one: what was previously said by the "alarmists" on the subject of 1934 versus 1998 in the temperature record of the continental US?
Sorry, I need to do a test to see what kind of formatting Live Spaces allows. So far I\’m unimpressed with the way it works, but it\’s young still.<blockquote>Can I do a blockquote using HTML?</blockquote>[quote]Does BBCode work at all?[/quote]
Late adjustments have rearranged the leader board! I\’m glad you are able to point this out. That\’s what happens when the fox is in charge of the hen house.
Talking to yourself is a sign of insanity.
Wishing I could edit but having to re-post in order to add a forgotten thousand (and opening myself to the charge of rejigging numbers)…
Q: How many thousand UN-sponsored scientists does it take to measure the annual temperature?
A: Two. One thousand to read and record the measurements and another one thousand to order a new set of rectal thermometers to get clean data for the next annus.
I looked up the following from NASA and sorted by annual mean to get these top-rankers (2007 at 0.84 was not tied with 1998 at 1.24)
http://data.giss.nasa.gov/gistemp/graphs/Fig.D.txt
year Annual_Mean 5-year_Mean1998 1.24 0.521934 1.24 0.422006 1.15 *1921 1.13 0.131931 1.08 0.261999 0.94 0.711953 0.9 0.321990 0.88 0.411938 0.85 0.351954 0.84 0.461939 0.84 0.44