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Bizarro Earth

Best of the Web: Science Scandal of the Century

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© H Payne
The World's Most Influential Climate Scientists Get Caught "Fudging" the Data

Climategate is shaping up to be the biggest science scandal in a generation. Given that the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) is being used to argue for radical changes in the economic and energy policies of every government on earth, affecting literally trillions of dollars of tax and economic policy, the stakes literally could not be higher. And the scientists involved in the scandal are the world's top climate scientists; the driving forces behind the UN's IPCC (Inter Governmental Panel on Climate change).

In mid-November, someone anonymously uploaded a ZIP file to the internet containing over a thousand e-mails and other data and program source code files totaling over 61MB lifted from the servers of the top British Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. It is not clear if the leak is the work of an outside hacker or the work of a whistle-blower from within.

While the leak was immediately a big story on the internet, most corporate-controlled media outlets initially attempted to downplay the controversy. For the first few weeks, the major TV outlets wouldn't even report the story. In fact, the BBC received the leaked documents first in October, but decided to sit on the story. The one outlet that did promote the story was FOX News, probably because the story fit their existing editorial slant and GOP talking points.

Most corporate print and on-line sources, such as Time, Huffington Post, The Atlantic, and many others have attempted to downplay the controversy, attributing the seemingly damning quotes from the e-mails to "innuendo and smear campaigns" or saying that they were "taken out of context". White House spokesman Gibbs even characterized the flap as "silly".

Unfortunately for them, the archive of over 1000 e-mails provides ample context for the damning quotes and you don't need to be a scientist to recognize when people are discussing the fudging of results, destruction of data and underhanded manipulation of the peer-review process. Also unfortunately for them, the more you do know about the science, the more damning the revelations become. This controversy is not going away.

Comment: Subject: Climategate - Science Scandal of the Century
Date: Fri, 25 Dec 2009 22:14:51 +0100
From: Arkadiusz Jadczyk
To: editor@RockCreekFreePress.com

Dear Dr Sullivan,

In your article on Climategate you wrote:
"That's just not the way science works. No scientific theory is ever "settled". "
But you keep repeating:
"There is not even much dispute about the current direction of change; the climate does appear to be getting warmer."
This doesn't sound very scientific. "Getting warmer"? Taking into account which set of data? From what period? From where? How reliable are these data? How they are being processed? Which selection criteria are being used?

Using appropriate selection criteria you can prove any thesis. So, first of all selection criteria must be made explicit - then you can say:

"There is not even much dispute given these selection criteria" - which may be the case or may not be the case. The point is that because YOU do not know of any disputes, that does not necessarily mean that there are no disputes whatsoever. Are you sure you know the opinions of all experts all over the world during the last, say, 50 years? I would rather doubt it.

Moreover, even if there is really no dispute given your selection criteria, there may be a dispute concerning the chosen criteria, which may lead to the dispute of the final conclusion - if there CAN BE a final conclusion.

What I want to highlight is the fact that there are a number of experts who have been warning of the far more disastrous event of a coming ice age for some time now and, looking out the window and checking the thermometer seems to support that view rather better than the "global warming" idea. See, for example, this article from Time magazine back in 1974, Another Ice Age?

and then David Deming's article here: The Coming Ice Age Consider also the experts here: IceAgeNow and here: IceCap

Kind regards,

Arkadiusz Jadczyk
http://arkadiusz-jadczyk.org/


Igloo

More than half of the U.S. now covered with snow

half UScovered insnow
© National Ice Center (NIC)More than half the US is covered in snow
Snow and Ice Program

The National Ice Center (NIC), a tri-agency operational center, operated by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), the United States Navy, and the United States Coast Guard, prepares a daily Northern Hemisphere Snow and Ice chart. This chart, prepared on a polar stereographic projection is centered on the North Pole with a 60 degree latitude of true scale, provides information on the areal coverage of the snow and ice. The visible and Near-infrared imagery of the polar orbiting satellites (POES) and geostationary orbiting environmental satellites (GOES) are the primary tools for the analysis of this snow and ice cover. Low resolution visible data are augmented whenever possible by the visible high resolution imagery and visible GOES, GMS, MTSAT, and METEOSAT data. In addition, ground weather observations, synthetic aperture radar (SAR), microwave scatterometer returns, numerical weather prediction, sea ice models, buoys, reconnaissance flights, and various DMSP visible and microwave products are incorporated into the daily Snow and Ice chart.

Igloo

Dallas, Texas: Rare white Christmas causes travel problems

Dallas snowstorm
© Star-Telegram/Paul Moseley Heavy snow brought poor visibility to drivers on Interstate 30 in west Fort Worth around 11:30 a.m. Thursday.
A Christmas Eve blizzard made a mess of holiday travel plans, stranding motorists, forcing flight cancellations, canceling church services and raising concerns about roadways on Christmas morning.

Bridges to D/FW Airport terminals were reported closed early today due to the icy road conditions, Fox 4 News said. The National Weather Service said the icy roads would persist into the mid- to late-morning hours, making for hazardous driving conditions, especially on bridges and under overpasses. The airport was hoping to reopen bridges by noon, Fox 4 said.

Despite the winter weather havoc, many North Texans were excited about waking up to a very rare event: a white Christmas. Snow fell heavily through the day and early evening Thursday, and overnight temperatures in the 20s made it possible for the fluffiness to stick around. Sunny skies and higher temperatures should melt the snow away by late-morning, the weather service said today.

More than 2 inches of snow was recorded at Dallas/Fort Worth Airport on Thursday, according to the weather service. Areas to the northwest were walloped, with 8 inches falling in Nocona in Montague County and 5 to 6 inches in Wichita Falls.

Cloud Lightning

Flashback Best of the Web: CNN Segment Warns of Coming Ice Age


If you're fortunate enough to have it - don't sell that oceanfront property for fear that the icecaps will melt, and rising seas swamping your property. A segment on CNN's Jan. 13 Lou Dobbs Tonight explored the possibility that earth isn't warming, but is, in fact, cooling.

Arrow Down

Heavy snow, cold temperatures hit many parts of Japan

Very cold air swept through large swaths of areas along the Sea of Japan on Thursday, causing record accumulations of snow and record-low temperatures for December in northern parts of the country, the Japan Meteorological Agency said.

Local observatories measured 93 and 86 centimeters of snow in Tsuruoka, Yamagata Prefecture, and Akita, respectively, in the morning for a record accumulation for the month at each location.

The first snowfall of the winter was observed in some warmer places, including Utsunomiya, Tochigi Prefecture, Hiroshima and Fukuoka.

Arrow Down

India shivers in unusually low temperatures

New Dehli - Delhiites shivered despite the sunshine Tuesday as the national capital recorded the season's lowest temperature of 6.4 degrees Celsius.

"The minimum temperature recorded early this morning was two degrees below the average, at 6.4 degree Celsius. While it is natural for temperatures to drop in December, the snowfall in Jammu and Kashmir is adding to the chill here," an official of the India Meteorological Department (IMD) told IANS.

Though there was a shallow fog in the morning, the visibility did not fall very much. According to the IMD, the visibility early Tuesday was 1,000 metres and there were no flight delays reported.

The maximum temperature is expected to hover around 21 degrees Celsius.

Igloo

Flashback Best of the Web: Science: Another Ice Age?

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© TimeCover of Time magazine from December 1979
Comment: This article was originally published in Time Magazine on June 24, 1974. Now, considering the revelations about "Climategate", perhaps we need to return to what was known before greed and manipulation took over science?

In Africa, drought continues for the sixth consecutive year, adding terribly to the toll of famine victims. During 1972 record rains in parts of the U.S., Pakistan and Japan caused some of the worst flooding in centuries. In Canada's wheat belt, a particularly chilly and rainy spring has delayed planting and may well bring a disappointingly small harvest. Rainy Britain, on the other hand, has suffered from uncharacteristic dry spells the past few springs. A series of unusually cold winters has gripped the American Far West, while New England and northern Europe have recently experienced the mildest winters within anyone's recollection.

As they review the bizarre and unpredictable weather pattern of the past several years, a growing number of scientists are beginning to suspect that many seemingly contradictory meteorological fluctuations are actually part of a global climatic upheaval. However widely the weather varies from place to place and time to time, when meteorologists take an average of temperatures around the globe they find that the atmosphere has been growing gradually cooler for the past three decades. The trend shows no indication of reversing. Climatological Cassandras are becoming increasingly apprehensive, for the weather aberrations they are studying may be the harbinger of another ice age.

Igloo

Winter storm sweeps across China

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© CFPA man struggles to walk in gales and heavy snows in Huiyuan County, north China's Shanxi province on December 24, 2009
The strong cold front that has been sweeping across most of north China over the past two days has brought a sharp temperature drop of up to 30 degrees centigrade to some hit areas.

The National Meteorological Center has issued second-level, or orange, alerts on the cold storm that brought fresh gales of up to force 8 to the affected areas, the China News Service reported.

The center forecast temperatures in parts of the northern Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region as well as Shaanxi, Shanxi and Hebei provinces to fall to 30 degrees below zero.

Cloud Lightning

Our Global Climate is Now Actually Cooling, Says Metereologist

"Our global climate is now actually cooling," says meteorologist Thomas F. Giella.

"An Interglacial period is a geological interval of time with warmer global average temperature that separates glacials/ice ages," says Giella. "Our current Holocene interglacial has persisted since the Pleistocene, approximately 11,500 years ago. Superimposed on this very long climate change cycle is a number of smaller ones caused by small variations in the energy output of our Sun, wobbles of our Earth as it spins on its axis and the eccentricity of Earth's orbit around the Sun."

"However there is now growing evidence that the interglacial warming reversed itself beginning around 1940 but I'm not sure if the reversal signals a return to a long term Ice Age or another shorter Little Ice Age. Typically an interglacial period lasts approximately 11,500 years, so anecdotal evidence would point to a return of a long term ice age. Personally I lean towards another Little Ice Age similar to the Dalton Minimum that occurred in the early and mid 1800's."

Bizarro Earth

Dozens Dead as Storm Hovers Over Central U.S.

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© AFPDrivers try to navigate through heavy snow in Alexandria, Virginia.
Dozens of Americans have lost their lives because of a massive winter storm just before the Christmas holidays, according to emergency services.

The fatalities attributed to the storm began Wednesday, with hundreds of Thursday flights cancelled at airports from Minneapolis to Dallas. The weather is not expected to clear before Saturday.

Five people died on Kansas's icy roads, the state highway patrol reported, and six people have died on Nebraskan roads.

Three people were killed after a dust storm near Phoenix caused a 22-vehicle pileup, the Arizona Republic reported.

Three were killed on the slippery roads in New Mexico and one other person died in a Minnesota crash, local media reported.