Saturday, December 5, 2009

The Truth about Hacked eMails

6 comments:

Michael Turner said...

Nice. One of the better rebuttals I've seen. Actually, come to think of it, simply the best I've seen so far. You've just earned yourself a subscriber.

Klystron said...

Interesting video. However, I am still not convinced that something a little underhanded was going on at the CRU. There were other emails that allude to the corruption of the peer review process, through attempts to prevent the publication of skeptical papers. This is why for a while we saw "all scientists agree on global warming" when in reality, those who didn't agree were silenced. Which might be okay to do in the political sector, but the scientific sector doesn't work like that.

In addition to the emails the source code for the climate data was released, along with the log book of one of the head programmers. Most news agencies will turn to the emails for evidence because people can understand English. Most people don't understand idl and fortran, the languages the code was written in.

So far none of the climate models that have predicted increased global warming, can account for the fact that temperatures have not gone up at all over the last 10 years, and in fact have started to decline.

Another interesting fact is that global temperatures on mars have undergone fluctuations similar to what the earth has seen.

I'm not saying that we shouldn't try to cut down on pollution, decrease reliance on fossil fuels, ect, that is all well and good. Yet you cannot use scientific evidence as a basis to do so if you are then going to turn around and silence all skeptics of your scientific data. You have to refute data with data, and if you can't then you are wrong and you need to move on.

Charles Barton said...

spadflyer12 Some scientists would see the exceptional heat of 1998 as the consequences of an exceptionally warm El Nino event, and would argue that the high global temperature that year was in part an anomaly. If you treat 1998 as an outlier, and there seems to be ample scientific grounds for doing so, then the world has gotten warmer during the last decade.

if you further consider that the world is in the deepest solar minimum in at least a century, you cannot dismiss the possibility that the solar activity may be playing a slight role in present global temperature trends, and that global temperature rises may return with a once solar activity increases.

There is a great deal of incontrovertible scientific evidence that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and AGW skeptics have failed to make a case that the global temperature rise has observed during the last third of the 20th century has some other cause.

Klystron said...

Even if you treat 1998 as an outlier, the models still can't account for lack of increase in temperatures. In fact most of the reports that I have seen indicate that global temperatures will drop during El Nino events, which is what people are using to explain the latest drop in global temperatures.

I read another paper on solar driving of the climate, and they concluded that 54% of the surface temperatures can be accounted for by solar irradiance. We are currently at a minimum for sunspot activity, which correlates to a maximum for solar irradiance.

That paper is here: http://www.geo.umass.edu/faculty/bradley/lean1995.pdf

I'm not saying that CO2 isn't a greenhouse gas, of course it is. What I am saying is that the conclusion that global warming stems from man made causes doesn't exactly hold much water. Most of the evidence for this ignores things such as solar driving, and focuses primarily on man made CO2 emissions. Which many scientists argue that even if global warming stems from man made causes, CO2 emissions aren't likely to be the primary cause.

Either way I feel that the whole discussion of global warming, be it man made or natural, is moot. We should be good stewards of our environment regardless, and try to minimize our impact on the environment. However, trying to force this on people using incomplete scientific evidence is just wrong.

I'm an MIT student studying nuclear engineering and physics. I'm currently doing research on nuclear fusion, and hope to see that allow us to take a huge step to minimizing our impact. I am also one of the MIT ANS public relations chairs. We often go out and talk to high school kids about nuclear power and we do use CO2 emissions as one of the major benefits, but we try to emphasize the other benefits, such as size, energy security, ect. just as much.

LarryD said...

"...last third of the 20th century..."

Which pretty well matches up with the warming phase of the oceanic oscillations. And the previous cooling trend matches up with the cooling phase of said oscillations. Now we're back in a cooling phase. I predict no warming for the next 20+ years. Of course neither of us may be be around when the phase changes again.

And Mann et al simply suppressed both the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age. And the fact that their temperature reconstruction didn't always track actual temperature records.

CRU hasn't been engaged in science, it's been engaged in propaganda. Now everything from them is suspect.

There are perfectly good reason for going nuclear, especially going to the upcoming forth generation reactors. Using thorium and depleted uranium as fuel, and using existing "spent" nuclear fuel as "ignition" charges for MSRs don't need AGW arguments for them.

Charles Barton said...

spadflyer and Larry, I do not debate climate change on this blog.

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