So choosing 'weseekthetruth' as a nic, is along the same lines as when you nicname the bald guy 'curly' or your big boned friend 'tiny'... nice, always a big irony fan.
So choosing 'weseekthetruth' as a nic, is along the same lines as when you nicname the bald guy 'curly' or your big boned friend 'tiny'... nice, always a big irony fan.
I must admit that from all of the information provided so far I fear that we are quickly slipping into another ice age. This could spell the end of humanity as we know it today.
If we cannot pump a lot more CO2 and water vapor into the atmosphere I'm afraid we're doomed!
Doomed I say!
- The Guardian (George Monbiot): "Pretending this is not a real crisis isn't going to make it go away. Phil Jones has got to go."
- The Atlantic Monthly (Clive Crook): "The stink of intellectual corruption is overpowering."
- UK Telegraph (Christopher Booker): "This is the worst scientific scandal of our generation."
- Financial Times (Michael Schrage): "Secrecy is at the rotten heart of this bad behavior."
‘climategate’ scientists cleared of wrongdoing
LONDON - British scientists accused of manipulating climate change data were not involved in any “deliberate scientific malpractice”, an independent review published Wednesday said.
The row which erupted in December centred on hacked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU) which sceptics claimed showed that the experts had manipulated data to support a theory of man-made global warming.
But a detailed review of 11 scientific papers from the CRU published over 20 years found “absolutely no evidence of any impropriety whatsoever”, according to the inquiry.
It said the scientists at the research unit arrived at their conclusions “honestly and sensibly”. The investigations were carried out by a panel of independent scientists, led by Ronald Oxburgh, a geologist.
The review did not analyse whether the conclusions drawn by the scientists were correct, but gave the scientific processes at the CRU a “clean bill of health”, said Oxburgh.
He said the reviewers found that the CRU scientists could have used “better statistical methods” in analysing some of their data, but that it was unlikely to have made much difference to their results.
The row overshadowed the discussions at the UN special conference on climate change in Copenhagen last December. The head of the CRU, Professor Phil Jones, stepped down from his post for the duration of the investigations.
By Karla Adam and Juliet Eilperin
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, April 15, 2010
LONDON -- In the second of three investigations of the scandal known as "climate-gate," a panel of academic experts said Wednesday that several prominent climate scientists did not engage in deliberate malpractice but did not use the best statistical tools available to produce their findings.
The University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit has been under intense scrutiny since November, when hackers posted more than 1,000 pirated e-mails and a raft of other documents that highlight the scientists' hostility toward global warming skeptics. But the review -- which follows a British parliamentary review that defended the institution's research but faulted its tendency to withhold information -- did nothing to bridge the divide between many climate researchers and their critics.
After interviewing staff members and analyzing 11 peer-reviewed articles published between 1986 and 2008, the panel concluded: "We saw no evidence of any deliberate scientific malpractice in any of the work of the Climatic Research Unit and had it been there we believe that it is likely that we would have detected it."
Newspapers Retract 'Climategate' Claims, but Damage Still Done
A lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on, as Mark Twain said (or “before the truth gets a chance to put its pants on,” in Winston Churchill’s version), and nowhere has that been more true than in "climategate." In that highly orchestrated, manufactured scandal, e-mails hacked from computers at the University of East Anglia’s climate-research group were spread around the Web by activists who deny that human activity is altering the world’s climate in a dangerous way, and spun so as to suggest that the scientists had been lying, cheating, and generally cooking the books.
But not only did British investigators clear the East Anglia scientist at the center of it all, Phil Jones, of scientific impropriety and dishonesty in April, an investigation at Penn State cleared PSU climatologist Michael Mann of “falsifying or suppressing data, intending to delete or conceal e-mails and information, and misusing privileged or confidential information” in February. In perhaps the biggest backpedaling, The Sunday Times of London, which led the media pack in charging that IPCC reports were full of egregious (and probably intentional) errors, retracted its central claim—namely, that the IPCC statement that up to 40 percent of the Amazonian rainforest could be vulnerable to climate change was “unsubstantiated.” The Times also admitted that it had totally twisted the remarks of one forest expert to make it sound as if he agreed that the IPCC had screwed up, when he said no such thing.
It’s worth quoting the retraction at some length:
The article "UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim" (News, Jan 31) stated that the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report had included an “unsubstantiated claim” that up to 40% of the Amazon rainforest could be sensitive to future changes in rainfall. The IPCC had referenced the claim to a report prepared for the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) by Andrew Rowell and Peter Moore, whom the article described as “green campaigners” with “little scientific expertise.” The article also stated that the authors’ research had been based on a scientific paper that dealt with the impact of human activity rather than climate change.
In fact, the IPCC’s Amazon statement is supported by peer-reviewed scientific evidence. In the case of the WWF report, the figure . . . was based on research by the respected Amazon Environmental Research Institute (IPAM) which did relate to the impact of climate change. We also understand and accept that . . . Dr Moore is an expert in forest management, and apologise for any suggestion to the contrary.
The article also quoted criticism of the IPCC’s use of the WWF report by Dr Simon Lewis, a Royal Society research fellow at the University of Leeds and leading specialist in tropical forest ecology. We accept that, in his quoted remarks, Dr Lewis was making the general point that both the IPCC and WWF should have cited the appropriate peer-reviewed scientific research literature. As he made clear to us at the time, including by sending us some of the research literature, Dr Lewis does not dispute the scientific basis for both the IPCC and the WWF reports’ statements on the potential vulnerability of the Amazon rainforest to droughts caused by climate change. . . . A version of our article that had been checked with Dr Lewis underwent significant late editing and so did not give a fair or accurate account of his views on these points. We apologise for this.
In another retraction you never heard of, a paper in Frankfurt took back (apologies; the article is available only in German) its reporting that the IPCC had erred in its assessment of climate impacts in Africa.
The Times's criticism of the IPCC—look, its reports are full of mistakes and shoddy scholarship!—was widely picked up at the time it ran, and has been an important factor in turning British public opinion sharply against the established science of climate change. Don’t expect the recent retractions and exonerations to change that. One of the strongest, most-repeated findings in the psychology of belief is that once people have been told X, especially if X is shocking, if they are later told, “No, we were wrong about X,” most people still believe X. As Twain and Churchill knew, sometimes the truth never catches up with the lie, let alone overtakes it. As I wrote last summer in a story about why people believe lies even when they’re later told the truth, sometimes people’s mental processes simply go off the rails.
Sea levels are pretty constant over the last 50 years... Global warming must not be enough to melt ice...
Thanks for the worthless thread.
Why do you even smoke weed?? You apparently get so high off your ego and imaginary knowledge that a bowl of some haze would bring you down...
Enough, you're not convincing anyone!
i'll add links and illustration.Sea levels are pretty constant over the last 50 years... Global warming must not be enough to melt ice...
A common error in climate debate is drawing conclusions from narrow pieces of data while neglecting the whole picture. A good example is the recent claim that sea level rise is slowing. The data cited is satellite altimeter measurements of global mean sea level over the past 16 years (Figure 1). The 60 day smoothed average (blue line) seems to indicate sea level peaked around the start of 2006. So one might argue that sea levels haven't risen for 3 years. Could one conclude that the long term trend in sea level rise has ended?
Figure 1: Satellite altimeter measurements of the change global mean sea level with inverse barometer effect (University of Colorado).
To answer this question, all one has to do is view the entire 16 year dataset. A noisy signal is imposed over the long term trend of sea level rise. These fluctuations mean there will be short periods where sea level shows no trend. For example, 1993 to 1996 or 1998 to 2000. In other words, there have been several short periods of several years over the last 16 years of steady sea level rise where sea level appears not to rise.
This is inevitably the case when you have a noisy signal imposed over a long term trend. We see exactly the same phenomenon occur in the temperature record (which is why we also see the same erroneous conclusions). The lesson from this is to treat with skepticism anyone who concludes long term trends from several years of a noisy signal (after all, skepticism should cut both ways).
In addition to this, Figure 1 is a particularly noisy signal because it displays unfiltered data. Sea level is subject to the "Inverse Barometer" Effect. This is where sea level is depressed in areas of high atmospheric pressure, and raised in areas of low pressure. When barometric pressure effects are filtered out, the result is a less noisy signal and a clearer picture of what's happening with sea level.
Figure 2: Satellite altimeter measurements of the change global mean sea level with inverse barometer effect filtered out (University of Colorado).
A broader view of sea level rise
Global mean sea level (eg - the global average height of the ocean) has typically been calculated from tidal gauges. Tide gauges measure the height of the sea surface relative to coastal benchmarks. The problem with this is the height of the land is not always constant. Tectonic movements can alter it, as well as Glacial Isostatic Adjustment. This is where land which was formerly pressed down by massive ice sheets, rebounds now that the ice sheets are gone.
To construct a global historical record of sea levels, tide gauge records are taken from locations away from plate boundaries and subject to little isostatic rebound. This has been done in A 20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise (Church 2006) which reconstructs global sea level rise from tide gauges across the globe. An updated version of the sea level plot is displayed in Figure 3:
Figure 3: Global mean sea level from 1870 to 2006 with one standard deviation error estimates (Church 2008).
Tidal estimates from sediment cores go even further back to the 1300's. They find sea level rise is close to zero in the early part of the sedimentary record. They then observe an acceleration in sea-level rise during the 19th and early 20th century. Over the period where the two datasets overlap, there is good agreement between sedimentary records and tidal gauge data (Donnelly 2004, Gehrels 2006).
What we're most interested in is the long term trends. Figure 2 shows 20 year trends from the tidal data. From 1880 to the early 1900's, sea level was rising at around 1mm per year. Throughout most of the 20th century, sea levels have been rising at around 2mm per year. In the latter 20th century, it's reached 3mm per year. The five most recent 20-year trends also happen to be the highest values.
Figure 4: The linear trends in sea level over 20-year periods, with one sigma error on the trend estimates shown by the dotted lines. From 1963 to 1991, there were a series of volcanic eruptions which caused cooling and hence contraction of the upper ocean. This temporarily slowed the rate of sea level rise.
So a broader view of the historical record reveals that sea level is not just rising. The rate of sea level rise has been increasing since the late 19th century.
LOL, me? Politics??? Where?
You're delusional.
It's starting to all make sense to me now.
Thanks for the clarification...
lmao... you're delusional... I was replying to white rhino first... don't overestimate your significance.
i guess you are, replying as though i said something to you about your politics....You're a bit slow there huh partner??
i guess you are, replying as though i said something to you about your politics....
White Rhino,
stop trolling this science based thread
The scientist at the center of the "Climate-gate" e-mail scandal has revealed that he was so traumatized by the global backlash against him that he contemplated suicide.