Monday, February 15, 2010

IGM Climategate . . .

Inter-Galactic Memo
To: All personnel
Fr: W. Leavitt
Re: Climategate . . . again

I know, I know, it’s beginning to sound like a broken record. But I just can’t leave it alone.
A story is circulating around the UK, but getting no airplay here, that may be the death knoll for global warming, esp. the anthropomorphic kind.
Professor Phil Jones, one of the principals on the IPCC, admitted publically a few days ago that there has been no warming of the global climate in fifteen years. Further, he told a press conference that the medieval period of AD 800 to 1300 was warmer than any highs in the last two hundred years or so. They are still arguing as to whether this was a local (Europe and North America) phenomenon or truly global.
In a stunning revelation, Jones admitted that the reason he had not come forth with critical data, pursued by the freedom of information act, is because he has lost a lot of it. Including the data that gave us Al Gore’s infamous “hockey stick graph.”
As if all this wasn’t enough, an even more embarrassing revelation has recently seen the light of day: It seems that the “apparent” rise in global temps was due to poor placement of data gathering stations. John Christy, an atmospheric prof at the University of Alabama (and former lead writer for the IPCC) said:

“The apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”

To reinforce that confession of what can only be described as professional incompetence, Ross McKitric, University of Guelph in Canada, had been invited to review the IPCC report. His conclusion?

“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialization and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias.”

Remember the report that the Andes were losing their snow pack and in imminent danger of drying up? (Well, you probably don’t but it was reported . . .) Turns out the reporting station wasn’t giving the researchers the data they wanted—which was support for the melting idea—so they moved the station halfway down the mountain where the data would be affected by the warmer and wetter Amazon basin. That isn’t incompetence; it’s disingenuous at best and criminal at worst.
The funniest thing to have happened recently—as far as Climategate goes—is this: Donald Trump (Admittedly a non-entity in the GCC debate) has called for the Nobel committee to take back Al Gore’s Nobel Prize. The Donald is a little slow on the uptake, but he is a shrewd player and politician. If he is calling for Gore’s head, then the climate really has changed. Yours truly has been calling for Gore’s metaphorical beheading since the day he was awarded the thing. If Trump is going public then he thinks Gore is already doomed and the world’s opinion has reached a tipping point. The only people still clueless are a few cranky (i.e., liberal) politicians and the Obama administration, which is doggedly keeping its head in the cool sand of willful ignorance.