Global Warming or a lot of hot air?

Video of Sunday Night's special: Global warming or a lot of hot air with host Bret Baier of Fox News. Here's part 1:



Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5, Part 6.
Watch these while you can. I suspect that YouTube may pull them.

Hide the decline

Via David Rose at the Daily Mail:

The claim was both simple and terrifying: that temperatures on planet Earth are now ‘likely the highest in at least the past 1,300 years’.

As its authors from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) must have expected, it made headlines around the world.

Yet some of the scientists who helped to draft it, The Mail on Sunday can reveal, harboured uncomfortable doubts.

But when the ‘warmest for 1,300 years’ claim was published in 2007 in the IPCC’s fourth report, the doubters kept silent.

It is only now that their concerns have started to emerge from the thousands of pages of ‘Warmergate’ emails leaked last month from the CRU’s computers, along with references to performing a ‘trick’ to ‘hide’ temperature decline and instructions to resist all efforts by the CRU’s critics to use the Freedom of Information Act to check the unit’s data and conclusions.

Which reminds me of that old adage that all that's required for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

Here, courtesy of the Daily Mail, is a closer look at the IPCC's hockey stick chart and how the green line mysteriously "disappears" just as it's about to show a sharp decline.

Be sure to read the whole article by David Rose. It's one of the best investigative reports on climategate to appear in mainstream media.

h/t: ClimateAudit

Illegal curve?

Looks like an illegitimate the hockey stick has been exposed. But will it receive anything more an a 2 minute minor penalty?

IPCC AR4

The final IPCC WG-1 AR4 report is now available on-line.

Steve McIntyre has analysis. Luboš Motl has comments:

Officially, we have had the summary for policymakers (SPM) only - until now. You may see that the long document contains a lot of serious albeit boring science and data. Concerned members of the IPCC have however (mis)interpreted the results in catchy ways in their summary. Journalists are even more concerned and their presentation is much closer to nutcases like Al Gore than the boring content of the IPCC report. This multi-level hysterization and cherry-picking is a primary mechanism fuelling this whole global idiocy.

Update: bump and note that there's a surprising lack of news reporting on the release of the final AR4 report. Nothing near the attention that the media gave to the Summary for Policymakers.

Reviewing the IPCC

Steve McIntyre relates an interesting tale of his attempts to access supporting data while acting as an expert reviewer for the IPCC AR4:

One of the most important IPCC representations is the supposedly tremendous quality control of its review process. I’ve mentioned in passing on a number of occasions that, when I sought to obtain supporting data for then unpublished articles, IPCC threatened to expel me as a reviewer.

I’ve had a few requests to recount my experience with trying to get data from IPCC for unpublished studies. So here’s a short summary of my correspondence with IPCC.

Be sure to read the comments too.

Cooking the Figures

This is a story that really won't be news to some, but to many it might be. It's the classic case of thinking that the end justifies the means.

He knows what he wants his results to be. And the original numbers aren't giving him that data. So the agency he works for won't be able to persuade people to fight the war he wants to fight.

Well, that's not acceptable.

He starts with his software. There are certain procedures that are normal and accepted in his line of work. But if he makes just one little mistake, his program does a weird little recursion and if there's any data at all that shows the pattern he wants it to show, it will be magnified 139 times, so it far overshadows all the other data.

He can run it on random numbers and it gives him the shape he wants. Unfortunately, the real-world numbers aren't random -- they have a very different shape. All the numbers. Even his jimmied program won't give the results he wants.

All he needs is any data shaped the right way. And so he looks a little farther, and ... here it is. It looks, on the surface, like all the other data that he's been working with. Other researchers working in his field, just glancing at it, will assume it is, too.

But it isn't. Because the source that gathered this batch of data had some other key information that takes it all away. The numbers don't mean what they normally mean. In fact, this number set is absolutely false.

If you use these numbers along with all the other data, however, the clever little program will pick them up, magnify them radically, and voilá! The final report shows exactly the shape he needs the numbers to have.

The trouble is, these numbers are supposed to be doublechecked. Anybody who looks closely at his numbers and at his program will see what he's done. It's not hard to find, if you have the original data sets and can examine the program. He will be exposed as a fraud. It will do his cause more harm than good, if it's made public.

But he's not afraid. He knows how this works.

He doesn't show the program or the lists of his data sources to anybody.

To those of you familiar with this story, you find some familiar names: Mann, Santer, McIntyre. Those of you who don't recognize these names, go and read All In A Good Cause by Orson Scott Card.

h/t: SDA