First, the New York Times via the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported yesterday on the hundreds of e-mails that were hacked in to a British university showing scientists' conspired to overstate their case for anthropogenic ('man-made') climate change. Here's the story (emphasis added):
The above article made mention of next month's summit in Copenhagen. Germany's Der Spiegel has published scientists' concerns that the summit might not result in any binding agreements:Climate Change Skeptics Get Fuel
NEW YORK TIMES
Hundreds of private e-mails and documents hacked from a computer server at a British university are causing a stir among global warming skeptics, who say they show that climate scientists conspired to overstate the case for a human influence on climate change.
The e-mails, attributed to prominent American and British climate researchers, include discussions of scientific data and whether it should be released, exchanges about how best to combat the arguments of skeptics, and casual comments — in some cases derisive — about specific people known for their skeptical views. Drafts of scientific papers and a photo collage that portrays climate skeptics on an ice floe were also among the hacked data, some of which dates back 13 years.
In one e-mail exchange, a scientist writes of using a statistical "trick" in a chart illustrating a recent sharp warming trend. In another, a scientist refers to climate skeptics as "idiots." ...
Some skeptics asserted Friday that the correspondence revealed an effort to withhold scientific information. "This is not a smoking gun, this is a mushroom cloud," said Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist who has long faulted evidence pointing to human-driven warming and is criticized in the documents.
Scientists and others contacted by the Times confirmed that they were the authors or recipients of specific e-mails included in the file.
In several e-mail exchanges, Kevin Trenberth, a climatologist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, and other scientists discussed whether a string of recent years of relatively stable temperatures undermined scientific models that predict long-term warming.
"The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment, and it is a travesty that we can't," Trenberth wrote.
Stephen McIntyre, a blogger who has for years been using his website — climateaudit.org — to challenge data used to chart climate patterns and came in for heated criticism in some e-mails, called the revelations "quite breathtaking."
Check out the lengthy, two-part article for more details.Low Expectations for Climate Summit: Can Copenhagen Still Be Saved?
A few short months ago, it seemed almost inconceivable that the UN Climate Change Summit in Copenhagen would end with anything less than a binding, legal agreement. The political pressure on the industrial states was too great, the expectations of their inhabitants too high.
"There is no Plan B," was the Danish Environment Minister Connie Hedegaard's mantra -- and the rest of the world seemed to signal its agreement, even if only in a murmur. And when world powers attending the G-8 summit in L'Aquila, Italy, in July agreed on ambitious targets for greenhouse gas emission reductions, it seemed to indicate that a positive outcome from the international climate change negotiations was actually a realistic option.
However, in the meantime, something else has become clear: Success is measured by the goals one sets. And that goal was re-defined on Sunday. At the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in Singapore, 17 heads of states and government -- including ones from China, Russia and the US -- destroyed all hopes of setting internationally binding climate targets in Copenhagen. Even the agreement to halve carbon dioxide emissions by 2050 that was agreed upon in L'Aquila has been sidelined. Now, the only possible result of the Copenhagen talks will be a "politically binding agreement." According to the latest plan for the summit, a formal, legal agreement would then be reached at a later stage.
...
But those "politically binding" agreements could also end up just being non-binding declarations of intent without a concrete schedule or any real details. Which of the alternatives eventually emerges from the talks seems to be open at the moment. "I currently see the chances as 50-50," Bals says.
I foresee a slow death of this global warming hoax ... but not before politicians and their whore- scientists manage to bilk unsuspecting people out of more money to fend off their predicted "impending doom."Stagnating Temperatures: Climatologists Baffled
by Global Warming Time-Out
By Gerald Traufetter
At least the weather in Copenhagen is likely to be cooperating. The Danish Meteorological Institute predicts that temperatures in December, when the city will host the United Nations Climate Change Conference, will be one degree above the long-term average.
Otherwise, however, not much is happening with global warming at the moment. The Earth's average temperatures have stopped climbing since the beginning of the millennium, and it even looks as though global warming could come to a standstill this year.
Ironically, climate change appears to have stalled in the run-up to the upcoming world summit in the Danish capital, where thousands of politicians, bureaucrats, scientists, business leaders and environmental activists plan to negotiate a reduction in greenhouse gas emissions. Billions of euros are at stake in the negotiations.
Reached a Plateau
The planet's temperature curve rose sharply for almost 30 years, as global temperatures increased by an average of 0.7 degrees Celsius (1.25 degrees Fahrenheit) from the 1970s to the late 1990s. "At present, however, the warming is taking a break," confirms meteorologist Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in the northern German city of Kiel. Latif, one of Germany's best-known climatologists, says that the temperature curve has reached a plateau. "There can be no argument about that," he says. "We have to face that fact."
Even though the temperature standstill probably has no effect on the long-term warming trend, it does raise doubts about the predictive value of climate models, and it is also a political issue. For months, climate change skeptics have been gloating over the findings on their Internet forums. This has prompted many a climatologist to treat the temperature data in public with a sense of shame, thereby damaging their own credibility.
"It cannot be denied that this is one of the hottest issues in the scientific community," says Jochem Marotzke, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg. "We don't really know why this stagnation is taking place at this point."
...
Just a few weeks ago, Britain's Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research added more fuel to the fire with its latest calculations of global average temperatures. According to the Hadley figures, the world grew warmer by 0.07 degrees Celsius from 1999 to 2008 and not by the 0.2 degrees Celsius assumed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. And, say the British experts, when their figure is adjusted for two naturally occurring climate phenomena, El Niño and La Niña, the resulting temperature trend is reduced to 0.0 degrees Celsius -- in other words, a standstill.
The differences among individual regions of the world are considerable. In the Arctic, for example, temperatures rose by almost three degrees Celsius, which led to a dramatic melting of sea ice. At the same time, temperatures declined in large areas of North America, the western Pacific and the Arabian Peninsula. Europe, including Germany, remains slightly in positive warming territory.
The global temperature-monitoring network consists of 517 weather stations. But each reading is only a tiny dot on the big world map, and it has to be extrapolated to the entire region with the help of supercomputers. Besides, there are still many blind spots, the largest being the Arctic, where there are only about 20 measuring stations to cover a vast area. Climatologists refer to the problem as the "Arctic hole."
..."Perhaps we suggested too strongly in the past that the development will continue going up along a simple, straight line. In reality, phases of stagnation or even cooling are completely normal," says Latif. ...
0 comments:
Post a Comment