Pre-Cambrian consensus

An interesting article in the NYTimes today on pre-cambrian animals

and geology. I remember from my freshman biology class the Cambrian

explosion, when all the different animals first appeared in the fossil record.

The NYTimes article shows how that record was changed, that now the

Ediacaran period has been added to the geologic timesscale before the

Cambrian, and some complex precambrian animals have been found.

The irony is the first discoverer of these animals submitted the information

to a conference and scientific journals, but was rejected.

Sprigg was excited by both the unusual appearance of the fossils and by their age, which he believed to be the beginning of the Cambrian, and made them the oldest animal forms yet seen. But despite their potential importance, Sprigg’s discoveries were ignored at an international geology meeting and his paper describing the fossils was rejected by the leading journal, . Sprigg moved on to other, more rewarding pursuits in the oil, gas, and mining industries.

This is the way that science should work, new physical information should eventually

cause the theories to be rewritten. What shouldn't happen is a consensus view should

prevent the collection of new information for 50 years. Even something that is very proven, such

as geological history can be updated with bette information. I don't think the NYtimes

noticed the irony, their normal website is all global warming, all the time.

Number of the Year

Over at the ever valuable Numberwatch, the Numby awards have been
given out and the number of the month, year and decade announced. The Numby
award for person of influence is Dr Rajendra Kumar Pachauri.

[shown here accepting
his Numby]









from Wolf Howling:

The man above, appropriately attired in the Chairman Mao outfit, is Rajendra Pachauri. Whether you realize it or not, he is of immense importance to you. He is rich. He is immensely powerful. He has financial interests hidden under a hundred different rocks. And if he gets his way, he will be stealing money out of your pocket and significantly lessening your quality of life. Remember that as you read this post.

EU referendum is covering this as well when they take a break from exposing the
inadequacy of the british MOD.

I'm always amazed that the left/green/communist interpretation of the world always
includes evil oil men suborning governments and destroying the world, but is blind to
things like the man in charge of the IPCC having vested interests in global warming
being true, whether there is any evidence for it or not.

I just had to repeat our company's training on avoidance of conflict of interest and ethics,
and to avoid even the appearance of corruption I can't accept gifts worth more than $200
from suppliers, or own stock in oil companies because I could conceivably have access to
data that could give me inside information. And I'm just a nobody so far down on the org
chart that I have a dashed line connecting me to the janitor.

Dr Pachauri doesn't just have the appearance of conflict of interest, a simple google search
shows that he's a direct beneficiary of the policies he's supposed to be investigating. I prefer
some good honest oilfield fatcats be in charge of the IPCC.

The Number of the year was also presented, and it is the number one.

One stands for the Norwich One, the whistleblower who revealed the contents of emails and program files from the CRU at the University of East Anglia . He provided much solace to those who attempt to continue the tradition of sceptical science, by providing evidence that what they had deduced about what this and associated outfits were up to was, in fact,

congratulations to all the winners.

More global warmin hack

Bishop Hill has a list of emails from the hru server that is
pretty damning. The great thing about the list is includes
a unique number for each email, and if you google that number
the first hit is the original text. from 1107454306.txt

Mike,
        I presume congratulations are in order - so congrats etc !
     Just sent loads of station data to Scott.  Make sure he documents everything better
     this time !  And don't leave stuff lying around on ftp sites - you never know who is
    trawling them.  The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear
    there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I'll delete the file rather than
    send to anyone.  Does your similar act in the US force you to respond to enquiries within
     20 days? - our does !  The UK works on precedents, so the first request will test it.
    We also have a data protection act, which I will hide behind. Tom Wigley has sent me a worried
     email when he heard about it - thought people could ask him for his model code.  He
     has retired officially from UEA so he can hide behind that.

I'm no lawyer, but if you conspire to break a law is that conspiracy or just
obstruction of justice?

I kind of feel for these guys. If my email got hacked it would be a boring
list of go here and do that, and me either going there and doing that or finding
some way to weasel out of going there, or if I really go there do I have to do that
or can I just sit in a pub and drink?

Which just points out the futility of my career versus these guys who are supposed
to be gathering accurate data that will determine whether the government wrecks
the economy to prevent a bigger disaster. They seem to be working on an agenda
to change the world and wreck the economy, which would be the plot of a bad Tom
Clancy novel except that I think all this will be coming to a vote in the next few months.

Note to climate scientists: Gather good data. Try and compare data to models.
When your models can reproduce the weather of the past 50 years I'll listen to
the future predictions of your models. Oh yea, good job on appearing to have not a single
dirty joke or nudie picture in the entire archive. Stop working so hard, you're making
us look bad.

Hacking the real scoop on global warming

Over at WUWT and climate audit, they are posting some mail
and documents posted by a hacker that hacked into the CRU facility
in the UK.

If some of the documents are real then it's just another example of don't
put anything in an email that you wouldn't printed in a newspaper, but
without the sex talk seen in normal examples of released emails.

I can't download the info to a work computer, the hacked docs are probably
chock full of virus', but the posted examples seem too good to be true:

I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps
to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from
1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline. Mike’s series got the annual
land and marine values while the other two got April-Sept for NH land
N of 20N. The latter two are real for 1999, while the estimate for 1999
for NH combined is +0.44C wrt 61-90. The Global estimate for 1999 with
data through Oct is +0.35C cf. 0.57 for 1998.

If some of those mails and documents are true, then get ready with
tar and feathers for these people. More likely they were created by
the hackers or taken out of context. They would be more believable
if there were some off color jokes or light sex chat.

"if the data don't fit, just make up some shit"

The purple avenger at Ace is channeling the ghost of johhny cochran and gives the
pithy summary of a great article over on Climateaudit:

"if the data don't fit, just make up some shit"

The much touted hockey stick is no longer mostly dead,
it's all dead.

All of the sudden, it isn’t the “hottest period in 2000 years” anymore.

Steve writes:

The next graphic compares the RCS chronologies from the two slightly different data sets: red – the RCS chronology calculated from the CRU archive (with the 12 picked cores); black – the RCS chronology calculated using the Schweingruber Yamal sample of living trees instead of the 12 picked trees used in the CRU archive. The difference is breathtaking.

Signal and Noise

So much of what passes as the results of global warming is due to
aliasing. Aliasing occurs when a signal is sampled too frequently or not
frequently enough, when the samples are used to recreate the original
signal you get the wrong answer, such as a hockey stick fitted to a sine wave.

The real temperature signal is a sine wave, or several sine waves superimposed
on one another. A long term glaciation signal, a short term multi-decade oscillation
and probably several others in between. Unfortunately the most common sample
of temperature data is a human lifetime. We remember that when we were young,
it was hotter or colder, but now it is different, and it is worse. It's such a common
experience that it is enshrined in jokes ("back in my day we walked two miles in
the snow to school, uphill both ways").

Some examples of this effect:
We used to see several hurricanes per year way back in the 1930's, but now we see
more. The temperature at the airport used to be much colder than in the city,
now it's the same. We used to have zero sunspots at the solar minimum, now
there are several even though they are not visible without electronics.

All of these measurements that seem to be proving global warming could just
as easily be just proving that our measurements are now much better, or they
are much worse than they used to be, but they are not the same.

More measurements, more science and less demogogery are what's needed now.
Instead we're getting the inverse.

Not science

From a letter to jonah goldberg at the corner, linked from the always
informative watts up with that?:

to be science something has to be testable and falsifiable. It must produce a predicted data point, interaction or outcome that is unique to the theory and can be verified or falsified. Would you bet your future on the accuracy of day seven of a seven day weather forecast? That is essentially what we are being told by the AGW proponents we absolutely must do without delay.

I agree wholeheartedly that AGW isn't science any more.

I use geological models to predict what will happen while drilling a well, once the measurements deviate from the model, if the measurements appear to be working correctly then I know the model is wrong. The AGW crowd has a model that doesn't predict what is happening now, and
their model is using data from temperature measurements that have bad data in them.
Global warming hysteria is nothing but chartmanship and pigs wanting to take their place
at the trough.

They should go back to doing science. Review the temperature record, make more measurements and come back in ten years.

The actions we should be taking should be rational and should have a different set
of priorities than reducing CO2:
- Energy independence
- prepare for the possibility of peak oil. (total oil production may or may not have peaked,
but the most important one, production in North America has peaked)
- assure cheap energy for the future
- minimize pollution and increase sustainability

Meeting those kind of goals will take planning, foresight and wisdom, and will
not be reached by sticking 300 pages in an already bloated bill at 2 am in the morning.
Unfortunately, I don't think the current government is capable of planning, forsight or
wisdom.

Hubris

I added some new links to the blogroll for blogs that I've been
reading lately, the first being the Ancient and Noble order of the
Gormogons. I don't know much about poland-lithuania, but I definitely
agree that val kilmer rocked in Tombstone, possibly making him the
hidden imam spoken of in scripture. ("a huckleberry shall rise up in
the west, and do a good job with The doors, but he shall do a poor job
of the Saint")

This morning they are talking about Hubris. Specifically that AGW
scientists are talking about geoengineering to solve the global warming
problem Re: Hubris This is true hubris to think we've
spent hundreds of years creating a problem, so we'll just make some adjustments
to old planet earth and that will fix it. I don't think we understand the earth's
atmosphere and oceans well enough to go mucking around with anything.

I'm much more worried by global cooling then by global warming. I think
that if its very hot, then it must be sunny and we can use PV panels to run some
air conditioning. I can't picture a hot cloudy climate. (venus?)

If some scientists go mucking around with the earth when they don't really
know if it is cooling or warming and they do something that will make the planet
cooler we could all be screwed, huddling in the dark and cold.

I was googling around for the source of the quote "you shall be as gods" (doh! genesis)
and I found an article on a mural at MIT.

The left panel on the south wall conveys the thought that chemistry has given mankind almost unlimited power and raised the question: shall the power be used to build up or demolish civilization?

Global cooling, global warming

Fabius Maximus has a standard good post on the current financial
crisis with a summary of what could happen going forward:

The new world brought another period of peace and prosperity, perhaps the greatest 5 decades the world has ever seen. Now the two superpowers of that era both have uncertain futures. The world sinks into a severe recession. Beyond that new challenges await.

1. Peak Oil
2. Climate change
3. The shift of power from west to east
4. The second demographic transition, aging populations and perhaps extinction for some major cultures.

Perhaps the new world will be even better than we can dream. It’s up to us.

A commenter there leaps on the climate change item. Fabius leaps back:

Fabius Maximus replies: The climate has never been static, but the changes have often been bad news. Like the little ice age. I suggest you study that period, as there are tentative indications we may be entering another cooling cycle. Not necessarily as long or cold, but even a few years of cold would be unpleasant with world grain inventories (per capita, or days demand) at 50-year lows.

He makes a good point. I might be a an "AGW denier", but I do worry about
climate change. Here in Italy it's much colder than I'm used to and it makes
me see that without heat it would be pretty hard to live through the winter.
If it is several degrees colder it would be much worse, going from 3 degrees above
freezing to zero would mean snow every day instead of just rain every day.

If it is just warmer then things might suck, we might be sitting under ceiling
fans stirring barely moving air as we sweat like a scene from In the Heat of the
Night, but we won't die. We need to be spending money to mitigate current problems
now, and not wasting trillions to prevent a potential one or two degrees
temperature rise in 100 years. Problems #1 is my real worry.
If we have energy, we can survive heat or cold. If we don't have energy, then
instead of surfing the internet while watching my new 40" LCD I'd be in
bed with 2 comforters on top of me.

Global warming my butt

Ace links to excerpts from a report on the senate website (I connected via
interweb pipes) where 650 earth scientists are saying they are global
warming skeptics. I'm a skeptic too, but as a paid minion of the oil industry
that's part of my job. These guys have day jobs as scientists so believe
them (hypnotic voice on) believe them, believe them, it's getting colder,
(hypnotic voice off)

here's my favorite quote:

“The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds… I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists,” - Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet.

There are better quotes, but that gentleman complains about non-geologists winning the nobel,
as a geologist.

I'm skeptical because I look at squiggly lines all day as part of my job. The hocky stick was a
a couple of straight lines made up of all different kinds of data, ice cores, tree rings, thermometers
and satellite data. It's hard enough putting together data that was all acquired the same week,
but splicing a bunch of crep together that doesn't match known historical data points like the
medieval warming period told me its a bunch of spliced crep.

There are more priorities that we should be worrying about now, apart from all the financial
disasters we should be trying to get energy independence for the usa, using whatever technology
is available from drill drill drill to nukes. peak oil is the approaching really big problem, even if
prices go to $8 next month, it won't change how much oil is in the ground. Once the oil runs out we
see what real poverty looks like.

[I'm not sure how to do it, but I'd start with an import tax on oil. If the us energy industry isn't
protected we'll see that most of the alternative energy industry will be destroyed at the same time.
Better to keep prices somewhat high, $50/bbl, and keep pushing ahead to energy independance
and not use cheap oil to keep suckling at the tit of the foreign oil industry.]