Cuppacafe

There are those this year that have had enough snow. Some folks have had enough. From the Minnesotans for Global Warming, here's Frozen Wasteland, sung to to the song made famous by The Who.

Note: I wish it were funnier instead of a bit ham fisted, but then again, James Hansen and Al Gore can't claim a lock on subtlety either. Without further editorializing:

YouTube link

You can only hold down a secret so long...

Finally liberal funny man that we all love here at Cuppacafe, Jon Stewart, has come out with his own take on the Climategate scandal.

To Jon's credit, he pretty much lays it out fairly well. I really didn't expect Jon to go into the outright fraud that went on over this, but this "first shot" on his show certainly lays out some of the highlights in a way that the public can understand.

Without further ado...

I hope to have a post up soon with my thoughts and a link to some more details.

-Walt

I know that Walt wants to talk about this (and he probably will at some point), but both he and I came across this bombshell and well, I wanted to get it out there. Apparently, (and if I’m understanding this correctly) everything we’ve learned about climate change and global warming (and what Al Gore has been telling us), is wrong. The way we learned about it, is due to someone apparently hacked a scientific server and discovered all these incriminating emails.

In the last few hours, thousands of emails have been leaked to internet forums detailing a massive conspiracy to fudge climate change results to make the results look more influenced by carbon emissions and cover-up any inconsistencies that may lead to alternative theories regarding climate control. Given the high controversy of this subject, it’s important to understand the potential for deception, and any evidence from either side must be taken with a grain of salt. Nevertheless, the controversy is causing quite a storm.

The documents, from the Climate Research Institute at East Anglia University are being scrutinized now, and seem on first inspection to be authentic. The 62 MB file was first uploaded to internet forum site, “The Air Vent” early yesterday. Many of the emails detail the disdain researchers have for those uncooperative scientists who are attempting to discredit thousands of hours worth of expensive research done by those involved in the controversy. Some names mentioned are Phil Jones, and Michael Mann who coined the “hockey stick” diagram.

“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) and from 1961 for Keith’s,” so one email goes, “to hide the decline.” Clearly we see here that if these emails are indeed authentic, then this is quite possibly one of the greatest conspiracies to surface from the scientific community since the Alternating Current Wars. And according to “Investigate” magazine, operating from Australia, Dr. Phil Jones has verified their authenticity. Dr. Jones’ analysis holds with it much weight, and many are now giving a second look to what would otherwise have merely been a “well crafted hoax.” Now as the controversy continues, many climatic science sites are taking the emails very seriously.

This is a very long (9:58) video in regards to this scientific hack and what the potential fallout.

Look, I'm not a Glen Beck fan. Nor am I a FOX listener/watcher. Nor am I a Republican.

However, that last part may change if President Obama decides on signing the Global Warming Treaty (er, "Agreement") in Copenhagen.

What follows is part of the Lord Monckton interview where Glen Beck acts all sane and Lord Monckton gets to explain part of why I oppose this treaty with so much of my heart and soul.

I really really wish this subject wasn't so political. But it is.

There's more links to the entire show and if you're interested, you'll want to watch the whole thing. This is part 4 of about 7 or 8. I may post links to more slices of the interview, but here's the reason why I'm posting this:

I'm telling you that even if you believe that the seas are rising so fast you've bought beach front property in Arizona, you won't want this treaty signed.

Signing this treaty won't cool off the earth. It will allow people who are not Americans the ability to tax America and give the money away to people who have no plans to do anything with the money that will save the planet.

You ever wonder when you're reading a fictional mystery or watching a TV or film mystery if heroes in real life ever get that same "break in the case" that allows them to prove, once and for all, that the culprit's alibi was busted?

You know, how the legendary TV detective Colombo would manage to find "just one more thing" and trip up the villain he knew was guilty from the start of the show, but just couldn't prove?

Another example comes to mind :The local airwaves have seen one movie repeat several times lately - "Legally Blonde" starring Reese Witherspoon as the unlikely lawyer who, through her experience in hair maintenance discovers that the step daughter is lying about who killed the rich guy? (Note to future alibi seekers: Never claim you're busy washing your hair just hours after getting a permanent done on your curls)

Well, those arguing for the impending doom of global warming have had one major pillar just melt away this week, all because of one tiny mistake one of the proponents made.

You see, if you are a scientist, and you're making claims based on your research, you have to show your work. Your "peers" then judge your work, and if approved, you get published in what is called a "peer reviewed journal". The problem is that some of those journals don't really care to make you show _ALL_ of your work, so if you happen to be fudging the numbers, nobody outside of your "peers" can really ask for the data to, you know, see if you've been cheating to get your desired results.

Journals such as Science or Nature are friendly to those that may have cut a few corners in the conclusion making department, and as long as your "peers" are a small circle of your friends, nobody ever really notices or cares, apparently.

The scientific detectives -- NOT one of the chosen "peers" -- are stonewalled and simply refused the raw data. Too much trouble to keep all that data archived, apparently. (Let's give 'em the benefit of the doubt... ha!)

The trip up -- the part where Columbo's eyebrow gets raised and he sticks that cigar in his mouth 'cuz he knows he's got what he wants even though the villain has no idea what he's done -- came last year when the same climate researcher published another similar paper (I'll tell you what this is about in a minute, bear with me)
but he published it in a journal that has a very strict policy of data archiving. Believe it or not, there are some science journals out there that still think that science should remain built on the purity of the data.

So, our scientific Colombo properly asked for the data, and finally received it.

I wouldn't be writing this if the data was even in the same ballpark as what the original researcher had portrayed.

What did he do? It'd be like having a census taker survey a ballroom from the top of a ladder and spotting a group of redheaded girls congregating in a corner declaring to people not allowed in the room that the room is filled with redheaded girls. No way to prove him wrong -- and he has no reason to lie to us, so let's believe him.
But our Columbo has discovered a color photograph and after every single head is cataloged, the average person in the room is a black haired man.
And this week, our Columbo has announced his findings.

Our Columbo is a man who seems to enjoy running statistics on the numbers generated from the global warming alarmists, a Canadian mathematician named Steve McIntyre.
His blog, ClimateAudit.org has been swamped since this announcement, and most of the material there is fit for those prepared for higher level math than the average college student. I try to follow the blog, but most of it leaves me scratching my head. The good news is, the man always shows his work. That doesn't help the average joe out there, however.

For a blog post that explains the actual situation to the average person, go here

How the global warming industry is based on one MASSIVE lie

and I'll quote from it first:

Those of you who saw An Inconvenient Truth may remember, if you weren’t asleep by that stage, the key scene where big green Al deploys his terrifying graph to show how totally screwed we all are by man-made global warming. This graph - known as the Hockey Stick Curve - purports to show rising global temperatures through the ages. In the part representing the late twentieth century it shoots up almost vertically. To emphasise his point that this is serious and that if we don’t act NOW we’re doomed, Al Gore - wearing a wry smile which says: “Sure folks, this is kinda funny. But don’t forget how serious it is too” - climbs on to a mini-lift in order to be able to reach the top of the chart. Cue consensual gasps from his parti pris audience.

Except that the graph - devised in 1998 by a US climatologist called Dr Michael Mann - is based on a huge lie, as Sceptics have been saying for quite some time. The first thing they noticed is that this “Hockey Stick” (based on tree ring data, one of the most accurate ways of recording how climate changes over the centuries) is that it seemed completely to omit the Medieval Warming Period.

According to Mann’s graph, the hottest period in modern history was NOT the generally balmy era between 900 and 1300 but the late 20th century. This led many sceptics, among them a Canadian mathematician named Steve McIntyre to smell a rat. He tried to replicate Mann’s tree ring work but was stymied by lack of data: ie the global community of climate-fear-promotion scientists closed ranks and refused to provide him with any information that might contradict their cause.

This continues on from this blog

Years [of research] go by. McIntyre is still stymied trying to get access to the original source data so that he can replicate the Mann 1998 conclusion. In 2008 Mann publishes another paper in bolstering his tree ring claim due to all of the controversy surrounding it. A Mann co-author and source of tree ring data (Professor Keith Briffa of the Hadley UK Climate Research Unit) used one of the tree ring data series (Yamal in Russia) in a paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 2008, which has a strict data archiving policy. Thanks to that policy, Steve McIntyre fought and won access to that data just last week.

Having the Yamal data in complete form, McIntyre replicates it, and discovers that one of Mann's co-authors, Briffa, had cherry picked 10 tree data sets out of a much larger set of trees sampled in Yamal.

When all of the tree ring data from Yamal is plotted, the famous hockey stick disappears. Not only does it disappear, but goes negative. The conclusion is inescapable. The tree ring data was hand-picked to get the desired result.

In other words, when the argument is made that global warming is "proven", now we know that's not only wrong, but it's a conclusion that was formed by researchers who purposefully chose only the data that fit their conclusion, and those researchers were backed up by others that were most likely involved in this charade.

I'd rather not show you the curves of the original and the "new" versions, as all of this is rather fresh and still being hotly debated. If/When this makes CNN.com I hope to make a followup post.

In the meantime, we still haven't seen the ScoobyDoo like announcement of "I'd have gotten away with it too, if it wasn't for those teenagers and that mangy mutt!"

...

and by the way, signs point to a very cold winter in the northeast US.

Connection between El Niño and Flu Pandemic?

I love a good panic in the morning...

Research conducted at Texas A&M University casts doubts on the notion that El Niño has been getting stronger because of global warming and raises interesting questions about the relationship between El Niño and a severe flu pandemic 91 years ago. The findings are based on analysis of the 1918 El Niño, which the new research shows to be one of the strongest of the 20th century.

El Niño occurs when unusually warm surface waters form over vast stretches of the eastern Pacific Ocean and can affect weather systems worldwide. Using advanced computer models, Benjamin Giese, a professor of oceanography who specializes in ocean modeling, and his co-authors conducted a simulation of the global oceans for the first half of the 20th century and they find that, in contrast with prior descriptions, the 1918-19 El Niño was one of the strongest of the century.

Giese adds, “The most commonly used indicator of El Niño is the ocean temperature anomaly in the central Pacific Ocean. By that standard, the 1918-19 El Niño is as strong as the events in 1982-83 and 1997-98, considered to be two of the strongest events on record, causing some researchers to conclude that El Niño has been getting stronger because of global warming. Since the 1918-19 El Niño occurred before significant warming from greenhouse gasses, it makes it difficult to argue that El Niño s have been getting stronger.”

The El Niño of 1918 coincided with one of the worst droughts in India, he adds. “It is well known that there is a connection between El Niño and the failure of the Indian monsoon, just as there is a well-established connection between El Niño and Atlantic hurricane intensity,” Giese says. In addition to drought in India and Australia, 1918 was also a year in which there were few Atlantic hurricanes.

The research also raises questions about El Niño and mortality from the influenza pandemic of 1918. By mid-1918, a flu outbreak – which we now know was the H1N1 strain that is of great concern today – was sweeping the world, and the resulting fatalities were catastrophic: At least 25 million people died worldwide, with some estimates as high as 100 million deaths. India was particularly hard hit by the influenza.

“We know that there is a connection between El Niño and drought in India,” Giese notes.

“It seems probable that mortality from influenza was high in India because of famine associated with drought, so it is likely that El Niño contributed to the high mortality from influenza in India.”

The flu epidemic of 1918, commonly called the “Spanish Flu,” is believed to be the greatest medical holocaust in history. It lasted from March of 1918 to June of 1920, and about 500 million people worldwide became infected, with the disease killing between 25 million to 100 million, most of them young adults. An estimated 17 million died in India, between 500,000 to 675,000 died in the U.S. and another 400,000 died in Japan.

Could the events of 1918 be a harbinger of what might occur in 2009?

Giese says there are some interesting parallels. The winter and spring in 1918 were unusually cold throughout North America, just at the time influenza started to spread in the central U.S. That was followed by a strengthening El Niño and subsequent drought in India. As the El Niño matured in the fall of 1918, the influenza became a pandemic.

With a moderate to strong El Niño now forming in the Pacific and the H1N1 flu strain apparently making a vigorous comeback, the concerns today are obvious, Giese adds.

http://dmc-news.tamu.edu/templates/?a=8028&z=15

It's annoying and starts slow, but still this video comes around to making my point beautifully.

Get ready for your grandchildren to pay money that doesn't actually do anything.

YouTube link

Stolen and altered from XKCD