Politick

The Illusion of Green Jobs

The Washington Post published a report on the bleak outlook for green jobs. Many have eagerly gone through training programs, only to find that there are no jobs to be had:

The Obama administration channeled more than $90 billion from the $814 billion economic stimulus bill intoclean energy technology, confident that the investment would grow into the economy's next big thing. ...

But the huge federal investment has run headlong into the stubborn reality that the market for renewable energy products - and workers - remains in its infancy.  ...

The industry's growth has been undercut by the simple economic fact that fossil fuels remain cheaper than renewables. [A]dministration officials acknowledge that it is likely to be years before the spending on green energy produces large numbers of jobs. 

There is a lot of potential in the green revolution, particularly around the "cradle to cradle" concept of building technology which has a recycle cycle similar to biology. A lot of folk believe you either accept the whole package, or are a denier of some sort. I rather think one should discriminate between the fact and the phantasm, the promising and the promoted. An important question is whether the diffusion of green technology throughout the developed countries can provide the foundation for coming out of the Great Recession. Are green jobs the ace in the hole for the future? 

The promise of green jobs, looked at critically, unfortunately comes up a joker. 

The Warning From Spain

Spain warned us of their failure with a green jobs program. You can download their report here. For every job created, 2.2 jobs were lost, or 9 jobs lost for every 4 created. And this does not even include opportunity cost - new jobs if the money had been spent elsewhere. Worse, only one out of ten green jobs were permanent. 

The White House response to this report was pretty awful and did nothing to treat this issue with seriousness, only spin. 

Bogus Claims 

The White House response to the Spanish warning is a striking example of how the proponents for green jobs often seem to have flown to Fantasy Island. 

The White House claimed close to 200,000 green jobs, but many of them turn out to be spurious, such as counting reporters who write about green jobs. The Dept of Energy claims around 80,000 jobs, but it is likely to be even less than that: of the $20B spent so far on green initiatives in the Stimulus, 80% of some programs went overseas (eg. to Chinese makers of wind turbines or solar cells). While it is hard to know what "some programs" encompass, it nonetheless means some or perhaps many of the green jobs were created outside the US. Paying $20B for 20-50,000 US jobs is $500k to $1m per job, a pretty steep price to pay, especially if most turn out to be temporary. 

California put out the results of a survey claiming 500k green jobs in the State, but most appear to be existing activities (recycling, insulation, etc.) and not an estimate of new venture-created jobs.

Arnold Schwarzenegger likes to say "as goes California, so goes the nation." Stephen Moore looked into his claims for California green jobs, and concluded it was not a dream of a green future, but a green nightmare: 

A new 2010 study by the University of California-Berkeley comes to the sobering conclusion that "the green economy accounts for just 1 percent of California's jobs." That's right: of the roughly 15 million California workers, only about 159,000 have green jobs (and this was an expansive definition of green jobs, including trash sorters at the dumpsters). ...

Gov. Schwarzenegger's own economics team concluded this year that the state's green regulatory structure is a menace to the state's economy. The governor's office study concluded that California's already iron-fisted environmental and workplace regulations translate into about $176 billion in lost output and nearly 4 million lost jobs. ...

Joseph Vranich, a business relocation expert, has a database of firms that move in and out of California. "Thanks mostly to California's hostile regulatory climate," he says, "for every three new businesses that move into the state of California, about 100 move out." ...

One former manufacturer in Los Angeles complained that "the regulators come onto your facility, and they want to shut you down. They view businesses as enemy combatants." Earlier this year, the EPA chased out of town the last steel foundry in Los Angeles, a firm that had hired hundreds of Southern California workers with good wages for decades. ...

Perhaps even more embarrassing is that when California's investments do generate new jobs, they are increasingly located outside the state. In June, the hot Silicon Valley firm MiaSolé reported that its planned home for one of the largest solar factories in North America, a 500,000-square-foot 1,000-worker plant, will be built in Atlanta. ...

Similarly, CalStar Products has erected its newest green plant in Wisconsin. Since then, it has been awarded nearly $2.5 million in federal clean energy tax credits through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act, and the company said, "We expect to build additional plants down the Mississippi Valley and East Coast over the next couple years" -- and conspicuously, not in California.

The Promise of Venture Capital

Stepping back, the bigger dilemma is what new industry sector or factor of production will drive us out of the Great Recession. In past depressions something pulled us out, like railroads, autos, or the jet age. Green jobs have a surface appeal of applying to construction, manufacturing, installation and other blue collar professions. But is the promise real?

Dian Chu took a look at the math of green jobs. The immediate problem is that the new, venture-capital type of green job is at the wrong side of the Industry Life Cycle curve - at the R&D side, not the growth & maturity side (see chart). 

The venture capital industry has experience with launching new industries, such as PCs, which grew fast and created many new jobs, but the green industries are not expected to show any similar sort of growth; instead they require large-scale, long-term infrastructure changes that eventually could become large, as the energy industry is very big.

Unfortunately, this means it will take too long to have enough green jobs to make the type of impact on an economy as large as the US to pull us out of the Great Recession. Worse, the US lacks a comparative advantage in many of these jobs, and ramping up projects to create demand for green products may benefit manufacturing in China as much as in the US - as we have already seen.

The Trap of Subsidies

Certainly a number of new green jobs have been funded by the venture capital industry, although I have not seen solid estimates of how many. Venture-backed job growth is promising, but to too great an extent these jobs depend upon continued government subsidies, and thus are at huge risk of evaporating. The green jobs of the '80s were gone by the '90s when the subsidies ran out. Already Europe and Japan are cutting back their subsidies to get their budget deficits under control. Are we that far behind?

Spain's green dream is turning into a nightmare for families who invested on the promise of those subsidies. Bloomberg ran a story on how the government is about to stiff green investors by pulling the subsidies they had promised:

Solar investors such as Vilimelis were lured by a 2007 law passed by the government of Prime Minister Jose Luis Rodriguez Zapatero that guaranteed producers a so-called solar tariff of as much as 44 cents per kilowatt-hour for their electricity for 25 years -- more than 10 times the 2007 average wholesale price of about 4 cents per kilowatt-hour paid to mainstream energy suppliers.

Thanks to the incentives, the family met the monthly cost of the loan and even earned a small profit. Once the debt was paid off in 2018, Vilimelis looked forward to making even more money during the 15 additional years of subsidies guaranteed under Spanish law.

Now Vilimelis and more than 50,000 other Spanish solar entrepreneurs face financial disaster as the policy makers contemplate cutting the price guarantees that attracted their investment in the first place.

“You feel cheated,” he says. “We put our money in on the basis of a law.”

The potential size of the losses is an astounding: Euro126 Billion. The goal of sustainable green jobs never materialized, as the solar panels and wind turbines were imported.  What is left is the wreckage of lost life savings, expensive energy, collapsed projects, and few green jobs. 

Too Cheap to Meter

There is something fundamentally different about green jobs than prior sectors like autos or railroads that pulled us into prosperity and growth. We used to have a goal of energy "too cheap to meter." Now we see innumerable steps to make energy more expensive, to encourage conservation and close the gap with high-cost renewable energy (wind, solar). It is hard to see how making energy expensive can drive growth in the economy and make the US more competitive with Asian rising powers. Worse, it is abject nonsense to believe a subsidized industry can pull us out - all we are doing is pulling money from profitable industries and sinking them in an unprofitable one.

The cleantech venture firms will say the subsidies are needed to get the new approaches to scale, where they can run down a cost curve and be viable without subsidy. Perhaps, but until the green industry gets to profitability on its own merits without subsidy, the jobs created will come at the expense of other jobs driven out by more expensive energy, and like Spain, we might find we lose more than we gain. 

Cooling is Warming

"Ignorance is Strength"
- George Orwell, 1984

"Global Warming" is Dead. So is "Climate Change". Long live "Global Climate Disruption!" 

Now cooling is proof of warming.

Orwell would smile.

If only they would spend more energy on the science than the spin. 

CO2 Negated As Cause of Global Warming

The theory of global warming peaked in 2007 after Katrina and the big Arctic melt. Since then folk began noticing that we had been cooling off, not warming up, and the big events predicted by the alarmists were not happening (big hurricanes, killer tornadoes, rising sea levels, dead polar bears, etc.). Their extreme fear-mongering began to undermine their credibility. ClimateGate delivered a body blow to their diminished credibility when it came out that a small cabal had been tampering with the temperature record and subverting the peer review process. The death blow to the theory is about to be released in a peer-reviewed paper by a former NASA scientist.

The study looked for the "hot spot", an essential feature of the Co2 theory of warming: that in the greenhouse layer of 10 km up we should be seeing more warming over time, creating a hot spot in a time-series map of the atmosphere. This chart from RealClimate shows what it should look like, but very accurate measurements from weather balloons over 60 years do not show it. 

In the new study, the hot spot could not be found.

The warmists have seen this rebuttal coming for a while, and have been arguing that the hot spot is there, just hard to detect, despite the simple truth that the weather balloon can measure well within the accuracy required to detect it. The weather balloons measure to 0.1C while the hot spot should be at least 0.6C.

Two spurious studies (Sherwood 2008 and Santer 2008) tried to show that it could be there within a margin of error, but the studies are jokes - one relied on wind-gauges as surrogates for temperature, and the other on statistical flim-flam. Such is how low the warmists have sunk, but at least these papers have the thin veneer of science. You can read a very good debate on this topic here. The fruitless effort to find what is not there has led to an egregious effort to try to fudge the visuals to show what is not there. Here is the simplest comparison of what the models require to what the data show:

 

Now the warmists are trying to shift the debate from a hot spot to a cooler stratosphere above. Here is one attempt, relying on "his wife" to justify the science. Come on. Here is another which doesn't resurrect the hot spot but instead says all its lack does is point to a failure of the models. Huh? The whole theory is based on the models. Every one of them requires the hot spot - it follows directly from the Co2 greenhouse layer argument. Without it, no Co2-based warming.

I was initially reluctant to put in these counter examples from the blogosphere since they are so weak, but they show how low the level of discourse has sunk. Even the veneer of science has been dropped. All that is left is mockery of skeptics. We have left the world of science and entered the world of parody. Readers of The Onion would understand.

The study also rebuts a second major prediction of the Co2 theory of warming: that Co2 warming is amplified by increased water vapor. Co2 alone cannot fit the climate models, and they all have a plug factor put in for climate sensitivity. The most important physical mechanism for the plug factor is an increase in humidity (water vapor) at the greenhouse layer. Water vapor absorbs more infrared than Co2. The study found that humidity actually was decreasing in the greenhouse layer, negating the effect of Co2.

Co2 was always a flimsy reason for warming. It does not correlate very well to the actual temperature record, and by itself is fairly wimpy. A better correlation was discussed in the prior post: inside of a modest warming since the Little Ice Age, climate is largely driven by the 60 year PDO cycle, which is now trending down. The Co2-based warming theory is likely to sink with temperatures as the PDO puts us into a 30-year period of global cooling. This chart from The Hockey Schtick captures the increasing irrelevance of Co2 and the rising pre-eminence of the PDO and solar cycle to explain global climate.

An Alternate Model for Global Warming

The climate models have consistently over-predicted warming. This seems to be a consequence of the carbon-based theory of warming: since Co2 is a relatively weak greenhouse gas, to fit prior years the models need a "climate sensitivity" factor beyond Co2 alone, but then the models over-predict what actually happens after. The models are now way out of whack with reality (the black line of measured temperatures, which is way below model projections):

When you hear that warming is "accelerating at a much faster pace than was previously thought", as UN Secy General Ki-Moon said recently, they are incorrect. The data show the opposite: we are cooling faster than previously thought. 

A climate scientist from India, Girma Orssengo, suggests a simpler alternative model which better matches historical temperature measurements: a modest trendline up of 0.6C degrees/century since the end of the little Ice Age, masked by a 60-year cycle of warming and cooling that adds 0.3C degrees over 30 years of warming, then subtracts it over the next 30 years of cooling, for a 0.6C swing top to bottom. 

This model can explain why the climate models are so off: they are fit to the wrong rate of warming, the swing not the trendline. Something natural is causing the 60-year cycle that is not in their models.

The 20th Century warmed up by around 1.1C degrees, while the model predicts the 21st Century will be flat with essentially no warming at all. Why the difference? The 20th Century started close to a bottom of the cycle and ended at a top, exaggerating warming, whereas the 21st Century will start at a top and end at a bottom, masking warming. 

The model has 0.6C rise over 100 years, with a 0.6C swing top-to-bottom. Hence it would predict that:

• a century which starts at a bottom and ends at a top would go 0.6C plus the bottom-to-top swing of another 0.6C, or 1.2C, close to the measured rise of 1.12C of the last century
• a century which starts at a top and ends at a bottom would find the 0.6C rise masked by the 0.6C top-to-bottom swing for a net 0.0C rise

This is easy to see from the chart:

1910 was a low point at -0.64C
2000 was a high at 0.48C
= a 90 year rise of 1.12C 

2090 is predicted to be a low point at 0.41C
= a 90 year fall of -0.07C 

There is a lot of investigation of the climate sensitivity factor. Prof. Lindzen of MIT has calculated it as much less than in the models: around 0.3-0.6x, not the plugs of above 1.2x in the IPCC climate models. 

A new study could be a game-changer: UC Irvine has found that soil microbes have a negative feedback with temperature increases. The models had assumed that microbe Co2 output would increase with warming, not decrease. Since microbe Co2 is 10x human emissions, they could also pull it back out of the atmosphere much faster than humans can put it up there. 

US Warming Happens During Winter Nights

Willis Eschenbach submits a fascinating dissection of US temperature claims: even accepting the temperature data as is, with upwards manipulations, all the warming claimed in the past century occurs during winter months at night. 

This chart overlays every year back to 1895, with the heavy red line 2009. It is right in the middle, and instead of being "one of the warmest years ever", looks about average. 

He then charted monthly temperatures averaged for each decade, and found almost all months were within a very narrow range except the winter months. (You can see the slightly broader range in Nov to Feb in the chart.) He concludes: 

My point in all of this is that the temperature changes that we are discussing (a global rise of a bit more than half a degree C in the last century) are trivially small. A half degree change cannot be sensed by the human body. In addition, the changes are generally occurring in the winter, outside of the tropics in the cooler parts of the planet, and at night.

ClimateGate Goes Back to 1980

Those of you who still believe that the ClimateGate scandal was just a bunch of emails in England should read this article. James Hansen of GISS appears to have systematically adjusted the historical temperature record to remove a cold patch in the '70s in order to exaggerate the rise since. The amount of change of 0.6 degrees is for one decade is close to the measured change for the whole century. This is vividly seen in these three snapshots of his data being modified:

 

Watch how the cooling trend of the 1960’s to 1970’s is steadily adjusted up so that 0.3 degrees cooler gradually becomes 0.03 warmer (notice the red and blue horizontal lines in the graphs above).

Mathews Graph 1976: 1955 – 1965 was around 0.3C warmer than 1970’s

Hansen/GISS 1980: 1955 – 1965 was around 0.1C warmer than 1970’s

Hansen/GISS 1987: 1955 – 1965 was around 0.05C warmer than 1970’s

Hansen/GISS 2007: 1955 – 1965 was around 0.03C cooler than 1970’s

Here is what we had thought was the historic temperature, back in the mid-1970s before the deception began. Note how much warmer the '30s and '40s looked then, and how in the charts above it shrinks in significance:

The article goes on to explain how weather balloon data created the prior temperature record, and is considered very accurate. It also matches very closely to satellite data, which started in 1979. Significantly, satellite data has diverged from the surface temperature data, showing less warming, pointing to the deception. 

The whole AGW edifice is built on surface temperature from three sources: Hansen's GISS, the UK's HadCRUt and the NOAA. The GISS data is now seen to be manipulated; the HadCRUt data is suspect since it is from the main sources of the ClimateGate emails; and NOAA is even warmer than both of them, suggesting manipulation there too.

Much of the rest of climate science is built on data which is now suspect. What is now seen as Garbage In, Garbage Out had been Garbage In, Gospel Out.

Is Global Warming a Pseudo Science?

Al Gore's bizarre editorial brings to the surface that question of whether what he calls Climate Change is a science or not. Is his emotive, Chicken Little ("the sky is falling!") approach scientific? Does it make specific, falsifiable predictions, or is it ever expanding to cover exigencies? 

I used to be an avid AGW supporter. What clued me in was when I heard the Global Warming crowd claim warming was melting the snows on Kilimanjaro, then when that stopped, claim it was also increasing precipitation, so lengthening the snows! 

This story repeats itself constantly. Before the big snow hit DC this year, Robert Kennedy editorialized that Global Warming was reducing snowfall in DC. After the storm hit, Al Gore editorialized that warming creates more precipitation so causes heavy snow!

The core of a pseudo science like Astrology is it constantly expands its claims to encompass de-verifying events. It refuses to be disprovable. The expansions always have a veneer of scientific plausibility. Isn't that what we see in Al Gore? Isn't he peddling a modern-day Astrology?

Karl Popper defined what makes a theory scientific: 

1. It is easy to obtain confirmations, or verification, but ...
2. Confirmations should count only if they are the result of risky predictions - an event which would have refuted the theory.
3. Every "good" scientific theory is a prohibition: it forbids certain things to happen
4. A theory which is not refutable by any conceivable event is non-scientific
5. Every genuine test of a theory is an attempt to falsify it, or to refute it
6. Confirming evidence should not count except when it is the result of a genuine test of the theory

Popper adds a critical distinction between real science and psuedo science:

Some genuinely testable theories, when found to be false, are still upheld by their admirers — for example by introducing ad hoc some auxiliary assumption, or by reinterpreting the theory ad hoc in such a way that it escapes refutation.

Such a procedure is always possible, but it rescues the theory from refutation only at the price of destroying, or at least lowering, its scientific status.

A theory must make specific predictions about how it behaves that can be tested by observation or experiment. There are certainly climate scientists trying this route. Unfortunately for the theory, the scientific claims are being steadily disproved. I have looked into these in this blog, such as these three key predictions:

1. Is the greenhouse layer in the troposphere warming as it must? No, there is no hotspot.
2. Is humidity increasing in the greenhouse layer as models require? No, it is decreasing.
3. Are the oceans warming as they must to hold the higher heat? No, cooling.

But Al Gore? He made a number of predictions in his documentary, most of which are proving false:

• Hurricanes are getting fewer and less violent
• Tornadoes are getting less violent
• Sea levels are not rising at the moment
• Greenland is not at risk of losing its land ice sliding into the sea
• ... etc

In the UK his documentary has been found in court to contain nine scientific errors. Gore has repudiated some of his alarmist assertions, such as when the Arctic ice would melt; and others are simply whacko, such as the temperature of the Earth a few kilometers down.

Now he falls back in his editorial on pleas to keep the faithful in the fold by appeals to emotion and extreme claims of "unimaginable" tragedies that await if we do nothing.

Face it, this is not science, but an Astrology of Fear.

Ironic Footnote to Global Warming Alarmism

Can Man cause Co2 to double? You hear over and over that a doubling of Co2 will lead to catastrophe. Nature can clearly double Co2; it was much higher in the atmosphere millions of years ago. But can Man? 

This table from Doomed Planet says NO. The IPCC asserts that half of fossil fuel Co2 remains in the atmosphere. Currently we have 800 gigatonnes of Co2 up there, which makes up 388 ppm (part per million) of all air. If we burn all the remaining fossil fuels, we burn 647 gigatonnes of carbon, and if half remain up there, it only increases Co2 by another 157 ppm, well short of a double. 

Funny. All this pernicious scientific manipulation for .. nothing. 

A SImple and Powerful Rebuttal to Global Warming

Since ClimateGate put the Climate Cabal on their back heels, a flood of new science has emerged, no longer being suppressed by the cabal, generally challenging the anthropogenic (man-made) global warming case. A simple rebuttal to man-made global warming is that the increase in Co2 has not had a corresponding increase in the greenhouse effect. 

A former NASA contractor, Dr. Ferenc Miskolczi, posited such a rebuttal based on his independent research. This chart shows that there has been no significant increase in the greenhouse effect for the past 60 years:

The black line is the annual variation in atmospheric "aborbing power" over a 61-year period. The red trend line shows the greenhouse absorbing power remaining constant (in equilibrium) during that period. Greenhouse absorption increases (blue trend line) only when H20 levels are kept constant.

The implication is that nature has a way of self-regulating.

One of the core assumptions of the global warming case is that an increase in Co2 should be amplified by other greenhouse gases, notably water vapor, but instead we have seen a decrease in water vapor where there is an increase of Co2. The red line in the chart is the greenhouse absorbing power, which is essentially flat for the period. The blue line is how the red would have looked if water vapor had remained constant. The global warming models all assume that water vapor would increase, steepening that blue line, but the opposite happened, disproving their theory.

GlacierGate: IPCC Admits Fraud

It just gets worse for the Climate Cabal: the IPCC has now confessed that they purposely put in bogus information to pressure policymakers. They also seemed to have pulled the 2035 date for the Himalayan glacier melt out of thin air. Consider this:

According to the IPCC’s statement of principles, its role is ‘to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis, scientific, technical and socio-economic information – IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy’.

It seems that the IPCC will melt away before an Himalayan glaciers.

If You Still Believe in Global Warming, Watch This Video

Is your belief a matter of Science or of Faith? This video calmly walks through the ice core data to show how today's warming compares to other warming. Are we at the highest temperatures in recorded history? Are we warming faster than Nature can manage? Watch and see for yourself what facts say the answers are.

After seeing this, you will ask, well, isn't this all out there in the public record, and don't climate scientists and policy-makers already know this? You may be shocked (at least, if your belief is based on Science) to know the answer is no, or likely not, since this information and much like it has been suppressed from the political process and kept out of the peer review process. Peer review has been corrupted by the ClimateGate Cabal. 

So now ask yourself: is my belief in man-made global warming based on the view that Man is spewing huge amounts of noxious stuff into the ecosystem, especially Co2, and all of that up there MUST have some consequence? Instead of continuing runaway capitalism industrial society, we NEED to get more in alignment with the Planet, becoming One with the Environment? If so, you have answered the question. Have a Namaste!

The NYT Has Been Predicting Polar Ice Melt for 128 Years

Funny - the New York Times has been reporting on the Polar ice melt for over 100 years, and usually blaming it on man. The dumbest is the 1959 story of the ice disappearing - which was followed by 20 years of Global Cooling. From the Daily Telegraph (Australia), Eternal Melting:

From the New York Times, 128 years of looming polar doom:

• 1881: “This past Winter, both inside and outside the Arctic circle, appears to have been unusually mild. The ice is very light and rapidly melting …”

• 1932: “NEXT GREAT DELUGE FORECAST BY SCIENCE; Melting Polar Ice Caps to Raise the Level of Seas and Flood the Continents”

• 1934: “New Evidence Supports Geology’s View That the Arctic Is Growing Warmer”

• 1937: “Continued warm weather at the Pole, melting snow and ice.”

• 1954: “The particular point of inquiry concerns whether the ice is melting at such a rate as to imperil low-lying coastal areas through raising the level of the sea in the near future.”

• 1957: “U.S. Arctic Station Melting”

• 1958: “At present, the Arctic ice pack is melting away fast. Some estimates say that it is 40 per cent thinner and 12 per cent smaller than it was fifteen years [ago].”

• 1959: “Will the Arctic Ocean soon be free of ice?”

• 1971: “STUDY SAYS MAN ALTERS CLIMATE; U.N. Report Links Melting of Polar Ice to His Activities”

• 1979: “A puzzling haze over the Arctic ice packs has been identified as a byproduct of air pollution, a finding that may support predictions of a disastrous melting of the earth’s ice caps.”

• 1982: “Because of global heating attributed to an increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide from fuel burning, about 20,000 cubic miles of polar ice has melted in the past 40 years, apparently contributing to a rise in sea levels …”

• 1999: “Evidence continues to accumulate that the frozen world of the Arctic and sub-Arctic is thawing.”

• 2000: “The North Pole is melting. The thick ice that has for ages covered the Arctic Ocean at the pole has turned to water, recent visitors there reported yesterday.”

• 2002: “The melting of Greenland glaciers and Arctic Ocean sea ice this past summer reached levels not seen in decades, scientists reported today.”

• 2004: “There is an awful lot of Arctic and glacial ice melting.”

• 2005: “Another melancholy gathering of climate scientists presented evidence this month that the Antarctic ice shelf is melting - a prospect difficult to imagine a decade ago.”

Russian Climate Center Accuses CRU of Cherry-Picking to Concoct Warming in Russia UPDATED

Russian papers are reporting that another fallout of ClimateGate is that Hadley/CRU has distorted the climate of 1/8th of the planet by cherry-picking warmer stations and ignoring the colder ones (emphasis added):

[T]he Moscow-based Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) issued a report claiming that the Hadley Center for Climate Change based at the headquarters of the British Meteorological Office in Exeter (Devon, England) had probably tampered with Russian-climate data.

The IEA believes that Russian meteorological-station data did not substantiate the anthropogenic global-warming theory.

Analysts say Russian meteorological stations cover most of the country's territory, and that the Hadley Center had used data submitted by only 25% of such stations in its reports.

Over 40% of Russian territory was not included in global-temperature calculations for some other reasons, rather than the lack of meteorological stations and observations.

The data of stations located in areas not listed in the Hadley Climate Research Unit Temperature UK (HadCRUT) survey often does not show any substantial warming in the late 20th century and the early 21st century.

My take: Russia is an Oil State and would lose out if fossil fuels were taxed or limited. This report may be true but given the timing of it (Copenhagen) and the politics involved, their core data needs to be reviewed before their conclusion is taken seriously. If it is found that CRU has cherry-picked, it becomes another reason to remove the climate cabal and have the temperature record re-constructed with unbiased climate scientists, if any are left. 

UPDATE: Climate realists are weighing in on the importance of the Russian Revelation. The lack of Siberian data explains an odd trend in the data to show unusual warming over Russia. Many papers are based on the HadCRUT data, which is the warmest of all the datasets; all of them would need to be revisited. This map below shows a bizarre hotspot over Russia; look at the dark cherry-colored red surrounded by gaps in the upper center-right of the map. Siberian heat wave? No: cherry-picked data. 

This problem in Siberian data also is another nail in the coffin of the former head of CRU, Phil Jones, who admitted that he "went to town" to suppress the Siberian colder temperatures in an email exchange with the nefarious Michael Mann, the author of the debunked Mann Hockey Stick:

Recently rejected two papers (one for JGR and for GRL) from people saying CRU has it wrong over Siberia. Went to town in both reviews, hopefully successfully. If either appears I will be very surprised, but you never know with GRL.

"Warmest Decade" May Be Due to a Splice Error

Bob Tisdale of Climate Observations is one of the more careful climate bloggers, and he highlights today a severe problem with the Hadley/CRUT temperature record: a bad splice in 1998 due to a change of the core data sets. This chart is one of four he constructed to show the problem is endemic across the various data sets. The splice increased the reported temperature by around 1 degree, a huge amount given the general trendline has temperature increasing less than one degree per century. Bob concludes:

If the Global HADCRUT data is in record territory in 2010, it is in large part the product of poor source dataset splicing of the HADSST2 portion of the HADCRUT data. The period bias in their SST data varies from 0.06 to 0.12 deg C, depending on the dataset one uses for comparison.

Now It Appears the NOAA Has Also Been Hiding The Decline (in the US!)

When it rains, it pours. Besides the two examples from Down Under, we now have several examples from California of what appear to be blatant manipulation of temperature data to hide a decline. In both cases the older record was truncated since it showed warmer temperatures back in the 1880s. This chart is from Orland, CA, a rural site which has happily stayed in one place for 100 years. The motion GIF should show the deception (click on it if it doesn't animate). A second example in the link above comes from Fairmont , CA, another happy, stable rural site. 

Yikes, as they say in Oz. When these guys adjust, they don't mess around. So how can they trumpet the current year as one of the hottest ever when we have had record cold since October, certainly in the US? 

In both cases NOAA like CRU before it are now claiming the raw data no longer exists. I guess they learned - Nixon should have burned the tapes! 

There may be a prosaic explanation, but instead all we get from the Climate Cabal are attempts to minimize the damage and pretend nothing happened. Worse, we hear Al Gore continue to repeat the falsities as alarmist fact. The cover-up and obfuscation simply compounds the mistake. This is the worst scandal in science in 500 years, and it is getting smellier as more revelations come to light. 

Another Example of Man-Made Warming (By Adjusting Data)

Just after the expose of unjustified adjustments (always upwards) in Oz data, a Brisbane resident took a look at the raw data at his local airport and how the ClimateGate Cabal has manipulated it. This animated chart shows the fraud. His take:

As you can see the raw data shows a downward trend of about -0.6 C per century. The unadjusted data however shows an opposite trend of +0.6 C per century. Intuitively as the airport grew from a quiet strip to a busy international jet airport one would think the more recent data would be adjusted downwards for the heat island effect. Instead we see that the data prior to 1978 is adjusted down and the data in recent times was adjusted up. 

 

ClimateGate is More Than Emails - The Data Have Been Artificially Increased UPDATED

Think this is just a few sloppy emails, but the data itself is ok? Here is a clear case of fraud in the data coming from a bit of Sherlock Holmes work in the land of Oz. The sleuth goes through the real data and the adjustments to it by the ClimateGate Cabal. He looked at the raw data, and then the adjusted data, and figured out how severe the adjustment was. The first chart shows this, and below it are his comments.

 

YIKES! Before getting homogenized, temperatures in Darwin were falling at 0.7 Celcius per century … but after the homogenization, they were warming at 1.2 Celcius per century. And the adjustment that they made was over two degrees per century … when those guys “adjust”, they don’t mess around.

He then went on to look closely at the specific thermometers and the adjustments made. Here is his second chart and comments (emphasis in color added):

Yikes again, double yikes! What on earth justifies that adjustment? How can they do that? We have five different records covering Darwin from 1941 on. They all agree almost exactly. Why adjust them at all? They’ve just added a huge artificial totally imaginary trend to the last half of the raw data! Now it looks like the IPCC diagram in Figure 1, all right … but a six degree per century trend? And in the shape of a regular stepped pyramid climbing to heaven? What’s up with that?

Those, dear friends, are the clumsy fingerprints of someone messing with the data Egyptian style … they are indisputable evidence that the “homogenized” data has been changed to fit someone’s preconceptions about whether the earth is warming.

One thing is clear from this. People who say that “Climategate was only about scientists behaving badly, but the data is OK” are wrong. At least one part of the data is bad, too. The Smoking Gun for that statement is at Darwin Zero.

The raw data from this area across multiple thermometers showed a consistent story of NO WARMING. There was no need to make those adjustments other than fitting into the pre-conceived case for Global Warming. The Climate Sleuths are progressively looking at such cases across the whole disgraceful data set. You can read more in my prior post, where they deconstruct Northern Europe to show the baseless adjustments there simply designed to fit the story, not the facts.

UPDATE 12/13: The Economist tries to rebut this work, and the author comes back and shows how their arguments were specious: The Economist claimed that the upwards adjustments were due to a change in a thermometer, but the author shows that none of the adjustments had anything to do with that, nor were due to a purported dramatic temperature anomaly 1941, because there was no such event. 

You can read this failed resurrection along with an AP story today that says they read the emails and found that they do not suggest the data itself is faked; but it turns out the AP author was part of the offensive email traffic and he appears to be in on the scam. He never reported on the negative side of the story, nor the undue pressure brought against skeptics, even after he had been emailed on these topics. At the very least he should be off this story due to a conflict of interest. 

We are now seeing the complicit media participate in the cover up. Sad, especially when a quality magazine like The Economist crosses the line like this.

ClimateGate Exposes that the Real Data Shows No Excess Warming

Getting past the bad behavior of the climate cabal, the real news is that they do not have the data to support their warming case. 

This reconstructed email thread is devastating to their beliefs. These charts of little hockey sticks turn out to be bogus - the underlying data does not exist to support the charts. It is bad enough that the computer models were wired to always produce hockey sticks, even when random temperature data is inserted. This is worst since it is outright fraud.

You can read the email and see the arguments. A quick summary:

• The data shows that the 1930s were as warm or warmer than now, with a similar rise up
• These mini hockey stocks suppress the '30s and elevate the '90s to produce the effect 
• The data shows no drastic warming anywhere in the world except maybe central Europe, and that is likely due to heavy urbanization
• The data for the Nordic countries shows that none of them have anything like the warming shown in the little chart above for Europe
• The climate cabal claims they excluded heavily urbanized areas, yet their data shows more than 500 central cities included. It is well known that the urban heat effect has skewed the readings up. They are lying about what is in the data. 

A cursory reading of the email snippets can lead one to dismiss this as over-reaction to some bad behavior. The reconstructed email shows that conclusion is premature. Reading the emails in context, and combining that with fraud wired into the computer models, makes a clear case of fraud. Sure, some of the cabal could go to jail for destroying the data to keep it out of a FOI request. 

I think the worse crime is to fake the science. 

Healthcare: Hide The Incline!

Riffing on the ClimateGate Hide the Decline video, here is the chart of the day from Verum Serum: how the Demo's are trying to hide the incline in healthcare reform.

You will see how phasing in the costs, but counting the taxes right away, gave the Senate bill a ten-year cost below $1T. When you instead count the first ten years of the fully-phased-in "reform", the cost almost doubles to $1.8T.

Clever, and misleading.

ClimateGate Grows Warmer Down Under

 Could it get any worse for the GW cabal? Yes. 

First, it appears that the NZ version of CRU also made strong adjustments to raw data to show warming. Yes, all the warming in NZ is man-made .. by the climate adjustments! 

"The shocking truth is that the oldest readings have been cranked way down and later readings artificially lifted to give a false impression of warming." 

Second, it appears Australian data was cherry-picked to show warming. 

Third, the Australian Parliment imploded when the opposition party deserted their leader who continued to support carbon restrictions in spite of the ClimateGate fraud. Cap&Trade may now be dead in Oz.