Dr Lee Gerhard,  retired Geologist,  believes it is crucial:

“..that scientists are factually accurate when they speak out,  that they ignore media hype and maintain a clinical detachment from social or other agendas.”

He says there are things we know and they are:

• The most effective greenhouse gas is water vapor, comprising approximately 95 percent of the total greenhouse effect.

• Carbon dioxide concentration has been continually rising for nearly 100 years. It continues to rise, but carbon dioxide concentrations at present are near the lowest in geologic history.

• Temperature change correlation with carbon dioxide levels is not statistically significant.

• There are no data that definitively relate carbon dioxide levels to temperature changes.

• The greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide logarithmically declines with increasing concentration. At present levels, any additional carbon dioxide can have very little effect.

He also says we know a lot about Earth’s temperature changes:

• Global temperature changes naturally all of the time, in both directions and at many scales of intensity.

• The warmest year in the U.S. in the last century was 1934, not 1998. The U.S. has the best and most extensive temperature records in the world.

• Global temperature peaked in 1998 on the current 60-80 year cycle, and has been episodically declining ever since. This cooling absolutely falsifies claims that human carbon dioxide emissions are a controlling factor in Earth temperature.

• Voluminous historic records demonstrate the Medieval Climate Optimum (MCO) was real and that the “hockey stick” graphic that attempted to deny that fact was at best bad science. The MCO was considerably warmer than the end of the 20th century.

• During the last 100 years, temperature has both risen and fallen, including the present cooling. All the changes in temperature of the last 100 years are in normal historic ranges, both in absolute value and, most importantly, rate of change.

• Effects of temperature change are absolutely independent of the cause of the temperature change.

• Global hurricane, cyclonic and major storm activity is near 30-year lows. Any increase in cost of damages by storms is a product of increasing population density in vulnerable areas such as along the shores and property value inflation, not due to any increase in frequency or severity of storms.

• Polar bears have survived and thrived over periods of extreme cold and extreme warmth over hundreds of thousands of years — extremes far in excess of modern temperature changes.

• The 2009 minimum Arctic ice extent was significantly larger than the previous two years. The 2009 Antarctic maximum ice extent was significantly above the 30-year average. There are only 30 years of records.

• Rate and magnitude of sea level changes observed during the last 100 years are within normal historical ranges. Current sea level rise is tiny and, at most, justifies a prediction of perhaps ten centimeters rise in this century.

Gerhard says that:

“The present climate debate is a classic conflict between data and computer programs. The computer programs are the source of concern over climate change and global warming, not the data. Data are measurements. Computer programs are artificial constructs.”

He concludes saying:

“I have been a reviewer of the last two IPCC reports, one of the several thousand scientists who purportedly are supporters of the IPCC view that humans control global temperature. Nothing could be further from the truth. Many of us try to bring better and more current science to the IPCC, but we usually fail. Recently we found out why. The whistleblower release of e-mails and files from the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia University has demonstrated scientific malfeasance and a sickening violation of scientific ethics.”

To read all of Dr Gerhard’s comments  click here

to read more about the weakness of the AGW theory  click here and here

Cbdakota

The following posting by JoNova stands on its own.

The Missing Hotspot

The ‘Hotspot’ is crucial to the climate debate.

If greenhouses gases are warming the planet, that warming will happen first in the cold blob of air 8-12 km above the tropics. It’s freezing cold up there, but it ought to be slightly less freezing cold thanks to greenhouse gases. All 20-odd climate models predict warming there first—it’s the fingerprint of greenhouse gas warming, as opposed to warming by some other cause, like solar magnetic effects, volcanic eruptions, solar irradiance, or ozone depletion etc etc.

Look at A above, the greenhouse gas fingerprint is markedly different from the rest and dominates the overall predicted pattern in graph F. The big problem for the believers of AGW is that years of radiosonde measurements can’t find any warming, as shown in part E of Figure 5.7 in section 5.5 on page 116 of the US CCSP 2006 report

SOURCES:

(A) Predicted changes 1958-1999. Synthesis and Assessment Report 1.1, 2006, CCSP, Chapter 1, p 25, based on Santer et al. 2000;

(B) Hadley Radiosonde record: Synthesis and Assessment Report 1.1, 2006, CCSP,, Chapter 5, p116, recorded change/decade, Hadley Centre weather balloons 1979-1999, p. 116 , fig. 5.7E, from Thorne et al., 2005.

Is there any way the missing hot-spot doesn’t fatally kill the greenhouse theory?

Perhaps we’re looking in the wrong spot and the hot-spot is lurking somewhere else?

If we are, that gets us right back to square one. The theory of greenhouse gas warming depends on finding a hotter spot of air above the equator… if that hot spot is somewhere else, the greenhouse theory itself collapses in a heap. It means either the greenhouse effect is not causing much of the recent warming, or the greenhouse theory is just plain wrong. AGW supporters are not asking this question because they can’t win either way.

Possibly we just can’t measure the air temperatures accurately enough to find the hot-spot?

Maybe, but we’ve been recording temperatures up there repeatedly for decades, and it’s not that the hot-spot is weak—it’s absent. There is no sign at all.

AGW says: Santer and Sherwood have found the missing hot spot.

Skeptics say: Santer uses statistics to show that the hot spot might be hidden under the noise. He hasn’t found any sign of warming–just the sign of fog in the results. Sherwood ignores the thermometers altogether and uses wind gauges to tell us the temperature. (Who’d a thought?!)

Full original blog entry here

Cbdakota