• mountebank: a flamboyant deceiver; one who attracts customers with tricks or jokes
  wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn
• A charlatan (also called swindler or mountebank) is a person practicing quackery or some similar confidence trick in order to obtain money, fame ...
  en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charlatan

Al Gore's Lies Exposed By Congress

By Marc Sheppard, The American Thinker

As the evidence of climate fraud at the University of East Anglia[s prestigious Climactic Research Unit (CRU) continues to mount, those who’ve been caught green-handed continue to parry their due opprobrium and comeuppance, thanks primarily to a dead-silent mainstream media.  But should the hubris and duplicity evident in the emails of those whose millennial temperature charts literally fuel the warming alarmism movement somehow fail to convince the world of the scam that’s been perpetrated upon it, certainly these revelations of the fraud cooked into the computer programs that create such charts will.

First—Let’s briefly review a few pertinent details. 

We reported on Saturday that among the most revealing of the “hacked” emails released last week was one dated November 1999, in which CRU chief PD Jones wrote these words to Hockey-Stick-Team leaders Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes: “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 (sic) from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”

Predictably, the suggestion of a climate-related data-adjusting “trick” being employed by such alarmist bellwethers 10 years ago instantly raised more than a few eyebrows.  And with similar alacrity, the Big Green Scare Machine shifted into CYA gear. 

Almost immediately after the news hit on Friday, Jones told Investigative Magazine’s TGIF Edition [PDF] that he “had no idea” what he might have meant by the words “hide the decline” a decade prior: “They’re talking about the instrumental data which is unaltered - but they’re talking about proxy data going further back in time, a thousand years, and it’s just about how you add on the last few years, because when you get proxy data you sample things like tree rings and ice cores, and they don’t always have the last few years. So one way is to add on the instrumental data for the last few years.”

Baloney.

Mere hours later, Jones’s warmist soul mates at RealClimate offered an entirely different explanation: “The paper in question is the Mann, Bradley and Hughes (1998) Nature paper on the original multiproxy temperature reconstruction, and the ‘trick’ is just to plot the instrumental records along with reconstruction so that the context of the recent warming is clear. Scientists often use the term “trick” to refer to “a good way to deal with a problem”, rather than something that is “secret”, and so there is nothing problematic in this at all. As for the ‘decline’, it is well known that Keith Briffa’s maximum latewood tree ring density proxy diverges from the temperature records after 1960 (this is more commonly known as the “divergence problem” - see e.g. the recent discussion in this paper) and has been discussed in the literature since Briffa et al in Nature in 1998 (Nature, 391, 678-682). Those authors have always recommend not using the post 1960 part of their reconstruction, and so while ‘hiding’ is probably a poor choice of words (since it is ‘hidden’ in plain sight), not using the data in the plot is completely appropriate, as is further research to understand why this happens.”

And later that day, Jean S at Climate Audit explained the reality of the quandary. In order to smooth a timed series, it’s necessary to pad it beyond the end-time. But it seems however hard they tried, when MBH plotted instrumental data against their tree ring reconstructions, no smoothing method would ever undo the fact that after 1960, the tree ring series pointed downward while the instrumental series pointed upward - hence the divergence: “So Mann’s solution [Mike’s Nature Trick] was to use the instrumental record for padding [both], which changes the smoothed series to point upwards.”

So the author of the email claimed the “trick” was adding instrumental measurements for years beyond available proxy data, his co-conspirators at Real Climate admitted it was actually a replacement of proxy data due to a known yet inexplicable post-1960 “divergence” anomaly, and CA called it what it was - a cheat.

The next day, the UEA spoke out for the first time on the subject when its first related press-release was posted to its homepage.  And Jones demonstrated to the world the benefits a good night’s sleep imparts to one’s memory, though not one’s integrity: “The word ‘trick’ was used here colloquially as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it refers to anything untoward.”

Tick Tock.

Of course, RealClimate also avowed there was “no evidence of the falsifying of data” in the emails.  But as Jones chose not to walk back his statement that the “tricks” were rarely exercised, and even assured us that he was “refer[ring] to one diagram - not a scientific paper,” his explanation remained at-odds with that of his virtual-confederates at RC.

And as Jones must have known at the time—such would prove to be the very least of CRU’s problems.

Getting with the Green Program(s)

One can only imagine the angst suffered daily by the co-conspirators, who knew full well that the “Documents” sub-folder of the CRU FOI2009 file contained more than enough probative program source code to unmask CRU’s phantom methodology. 

In fact, there are hundreds of IDL and FORTRAN source files buried in dozens of subordinate sub-folders.  And many do properly analyze and chart maximum latewood density (MXD), the growth parameter commonly utilized by CRU scientists as a temperature proxy, from raw or legitimately normalized data.  Ah, but many do so much more. 

Skimming through the often spaghetti-like code, the number of programs which subject the data to a mixed-bag of transformative and filtering routines is simply staggering.  Granted, many of these “alterations” run from benign smoothing algorithms (e.g. omitting rogue outliers) to moderate infilling mechanisms (e.g. estimating missing station data from that of those closely surrounding).  But many others fall into the precarious range between highly questionable (removing MXD data which demonstrate poor correlations with local temperature) to downright fraudulent (replacing MXD data entirely with measured data to reverse a disorderly trend-line).

In fact, workarounds for the post-1960 “divergence problem”, as described by both RealClimate and Climate Audit, can be found throughout the source code.  So much so that perhaps the most ubiquitous programmer’s comment (REM) I ran across warns that the particular module “Uses ‘corrected’ MXD - but shouldn’t usually plot past 1960 because these will be artificially adjusted to look closer to the real temperatures.”

What exactly is meant by “corrected” MXD, you ask?  Outstanding question—and the answer appears amorphous from program to program.  Indeed, while some employ one or two of the aforementioned “corrections,” others throw everything but the kitchen sink at the raw data prior to output.

For instance, in subfolder ”” there’s a program that calibrates the MXD data against available local instrumental summer (growing season) temperatures between 1911-1990, then merges that data into a new file.  That file is then digested and further modified by another program which creates calibration statistics for the MXD against the stored temperature and “estimates” (infills) figures where such temperature readings were not available.  The file created by that program is modified once again, by a program which “corrects it” - as described by the author—by “identifying” and “artificially” removing “the decline.”

But oddly enough - the series doesn’t begin its “decline adjustment” in 1960—the supposed year of the enigmatic “divergence.” In fact, all data between 1930 and 1994 are subject to “correction.” And such games are by no means unique to the folder attributed to Michael Mann.

A Clear and Present Rearranger

In 2 other programs, briffa_Sep98_d.pro and briffa_Sep98_e.pro, the “correction” is bolder by far. The programmer (Keith Briffa?) entitled the “adjustment” routine “Apply a VERY ARTIFICAL correction for decline!!” And he/she wasn’t kidding. Now, IDL is not a native language of mine, but its syntax is similar enough to others I’m familiar with, so please bear with me while I get a tad techie on you.

Here’s the “fudge factor” (notice the brash SOB actually called it that in his REM statement): yrloc = [1400,findgen(19)*5.+1904]
valadj=[0., 0., 0., 0., 0., -0.1, -0.25, -0.3, 0., -0.1, 0.3, 0.8, 1.2, 1.7, 2.5, 2.6, 2.6, 2.6, 2.6, 2.6] *0.75; fudge factor

These 2 lines of code establish a 20 element array (yrloc) comprised of the year 1400 (base year but not sure why needed here) and 19 years between 1904 and 1994 in half-decade increments.  Then the corresponding “fudge factor” (from the valadj matrix) is applied to each interval.  As you can see, not only are temperatures biased to the upside later in the century (though certainly prior to 1964) but a few mid-century intervals are being biased slightly lower.  That, coupled with the post-1930 restatement we encountered earlier, would imply that in addition to an embarrassing false decline experienced with their MXD after 1960 (or earlier), CRU’s “divergence problem” also includes a minor false incline after 1930.

And the former apparently wasn’t a particularly well-guarded secret, although the actual adjustment period remained buried beneath the surface.

Plotting programs such as data4alps.pro print this reminder to the user prior to rendering the chart: “IMPORTANT NOTE: The data after 1960 should not be used.  The tree-ring density records tend to show a decline after 1960 relative to the summer temperature in many high-latitude locations.  In this data set this ‘decline’ has been artificially removed in an ad-hoc way, and this means that data after 1960 no longer represent tree-ring density variations, but have been modified to look more like the observed temperatures.”

Others, such as mxdgrid2ascii.pro, issue this warning: “NOTE: recent decline in tree-ring density has been ARTIFICIALLY REMOVED to facilitate calibration.  THEREFORE, post-1960 values will be much closer to observed temperatures then (sic) they should be which will incorrectly imply the reconstruction is more skilful than it actually is.  See Osborn et al. (2004).”

Care to offer another explanation, Dr. Jones?

Gotcha

Clamoring alarmists can and will spin this until they’re dizzy.  The ever-clueless mainstream media can and will ignore this until it’s forced upon them as front-page news, and then most will join the alarmists on the denial merry-go-round.

But here’s what’s undeniable:  If a divergence exists between measured temperatures and those derived from dendrochronological data after (circa) 1960 then discarding only the post-1960 figures is disingenuous to say the least. The very existence of a divergence betrays a potential serious flaw in the process by which temperatures are reconstructed from tree-ring density.  If it’s bogus beyond a set threshold, then any honest men of science would instinctively question its integrity prior to that boundary.  And only the lowliest would apply a hack in order to produce a desired result.

And to do so without declaring as such in a footnote on every chart in every report in every study in every book in every classroom on every website that such a corrupt process is relied upon is not just a crime against science, it’s a crime against mankind.

Indeed, miners of the CRU folder have unearthed dozens of email threads and supporting documents revealing much to loathe about this cadre of hucksters and their vile intentions.  This veritable goldmine has given us tales ranging from evidence destruction to spitting on the Freedom of Information Act on both sides of the Atlantic. But the now irrefutable evidence that alarmists have indeed been cooking the data for at least a decade may just be the most important strike in human history.

Advocates of the global governance or financial redistribution sought by the United Nations at Copenhagen in two weeks and the expanded domestic governance and financial redistribution sought by Liberal politicians both substantiate their drastic proposals with the pending climate emergency predicted in the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  Kyoto, Waxman-Markey, Kerry-Boxer, EPA regulation of the very substances of life - all bad policy concepts enabled solely by IPCC reports.  And the IPCC, in turn, bases those reports largely on the data and charts provided by the research scientists as CRU - largely from tree ring data—who just happen to be editors and lead authors of that same U.N. panel.

Bottom line:  CRU’s evidence is now irrevocably tainted.  As such—all assumptions based on that evidence must now be reevaluated and readjudicated. And all policy based on those counterfeit assumptions must also be re-examined.

Gotcha.  We’ve known they’ve been lying all along, and now we can prove it.  It’s time to bring sanity back to this debate.  It’s time for the First IPCC Reassessment Report.  See post here.

A week after my colleague James Delingpole, on his Telegraph blog, coined the term “Climategate” to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.

The reason why even the Guardian’s George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Professor Philip Jones, the CRU’s director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC’s key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely - not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.

Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.

Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.

Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the “hockey stick” were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre, an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann’s supporters, calling themselves “the Hockey Team”, and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.

The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC’s scientific elite, including not just the “Hockey Team”, such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC’s 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore’s ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.

There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre’s blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt’s blog Watts Up With That), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws. They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.

This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones’s refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got “lost”. Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.

But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is  what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction - to lower past temperatures and to “adjust” recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.

In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played - to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.

What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.

The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods - not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics’ work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.

Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre’s demolition of the “hockey stick”, he excoriated the way in which this same “tightly knit group” of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to “peer review” each other’s papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.

The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation, rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society - itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause - is far from being what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age. See post here. For inspiration see this UK Telegraph post below and here.

Claiming to save the planet is no excuse for scientific fraud

The Huge Mistake - Climate Change Solutions 2009

October 6, 2009

Antarctic Ice Melt at Lowest Levels in Satellite Era

Where are the headlines? Where are the press releases? Where is all the attention?

The ice melt across during the Antarctic summer (October-January) of 2008-2009 was the lowest ever recorded in the satellite history.

Such was the finding reported last week by Marco Tedesco and Andrew Monaghan in the journal Geophysical Research Letters:

A 30-year minimum Antarctic snowmelt record occurred during austral summer 2008-2009 according to spaceborne microwave observations for 1980-2009. Strong positive phases of both the El-Nińo Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the Southern Hemisphere Annular Mode (SAM) were recorded during the months leading up to and including the 2008-2009 melt season.

The silence surrounding this publication was deafening.

It would seem that with oft-stoked fears of a disastrous sea level rise coming this century any news that perhaps some signs may not be pointing to its imminent arrival would be greeted by a huge sigh of relief from all inhabitants of earth (not only the low-lying ones, but also the high-living ones, respectively under threat from rising seas or rising energy costs).

But not a peep.

But such is not always the case--or rather, such is not ever the case when ice melt is pushing the other end of the record scale.

For instance, below is a collection of NASA stories highlighting record high amounts of melting (or in most cases, simply higher than normal amounts in some regions) across Greenland in each of the past 3 years, as ascertained by Marco Tedesco (the lead author of the latest report on Antarctica):

NASA Researcher Finds Days of Snow Melting on the Rise in Greenland

"In 2006, Greenland experienced more days of melting snow and at higher altitudes than average over the past 18 years, according to a new NASA-funded project using satellite observations...."

NASA Finds Greenland Snow Melting Hit Record High in High Places

"A new NASA-supported study reports that 2007 marked an overall rise in the melting trend over the entire Greenland ice sheet and, remarkably, melting in high-altitude areas was greater than ever at 150 percent more than average. In fact, the amount of snow that has melted this year over Greenland is the equivalent of more than twice the surface size of the U.S..."

Melting on the Greenland Ice Cap, 2008

"The northern fringes of Greenland's ice sheet experienced extreme melting in 2008, according to NASA scientist Marco Tedesco and his colleagues."

And lest you think that perhaps NASA hasn't had any data on ice melt across Antarctica in past years, we give you this one:

NASA Researchers Find Snowmelt in Antarctica Creeping Inland

"On the world's coldest continent of Antarctica, the landscape is so vast and varied that only satellites can fully capture the extent of changes in the snow melting across its valleys, mountains, glaciers and ice shelves. In a new NASA study, researchers [including Marco Tedesco] using 20 years of data from space-based sensors have confirmed that Antarctic snow is melting farther inland from the coast over time, melting at higher altitudes than ever and increasingly melting on Antarctica's largest ice shelf."

But this time around, nothing, nada, zippo from NASA when their ice melt go-to guy Marco Tedesco reports that Antarctica has set a record for the lack of surface ice melt (even more interestingly coming on the heels of a near-record low ice-melt year last summer).

So, seriously, NASA, what gives? If ice melt is an important enough topic to warrant annual updates of the goings-on across Greenland, it is not important enough to elucidate the history and recent behavior across Antarctica?

(These are not meant as rhetorical questions)

Reference

Tedesco M., and A. J. Monaghan, 2009. An updated Antarctic melt record through 2009 and its linkages to high-latitude and tropical climate variability. Geophysical Research Letters, 36, L18502, doi:10.1029/2009GL039186.

Look at it a little closer:

Notice how the curve levels off as the earth reaches an equilibrium?
Whatever reasons caused the increase are cancelling out.

Look at the Little Ice Age.
Do you think that man could be having an effect on turning it around?

Things ARE warming up but if you think this is all a natural cause and effect and that man does not have an effect, you are just burying your head in the sand.

How can you think this? Do you not have eyes?
Do you not have a brain?

Have you never seen notice of beaches being closed due to pollution?
Have you ever flown over a city on the water and seen how far it's polluted influence extends out into the water? Have you not noticed how it is hard to get some previously abundant fish dinners because of over fishing?

Have you ever walked a once pristine beach now littered with cruise ship effluent?

The earth is a closed system being fed by solar power.
Change the transmission of the sun's power and you effect the stability of the environment.

Reduce the balance between elements by deforestation, pollution, or over use and this is transmitted to the whole.
Look at the hole in the Ozone, primarily caused by human-produced compounds that release chlorine and bromine gases in the stratosphere.
It is said that this is helping Antarctica resist global warming.

I have watched as man's pollution has reached greater and greater proportions.
I don't need some evangelist with his own agenda to tell me we are having a negative effect on our environment.
I don't need any self proclaimed experts telling me that it is all natural and "don't worry - be happy".

As a child I could lie in my Park Ex backyard in Montreal and watch the stars.
As a teenager in the same yard most of the stars were gone due to the increase in light pollution.
As an adult I could not even find the yard, the neighborhood converted from single family homes and duplexes to unending apartment buildings. There are few yards left. Hundreds of thousands of trees gone and numerous square miles of lawn are now home to 35,000 people living in only 1.6 square kilometers.

IMO they should tax the crap out of polluters.
Force them out of business if they won't meet "green" standards.
Set tough green standards.