No Truce With Kings

said Churchill, “you should occasionally look at the results.”

Via Coyote blog, some results-checking of climate models by Roy Spencer. Click the image for a larger (readable) view.

Dr. Roy Spencer has compared the output of 73 climate models to actual recent temperature measurements. He has focused on temperatures in the mid-troposphere in the tropics — this is not the same as global surface temperatures but is of course related. The reason for this focus is 1) we have some good space-based data sources for temperatures in this region that don’t suffer the same biases and limitations as surface thermometers and 2) This is the zone that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming theory says should be seeing the most warming, due to positive feedback effects of water vapor. The lines are the model results for temperatures, the dots are the actuals.

Here’s an interesting project at indiegogo to document "the true cost of ‘action’ on climate change" using the IPCC’s own figures.

Topher has raised about 20% of his $130,000 goal with 23 days left.

This project is being administered by the Lord Monckton Foundation (that web site appears to have been launched very recently). Lord Monckton, of course, is the self-described “high priest” of climate skepticism (PDF).

I think this is a good idea and is way over due. It’s easy to wish for everything when you never count the cost of anything.

Tip o’ the hat to sailor Jeff

I found this interesting, even though I’m skeptical about many AGW claims. Total global CO₂ emissions were up, even though US emissions were down.

Shhh, U.S. Leads World In Carbon Emissions Reductions
Technology, market forces credited for reductions

Over the past six years, the United States has reduced its carbon emissions more than any other nation in the world.

Efforts to curb so-called man-made climate change had little or nothing to do with it. Government mandated “green” energy didn’t cause the reductions. Neither did environmentalist pressure. And the U.S. did not go along with the Kyoto Protocol to radically cut CO2 emissions. Instead, the drop came about through market forces and technological advances, according to a report from the International Energy Agency.

Breakthroughs in how natural gas is extracted from underground shale formations were the key factors that led to the reductions, the report said. Natural gas has a low carbon footprint and is widely available in the United States. As a result, entrepreneurs are flocking to extract it from new areas.

Here’s Earth Hour: A Dissent by Ross McKitrick, an economics professor in Ontario who abhors the idea. It’s a single page PDF, in which he puts his ideas very succinctly.

This snippet will give you the flavor of it:

People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour. And pop down to the cardiac unit at the hospital and shut the power off there too.

Paul sends a link to an op-ed by Margaret Wente in The Globe and Mail. It summarizes some of the more dubious and fraudulent claims made to support the IPCC’s reports on climate change. RTWT.

The great global warming collapse

In 2007, the most comprehensive report to date on global warming, issued by the respected United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made a shocking claim: The Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035.

These glaciers provide the headwaters for Asia’s nine largest rivers and lifelines for the more than one billion people who live downstream. Melting ice and snow would create mass flooding, followed by mass drought. The glacier story was reported around the world. Last December, a spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental pressure group, warned, “The deal reached at Copenhagen will have huge ramifications for the lives of hundreds of millions of people who are already highly vulnerable due to widespread poverty.” To dramatize their country’s plight, Nepal’s top politicians strapped on oxygen tanks and held a cabinet meeting on Mount Everest.

But the claim was rubbish, and the world’s top glaciologists knew it. It was based not on rigorously peer-reviewed science but on an anecdotal report by the WWF itself.

One of the lessons I’m taking from Climategate and its aftermath is a growing disbelief in any objectivity at the United Nations. This may not be news to those who follow the U.N. but it seems even more prone to power-hungry factions than the U.S. government. (And that’s a pretty low standard for unbiased policies that actually, y’know, benefit citizens – as opposed to simply expanding government power.)

Until now, I’ve been giving the U.N. the benefit of the doubt. But no more Mr. Nice Guy.

That’s one of Ms. Wente’s points: a cabal in the AGW camp has destroyed a lot more than just confidence in their case for climate change. They’ve damaged everyone’s confidence in finding objectivity among scientists and among people at the United Nations. They’re making a lot of people look like the Boy Who Cried, ‘Wolf!’

I’ll bet there are many people now wondering whether any scientific evidence can be trusted. I wouldn’t be too surprised to find people putting scare quotes around the words scientific evidence.

That would be a very scary thing since we rely on technology to the extent we do.