CA Revisionism

January 16, 2010 by Policy Lass 5 Comments

Now you see him...

Now you don't.


Over at Climate Audit, I noticed that McI reinstated the comments of mine in the FOI Myth #1 post he deleted that sent me into the penalty box.

Nice move.

Note that I saved threads to show that not only were these posts “In moderation” but had been deleted. In other words, I went back and they were no longer showing that they were in moderation, so I expect McI had a change of heart — perhaps when my posts were discussed elsewhere such as at RCrejects.

Note to the sarcasm-impaired — I point this out only because I think it’s FUNNY PEOPLE!

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A Former AGW Supporter Turns Skeptic

January 16, 2010 by Policy Lass 69 Comments

As promised to Ron Cram, I am creating this post to discuss Allegre’s skeptic turn and the reasons for it.

Here is an excerpt from the NP article:

Fifteen years ago, Dr. Allegre was among the 1500 prominent scientists who signed “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity,” a highly publicized letter stressing that global warming’s “potential risks are very great” and demanding a new caring ethic that recognizes the globe’s fragility in order to stave off “spirals of environmental decline, poverty, and unrest, leading to social, economic and environmental collapse.”

So we have a bona fide AGW supporter who signed the letter regarding the threat of global warming.  Here is his current stance: Continue reading →…

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NASA Emails – Judicial Watch

January 16, 2010 by Policy Lass 24 Comments

Some interesting material over at Climate Audit around the NASA FOI request for emails surrounding McI’s discovery of a mistake in the GISS record post 2000.

As I understand it, Steve McI found an error in the data, which according to Hansen and his colleagues was a result of an error in processing the data.  When corrected, the change affected only the US data, not the global data.  It had no effect on the ranking of years prior to 2000 and post 2000, it meant a correction of 0.15C.

However, much ado was made of this error.

Here is Steve McIntyre:

Hansen switched from TOBS adjusted versions to raw versions on Jan 1, 2000 without any disclosure of this change to readers and without any scientific justification. It’s nothing to do with throwing out data…That Hansen has made this type of gross programming error in something as extraordinarily simple as a program to merely calculate average temperatures should give pause to anyone assuming that Hansen’s climate model is error-free. The need for a proper arms-length audit of the GISS climate model (or some other equally important model) is obviously a major challenge and, in my opinion, something of very high priority for anyone wanting to rely on these models for policy. [my emphasis]

IT will be interesting to see if GISS apologist, Eli Rabett, comments on this matter.

You can see he suggests this was done on purpose, consciously, and was not an error. Continue reading →…

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Trenberth on the real travesty

January 14, 2010 by Policy Lass 42 Comments

Over at “A Few Things Ill Considered” Coby posts about Trenberth’s recent article in The Daily Camera on the travesty that is the way his email commenting on the “travesty” of being unable to account for the lack of warming is being misrepresented around the net.

Coby writes:

It is a constantly, and often intentionally, misunderstood fact that the large variability of weather will often overshadow the slow and constant march of CO2 driven warming. The weather can change tens of degrees from day to day in one location. In fact, the record change is 57oC, 105oF for our American readers, in a single 24hr period! (I leave it as an excercise for the reader to extrapolate that to a 100 year trend.) Globally averaged annual temperatures are about 2 orders of magnituded more stable but that still leaves room for one or two tenths of a degree each year.

It drives me nuts, and I sure others can attest to the same, when I see people on skeptic and contrarian blogs point to how cold it is as if that invalidates AGW. Come on people! At least learn the difference between climate and weather, signal and noise — that is, if you care about credibility… The yukking it up I see when people do this is nothing but a show of how stupid or ignorant they are, and says nothing about AGW itself.

Back to the Trenberth “travesty”  travesty… Continue reading →…

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A Former Skeptic Speaks of Skepticism

January 14, 2010 by Policy Lass 5 Comments

A hat tip to MarkB for bringing this post up — very interesting, especially since it appeared in our Canadian National Post — a right-wing press well-known for its anti-government pro-business stance on many public policy issues.

Johnathan Abrams post on Why I am no longer a skeptic on climate change:

Here is a really apropos quote that speaks to my own views on this as a public policy matter:

AGW poses a direct threat to some forms libertarianism and right-wing capitalism. I think that this may have played a strong role in my personal AGW skepticism, and perhaps in other libertarians. As I discussed in a previous blog post, values can determine whether someone considers themselves a libertarian, liberal, conservative, etc. One important value of libertarianism is the desire for smaller government. This rubs up against the problem of AGW. If the problem of AGW is real, and if we have any hope of solving it, we would most likely require development of gross regulations from governments.

Continue reading →…

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Origins of the IPCC or Houston, we have a problem…

January 6, 2010 by Policy Lass 50 Comments

My primary interest in this is to know what is correct regarding global warming, but as a policy analyst and someone with a background in social science and the history and logic of science, I can’t help but be interested in this whole mess as a social / political / cultural phenomenon.  As a public policy type, I view public policy as primarily a problem solving exercise — a problem is identified through a variety of possible channels or processes and the government — and public — have to decide whether to respond and if so, how.

Not responding to a perceived problem is, of course, also a policy. In fact, some problems do not require a public policy to be developed and in those cases, no policy is better than a policy that either doesn’t work or makes things worse.

The place to start is of course, at the beginning:

Is there a problem requiring a public policy solution? Continue reading →…

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