AICmr 12 (26 April 2012)]

10. Having inspected the documents, I have determined that 10 of the documents, in the form of emails, do not contain threats to kill or threats of harm. These documents contain abuse in the sense that they contain insulting and offensive language.

11. One document, again in the form of an email, contains a recollection of an exchange which occurred during an off-campus event sponsored by members of the Climate Change Institute and other governmental agencies. The ANU responded to the conduct and comments described in the email as a security threat.

One possible outcome of that scenario could be an increase of carbon dioxide in the region. As bacteria in Arctic Ocean use the new influx of carbon as a food source, they may create CO2 as a byproduct. A second possibility, Griffith posits, is that warming temperatures and melting sea ice might boost the production of phytoplankton, tiny plant-like organisms that live near the ocean’s surface and thrive on carbon dioxide in the water. As those phytoplankton die (or are eaten by other organisms and released as waste), they would sink to the sea floor, causing the carbon in their bodies to be sequestered in thick sediments—effectively removing the increased carbon from the environment.

“Those are just a few aspects of what might happen. But for every one that we think about, there could be 10 others that drive the system in a different direction,” says Griffith. “We don't yet have the kind of data to say anything definitive about how the Arctic would be affected by warming climate—but what we do have is a very important baseline of data to help evaluate changes that will happen in the future. Without that, you‘re unfortunately just guessing at how things change over time.”

We were moved after two threatening incidents... both events (in late 2009 and early 2010) involved visitors coming unannounced into our offices and taking or threatening aggressive actions against me ... and another academic associated with the CCI.

\u2014 Professor Will Steffen, Executive Director, ANU Climate Change Institute, 17th May, 2012

Heartland's seventh climate conference, which runs until Wednesday, was a much diminished event, compared to earlier lavish gatherings which spilled out over several floors of a hotel in New York's Time Square, and attracted up to 800 followers. The tables were set for 270 at this year's gala, featuring the Czech president and climate contrarian Václav Klaus, and there were well over 100 no-shows. In a further sign of Heartland's cash crunch, meals were not included in this year's conference package.

Britain's leading climate contrarian Christopher Monckton got a standing ovation for telling a series of "birther" jokes.

Listed as a "gold level" sponsor of this week's conference was the Illinois Coal Association, although Heartland told reporters the contribution was only in the hundreds of dollars. Other allies were scarce. Only three groups set up tables at the conference. The largest was staffed by Americans for Prosperity, the ultra-conservative organisation founded by the Koch oil billionaires.

Going to Heartland conferences was always a bit like entering the portal to an alternative universe. Speakers and audience are almost entirely male, white and getting on in years. Jokes about Al Gore fly fast and furious, and can be counted on to get big laughs.

But this year's event had a sense of desperation. Speakers spoke about being "victimised" by "warmists" and "alarmists" – scientists and politicians who accept that carbon dioxide emissions from industry are a main driver of climate change.

Klaus, who made his name as an economist before his election as president, sees environmental concerns as a red menace. "It is identical to communism – identical not similar," he warned.

John Dunn, a Heartland policy adviser, sees his role as fighting "enviro-fascist madness". In his speech, he sought to ridicule recorded evidence of growing drought and heatwaves due to climate change. "Warm is good for people, and it's particularly good for people as they get older," said Dunn. "The people that warm spells kill are already moribund." He went on to say that only extreme cold caused extra deaths.

The next speaker called for the return of the insecticide DDT, long banned in the US. "It's cheap, it's effective and it's perfectly safe for humans and for all wildlife."

Yes and we all know how well the models have worked for the past 25 years.

Please consider supporting the Heartland Institute. These conferences are expensive, and I’m not a good fundraiser so as a result I don’t raise enough money to cover them, we really scramble to make payroll as a result to cover these expenses. If you can afford to make a contribution, please do. If you know someone, if you’ve got a rich uncle or somebody in the family or somebody that you work with, please give them a call and ask them if they would consider making a tax-deductable contribution to the Heartland Institute.”

It isn't just me saying they are unreliable PG. Yes teh article is 5 years old but the problem here is that they are still using teh same models that they created 25 years ago and the results have been anything but conculsive.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/12/071211101623.htm

ScienceDaily (Dec. 11, 2007) — A new study comparing the composite output of 22 leading global climate models with actual climate data finds that the models do an unsatisfactory job of mimicking climate change in key portions of the atmosphere.


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See Also:

Earth & Climate
•Weather
•Climate
•Global Warming

Computers & Math
•Computer Modeling
•Mathematical Modeling
•Information Technology

Reference
•Consensus of scientists regarding global warming
•Climate model
•Numerical weather prediction
•Instrumental temperature record


This research, published online in the Royal Meteorological Society's International Journal of Climatology, raises new concerns about the reliability of models used to forecast global warming.

"The usual discussion is whether the climate model forecasts of Earth's climate 100 years or so into the future are realistic," said the lead author, Dr. David H. Douglass from the University of Rochester. "Here we have something more fundamental: Can the models accurately explain the climate from the recent past? "It seems that the answer is no."

Scientists from Rochester, the University of Alabama in Huntsville (UAH) and the University of Virginia compared the climate change "forecasts" from the 22 most widely-cited global circulation models with tropical temperature data collected by surface, satellite and balloon sensors. The models predicted that the lower atmosphere should warm significantly more than it actually did.

"Models are very consistent in forecasting a significant difference between climate trends at the surface and in the troposphere, the layer of atmosphere between the surface and the stratosphere," said Dr. John Christy, director of UAH's Earth System Science Center. "The models forecast that the troposphere should be warming more than the surface and that this trend should be especially pronounced in the tropics.

"When we look at actual climate data, however, we do not see accelerated warming in the tropical troposphere. Instead, the lower and middle atmosphere are warming the same or less than the surface. For those layers of the atmosphere, the warming trend we see in the tropics is typically less than half of what the models forecast."

The 22 climate models used in this study are the same models used by the UN Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change (IPCC), which recently shared a Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore.

The atmospheric temperature data were from two versions of data collected by sensors aboard NOAA satellites since late 1979, plus several sets of temperature data gathered twice a day at dozens of points in the tropics by thermometers carried into the atmosphere by helium balloons. The surface data were from three datasets.

After years of rigorous analysis and testing, the high degree of agreement between the various atmospheric data sets gives an equally high level of confidence in the basic accuracy of the climate data.

"The last 25 years constitute a period of more complete and accurate observations, and more realistic modeling efforts," said Dr. Fred Singer from the University of Virginia. "Nonetheless, the models are seen to disagree with the observations. We suggest, therefore, that projections of future climate based on these models should be viewed with much caution."

The findings of this study contrast strongly with those of a recent study that used 19 of the same climate models and similar climate datasets. That study concluded that any difference between model forecasts and atmospheric climate data is probably due to errors in the data.

"The question was, what would the models 'forecast' for upper air climate change over the past 25 years and how would that forecast compare to reality?" said Christy. "To answer that we needed climate model results that matched the actual surface temperature changes during that same time. If the models got the surface trend right but the tropospheric trend wrong, then we could pinpoint a potential problem in the models.

"As it turned out, the average of all of the climate models forecasts came out almost like the actual surface trend in the tropics. That meant we could do a very robust test of their reproduction of the lower atmosphere.

"Instead of averaging the model forecasts to get a result whose surface trends match reality, the earlier study looked at the widely scattered range of results from all of the model runs combined. Many of the models had surface trends that were quite different from the actual trend," Christy said. "Nonetheless, that study concluded that since both the surface and upper atmosphere trends were somewhere in that broad range of model results, any disagreement between the climate data and the models was probably due to faulty data.

"We think our experiment is more robust and provides more meaningful results."