CB, lol, I keep telling you I don't either make this stuff up or write it myself. I just quote news stories with links and everything and usually don't make any comments and when I do it is in plain text where the quoted story is in italics.

Heres a tip - If you have a problem with the content fire up your keyboard and send a nasty o gram to the author, but don't post it here because she won't read it. I feel certain that Jo Nova will take your comments to heart, print a retraction as you have pointed out the errors of her ways in such a succinct manner that she will have no option but to immediately correct her obvious errors.

In the meantime I am utterly devestated and wounded to my very core that you could mistake me for a fake sceptic, whatever gave you that impression? /sarc

That I once believed and now don't that cAGW is soley the responsiblity of humans I have admitted on many previous occasions. I don't believe your science, I don't believe your data, I don't believe one iota that comes from the mouths of the likes of Hansen, Flannery, Mann or anyone else from the cAGW camp including yourself. I know that the whole concept of changing your mind when you have seen the proof only works in your mind if you can convert a sceptic into a believer but I am your worst nightmare. A believer who changed camps because I couldn't believe what was being called proof when it turns out it was anything but.

There is nothing fake about my sceptism CB. There is a lot of fake in those who are pushing the cAGW agenda though.

Maggot's do as Maggots does,they eat rotten flesh and digest it.... and then defecate. They can't help what they are.

Ummm wrong post on the wrong forum ????


No wait I was right.

Article in this morning's Brisbane Courier Mail newspaper highlighting the latest cold spell this winter, namely the longest run of sub 10 deg mins for Brisbane since 1995, following the longest run of sub 20 deg maxs in late June for 40 years..

I understand your stance. You are rejecting all of climate science out of hand no if's or but's. Complete and total rejection of all Atmospheric Physics, Atmospheric and Oceanic Fluid Dynamics, Physical Chemistry of Atmospheric Science, Ocean Dynamics and the Carbon Cycle, Principles of Planetary Climate, Physics of the Atmosphere and Climate, etc, etc.

Sounds to me more like denial than scepticism though...

Just read that. But you do realise that Team CeeBee will just say, "It is winter after all".....

Keeping out of all this. Just reporting the article, as per the thread...

I am posting this very long article by Roger Pielke Jr, the warmist that i quoted from a day or so ago on page 257 of this thread.
I don't necessarily agree with Roger Pielke Jr's beliefs in mankind's influences on the climate, influences which are possibly quite marked but are from changes in land use and more important factors than just the ridiculous concentration on CO2 alone as the source of any so far unproven claims on the supposed global warming / climate ,change meme.

But in this article from the "Foriegn Policy" on line mag site, Roger Pielke Jr has a gret deal of plain good old common sense in his proposals, criticisms and possible paths to follow for the future in this whole debacle of policy and totally unnecessary social dissension and conflict.

And I post it because here on this forum we have just one coldly fanatical person who has totally disrupted and poisoned the whole forum, probably quite deliberately, with his fanatical and extremely limited mind set, a rigid fanaticsm which may have created the forum environment in which he revels but has in all likelihood done his ideology considerable harm as well as to the forum's standing amongst the readers of this forum.

Unfortunately this fanatical, inflexible rigid unforgiving mind set of this individual and one or two others has triggered a very strong and vitriolic and very unpleasant counter reaction in some whose beliefs are that it is only natural forces that are at work in the changes that are occurring, as always, in our global climate.

Although I don't subscribe to the posting of long complete articles on these pages, although I have done so many times past myself despite my dislike of doing so, I think this article by warmist Roger Pielke Jr should be read and thought about by all who have posted or read the posts on this subject on this forum.

[ i have bolded a couple of Paras which I think, although others may differ, are very important to this whole climate debacle ]


Climate of Failure

Environmentalists are just now waking up to the reality that if we're going to stop global warming, we're going to have to be a lot more politically savvy.

BY ROGER PIELKE JR. | AUGUST 6, 2012

The heady days of early 2009, when advocates for global action on climate change anticipated world leaders gathering later that year around a conference table in Copenhagen to reach a global agreement, are but a distant memory. Today, with many of these same leaders focusing their attention on jumpstarting economic growth, environmental issues have taken a back seat. For environmentalists, it may seem that climate policy has dropped from the political agenda altogether.

They're right. The world's biggest emitters have reached a consensus of sorts, but not the one hoped for in Copenhagen. In the United States, President Barack Obama has borrowed his energy policy -- "all of the above" -- from the Republicans. Europe has dithered on any further commitments to emissions reductions as governments have been completely consumed by the euro crisis. China and India have used the follow-on conferences to Copenhagen, held in Durban and Cancun, to decisively push international climate negotiations into the long weeds. Leaders' attention to climate policy is not coming back -- at least not in any form comparable to the plans being discussed just a few years ago.

Copenhagen will likely be remembered as the moment when advocates for action lost their innocence. For more than a decade, expectations had been raised for a grand global bargain to put a price on carbon that would compel a major reduction in greenhouse-gas emissions -- notably carbon dioxide -- over the coming decades. To understand why this bargain failed requires a basic understanding of where carbon dioxide comes from and how it is reduced. A very simple but powerful framework for such an understanding was proposed in the 1980s by Japanese scientist Yoichi Kaya. Kaya explained that future carbon dioxide emissions would be the product of four factors: population, economic activity, how we obtain our energy, and how we use that energy.

We can simplify these four factors even further. Population and income together are simply GDP, or aggregate economic activity, and the production and consumption of energy reflect the technologies of energy supply and demand. The resulting Kaya Identity -- as his equation has come to be called -- simply says:

Emissions = GDP x Technology

With this simple equation before us, we can see the fundamental challenge to reducing emissions: A rising GDP, all else equal, leads to more emissions. But if there is one ideological commitment that unites nations and people around the world in the early 21st century, it is that GDP growth is non-negotiable. Right now, leaders on six different continents are focused on efforts to grow GDP, and with it jobs and wealth. They're not as worried about emissions.

If you spend any time in the midst of the climate debate, it won't be long before you will be assailed by those who would like to argue that economic growth is unnecessary or even wrong, and stopping it is a key to reducing emissions. I hear these arguments mostly from wealthy liberal academics in posh university towns across the richer parts of the world. Noted environmental activist Bill McKibben, for example, frequently makes the case that "growth may be the one big habit we finally must break," and he is far from a lone voice. But of course, no candidate has ever secured political office on an anti-growth platform. One has to live in a thickly insulated bubble to think that stopping or reversing growth could ever be a feasible way to reduce emissions.

So what's the solution, then? The Kaya Identity tells us that instead of GDP, the focus must be on technology, and here the math is surprisingly simple. Stabilizing the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere would require more than 90 percent of the energy we consume to come from carbon-free sources like nuclear, wind, or solar. Policymakers often discuss reducing annual emissions by 80 percent from 1990 levels. But emissions today are already more than 45 percent higher than in 1990, so that higher level implies a need to cut by more than 90 percent from today's levels. Put another way, in round numbers, we could keep at most 10 percent of our current energy supply, and 90 percent or more would have to be replaced with a carbon-free alternative. Today, about 10 percent of the energy that we consume globally comes from carbon-free sources -- leaving a long way to go.

Frustratingly, this 90 percent threshold for carbon-free energy supply is largely independent of how much energy the world consumes. Every major projection of future energy consumption foresees growth in energy demand around the world, which makes sense when you consider that today 2 billion people or more lack basic access to energy. Energy demand is skyrocketing in China and India, and eventually will in Africa. But even letting your imagination go wild and envisioning a future world that consumes half of the energy we do today would still require that more than 80 percent of our energy supply be carbon-free. This isn't a statement about the feasibility or desirability of improved energy efficiency; it's just math.

Consider this: If the goal is to stabilize the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere at a low level by 2050 (in precise terms, at 450 parts per million or less), then the world would need to deploy a nuclear power plant worth of carbon free energy every day between now and 2050. For wind or solar, the figures are even more daunting.

For several decades, the dominant view among climate specialists was that imposing a high price on carbon emissions -- whether through a tax or a traded permit system -- would create the economic incentive necessary to stimulate the green energy innovation needed. Unfortunately, the track record of such schemes is not encouraging. Any policy that depends for its success on creating economic stress on consumers (or voters) to motivate massive change is a policy doomed to fail. Voters typically respond to higher energy prices by voting out of office any politician or party who is perceived to be working against their economic interests. Supporters of carbon pricing have no good answer for the politics.

Australia has tried to get around this problem by subsidizing its relatively low carbon tax with broader income-tax reform -- that is, the government is returning to consumers more money than is collected by the tax. But the policy still remains wildly unpopular, with 38 percent of the public feeling worse off under the tax and only 5 percent feeling better off one month after its introduction, despite consistent strong support for non-specific action on climate.

Or consider Germany, where the government, having expressed a desire to shut down nuclear and fossil-fuel power altogether, is quickly waking up to reality. German politicians have begun to realize that their present choices are more carbon-intensive fossil fuel, more nuclear, or letting the lights go out. The impotence of the European Emissions Trading Scheme, due to an excess of tradable permits resulting from the economic downturn, actually creates incentives for more coal -- in 2012, black coal consumption is expected to increase by 13.5 percent. The Economist recently concluded that for Germany, "Greenhouse-gas emissions are likely to be higher than they would have been [without the nuclear shutdown] for quite a while to come."

Efforts to secure a high carbon price to create incentives for change still have staunch advocates in the environmental community, despite the little evidence that it can work. Advocates for carbon pricing typically argue that the costs are low or even nonexistent. The typical basis for such claims is an economic model that projects net costs over the better part of a century, with claims of low costs based on that aggregated, hypothetical sum. Such models, often laden with dodgy assumptions -- such as predictions of the magnitude and pace of future technological innovation in energy -- offer little solace to the politician who runs for election every two years and whose political fortunes hinge on the actual short-term costs.

The evidence that a high carbon tax is politically infeasible seems irrefutable, based on experience and common sense. Yet, even so, to try to push the debate forward, advocates constantly seek to demonstrate that climate change is taking place with high tangible costs, as if to try to rebalance the cost-benefit math. Such efforts to stoke alarm have no apparent limit, no matter how tenuous the science. For instance, even though scientists, including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), have observed that the magnitude of drought in the central United States has actually decreased over the past century, there has been a rush to attribute the 2012 drought solely to human causes. Thomas Homer-Dixon, a Canadian economist, cheered on the drought and its devastation, writing "It sounds harsh, but in light of these realities, this year's U.S. drought is good news ... fears about imperiled food security may be our best hope for breaking through widespread climate-change denial and generating the political pressure to do something."

Science and nature provide enough varied data to paint anyone's political ink blot, ensuring that the debate over the weather sustains without end. In this debate ostensibly about the science, the opposing camps have created names for one other -- "alarmists" (who say the costs of inaction will be high) and "deniers" (who say that the costs of inaction will be low or even zero). The end result has been neither to win the debate nor secure a political mandate, but to politicize the science itself.

Even Foreign Policy has played this game. When in 2010 I observed that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had made a rather silly error in its report by including a graph that could not be found in the scientific literature (and was erroneous to boot), FP included me in a line-up of alleged "climate deniers." Rather than seeking to get the science right, the magazine sought to enforce conformity of view. The good news is that the IPCC error has been widely recognized (even by the IPCC author who created the questionable graph) and the FP effort to discredit my views lives on only in the bowels of blogospheric debates over climate, dredged out occasionally by those relying on ad hominem attacks in the never-ending climate wars.

So what's the next step? For years -- decades, even -- science has shown convincingly that human activities have an impact on the planet. That impact includes but is not limited to carbon dioxide. We are indeed running risks with the future climate through the unmitigated release of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere, and none of the schemes attempted so far has made even a dent in the problem. While the climate wars will go on, characterized by a poisonous mix dodgy science, personal attacks, and partisan warfare, the good news is that progress can yet be made outside of this battle.

The key to securing action on climate change may be to break the problem into more manageable parts. This should involve recognizing that human-caused climate change involves more than just carbon dioxide. This is already happening. A coalition of activists and politicians, including numerous prominent scientists, have argued that there are practical reasons to focus attention on "non-carbon forcings" -- human influences on the climate system other than carbon dioxide emissions. The U.N. Environment Program argues that actions like reducing soot and methane could "save close to 2.5 million lives a year; avoid crop losses amounting to 32 million tons annually and deliver near-term climate protection of about half a degree Celsius by 2040."

Some of these opportunities are political. For instance, in the United States, Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK), a loud and theatrical opponent to most action related to climate, supports action on non-carbon forcings, particularly efforts to reduce the amount of particulates in the air. As he explained to the Guardian "Al Gore probably would be against automobile accidents and I am too. This has nothing to do with the CO2 issue." The lesson here is that if Gore and Inhofe can find common political ground on one important aspect of the issue, then there is plenty of hope for progress.

Other human influences on climate, such as those caused by chlorofluorocarbons, which are also known to impact the ozone layer, offer other tantalizing opportunities for progress while circumventing the most gridlocked parts of the debate. Similarly, the global demand for huge amounts of energy in coming decades provides a compelling rationale for energy technology innovation independent of the climate issue.

Of course, we can't ignore carbon dioxide. Carbon emissions will remain a vexing problem because they are so tightly bound to the production of most of the world's energy, which in turn supports the functioning of the global economy. But even here the situation may not be hopeless. America's recent boom in the production of shale gas illustrates the virtuousness of innovation: In the United States, shale gas has become widely available and inexpensive due to technologies developed by the government and private sector over decades and has displaced large amounts of coal in a remarkably short time, dramatically reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the process. According to the U.S. Energy Information Agency, carbon dioxide emissions in 2011 were lower than those of 1996, even though GDP increased by more than 40 percent after inflation.

Natural gas is not a long-term solution to the challenge of stabilizing carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere, because it is still carbon intensive, but the rapidly declining U.S. emissions prove an essential policy point: Make clean(er) energy cheap, and dirty energy will be quickly displaced. To secure cheap energy alternatives requires innovation -- technological, but also institutional and social. Nuclear power offers the promise of large scale carbon-free energy, but is currently expensive and controversial. Carbon capture from coal and gas, large-scale wind, and solar each offer tantalizing possibilities, but remain technologically immature and expensive, especially when compared to gas. The innovation challenge is enormous, but so is the scale of the problem. A focus on innovation -- not on debates over climate science or a mythical high carbon price -- is where we'll make process.

The vast complexity of the climate issue offers many avenues for action across a range of different issues. What we need is the wisdom to have a constructive debate on climate policy options without all the vitriolic proxy battles. The anger and destructiveness seen from both sides of this debate will not be going away, of course, but constructive debate will move on to focus on goals that can actually be accomplished. To paraphrase the great columnist Walter Lippmann, politics is not about getting people to think alike, but about getting people who think differently to act alike. The climate issue will never be solved completely, but it's still possible for us to make things better or worse.

I'm all for doing better.

Drought Parches Much of the U.S.



Dry Dock

A once-floating dock was left high and dry by drought conditions that lowered the level of Medina Lake some 52 feet (16 meters). The lake, which provides water to Texas farmers and the city of San Antonio, is shrunken thanks to an ongoing drought that includes the driest, hottest 12 months in Texas' recorded history.

Across much of the western United States, similar conditions have caused cities, farms, and businesses to fear for the future of their water supply as demand outstrips availability.

"In the Southwest, if you look at the past three-quarters of a century when people were moving here and farming here and building dams here, all that activity was based on a much wetter period of time than we've had historically or what we're likely to have in the future," said Sandra Postel, founder of the Global Water Policy Project and the National Geographic Society's Freshwater Fellow.

Overall, nearly half the country currently faces drought, according to the U.S. Drought Monitor.

http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2012/07/120712-drought-pictures-us/

Andrew Bolt Cuts Ties With Climate Science Denying Galileo Movement Over Alleged Anti-Jewish Conspiracy Theory

ANDREW Bolt is Australia's loudest and most popular climate science doubt-spreader who just loves to stoke the fires of environmental conspiracy theorists with his daily splurge of blog posts and his weekly radio and TV shows.

The blogger and columnist in the Murdoch-owned News Ltd press describes climate change as a "religious movement" and says climate scientists are part of a global conspiracy.

Bolt allows his commenters to refer to the United Nations as the "United Nazis" and regularly joins the "one world government" conspiracy theorists while pulling quotes out of context to insinuate "warmists" have ambitions of totalitarian "global management". He maligns solar power at every opportunity and claims wind farms are an "insult to the intelligence".

But there is at least one conspiracy theory which Andrew Bolt isn't happy to endorse. Up until last week, Bolt was listed as an adviser to one of Australia's most active climate denialist organisations the Galileo Movement. But then what happened?

Click the link to find out http://s.tt/1kawU

Bolt's defection does put him in something of an awkward position, not least because one of the people who Roberts recommends to Bolt for more on his banking theories is David Evans, who is one of Bolt's favourite skeptics.

Evans, the husband of climate sceptic blogger JoNova, once outlined his thesis in a 2009 paper published by the Science and Public Policy Institute titled Manufacturing Money, and Global Warming.

One of Bolt's other favourite "experts" to cite is Christopher Monckton who, like Evans and Nova, is also an adviser to the Galileo Movement.

Monckton has been pushing his various conspiratorial talking points around the globe for years. To add to his insistence that climate change is some sort of socialist plot to take over the world, Monckton has recently taken to questioning the legitimacy of President Barack Obama's birth certificate in a Tea Party-sponsored tour. Is Bolt happy to stick with Monckton, one wonders?

But is it fair to generalise that people who deny climate change science are all conspiracy theorists? Well no, but one piece of new research does suggest that people who reject the science are also more likely to entertain a whole range of whacky ideas. (snafu and his chemtrail nonsense is but one example)

Research led by cognitive psychologist Professor Stephan Lewandowsky at the University of Western Australia, to be published in the journal Psychological Science, found an important predictor for climate science denialism was a belief in free-market economics.

But the research also found a correlation between denial of human caused climate change science and "conspiracist ideation", such as acceptance of supposed CIA plots to kill Martin Luther King, faked Moon landings or how the US government let the Japanese attack Pearl Harbour so they could enter World War II.

Or the strongest correlation, plots to create world governments.

link

Hmmmm...



Got me in one. I believe in free markets and I believe in individual freedom. (In the Adam Smith and John Stuart Mill tradition to be precise).

CeeBee... I presume that as you are such a fan of Lewandowski, I can therefore accurately predict that you don't believe in free market economics?

I have to laugh. Graham Readfearn is not the most intelligent individual. It is one thing to pick an argument as being wrong, but to misread the argument when it is based upon well researched information as conspiracy theories tends to suggest he is way out of his depth in this debate.

CB I don't reject climate science, far from it. I have never said I reject climate science - I studied Geology for a couple of years at high school many years ago that showed me a brief introduction into climate sciences but I reject outright the bullshit that has been promulgated by Hansen, Mann et al as anything but utter flim flam.

The so called science they promote is psuedoscience. It can't be replicated by anyone else, the models have never worked, you can't hindcast with them so you can't forecast with them either, this makes any predictions based on them suspect in the and utter piffle in the extreme. It is the continued reliance on this nonsense in an attempt to make world wide decisions that I utterly reject out of hand.

Whenever a scientist loses his sceptism he loses any ability he has to make credible decsions based on facts because he no longer is looking at data for causes but is now looking to facts to fit his theory and rejecting anything that doesn't fit.

Spoken like a true denier of climate science.

You actually said:

"I don't believe your science, I don't believe your data"

You're no sceptic - you're a fake sceptic and there's no point in denying it!

Mike - you made the mistake of calling that what CeeBee spouts as "science". Get it right. It's climatezience. Sort of like science but not quite.

You can call also it pseudo-science, ersatz-science, or even (pity it does not quite fit) hokey-science.

Hokey HAHAHAHAHA - ROFLMAO!

I have been away and caught up on 153 posts, and I have learnt a strong lesson from reading them all & that is how ridiculous this "mish-mash of to and fro insults particular thread" must appear to any new reader!!!

Hansen out of control.

http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=13963&page=1

James Hansen, Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York City, personifies American author Mary McCarthy's observation that "Bureaucracy, the rule of no one, has become the modern form of despotism." Hansen has used his NASA position to misdirect public policy on climate change for 24 years. His recent pronouncements that humanity is causing a dangerous increase in extreme weather have a similar disregard for scientific accuracy.

The public are turning away from claims of human impacts on climate. Politicians use the poor economy as an excuse to cut funds and bypass the issue. As a result, a counterattack is underway by those using global warming for a political agenda. At the forefront again is NASA bureaucrat Hansen, who put climate activism on the world stage before then-Senator Al Gore's Science, Technology and Space committee hearings in 1988.

In a PBS interview former Senator Timothy Wirth admitted how they chose Hansen, then a maverick NASA scientist-even his supervisor did not agree with him on global warming-and orchestrated his appearance before the 1998 committee. Wirth said,"We called the Weather Bureau and found out what was historically the hottest day of the summer…so we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it…we went in the night before and opened all the windows so that the air conditioning wasn't working inside the room." Wirth summarized the objective in 1993; "We've got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing …"

Hansen told the hearing that he was "99 percent sure . . the [human caused] greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now." No scientist would make such a claim. It even contradicts what the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in 1995. They asserted,"…no study to date has positively attributed all or part of climate change observed to man-made causes." Hansen's 1988 predictions have turned out to be 150 percent wrong.

Undeterred, Hansen now writes that he underestimated how bad things would actually get and makes even more of the sort of mistakes that have been typical throughout his career. In his July 2012 article, The New Climate Dice: Public Perception of Climate Change, he and his co-authors cite the 2007 IPCC Report which said "...observed global warming is now attributed with high confidence to increasing greenhouse gases (IPCC 2007a)."

Yet, real observations show the opposite-temperature has declined as carbon dioxide, the greenhouse gas of most concern to the IPCC, increased.

Hansen et al also tell us that the warming will continue, "...because Earth is now out of energy balance…". He means the balance between solar energy entering the atmosphere and heat energy from the surface going to space. But the Earth is essentially never in balance. As the balance changes the Earth warms or cools. Hansen and his colleagues say it's warming because less heat is going out. But the planet is actually cooling because less heat is coming in since the Sun is in a slight dimming period.

IPCC scientists don't include critical solar changes in their computer models. They were deliberately limited to human-caused climate change and built models to support it. Hansen accepted the hypothesis with narrowness inappropriate in science. He, probably more than any other scientist, then used his position and political views to perpetuate false science to the detriment of society.

Consider the comment by German physicist and meteorologist and Klaus-Eckard Plus:

Ten years ago I simply parroted what the IPCC told us. One day I started checking the facts and data – first I started with a sense of doubt but then I became outraged when I discovered that much of what the IPCC and the media were telling us was sheer nonsense and was not even supported by any scientific facts and measurements. To this day I still feel shame that as a scientist I made presentations of their science without first checking it. The CO2-climate hysteria in Germany is propagated by people who are in it for lots of money, attention and power.

All this suggests either Hansen:
•hasn't looked properly at the IPCC science;
•doesn't properly understand the science; or
•is misinterpreting for some reason.

Cumulative evidence since 1988 suggests option c is the correct one.

It is important to understand that former under-secretary general of the United Nations, Maurice Strong set up the IPCC through the World Meteorological Organization so weather bureaucrats in every country controlled the climate science. They appoint the members, control the data and fund most of the research, mostly to prove the human-caused dangerous global warming hypothesis.

Yet, few have controlled the agenda more than Hansen. He even bullied the White House, claiming they tried to stifle him, an allegation Hansen's boss completely discounted.


It is clear that Hansen has used his position for political activism and abuse of public trust. As a US Federal bureaucrat it appears he has violated the Hatch Act defined as follows:


Enacted in 1939, the Hatch Act (5 U.S.C.A. 7324) curbs the political activities of employees in federal, state, and local governments. The law's goal is to enforce political neutrality among civil servants: the act prohibits them from holding public office, influencing elections, participating in or managing political campaigns, and exerting undue influence on government hiring.

The public has a right to know who is protecting James Hansen and why are they doing it.

http://www.nytimes.com/2012/08/07/scienc...4&smid=tw-share


The percentage of the earth’s land surface covered by extreme heat in the summer has soared in recent decades, from less than 1 percent in the years before 1980 to as much as 13 percent in recent years, according to a new scientific paper.


James E. Hansen, a NASA scientist, led a study that says it is nearly certain that recent extremes wouldn’t have occurred without the release of greenhouse gas.

The change is so drastic, the paper says, that scientists can claim with near certainty that events like the Texas heat wave last year, the Russian heat wave of 2010 and the European heat wave of 2003 would not have happened without the planetary warming caused by the human release of greenhouse gases.

Those claims, which go beyond the established scientific consensus about the role of climate change in causing weather extremes, were advanced by James E. Hansen, a prominent NASA climate scientist, and two co-authors in a scientific paper published online on Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

“The main thing is just to look at the statistics and see that the change is too large to be natural,” Dr. Hansen said in an interview. The findings provoked an immediate split among his scientific colleagues, however.

Some experts said he had come up with a smart new way of understanding the magnitude of the heat extremes that people around the world are noticing. Others suggested that he had presented a weak statistical case for his boldest claims and that the rest of the paper contained little that had not been observed in the scientific literature for years.

The divide is characteristic of the strong reactions that Dr. Hansen has elicited playing dual roles in the debate over climate change and how to combat it. As the head of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, he is one of NASA’s principal climate scientists and the primary custodian of its records of the earth’s temperature. Yet he has also become an activist who marches in protests to demand new government policies on energy and climate.

The latter role — he has been arrested four times at demonstrations, always while on leave from his government job — has made him a hero to the political left, and particularly to college students involved in climate activism. But it has discomfited some of his fellow researchers, who fear that his political activities may be sowing unnecessary doubts about his scientific findings and climate science in general.

Climate-change skeptics routinely accuse Dr. Hansen of manipulating the temperature record to make global warming seem more serious, although there is no proof that he has done so and the warming trend has repeatedly been confirmed by other researchers.

Scientists have long believed that the warming — roughly 2.5 degrees Fahrenheit over land in the past century, with most of that occurring since 1980 — was caused largely by the human release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels. Such emissions have increased the likelihood of heat waves and some other types of weather extremes, like heavy rains and snowstorms, they say.

But researchers have struggled with the question of whether any particular heat wave or storm can be definitively linked to human-induced climate change.

In the new paper, titled “Perception of Climate Change,” Dr. Hansen and his co-authors compared the global climate of 1951 to 1980, before the bulk of global warming had occurred, with the climate of the years 1981 to 2011.

They computed how much of the earth’s land surface in each period was subjected in June, July and August to heat that would have been considered particularly extreme in the period from 1951 to 1980. In that era, they found, only 0.2 percent of the land surface was subjected to extreme summer heat. But from 2006 to 2011, extreme heat covered from 4 to 13 percent of the world, they found.

“It confirms people’s suspicions that things are happening” to the climate, Dr. Hansen said in the interview. “It’s just going to get worse.”

The findings led his team to assert that the big heat waves and droughts of recent years were a direct consequence of climate change. The authors did not offer formal proof of the sort favored by many climate scientists, instead presenting what amounted to a circumstantial case that the background warming was the only plausible cause of those individual heat extremes.

Dr. Hansen said the heat wave and drought afflicting the country this year were also a likely consequence of climate change.

Some experts said they found the arguments persuasive. Andrew J. Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia who reviewed the paper before publication, compared the warming of recent years to a measles outbreak popping up in different places. As with a measles epidemic, he said, it makes sense to suspect a common cause.

“You can actually start to see these patterns emerging whereby in any given year more and more of the globe is covered by anomalously warm events,” Dr. Weaver said.

But some other scientists described the Hansen paper as a muddle. Claudia Tebaldi, a scientist with an organization called Climate Central that seeks to make climate research accessible to the public, said she felt that the paper was on solid ground in asserting a greater overall likelihood of heat waves as a consequence of global warming, but that the finding was not new. The paper’s attribution of specific heat waves to climate change was not backed by persuasive evidence, she said.

Martin P. Hoerling, a researcher with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who studies the causes of weather extremes, said he shared Dr. Hansen’s general concern about global warming. But he has in the past criticized Dr. Hansen for, in his view, exaggerating the connection between global warming and specific weather extremes. In an interview, he said he felt that Dr. Hansen had done so again.

Dr. Hoerling has published research suggesting that the 2010 Russian heat wave was largely a consequence of natural climate variability, and a forthcoming study he carried out on the Texas drought of 2011 also says natural factors were the main cause.

Dr. Hoerling contended that Dr. Hansen’s new paper confuses drought, caused primarily by a lack of rainfall, with heat waves.

“This isn’t a serious science paper,” Dr. Hoerling said. “It’s mainly about perception, as indicated by the paper’s title. Perception is not a science.”

To quote the NY times article for you Anthony, as the conspiracy theory in the post prior seems to miss this:




Thats an outright lie - spend about 2 minutes with any climate model and you would realise that literally every known forcing is included because its pretty damn obvious that you need to rule out each possibility. I am not saying that everything in the models is right, nor are their simulations certain to a degree where I would agree with certain statements by Hansen and others - but up to their current understanding of the climate system climate modellers attempt to include it all - however misguided that might be - from soil moisture to radiative variations. The second sentence reflects a ridiculous paranoia associated with a lack of knowledge or understanding and makes the "skeptic" case very simple to portray as a conspiracy theory (looked down on by society in most cases). Perhaps if more of the hardline skeptical individuals spent more time actually showing why the data is wrong and became less political they could be taken more seriously (the same can be said for the so-called 'activists except exchange right for wrong). Radical polarity is anything but true in the scientific community, but is more commonly found in the political arena. Anyway, I'm going to stick to the science, where I can at least look at the problem rather than paranoid conjecture.

NOTE: I am not talking about all "skeptics" here, I am referring to those that have either little comprehension of the science, or are so angry and polarised in their opinion that they can do little better than spout conspiracy. I firmly believe that there are a number out there that actually have seen flaws in the approach and their opinions differ because of this, and would not refer to them as skeptics, but rather scientists (if they were scientists to begin with) or scientifically-minded.

Study by ‘global warming godfather’: Texas drought, Europe heat waves are climate change

"The science in Hansen’s study is excellent “and reframes the question,” said Andrew Weaver, a climate scientist at the University of Victoria in British Columbia who was a member of the Nobel Prize-winning international panel of climate scientists that issued a series of reports on global warming.

“Rather than say, ‘Is this because of climate change?’ That’s the wrong question. What you can say is, ‘How likely is this to have occurred with the absence of global warming?’ It’s so extraordinarily unlikely that it has to be due to global warming,” Weaver said."

A quote from Climate4you.



Climate models used in the AR4 had very little included on solar effects on the climate in their computations as until the very recently it was believed that the TSI, [ Total Solar Irradiance ] the sum of all the mostly visible parts of the solar spectrum which changes by only about a maximum of 1% across solar cycles, was having negligible effect on the global climate.
No mechanism could be definitely be identified by which the changes in the solar cycle TSI or other solar mechanisms such as the long known changes in the solar magnetic field directions and strengths through solar cycle changes could affect the global climate.

All this changed with the advent of the latest solar observing satellites where it was discovered that the solar UV output, not included in the TSI as it was previously not regarded as significant and the changes in the solar UV flux were not observable, had changed by some 6% when the sun dropped from it's previous very strong solar cycle activity over the last 3 cycles into what now appears to be one of the lowest activity cycles since the Dalton minimum of 1785 to about 1815.
The came Svensmark's hypothesis that strength of the solar magnetic field which is tied to solar activity levels has a very significant influence on the global low level cloud formation and the consequent albedo or reflectivity of the Earth.
It only needs a 2% or 3% change in the global albedo to make the difference between a warming planet and a cooling planet. i
Svensmark's theory is now partly confirmed by data coming out of the recent CERN cloud chamber experiment which was set up specifically to test
Svensmark's theory; ie Strong Solar magnetic fields divert incoming magnetically charged intergalactic cosmic rays from the solar system and therefore less of those cosmic rays impact the earth's upper atmosphere.
Upon impact with the atoms and molecules of the upper atmosphere, the shattered particles from the impacts then drift down into the lower atmosphere where they act as the seed nuclei for the formation of droplets from the super cooled water vapour in the upper atmosphere.

A further process now hypothesized then promotes the aggregation of these droplets into the much larger cloud droplets.
Low level clouds within their extremely reflective upper tops are the prime reason for the earth's albedo so less clouds in the above example , more solar radiation into the lower levels and hence more warming.

In our current low solar activity and low solar magnetic field strength, almost off the scale at the bottom at present, lots more incoming cosmic rays, lots more cloud droplets from nuclear debris from the upper atmosphere collisions between the higher number of cosmic rays and the atmosphere's atoms and molecules and therefore more low level clouds and a much higher albedo and therefore much less solar radiation down at ground level and into the sea surface and therefore global cooling for the duration of the weak solar cycle and further cumulative cooling over any subsequent consecutive weak solar cycles.
Solar scientists expect the next 2 or 3 solar cycles to be very weak; ie; the next 30 years or so to be much colder as a result possibly similar to the Dalton minimum.
Easy reading ref;Calder's Updates

None of this has been included in the previous AR4's modelling and most of it won't be included in the CMIP5 [ Coupled Model Intercomparison Project; phase 5 ] as it is still in very early days of this connection between solar magnetic field activity and cloud formation and albedo effects on incoming solar radiation and the global temperature connection.

The AR5 due in 2013 / 14 apparently will be much less certain in its claims on the direction the global climate will take than the AR4 of 2007.

Further reading on climate modelling [ in layman's language ] and all the limitations of that modeling from an IPCC climate modeler can be found on Tamsin Edward's site "All Models Are Wrong"

I was asked recently for a list of the papers that have been submitted for the IPCC's AR5.

A comprehensive but still incomplete list of papers for the CIMP5 can be found here; Follow the links for more papers and information
Papers based on CMIP5 data

And for Severely Tall; Stormy weather ahead?

Cheers