At a meeting Monday of 150 climate scientists, representatives of Britain's weather office proposed that the world's climatologists start all over again and produce a new trove of global temperature data that is open to public scrutiny and "rigorous" peer review....what a great idea!!
In naming roustabout, lumberjack, ironworker, and dairy farmer America's "worst jobs," CareerCast.com omitted one whose awfulness is counterbalanced only by its public-spiritedness: fact-checking Bjørn Lomborg.
Erm, remember the green power potion of the stimulus, which was supposed to generate all those new American jobs? Uh, maybe not...
"The Workshop was the first to report last October that more than 80 percent of the first $1 billion in grants to wind energy companies went to foreign firms. Since then, the administration has stopped making announcements of new grants to wind, solar and geothermal companies, but has handed out another $1 billion, bringing the total given out to $2.1 billion and the total that went to companies based overseas to more than 79 percent.... The same day the Workshop's first reported on this story a consortium of American and Chinese companies announced a deal to build a $1.5 billion wind farm in Texas, using imported Chinese turbines. Company officials said they planned to collect $450 million in stimulus grants for the project. The deal would create dozens of jobs in the U.S. and thousands in China."
Even Chuck Schumer [D-NY] is annoyed. Repeat after me, kiddies:
"I pledge allegiance to America's debt, and to the Chinese government that lends us money. And to the interest we will pay, compoundable, with higher taxes, fewer services, and lower pay, until the day we die."
Aren't you glad it was all worth it, though? Yeah, me too.
Something those of us who want to prevent catastrophic climate change need to remember is that we're right. Not just factually right, but morally. But while it's true that effective communications tactics employed by the other side have been helpful to their cause, ultimately the main thing that's helped them has been the willingness of people who know better to act in a morally indefensible manner.
I'm fairly certain, for example, that Fred Hiatt wouldn't strangle a baby polar bear just for cheap thrills. But he would run an ignorant Sarah Palin op-ed on climate, and repeatedly allow George Will to mislead people about climate science. What's more, if Hiatt strolled around Washington soaked in the blood of polar bears he'd been strangling, people would treat him like a pariah. But instead his friends and colleagues and professional peers have evidently decided that he's just a nice guy who happens to run a crappy-but-influential op-ed page.
Recent divergence between tree-ring growth and temperature
The final aspect of tree-ring studies that needs to be highlighted is what has become known as the 'divergence' issue. This refers to the apparent failure of some (established as temperature-responsive) tree-ring data to follow the trend in instrumental temperatures observed over the latter part of the twentieth century. Chronology time series that vary largely in parallel with changing temperature in earlier periods progressively fail to show the increasing trends that would represent a continuing positive response to the strong warming observed during recent decades. Originally this was noted primarily in certain northern high-latitude areas for ring-width data in Alaska (Jacoby and D'Arrigo, 1995) and in ring-width and particularly ring-density data, in more extensive regions of northern Europe and Russia (Briffa et al., 1998). In the earlier work, it was suggested that the cause of the North American observations was a shift from a direct dominant temperature control on tree growth to one where lack of available moisture becomes increasingly influential, possibly to an extent where the sign of the temperature influence becomes negative rather than positive (Jacoby and D'Arrigo, 1995; D'Arrigo et al., 2004).
There are three main global temperature datasets. One is at the CRU, Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia, where we've been trying to get access to the raw numbers. One is at NOAA/GHCN, the Global Historical Climate Network. The final one is at NASA/GISS, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The three groups take raw data, and they "homogenize" it to remove things like when a station was moved to a warmer location and there's a 2C jump in the temperature. The three global temperature records are usually called CRU, GISS, and GHCN. Both GISS and CRU, however, get almost all of their raw data from GHCN. All three produce very similar global historical temperature records from the raw data.OK, this is - if true - the answer to one of the questions I hoped to get to in my 'pet project.' Without making any judgment on the quality of the datasets, the interesting issue is that if AGW scientists rely on one sole 'master dataset' rather than heterogeneous sets of data - and if the social pressure is to conform to that one master dataset - the risk of social drift and groupthink get raised substantially.
