Dr Phil Jones, July 5, 2005:
“The scientific community would come down on me in no uncertain terms if I said the world had cooled from 1998. Okay it has but it is only seven years of data and it isn’t statistically significant.”
From: Kevin Trenberth <trenbert@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: Michael Mann <mann@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Subject: Re: BBC U-turn on climate
Date: Mon, 12 Oct 2009 08:57:xxx xxxx xxxx
Hi all
Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record.
The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a
travesty that we can’t.
From: Phil Jones <p.jones@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
To: Tim Johns <tim.johns@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>, “Folland, Chris” <chris.folland@xxxxxxxxx.xxx>
Subject: Re: FW: Temperatures in 2009
Date: Mon Jan 5 16:18:xxx xxxx xxxx
Tim, Chris,
I hope you’re not right about the lack of warming lasting
till about 2020. I’d rather hoped to see the earlier Met Office
press release with Doug’s paper that said something like –
half the years to 2014 would exceed the warmest year currently on record, 1998!
Still a way to go before 2014…..it would be nice to wear their(sceptics) smug grins away.
It seems they were all too right.
The Met Office has downgraded its forecast for global warming to suggest that by 2017 temperatures will have remained about the same for two decades.
However the BBC’s Roger Harrabin is out to limit the damage to the Cause that he so assiduously promotes.
.
With the rapid and unceremonious exit of Richard Black from the portals of the BBC we lost one of the finest examples of a Blogger masquerading as a journalist. However, his carbon footprint has been more than filled by the lamentable Roger Harrabin whose journalism, like Black’s, is shelved in favour of pro man made global warming propaganda.
Here he shows himself to be no better than a ‘mere blogger’ in a piece that is as slippery as it is weasily in trying to overturn the damage done by the Met. Office admission that there has been no warming since 1998 and that this may continue until 2017…totalling at least two decades.
I call Harrabin a ‘Blogger’ for two reasons…firstly that his articles are more propaganda than news and secondly ‘Blogger’ seems to be the agreed term, within the BBC at least, to use now to describe any climate Sceptic….so only fair I return the compliment.
The use of ‘Blogger’ is clearly intended to portray any sceptic as unscientific, unqualified and possibly some sort of lunatic conspiracy theorist…not to be taken seriously. It is clear that this is a term that has official BBC ‘approval’ and is to be used rather than sceptic, denier or contrarian…it will be interesting to see if it crops up in other ‘warmist’s’ writing…such as Dr Joe Smith, as well as amongst BBC environmental journalists.
Harrabin makes excuses left right and centre for the Met Office…..telling us that any impression we may have got that global warming may stand still for two decades is wrong:
‘The story was projected into headlines suggesting that the Met Office admitted global warming wouldn’t be as bad as previously thought. The Met Office didn’t say that, but often complex messages get distorted when journalists, or indeed scientists, try to condense them into a handful of words. The BBC faced criticism over its reporting of the issue.
The damage to Met Office credibility, though, was exacerbated by a couple of blunders in its own communication.’
He assures us that it is all the fault of bad communication skills…on the part of the BBC, and by the Met Office itself.
He tells us that there was no conspiracy to hide the data…..they have a ‘plausible explanation’ and that a badly worded caption led to the wrong conclusions.
Apparently not only does Harabin accept such explanations..he should do as he invented them….but he assures us so do the legendary pack of feral Bloggers…..
‘It was badly-worded and led bloggers to conclude that the Met Office were trying to cover up the disparity between forecasts. (They seem to have accepted later that this is not the case).’
He tries to damn climate sceptics further…..claiming it is not the science but politics that motivates the ‘Blogger’ sceptics:
‘It also drew into the climate debate some libertarian bloggers who fear the impact of climate policies on individual freedoms and who temperamentally distrust authorities.’
‘Temperamentally’…..nicely chosen word that…has all sorts of connotations.
He makes a case for the poor, put upon Met Office researchers who only want to be left alone to do their science:
“Ideally, we would like to just publish our science. But it is clear now that we have to make sure that we time releases carefully. I hate the idea of that – but it looks like it will have to happen. We’ll also have to make sure they are accompanied with explanatory notes.”
Ultimately of course, as always, it is the fault of the Public….who just aren’t educated enough to grasp the reality and complexities of science….
‘Ensuring that the public understand the difference in levels of certainty of these different sorts of science has long been a challenge.
When talking to the media, for instance, some prominent scientists used to use the shorthand phrase: “With climate change the planet will warm by X degrees.” What they meant was “according to our best projections the world will warm X degrees”. There is a difference.’
Hang on….’according to our best projections’……there is a difference?
All the difference in the world…by saying that, Harrabin admits then that the BBC’s stance on the climate science being settled is wrong….as it is merely based on ‘best projections’ not ‘will warm’….so there must be room for people who wish to challenge the ‘settled science’….the BBC must start allowing ‘Sceptics’ a voice again on the airwaves, not just the voice of their own highly motivated pro AGW journalist.
Harrabin hasn’t finished though…as usual rounding it all up with a bit of scaremongering to whip us all into line and make us think ‘something must be done’ or we’ll all fry and die……remember last year was the ‘weirdest year of weather’ and ‘extremes’ are the result of global warming (er that has stood still for 15 or so years)……..
‘With global temperatures [last year] ranking “only” ninth in the recordwe suffered dreadful extremes.
We can’t be sure yet which, if any, were made worse by manmade climate change, although a study from researchers in Germany suggests that heatwaves are five times more likely due to current levels of heating.
But let’s not forget that the extremes were produced on a planet that has warmed by “only” 0.7C in a century. Even the arch climate sceptic Richard Lindzen agrees it will warm by one degree or so, but maintains we can be fairly relaxed about that. Based on current patterns others may disagree.
And what if the world warms at least 2C, which most scientists think likely – or 4C which the World Bank thinks probable on current trends.
If we get more and more years like 2012 we face serious challenges.’
From an article on The Commentator website:
‘We ought to start expecting our governments to abandon doomsday scenarios in the guise of popular science in favour of old-fashioned “under-the-microscope”, empirical science.’
Of course, the pro-alarmist BBC gets a mention. The link:
http://www.thecommentator.com/article/2472/global_warming_just_isn_t_happening_official
I should not think so. Global warming is a tool of the left to attack commerce and big business, but not only that, it provides the sought after publicity they so crave and provides them a health income.
Will to BBC do a full investigation into the latest data ?
No chance, they will lie, misrepresent and omit evidence to maintain their stance.
I’d say it was the elite that are running this lie not just the left. All those public school Normans that seem to infest all the plum jobs – either left ot right.
They see us as a tax crop and AGW is just another method of harvesting.
Good article.
‘Nor should we expect a highly politicized organization like the UN to admit how apocalyptic pseudo-scientific prophecies offer it an unprecedented shot at achieving its primary ambition: global governance.’
Exactly. See UN Agenda 21 which is basically the IPCC’s recommended actions to mitigate ‘climate change’ writ large as a world eco-socialist political system.
12mins 40. no more words needed – the rest of this explains your point clearly.
Harrabin, Fucking hell, other than Paul Hudson, there is no one at the BBC remotely qualified in Planetary Atmospheric Physics. So how could I debate the science with that moron.
A great deal of what I learned about the greenhouse effect was a waist of time and has been a disappointment as (Greenhouse effect in semi-transparent planetary atmospheres, Ferenc M. Miskolczi, 2007) would reveal. That paper revealed that everyone in atmospheric physics was on to a dead end in understanding climate.
Then along comes (Unified Theory of Climate, Ned Nikolov & Karl Zeller, 2011). The Unified Theory of Climate calibrates CO2 warming in the Earths atmosphere using thermodynamics, as far too small to be detected, as well as pointing to Cosmoclimatology as having the answer to Global Warming in the 20th Century.
So this makes everything much more simple, for instance the “Greenhouse Effect” is “as the increase in pressure reduces the speed of transfer of heat, the increase in heat maintains the equilibrium with the input of heat from the Sun, as more heat is transferred but at a slower rate, maintaining the equilibrium“.
I can assure you that if you can understand relativity as a great many non-scientist can, then non-scientist have a right to have an opinion on the Met Office.
The Met Office is only trying to make things as complex as possible because this is the essential motive for people at the Met Office to justify their jobs, as is the case in many parasitical organisations.
This is why private weather forecasters on an infinitely smaller budgets, such as Weatheraction are booming.
Harrabin assures us that it is all the fault of bad communication skills…on the part of the BBC, and by the Met Office itself.
The job of public relations people is to tell believable lies because that is their job, otherwise the scientists would be free to say the truth, but they fear telling the truth because of the consequences from left-wing green thugs like Harrabin.
The left-wing green activists influence on Public Relations, Journalists and Editors at the BBC, has recently been revealed by the identities of the people invited to the BBC‘s Climate Change Seminar. These groups are almost exclusively qualified in the Arts and Humanities and seem to worship science as a religion, but are not interested in science as an intellectual subject to read about or understand.
I cannot say much, and am not sure of the rumours, but if what is being said at Oxford is true, I do not think the BBC Trust will last until the end of the year.
I am a scientist in a different field however the same guiding principles apply within all scenarios.
If one is to approach the subject of AGW then the principle is that there must be a base line of warming that is attributable to the effects of the sun which we know is the cause of cycles of cooling and heating (ice-age/warm periods). The additional cooling caused by CO2 could then be assigned. However we fail to factor in variables such as cloud effect from volcanoes and major fires that lead to significant cooling (see period in 1400’s when many thousands in Europe died from cold and hunger due to volcanic activity).
Here’s my difficulty; our technology to measure temperatures is very finite in comparison to the current period of warming. Any data that we do have is very short in comparison to the period. If we were to place a value on this it would be the equivalent of one page in a book containing 5000 pages. Such finite data cannot provide any kind of base line for warming and therefore it would be impossible to attribute small scale changes to temperature to any particular variable like CO2.
Jones et al tried to extrapolate tree ring data but peer review has shown such information to be unreliable.
Ergo there is insufficient data to attribute natural variations in temperature to a single cause. Richard Pinder, an imminent solar scientist, has said many times on this blog that it is impossible to quantify the effects of solar flares. We know little about the sun and even less about predicting when solar flares occur and the exact effect these events have on our atmosphere and therefore the effect on our planet. Since our sun is our primary influence without detailed knowledge of it effects it is impossible to predict with any certainty what might or might not happen over any period.
Finally a figure or 0.7C rise is bandied around. In the realm of finite figures, and lack of long term data, such a figure is pure fiction because it would fail on statistical variance which would be in the realm of +_ 2C.
I helped with a Mensa article on Weather from Space, but I have not done anything about solar flares effects on weather. I am more of a Climate from Space expert, which is about long term trends of 11 years or more.
This is from the article, and may be of interest.
An El Nino can be triggered by a sudden solar magnetic blast from a coronal hole on the Sun hitting the Magnetosphere, and when Stratospheric ozone levels are high a sudden increase in short-wave solar radiation causes a Sudden Stratospheric Warming event which then causes the evaporation of high altitude cirrus cloud. The increase in the temperature of the air at the upper limits of the high pressure cells in subtropical latitudes is greater than elsewhere because these cells entrain ozone from the stratosphere. These same cells give rise to the trade winds. The increase in temperature at the top of the descending column of air counteracts the tendency for the air to settle. Sea surface pressure falls and wind strength abates. The loss of trade wind velocity is the surface manifestation of an El Nino. Sudden Stratospheric Warming events at other times (they occur twice every three years on average) also cause the upper-tropospheric winds to slow, become stationary, reverse and or change direction. These blocking patterns typically exist over the same location for three to five days and on rare occasions may persist for weeks. Watching these events develop and then comparing these events with weather patterns in the past and the position of the Moon in its 19 year Metonic cycle comprises part of the Solar Lunar Action Technique of the long-range weather forecaster Piers Corbyn of WeatherAction who correctly predicted the last three cold winters.
And this is the cause of Global Warming.
The speed of the centre of the Sun relative to the centre of mass or barycentre of the Solar System determines the length of the solar cycle, this in turn is caused by the orbits and masses of the Planets. Short Solar Cycles have higher Solar Magnetic activity due to the increase in the speed of plasma within the Sun, and therefore a larger number of Sun spots. Long Solar Cycles have lower Solar Magnetic activity and therefore a smaller number of Sun spots.
Between 1913 and 1996, only one of eight Solar Cycles was longer than the mean Solar Cycle length of 11.04 years, the last of these was the shortest Solar Cycle for more than 200 years, the strength of the Suns magnetic field more than doubled, the cosmic ray flux fell by 11 percent and there was a 8.6 percent reduction in clouds.
So you see how that looking at the orbits of the Planets you can work out that there is going to be a little ice age in the 2020’s.
How very refreshing, that we have at least 2 scientists ,who appear on this site & give us an unbiased view of “Global Warming” unlike the socialist green sh*t coming out of TV Centre or is it New Broadcasting ( £1 billion +) House !
Yet another AGW/CC article with no opportunity for readers to comment. It has been some considerable time since comments have been allowed, as far as I can tell. What is the BBC worried about?
The CAGW alarmist cause is unravelling fast and they really don’t like it. You would think that they would be delighted for mankind’s sake that we are probably not all going to fry after all. Instead they appear to be pretty annoyed that they are being shown to be wrong. The tone of Jones’ email is very revealing.
In view of recent developments, the BBC has no excuse whatever for not opening up the debate on Global Warming. The science is most definitely NOT settled.
Snow News Day
BBC Radio 5 will hardly be stuck for content for their regular news headlines today. Algeria, Europe and Lance Armstrong spring to mind.
However at 10am this morning prominent in the news are alarming headlines about snow in the UK juxtaposed with bush fires in Australia.
The sound journalistic rule is : man bites dog – that is a story.
So, when it snows in the British summer and when the Aussies get bush fires in their winter, then BBC that is news.
Otherwise I suspect you are pushing an agenda.
‘The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.’
He’s writing that like a travesty is a bad thing, when from my observation of certain science and its reporting by the world’s most reliable propaganda monopoly I think it’s more a requirement in the guidelines.
Comrades Harrabin and Shukman are common purpose trolls who’s main job is to pimp the CAGW meme as often as possible, no matter the sheer amount of growing evidence that the entire ‘man-made climate change’ edifice is built on very shifting sand, indeed.
The BBC, which these days sees itself primarily as a leftwing political organisation will continue to provide its support, tacitly and sometimes quite brazenly, via a compulsory UK tax, to such Marxist political shenanigans as the wretched Agenda 21 and the ever-expansionist UN, which has tried repeatedly at successive ‘climate conferences’ (known as ‘Conference of the Parties’) to introduce laws for a ‘global police force’ to enforce ‘sustainability’, as well as a global ‘climate change’ court to try those it deems ‘offenders’ against Mother Earth – or ‘Gaia’. The UN also wishes, of course, to introduce a raft of new and draconian laws with which to govern their shiny new, green sustainable future. The UN has been watching and learning from the EU’s slick stealth moves. That’s how you build an empire – one slice of legislation at a time. People tend not to notice that kind of thing until its too late.
Harrabin and Shukman do what they can to propagandize on behalf of these aims from within the BBC bunker. Of course, they never spell it all out quite so clearly, but every time they endorse the political invention known as CAGW, they are demonstrating yet again not only their contempt for genuine science (in favour of a politically agreed ‘consensus’ – and as we all know, science has never worked by ‘consensus’) but also their unwillingness to engage in anything remotely resembling the truth.
Such is the parlous state of climate ‘journalism’ at the p*sspoor BBC.
I know this is a dumb, newby question but how is the ‘temperature of the Earth’ determined? In any given minute the temperature of the earth’s surface varies from below zero to 50°C plus depending where it is measured. Twelve hours later the temperture may have risen or fallen due to heat from the sun reaching or not reaching also depending on position. We can add to this the influence or lack of influence from the seasons. Every child knows this.
When we are told that the world has warmed or cooled or stayed stable how do we reach that figure? Are we just talking about an average over 365 days for a sample of places?
The worlds average telephone number, sorry, average temperature as calculated by UEA:
http://www.cru.uea.ac.uk/cru/data/temperature/#faq
I don’t think they address the question to quite the basic level as “someone looks at a thermometer to record the highest and lowest that day and we add ’em all up, so I have no idea either, but I suspect that is what happens.
Perhaps a scientist could enlighten us. After all, we are supposed to change how we all live because of it.
It’s actually a darned good question.
I was pondering this as I checked out an eco competition that promised to take me from the bottom of the seas to the top of the highest mountain ( I presume on foot).
That we get to exist on the thinnest eggshell of this massive sphere where such extremes exist already, and beyond which we’d be toast, or frozen, or squashed, etc, already seems a heck of a lucky break, but that this is also all on a wobbly ball whose orbit around the sun is at such a precise distance a tilt can take us from freezing to baking on a whim (with added water, meteor-burning atmosphere and solar-wind distracting magnetic fields) is beyond fortunate.
London Calling and GW: you might find these links useful:
Steve McIntyre’s is one of the best sources for data and statistical analysis (see menu left-hand margin)…
http://climateaudit.org/statistics-and-r/
Background to the deconstruction of Mann’s ‘hockey stick’…
Click to access McKitrick-hockeystick.pdf
Plus a plethora of further links from both sites.
Couldn’t find any basic information about the definition of the building block, temperature data unit for one thermometer reading that makes up the 3 or 6 thousand they add together.
Everyone seems to take “the data” as given, then argue how you weight it for the uneven geographical location of the “readings”. This commenter summed it up for me:
Malcolm Miller says: July 13, 2010 at 3:56 pm
This seems to me all a terrible waste of time and effort. We don’t know how to measure the surface temperature of the whole planet (always changing with night, day, weather, seasons, etc) from here. Maybe it could be measured from space. But that would give us no information about what it was in the past, or how it might have changed in 100 or 200 or 500 years (all very tiny intervals in terms of geological time!). So what is the ‘temperature of the planet’ and where do you put the thermometer? It seems to me that the present records and readings are so suspect and so inaccurate (those Stevenson screens!) that they are useless and don’t represent valid data.
The only problem with average temperature at the moment is the increase in emphasis of the Arctic by the Met Office. The Met Office assumes that the increase in temperature this century was caused by a decrease in Albedo.
But in fact the Albedo has increased in the Arctic according to the CERES instrument on the Modis satellites. This means that cloud cover in the Arctic has increased temperatures as clouds trap heat. The Arctic has far more heat input than the Antarctic region, due to the jet stream. So the Met Office have diddled the average temperature upwards.
Another way that the Met Office could diddle the average temperature for January, is the fact that the Earth is closer to the sun in January and irradiance is almost 7 percent stronger than it is in July. So I wonder if they will take my advice on this.
If it were 7 years of warming I’m sure they would consider it “statistically significant”. Also that’s a throwaway term he’s using to dismiss the data. I bet he hasn’t actually checked the actual mathematical statistical significance.
‘‘something must be done’ or we’ll all fry and die……remember last year was the ‘weirdest year of weather’ and ‘extremes’ are the result of global warming’
And yet according to the latest leaked draft of the UN IPCC report, there is nothing to suggest a link between the rise in temperature thus far and ‘extreme weather events’.
So where’s he getting his science from? Could it be the CMEP bunch the BBC held their secret meeting with, dominated by climate activists?
It is now blatantly obvious the BBC is pushing the eco-socialist political agenda which lies behind ‘climate change’ and will shamefully ignore any evidence that warming has little to do with CO2 (as the past 15 years have proven). Their use of activist language (‘bloggers’, deniers’) and refusal to acknowledge the vast body of scientists and their research which contradicts the AGW theory is in blatant contravention of their charter. This now needs a public enquiry, and fast.
I look forward to school teachers recalling every pupil they taught this rubbish to over the last fifteen years. They would have to do so if it was Toyota and a faulty steering mechanism caused the car to constantly swerve to the left.
They probably see it for the rubbish that it is already. No recall necessary as I think the general public-school kids included- have always been sceptical about the whole man made global warming phenomenon. AGW is an obsession of the political class-it’s useful to them as it gives them power over people and a justification to tax people more in the name of ‘the environment’-and the BBC.
The BBBC never ceases to make me feel nauseous with its filth and propaganda dressed up as news.
I’d say Harrabin used the term “blogger” as a pejorative in the sense that he is a professional “journalist”, paid a handsome sum for his work, and see blogger as amateurs and cranks beneath him. He does more than type out posts for the website as well: he appears on air from time to time in his professional, paid capacity. Bloggers, in general and until recently, are not paid, certainly don’t make a living doing it, don’t do it professionally, and on-air appearances are not part of the regular duties of a blogger.
Just like when other legacy media hacks dismiss “mere bloggers”, Harrabin is trying to separate the professionals from the unprofessionals. It’s not at all the same thing as saying that all bloggers are conspiracy theorists and propagandists.
Harrabin is a propagandist, but he’s paid to be one on air as well as on the website. That makes him a professional propagandist, but not really a blogger.