Oxford Kevin

Anthony Watts who has claimed that NASA’s temperature record only shows a warming trend because of adjustments made to the temperature record or because weather stations have been removed from the list of stations used for creating the global temperature record.

Anthony is now rapidly distancing himself from his co-conspirator E.M. Smith (aka chefio) claiming that it was Smith only who worked on the station drop out on from which Anthony had made his claims. Anthony has been editing or removing old posts from his blog to hide his claims.

Claims like:

Interestingly, the very same stations that have been deleted from the world climate network were retained for computing the average-temperature base periods, further increasing the bias towards overstatement of warming by NOAA.

Anthony Watts has claimed that the measured temperature record has shown an upward rise in temperatures because large number of weather stations have been dropped from the record and that adjustments to temperature data have been made to generate the rise.  

These are serious claims demonstrating either gross incompetence or serious outright scientific fraud, either claim if true would call into question the reliability NASA’s giss temperature series.

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The scientists at the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia have been slammed for not making their raw data, intermediate data and source code available.

Climate Research Unit at UEA

I think the problem has been that in many areas of science keeping data to yourself is commonplace and that this is seen as a reasonable way of working. It forces your competitors to obtain data from the original primary sources and for them to carry out every step independently of the work that you have done. This process makes the sum of knowledge built up by science more robust than if any of the original prepared data or source code, or data from intermediate steps is made available.

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As described at leftfootforward an important amendment for tightening the regulation standards for the building of new power stations failed yesterday. This amendment failed by 8 votes and David Cameron managed to get the Tories attending parliament to vote for the amendment, but 13 Lib Dem MPs could not even be bothered to turn up, including Nick Clegg, Vince Cable, and Chris Huhne. So much for their championing and commitment for tougher regulation that would mean the end of dirty coal fired power stations like the new proposed Kingsnorth station.

A Guardian piece titled: Climate scientists withdraw journal claims of rising sea levels in the current climate debate might lead you to think that overstated claims by climate scientists have had to be retracted. But this could not be further from the truth, instead the scientists have been too conservative with their estimates of sea level rise. Previous estimates of sea level rise have proved to underestimate badly the potential sea level rise. The previous maximum estimate of sea level rise by 2100 of 82 cm is now closer to the new minimum estimate of likely sea level rise by the year 2100.

This is a consequence of the attacks on climate scientists and their attempts to cover their asses not by keeping strictly to what the science says but instead by taking the science and reporting only the more conservative of future estimates of change.

Gravity measurements by satellites is demonstrating that ice loss in Antarctica and Greenland is happening faster than expected and that the melting is rapidly accelerating.

You can see how the denialosphere has run with this headline and taken it to mean what they want it to mean. In this case I use the term denial and not sceptic, because they have once again taken the article headline out of context, interpreting it in a way that nicely fits their world view without any sign of scepticism whatsoever.

If you hadn’t heard of Jonathan Leake then you are lucky. Jonathan is the Science Editor for the Sunday Times.

I’ve been wanting to write something on him for sometime, but all that has happened is that more evidence of his poor journalism keeps coming in that it has been difficult to keep up and impossible to put together the full story. So I’ve decided just to do a quick post.

Tim Lambert of the deltoid blog has done most of the work in digging beneath Jonathan Leake’s lazy journalism, quote mining for dramatic headlines, misrepresentation, plagiarism and journalistic fraud. Eli Rabbet has nicely listed all of Tim’s blog posts so that you can see all of pieces by Tim to that date on Jonathan Leake’s complete lack of journalistic standards.

The journalistic fraud is pretty egregious, Leake was informed two days before publication that his information was factually incorrect but Leake published the piece anyway. Stating that the evidence for 40% of the Amazon being susceptible to a reduction in rainfall was “bogus”. This is typical for Leake and especially so with anything related to climate change from attacking Google for the supposed emissions of a search to his repeated misrepresentation of climate scientists.

Leake is determined to make the case that the science of climate change is awash with uncertainty but can only seem to do it by misrepresenting those whom he quotes or actively ignoring the evidence before his eyes.

I have been having a long discussion with Mr Mouse on this thread at leftfootforward. Mr Mouse states that there is a basis for everything he writes, and claimed that it was far hotter in the Northern Hemisphere during the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) than it is today. I pushed him on this claim because I wanted to see the evidence for it.

At present he hasn’t found the evidence to substantiate his claim, but like him I often know I have read something somewhere but for the life of me can’t find where it came from, so I am not in anyway claiming that Mr Mouse was trying to deceive.

I tracked down some Greenland ice core data. You can download it here and I think that this might be the data that Mr Mouse refers to, the location of where the ice core was taken from can be viewed here. Since Anthony Watts from Watts Up With That so nicely plots the data for me I’ll not plot them again.

Figure 1 shows the MWP centring on the year 1000 ad very strongly. The left hand column is temperature in Celsius (I had to check the original data I linked to above to confirm the temperature scale) and it shows that temperature during the MWP was close to 1.5 degrees warmer than the year 1800 and it also shows temperatures climbing from around 1850 onwards.

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Snow Children Protesting

Snow children fearing for their future gather together to protest against their impending doom.

Snowkie aged three, says “please just let us grow up, I don’t want to be known for being a slushball.”