This blog uses the best up-to-date peer-reviewed climate science, quality sources, logic and critical thinking to explain man-made climate change and to debunk fake news, propaganda, myths and conspiracy theories.
Bloggen bruker den beste oppdaterte fagfellevurderte klimavitenskapen, kildekritikk og kritisk tenking til å forklare de menneskeskapte klimaendringene og til å svare på falske nyheter, propaganda, myter, konspirasjonsteorier og alternative virkelighetsoppfatninger om klima.
If you could know the truth about the threat of climate change — would you want to know? Before the Flood, presented by National Geographic, features Leonardo DiCaprio on a journey as a United Nations Messenger of Peace, traveling to five continents and the Arctic to witness climate change firsthand. He goes on expeditions with scientists uncovering the reality of climate change and meets with political leaders fighting against inaction. He also discovers a calculated disinformation campaign orchestrated by powerful special interests working to confuse the public about the urgency of the growing climate crisis. With unprecedented access to thought leaders around the world, DiCaprio searches for hope in a rising tide of catastrophic news.
In 2013 renewables accounted for almost 22% of global electricity generation, and the IEA Medium-Term Renewable Energy Report 2015 foresees that share reaching at least 26% increase in 2020.
..the world met 13.7% of its energy needs from zero-carbon sources in 2014. Solar and wind, in particular, are growing fast, with output more than doubling in the five years to 2014. A quarter century ago, wind and solar energy provided 0.1% of global needs.
A new report released
by the International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) reveals that solar
jobs in the US (and other nations) are expanding quickly. As of
November 2016, the American solar industry employed 260,077 workers.
This is an increase of 24.5 percent from 2015, with a growth rate that
is 17 times faster than the United States economy as a whole.
Solar and wind power cheaper than fossil fuels for the first time
China
has already reached its solar energy installation target for 2020,
reaffirming its position as the largest producer of solar power on
earth.
A comprehensive survey
of the wind industry shows wind energy is routinely purchased in bulk
for just two cents per kilowatt-hour—and turbines are only getting
cheaper, bigger, and better.
Scotland’s wind turbines provided more electricity than the country needed four days in a row
Look, no lithium! First rechargeable proton battery created
Renewables, not natural gas, were main driver behind drop in U.S. power sector emissions in 2017
https://thinkprogress.org/carbon-emissions-decline-with-renewables/ Two
new records for Scottish wind power ‘underline the massive progress
Scotland is making in securing an ever increasing proportion of its
electricity needs from wind power and other clean renewable sources’,
says WWF Scotland director Lang Banks
More Than 100 Cities Worldwide Now Powered Primarily by Renewable Energy
These cities get more than 70 percent of their electricity from wind, solar, geothermal and other renewables. That’s up since the Paris climate agreement
Tenk
om alle midlene som blir brukt til å tåkelegge klimadebatten kunne
blitt brukt til å tenke nytt isteden? Når en ser hvilke enorme summer
som er blitt brukt: Klimafornekting er storindustri.
Myth #1: Wind power is the Ted Bundy of bird-killers.
Fact: The myth that turbines kill birds is one of the most common arguments against wind energy, but it is not grounded in fact.
According to a 2007 report
by the National Research Council (NRC), wind turbine losses account for
"a minute fraction" of bird deaths caused by human activities. In 2003,
wind turbines killed an estimated 20,000 to 37,000 birds in a year. And
while this may seem like a lot, it makes up less than 0.003% of bird
deaths for that year. In comparison, collisions with buildings kill 97
to 976 million birds annually; cars are thought to kill 80 million birds
per year; toxic chemicals kill more than 72 million birds each year;
And cats? Yeah, they kill hundreds of millions of birds each year.
Myth #3: Solar power won't work in places that are cloudy or cold.
Fact:
Thanks to organic photovoltaic (OPV) technology, solar panels work even
in cold or cloudy places. In fact, in places like London or Seattle,
OPV devices could actually generate more solar energy
than their more traditional, silicon counterparts. Silicon cells
require direct sunlight, but OPV generates energy regardless of whether
the angle is direct or not. This means that even though there is less
overall sunlight on cloudy days, OPV is still able to capture diffuse
and reflected light.
The seven megatrends that could beat global warming: 'There is reason for hope'
Det er åpenbart at elbiler er mer energieffektive i bruk enn fossilbiler. Men hva med all energien som går med til produksjonen?
Det er feil å hevde at elbiler har små, om noen, miljøfordeler
sammenlignet med fossilbiler. For å beregne hvordan ulike biler påvirker
miljøet, må man undersøke utslippene for hele bilens livsløp.
En livsløpsanalyse finansiert av Europakommisjonen slår fast en
miljøgevinst på mellom 50 og 60 prosent, målt etter utslipp i form av
drivhusgasser. Flere andre studier viser også betydelig reduserte
utslipp for elbiler sammenlignet med andre biler
President
Trump has called the Paris climate accord “very unfair” for the United
States, especially the coal industry, and pledged to restore coal
miners’ jobs. But bringing back coal isn’t the same thing as bringing
back coal miners’ jobs.
Almost all coal use in the United States is for producing electricity.
Coal mining jobs are declining partly because low natural gas prices
have cut coal’s market share from 50 percent in 2000 to 30 percent in
2016. Også i Australia går kull tilbake.
Toxic air, water, soils and workplaces are responsible for the diseases that kill one in every six people around the world, the landmark report
found, and the true total could be millions higher because the impact
of many pollutants are poorly understood. The deaths attributed to
pollution are triple those from Aids, malaria and tuberculosis combined.
The vast majority of the pollution deaths occur in poorer nations and
in some, such as India, Chad and Madagascar, pollution causes a quarter
of all deaths. The international researchers said this burden is a
hugely expensive drag on developing economies.
Over the past century, the federal government has pumped more than $470 billion into the oil and gas industry in the form of generous, never-expiring tax breaks. Once intended to jump-start struggling domestic drillers, these incentives have become a tidy bonus for some of the world’s most profitable companies.
Taxpayers currently subsidize the oil industry by as much as $4.8 billion a year, with about half of that going to the big five oil companies—ExxonMobil, Shell, Chevron, BP, and ConocoPhillips—which get an average tax break of $3.34 on every barrel of domestic crude they produce. With Washington looking under the couch cushions for sources of new revenue, oil prices topping $100 a barrel, and the world feeling the heat from its dependence on fossil fuels, there’s been a renewed push to close these decades-old loopholes. But history suggests that Big Oil won’t let go of its perks without a brawl.
A new paper published in Climatic Change estimates that when we account for the pollution
costs associated with our energy sources, gasoline costs an extra $3.80
per gallon, diesel an additional $4.80 per gallon, coal a further 24
cents per kilowatt-hour, and natural gas another 11 cents per
kilowatt-hour that we don’t see in our fuel or energy bills.
Children labour/slave labour cobolt claims pushed by petroleum industry lobbyists is a bit ironic:
is a very old problem not related to electric cars. Only a fringe amount of cobolt used in electric cars batteries comes from child laboured mines in Congo. Child labour in english coal and iron mines was common in the 19th century.
"Until the mid-nineteenth century, the British state accepted that children as young as five years old were an acceptable part of the industrial workforce."
There are better places to get cobalt than the artisanal mines in Congo, and alternative chemistries and cobalt recycling are also providing promising pathways toward lowering raw cobalt demand.
According to the Amnesty International report that first opened the world’s eyes to the troubles of cobalt mining in Congo, Tesla was not called out “because its main battery cell supplier, Panasonic, sources its cobalt from the Philippines and not Congo.” Tesla also has committed to sourcing cobalt and other raw materials exclusively from North America for its new Gigafactory battery production facility.
According to the U.S. Geological Survey, 58 percent of the world’s cobalt is mined in Congo. (CNN’s investigation claims in consecutive slides, that “two-thirds of the world’s cobalt come from Congo” and that 58.8 percent is cobalt produced in Congo, providing the London Metal Exchange as the source for the latter figure). Of the cobalt sourced in Congo, according to CNN, roughly one-fifth is mined by hand. Accordingly, roughly 7.5 percent of the world’s cobalt is mined in the disturbing manner portrayed in the CNN multimedia piece.
That’s still far too much, of course, but the startling conditions at the “artisanal” hand mines shown by CNN are still the minority fringe of the industry.
Additionally, electric vehicles — which CNN’s headline and language within the article blames for the unethical mining practices — are responsible for a relatively small percentage of the total cobalt that is mined, marketed, and put to use.
In other words, just over 10 percent of the world’s cobalt supply is currently being used for batteries to power electric cars.
The bigger culprits are portable consumer electronics — like cell phones and laptop computers — which use around 72 percent of the cobalt that goes into lithium ion batteries, or roughly 30 percent of all cobalt mined.
“let’s also not forget that the supply chain for gasoline-powered vehicles has its fair share of issues, ranging from human rights violations like the use of child labor, to disastrous oil spills like Deepwater Horizon.”
Electric cars are still a small, but growing, part of the market for raw cobalt. Electric carmakers, however, will continue to improve battery technology to reduce dependence on cobalt and can better source the cobalt that they do require from well-regulated mines and from recycled resources. Meanwhile, gasoline-powered cars will always depend on oil, which has a long and irrefutably exploitative supply chain that harms communities at the point of extraction, in the areas that is it refined, and then again when the byproducts of its combustion spew out of tailpipes.
Rare earths is a misnomer, because they are neither “rare” nor “earths.” They are rare in their pure forms, but plentiful as compounds. They are called “earth metals” because that used to be the term for metals that can dissolve in acid.
Quote from Wikipedia:
Neodymium
“Although neodymium is classed as a rare earth, it is a fairly common element, no rarer than cobalt, nickel, and copper, and is widely distributed in the Earth's crust. “
Around 2010, some articles and commentators warned that shortages of rare earths, or China’s near-monopoly on them, could choke off the West’s shift to renewable energy and other clean technologies. This was never true—but the myth persists.
And if there ever was a minor problem, its about to go away.
Most modern turbines dont even use rare earth materials:
Around half of the annual output of Siemens wind turbines now feature permanent magnet generators – they are incorporated into all new models as standard.
"David Rose makes the extraordinary claim that “world leaders were duped into investing billions over manipulated global warming data”, accusing the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) of manipulating the data to show more warming in a 2015 study by Tom Karl and coauthors."
This smear attack, which was built on hot air, fell apart like a house of cards. Lets debunk it in three simple steps:
1. In the fall of 2017, and try not to laugh now, the Daily Mail, the newspaper which first printed the story, published a rebuttal of their own story. It WAS a hoax:
"World leaders had NOT been "duped", as the headline said, and there was no "irrefutable evidence" that the paper was based on misleading, unverified data, as the article had claimed."
"We are disappointed with this finding, but we accept it and are publishing the adjudication with prominence in the newspaper and online."
Here is the fake graph Daily Mail printed, debunked and explained:
Mail on Sunday gets two measurement series to appear as different by using different starting points.Taking the same starting point for the temperature deviation, the two measuring series become identical.This is directly fraudulent by Mail on Sunday.
2.The NOAA study has since been independently confirmed. Scientists went through both the NOAA work and other new estimates for the warming. They find that all estimates conclude equally and use correct methods. Ironicly there is a small bias towards cooling.
Assessing recent warming using instrumentally homogeneous sea surface temperature records.
Abstract
Sea surface temperature (SST) records are subject to potential biases due to changing instrumentation and measurement practices. Significant differences exist between commonly used composite SST reconstructions from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Extended Reconstruction Sea Surface Temperature (ERSST), the Hadley Centre SST data set (HadSST3), and the Japanese Meteorological Agency’s Centennial Observation-Based Estimates of SSTs (COBE-SST) from 2003 to the present. The update from ERSST version 3b to version 4 resulted in an increase in the operational SST trend estimate during the last 19 years from 0.07° to 0.12°C per decade, indicating a higher rate of warming in recent years. We show that ERSST version 4 trends generally agree with largely independent, near-global, and instrumentally homogeneous SST measurements from floating buoys, Argo floats, and radiometer-based satellite measurements that have been developed and deployed during the past two decades. We find a large cooling bias in ERSST version 3b and smaller but significant cooling biases in HadSST3 and COBE-SST from 2003 to the present, with respect to most series examined. These results suggest that reported rates of SST warming in recent years have been underestimated in these three data sets.
Fig. 2 Twelve-month centered moving
average of temperature difference series between composite and
buoy-only, CCI, and ARC SST anomalies.Values below 0 indicate that the
composite series has a cool bias relative to the IHSST record.
3. IT WASNT EVEN ABOUT THE VALIDITY OF THE DATA, ONLY ABOUT ARCHIVING.
These 6 sentences sums up what is was all about:
"Bates himself later told E&E News that "The issue here is not an issue of tampering with data, but rather really of timing of a release of a paper that had not properly disclosed everything it was." In other words: The issue was never the truth of the global warming pause, which most other scientists agree likely didn't happen. Rather, it was a straightforward debate about data archiving and management.
THE NEW NOAA SMEAR CAMPAIGN RUNNING IN DENIER BLOGS
Temperature measurements made with different instruments and methods
over time must necessarily be adjusted to ensure high-quality records of
temperature that reliably represent changes. The adjustments needed for
land stations in the United States often increase the apparent
long-term warming, but overall, adjustments actually reduce the global
warming trend.
For a long time the UAH satellite data showed less warming than all the other data, but this was due to a bug in the system. When this calibration error was fixed, the data showed the same warming as the other data.
CLIMATEGATE DEBUNKED The issue:
In late November 2009, more than 1,000 e-mails between scientists at the
Climate Research Unit of the U.K.’s University of East Anglia were
stolen and made public by an as-yet-unnamed hacker. Climate skeptics are
claiming that they show scientific misconduct that amounts to the
complete fabrication of man-made global warming.
The hacker attack was a manufactured "controversy" by fossil fuel interests and global warming denialists - timed specifically to disrupt the 2009 and 2011 climate talks and the Cap and Trade bill.
2009: In Copenhagen, an important climate meeting is about to happen and in the United States the so-called "cap and trade" bill would reduce CO2 emissions. The fossil fuel industry goes into panic mode. "Something" had to be done.
Let's see, what is the cheapest trick in the book? Ahh, smear campaigns !! Emails from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) in England are stolen by an hacker. (So convinient for fossil fuel interests!). The contents of these emails were twisted and cherry picked out of context thus "proved" climate science and scientists was corrupt.
The right-wing conservative media in the United States, including the mad cappers, of course, went completely bananas. The all reported the case exactly in the same manner. The news anchors words were the same, they were like programmed robots, thats how carefully planned the hacker attack was.
Late 2009: Right-wing media goes wall to wall with coverage of the emails, claiming climate change is a global conspiracy. Rush Limbaugh says, “It looks like substantial fraud,” and he calls for
the scientists involved to be “named and fired, drawn and quartered, or
whatever it is.” After a conservative media watchdog organization demands that
the major broadcast networks cover the “growing scandal,” the networks
comply. “Have the books been cooked on climate change?” asks NBC’s Brian Williams at the start of one broadcast. “Did scientists skew their research to support theories about global warming?” asks ABC’s Charles Gibson. Conservatives demand an investigation of Mann.
OUR FRIEND POTHOLER54:
And, do not laugh now, just before another global climate conference, the UN Climate Conference in Durban, South Africa November 28, 2011, a new series of 5,000 hacked emails was posted on a Russian server. Once again, the e-mails are communicated via links in climate-skeptical blogs. The hacker writes, "Today's decisions should be based on all information we can get, not on "hiding the ddecline."
The hacker attack was "successful", and the timing was perfect. Here we see how
republican politicians, funded by oil money, turn on around in a flash
after the "scandal" is a fact. The Cap and Trade bill was dead in the
water.
And gain, dont laugh, this smear campaign we "accidentally" first heard of on WATTSUPWITHTHAT, a blog sponsored by, dont laugh, the Heartland Institute, notorious for its anti-science activities that include lobbying for tobacco and oil industry. Hilarious.
The whole thing looked remarkably like the US election 2016.
11/24/09: Sen. James Inhofe (Okla.), the top
Republican on the Senate’s environmental committee, launches a
“Climategate investigation,” claiming that the basis for government
efforts to address global warming “was contrived and fabricated.”
11/28/09: Penn State says it “is reviewing the concerns that have been raised” about Mann’s research.
12/1/09: Phil Jones steps aside as CRU’s director, citing the need to let an independent review run its course.
12/3/09: A key Saudi Arabian diplomat predicts Climategate will have a “huge impact”
on upcoming global warming negotiations in Copenhagen, Denmark. “It
appears from the details of the scandal that there is no relationship
whatsoever between human activities and climate change,” he tells the
BBC. “Climate is changing for thousands of years, but for natural and
not human-induced reasons. So, whatever the international community does
to reduce greenhouse gas emissions will have no effect on the climate’s
natural variability.”
12/6/09: Donald Trump signs his name to a full-page advertisement in the New York Times
a day before the Copenhagen summit. The letter calls for strong
international and domestic action to fight global warming and notes that
it “is scientifically irrefutable that there will be catastrophic and
irreversible consequences” if leaders fail to act.
12/6/09: The vice chairman of the United Nation’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) speculates that Russian
intelligence may have orchestrated the Climategate hack, because of the
Russian FTP server the hacker used to post the stolen emails; however,
that server would have been available to anyone in the world.
12/7/09: Climate negotiators begin meeting in Copenhagen as Climategate continues to dominate US global warming coverage.
12/8/09: CRU scientists report they’re receiving death threats and facing harassment.
12/9/09: Sarah Palin falsely claims in a Washington Postop-ed
that the Climategate emails “reveal that leading climate
‘experts’…manipulated data to ‘hide the decline’ in global
temperatures.” She calls on President Barack Obama to boycott
Copenhagen.
12/10/09: Twenty-six Republican senators send a letter to the United Nations’ secretary general requesting an independent investigation into the findings of the IPCC.
12/18/09: The Copenhagen talks end
after failing to produce a meaningful agreement. The apparent
Climategate hacker would later claim that his goal in releasing the
emails was to disrupt the conference. (Negotiators blame policy disagreements rather than the emails.)
December 2015: Six years after the failure in Copenhagen, nearly 200
countries agree to adopt the landmark Paris climate accord and commit
to reduce global emissions. Trump calls US participation in the
negotiations “ridiculous.”
7/22/16: Three days before the Democratic National
Convention, WikiLeaks publishes nearly 20,000 hacked emails from the
Democratic National Committee. Twitter bots are partially responsible
for spreading the information. A persona named Guccifer 2.0, later connected to Russian intelligence, takes credit for the hack.
8/27/16: Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid
(D-Nevada) asks the FBI to investigate the Trump campaign’s connections
to Russia. “The prospect of individuals tied to Trump, WikiLeaks and the
Russian government coordinating to influence our election raises
concerns of the utmost gravity,” writes Reid.
10/7/16: The same day that US intelligence agencies
say they are “confident” Russian entities were involved in the DNC hack,
WikiLeaks begins releasing thousands of emails stolen from John
Podesta’s private email account. The Podesta emails are released less
than an hour after the Washington Post revealed a 2005 video in which Trump boasted about sexually assaulting women.
10/10/16: “I love WikiLeaks,” Trump says at a
Pennsylvania campaign rally. Trump repeatedly promotes WikiLeaks during
the final month of the campaign—at least 164 times, according to a ThinkProgress analysis of Trump’s speeches, media appearances, debates, and tweets.
11/8/16: Trump is elected president.
7/18/12: Police
in Norfolk, England, close the investigation into the CRU server
breach, with no real leads. While the police have no suspects, lead detective Julian Gregorytells the Guardian that
the “targeted” attack “appears to have been done with the intention of
influencing the global debate on climate change.” Gregory concludes that the email dumps were timed specifically to disrupt the 2009 and 2011 climate talks.
April 2010 to August 2011: Nine separate investigations clear the
scientists—including Mann and Jones—of wrongdoing and note that the
scientific consensus on global warming remains strong. Investigators do
criticize the University of East Anglia for dodging open records
requests. LONDON, UK, March 31, 2010 (ENS) - An investigation into leaked emails by British climate scientists that appeared to indicate a conspiracy to manipulate data to bolster a case for global warming has cleared the scientists of wrongdoing. The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee today published its report on the disclosure of climate data from the Climatic Research Unit, CRU, at the University of East Anglia.
The investigation found no basis for accusations of dishonesty and no attempt to mislead on the part of the scientists.
Discover Magazine: Basically, some emails from climate scientists were leaked by a still-unknown hacker, and to some people it indicated knowingly fraudulent activity by the scientists. However, those of us familiar with the way science and scientists actually work knew from the start there was nothing nefarious going on. When the emails were made public, a lot of noise came from the usual places. The deniers went into overdrive. But it turns out they were just spinning their wheels.
"Claims that "hide the decline" meant "hide the fact that global temperatures have been declining" are also unraveled by the timeline. Phil's email was 1999, and 1998 had been the hottest year on record, peaking a global rise throughout the 1990s that nobody disputed, as it was all instrumental data. There had been no decline of global temperatures to hide."
No charges, no trials, no sentences no nothing. Isnt it about time you amateur deniers and pro think tank deniers to stop chasing ghosts and to act as jugde and jury and executioniers over this manufactured smear campaign?
If there is anyone guilty here, its all the deniers who keeps on accusing, attacking and smearing these scientists, scientists who has never been proven guilty of anything by any court of law.
All allegations against Michael M. Mann, were found groundless.
Just check the inquiry report. RA-10 Inquiry Report: Concerning the Allegations of Research Misconduct Against Dr. Michael E. Mann, Department of Meteorology, College of Earth and Mineral Sciences, The Pennsylvania State University February 3, 2010 RA-10 Inquiry Committee for the Case of Dr. Michael E. Mann:
The report concludes that there is no basis for claims that Mann has held back or forged data that he has deleted or destroyed e-mails or other material or has misused information he has received in a privileged manner.
Finding 1. After careful consideration of all the evidence and relevant materials, the inquiry committee finding is that there exists no credible evidence that Dr. Mann had or has ever engaged in, or participated in, directly or indirectly, any actions with an intent to suppress or to falsify data. While a perception has been created in the weeks after the CRU emails were made public that Dr. Mann has engaged in the suppression or falsification of data, there is no credible evidence that he ever did so, and certainly not while at Penn State. In fact to the contrary, in instances that have been focused upon by some as indicating falsification of data, for example in the use of a “trick” to manipulate the data, this is explained as a discussion among Dr. Jones and others including Dr. Mann about how best to put together a graph for a World Meteorological Organization (WMO) report. They were not falsifying data; they were trying to construct an understandable graph for those who were not experts in the field. The so-called “trick”1 was nothing more than a statistical method used to bring two or more different kinds of data sets together in a legitimate fashion by a technique that has been reviewed by a broad array of peers in the field.
Decision 1. As there is no substance to this allegation, there is no basis for further examination of this allegation in the context of an investigation in the second phase of
RA-10.
"The Independent Climate Change Email Review went back to primary data sources
and were able to replicate CRU's results. This means not only was CRU
not hiding anything, but it had nothing to hide. Though CRU neglected to
provide an exact list of temperature stations, it could not have hid or
tampered with data." https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn20739-ok-climate-sceptics-heres-the-raw-data-you-wanted/
But this is the funniest part. Deniers favorite scientist, Roy Spencer, and his UAH data, which deniers love to refer to, what trend do they show for the same period of the Climategate smear attack?
Lets go to the UAH home page:
Their trend is 0.13 C per decade. Very much in tune with all the other data.
Lets have a closer look at those emails taken out of context.
Thats what denial blogs do. They pull one sentence, or one phrase, or one data point OUT OF CONTEXT. They hope their audience accepts it without looking any further. They want their blogs to be the blinders on the eyes of their readers. "Look here; don't look there."
A prime example is a 1999 e-mail from Jones, who wrote:
“I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e., from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
Skeptics claim the words “trick” and “decline” show Jones is using sneaky manipulations to mask a decline in global temperatures. But that’s not the case. Actual temperatures, as measured by scientific instruments such as thermometers, were rising at the time of the writing of this decade-old e-mail, and (as we’ve noted) have continued to rise since then. Jones was referring to the decline in temperatures implied by measurements of the width and density of tree rings. In recent decades, these measures indicate a dip, while more accurate instrument-measured temperatures continue to rise.
"Scientists at CRU use tree-ring data and other “proxy” measurements to estimate temperatures from times before instrumental temperature data began to be collected. However, since about 1960, tree-ring data have diverged from actual measured temperatures. Far from covering it up, CRU scientists and others have published reports of this divergence many times. The “trick” that Jones was writing about in his 1999 e-mail was simply adding the actual, measured instrumental data into a graph of historic temperatures. Jones says it’s a “trick” in the colloquial sense of an adroit feat — “a clever thing to do,” as he put it — not a deception. What’s hidden is the fact that tree-ring data in recent decades doesn’t track with thermometer measurements." http://www.factcheck.org/2009/12/climategate/
Here is another from Michael E. Mann:
"No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, “grafted the thermometer record onto” any reconstruction"
In
the right context, the meaning is nothing like what denier bloggs wants
you to believe. That highlighted part clearly shows he didn't mean the
first sentence the way science-denial blogs pretended.
Another common quote is from Kevin Trenberth:
“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.”
Again,
out of context, that sounds pretty damning, but in context, he was not
talking about the warming of the entire planet, but rather the flow of
energy through the earth, and the fact that there are parts of that
system that we do not yet understand. Here is the paper that Trenberth
was discussing (Trenberth 2009)
So to summarise, Trenberth's email says this:
"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."
After reviewing the discussion in Trenberth 2009, it's apparent that what he meant was this:
"Global warming is still happening - our planet is still accumulating heat.
But our observation systems aren't able to comprehensively keep track
of where all the energy is going. Consequently, we can't definitively
explain why surface temperatures have gone down in the last few years. That's a travesty!"
Skeptics
use Trenberth's email to characterise climate scientists as secretive
and deceptive. However, when one takes the trouble to acquaint oneself
with the science, the opposite becomes apparent. Trenberth outlines his
views in a clear, open manner, frankly articulating his frustrations at
the limitations of observation systems. Trenberth's opinions didn't need
to be illegally stolen and leaked onto the internet. They were already
publicly available in the peer reviewed literature - and much less open
to misinterpretation than a quote-mined email.and you can find more
details at Skeptical Science.
Despite being heralded as “the final nail in the coffin of anthropogenic global warming, Climategate did not even demonstrate small-scale corruption of the peer review process, let alone on the scale of the climate science community. In any case, the CRU scientists reviewed only a small part of the large body of evidence for anthropogenicglobal warming. That mountain of evidence cannot be explained away by the behaviour of a few individuals.
Letter to Congress from U.S. scientists: "The body of evidence that human activity is the dominant cause of global warming is overwhelming. The content of the stolen emails has no impact whatsoever on our overall understanding that human activity is driving dangerous levels of global warming. … Even without including analyses from the UK research center from which the emails were stolen, the body of evidence underlying our understanding of human-caused global warming remains robust."
The truth is that over the 13 years covered by the CRU e-mails, scientific consensus has only become stronger as the evidence for global warming from various sources has mounted. Reports from the National Academies and the U.S. Global Change Research Program that analyze large amounts of data from various sources also agree, as does the IPCC, that climate change is not in doubt. In advance of the 2009 U.N. climate change summit, the national academies of 13 nations issued a joint statement of their recommendations for combating climate change, in which they discussed the “human forcing” of global warming and said that the need for action was “indisputable.”
