A study by 3 researchers and published in the Journal of Geophysical Research has concluded that the weather variations (both increases and decreases) are the result of natural climate processes. They find that the Southern Oscillation is a key indicator of changing global atmospheric temperatures seven months later.

The paper is titled “Influence of the Southern Oscillation on tropospheric temperature” and following is the abstract:

Time series for the Southern Oscillation Index (SOI) and global tropospheric temperature anomalies (GTTA) are compared for the 1958−2008 period. GTTA are represented by data from satellite microwave sensing units (MSU) for the period 1980–2008 and from radiosondes (RATPAC) for 1958–2008. After the removal from the data set of short periods of temperature perturbation that relate to near-equator volcanic eruption, we use derivatives to document the presence of a 5- to 7-month delayed close relationship between SOI and GTTA. Change in SOI accounts for 72% of the variance in GTTA for the 29-year-long MSU record and 68% of the variance in GTTA for the longer 50-year RATPAC record. Because El Niño−Southern Oscillation is known to exercise a particularly strong influence in the tropics, we also compared the SOI with tropical temperature anomalies between 20°S and 20°N. The results showed that SOI accounted for 81% of the variance in tropospheric temperature anomalies in the tropics. Overall the results suggest that the Southern Oscillation exercises a consistently dominant influence on mean global temperature, with a maximum effect in the tropics, except for periods when equatorial volcanism causes ad hoc cooling. That mean global tropospheric temperature has for the last 50 years fallen and risen in close accord with the SOI of 5–7 months earlier shows the potential of natural forcing mechanisms to account for most of the temperature variation.

So once again, we are in a situation where one researcher says that humans are to blame and another says that it is all natural.

Following are selected excerpts in Farm Weekly which is the article that AccuWeather referenced:

The findings follow research released earlier this month by US scientists which shows that maximum solar activity and its aftermath have impacts on earth that resemble La Niña and El Niño events in the tropical Pacific Ocean.

In a statement to the media, lead author John McLean said that when climate modellers could not accurately determine historical temperatures “they added a ‘human influence’ to their models”.

“This paper shows that the missing component was the El Niño-Southern Oscillation (ENSO),” Mr McLean said.

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“The IPCC acknowledges in its 4th Assessment Report that ENSO conditions cannot be predicted more than about 12 months ahead so until that situation improves projected global temperatures are likely to be quite inaccurate.”

The group says that the surge in global temperatures since 1977 can be attributed to a 1976 climate shift in the Pacific Ocean that made warming El Niño conditions more likely than they were over the previous 30 years and cooling La Niña conditions less likely.

“We have shown that internal global climate-system variability accounts for at least 70 per cent of the observed global climate variation over the past half-century,” Associate Professor de Freitas said.

Climate researchers have long been aware that ENSO events influence global temperature, for example, causing a high temperature spike in 1998 and a subsequent fall as conditions moved to La Niña.

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Professor Bob Carter, one of four scientists who recently assisted Senator Steve Fielding in questioning the justification for the proposed Australian emissions trading scheme, says that this paper has significant consequences for public climate policy.

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“Our paper confirms what many scientists already know: which is that no scientific justification exists for emissions regulation, and that, irrespective of the severity of the cuts proposed, an emissions trading scheme will exert no measurable effect on future climate.”

While few people would call me a global warming alarmists, I do think it is important to have relatively balanced perspective on all of this.  In fact, that is the essence of this blog.

Most reputable scientists without an agenda (which likely excludes anyone associated with Al Gore) had concluded long ago that it wasn’t the CO2 concentrations that would deliver the doom and gloom of the alarmists.  Rather, the concern was a feedback loop that would be accelerated by a fairly rapid expansion of carbon dioxide.  One theory is that this CO2 increase would cause temperatures to increase slightly which causes an increase in H2O in the atmosphere which further increases the temperature in an escalating fashion.

The concern is not the CO2 increase directly but the tipping point that it trips. This is incredibly difficult to model in the computer models that we are using since we have never seen this phenomenon.  This is part of the reason that I do not trust the current state of the art of the computer models – they assume that this tripping point will be hit and we don’t know that it will.

Here are highlights from the USAToday article.

Could the best climate models — the ones used to predict global warming — all be wrong?

Maybe so, says a new study published online today in the journal Nature Geoscience.  The report found that only about half of the warming that occurred during a natural climate change 55 million years ago can be explained by excess carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. What caused the remainder of the warming is a mystery.

“In a nutshell, theoretical models cannot explain what we observe in the geological record,” says oceanographer Gerald Dickens, study co-author and professor of Earth Science at Rice University in Houston. “There appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way temperature and carbon are linked in climate models.”

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The conclusion, Dickens said, is that something other than carbon dioxide caused much of this ancient warming. “Some feedback loop or other processes that aren’t accounted for in these models — the same ones used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change for current best estimates of 21st century warming — caused a substantial portion of the warming that occurred during the PETM.”

In their most recent assessment report in 2007, the IPCC predicted the Earth would warm by anywhere from 2 to 11 degrees by the end of the century due to increasing amounts of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere caused by human industrial activity.

This article misses out by not making a big enough distinction that weather is not climate and climate is not weather. The amount of ice in any given 2 or 3 year stretch has as much to do regarding global warming as the occassional all time high or low that is hit in Peoria, IL. I have talked about weather v. climate before but we always seem to go around to the same things.

Last year, there was a great deal of talk about Arctic Sea ice and the fact that it was vanishing. Very little talk at the time had to do with the currents under the ice (except for here). The end of the world was at hand though if you read some blogs!

The post on WUWT does a good job of showing the various changes in ice thicknesses over the last several decades. It isn’t extremely scientific but it does show photos of open water and thin ice for as long as subs have been poking their head through the ice.

To their credit, they encourage readers to go to the original sources to get the complete story but, frankly, that is not good enough.  They have published the information in a way that is incredibly one-sided and is also not consistent from one chart to the next.  That is the true problem with the article, one cannot see the filters or data sources in this presentation so the inconsistencies are too strong.

The first chart tries to show temperature swings of the last 12,000 years.  The problem is that none of these previous highs (save one) show the temperature increasing, leveling off, and then increasing again.  This is absolutely the situation in the latest bump above the line which implies that something may be different in this latest warming trend.  Of course that difference could be the ways that the temperatures are gathered (with satellites today v. observing tree rings or other such proxies).

The second chart tries to ridicule the IPCC projections which are based on computer models (I give little credence to most computer models as regular readers know).  However, did they bother to look at the major inconsistincies with the chart immediately above?  The first chart is a straight line average starting and stopping at 15 degrees and the second is consistently increasing.  What are the differences and why?  While more in depth reading of both studies would likely give a clue as to the differences, showing both charts side-by-side raises huge skepticism in the quality of the data.

Also, why does the 2nd chart imply that historical average temperature was crossed at about 1960 but the first chart implies that it happened a few hundred years ago?

Then the 3rd chart shows temperature going down but that disagrees with the first chart where the final trend was going up and the second chart which has the average increasing on a regular pace.  What gives?

I could go on and on but I think you have seen the point.  The article stops being about the science that they rave about in the beginning of the piece and gravitates to a consistent whine that the IPCC is not fair and the US government administration should run away from its intended policies of climate crisis control.

I hope that future discussions of this are more about science and data.  Let the conclusions come without filtering for agenda and political goals.  It is frustrating to follow this topic so closely on this site only to be at the same basic point we were at when I first started this discussion.  We simply need to let the science figure this out and THEN we can prescribe the medecine for what ails us.  We cannot all agree if we have a cold, the flu, tuberculosis or liver cancer yet!  But I do know all of this political maneuvering is giving me a headache.

I think I will just go take 2 aspirin and see if I feel better tomorrow.

global+warming, climate models, greenhouse gas, IPCC

Walter Cunningham is one of the astronauts of Apollo 7.  He writes about global warming in the latest issue of Launch Magazine and his comments bear considering.

Mr. Cunningham is important in this discussion because of his obvious intelligence and past leadership but also in his strong ability in analyzing scientific and political events and drawing conclusions.

What I find to be most compelling are:

• his ridicule of climate models.
• his discussions of correlation and causation.
• the replacement of scientific discussion with emotional arguments.
• the condemnation of Mr. Hansen – one of the early warning voices of global warming and an employee of NASA.

I am not going to reproduce all of Mr. Cunningham’s comments here.  Please follow the link below but here are some of the highlights.

For example, recently generated NASA data enabled scientists to finally understand the Gulf Stream warming mechanism and its effect on European weather. Such data will allow us to improve our models, resulting in better seasonal forecasts.

NASA’s Aqua satellite is showing that water vapor, the dominant greenhouse gas, works to offset the effect of carbon dioxide (CO2). This information, contrary to the assumption used in all the warming models, is ignored by global warming alarmists.

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Unfortunately, it is becoming just another agency caught up in the politics of global warming, or worse, politicized science. Advocacy is replacing objective evaluation of data, while scientific data is being ignored in favor of emotions and politics.

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I believe in global climate change, but there is no way that humans can influence the temperature of our planet to any measurable degree with the tools currently at their disposal. Any human contribution to global temperature change is lost in the noise of terrestrial and cosmic factors.

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Even though CO2 is a relatively minor constituent of “greenhouse gases,” alarmists have made it the whipping boy for global warming (probably because they know how fruitless it would be to propose controlling other principal constituents, H2O, CH4, and N2O). Since human activity does contribute a tiny portion of atmospheric CO2, they blame us for global warming.

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Even though recent changes in our atmosphere are all within the bounds of the Earth’s natural variability, a growing number of people are willing to throw away trillions of dollars on fruitless solutions. Why do we allow emotional appeals and anecdotal data to shape our conclusions and influence our expenditures with the science and technology we have available at our fingertips?

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It doesn’t help that NASA scientist James Hansen was one of the early alarmists claiming humans caused global warming. Hansen is a political activist who spreads fear even when NASA’s own data contradict him.

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It is the true believers who, when they have no facts on their side, try to silence their critics. When former NASA mathematician Ferenc Miskolczi pointed out that “greenhouse warming” may be mathematically impossible, NASA would not allow him to publish his work. Miskolczi dared to question the simplifying assumption in the warming model that the atmosphere is infinitely thick. He pointed out that when you use the correct thickness—about 65 miles—the greenhouse effect disappears! Ergo: no AGW. Miskolczi resigned in disgust and published his proof in the peer-reviewed Hungarian journal Weather.

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The reality is that atmospheric CO2 has a minimal impact on greenhouse gases and world temperature. Water vapor is responsible for 95 percent of the greenhouse effect. CO2 contributes just 3.6 percent, with human activity responsible for only 3.2 percent of that. That is why some studies claim CO2 levels are largely irrelevant to global warming.

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For a tiny fraction of the trillions of dollars a cap-and-trade system would eventually cost the United States, we could pay for development of clean coal, oil-shale recovery systems, and nuclear power, and have enough left over to pay for exploration of our solar system.

You can read the entire article here.  If you read the rather testy comments, you will see that Mr. Cunningham even chimes in to defend himself.

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A group of 13 prominent scientists have written a letter to UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon requesting him to “redress the lack of scientific integrity of the UN’s Climate Change Panel (IPCC) and to stop making reactionary and futile ‘Climate Change’ recommendations that hold back the developing world.”

I am not going to reproduce the entire letter here as it is freely available in PDF format.  I will point out that these are not lightweight scientists.  Evidently the signatories are below and they include at least one Nobel Prize winner.

• Piers Corbyn Astrophysicist & forecaster, WeatherAction, UK
• Vincent Gray IPCC Expert Reviewer, Climate Consultant, NZ
• Richard Courtney IPCC Exp. Rev., Energy & Envir. Consultant, UK
• Hans Labohm IPCC Expert Reviewer, Economist & Author, Holland
• Will Alexander Prof. Em. Dept. Civil & Biosystems, South Africa
• Don Parkes Prof. Human Ecology (Ret.) Australia & Japan
• Joseph D’Aleo Certified Consultant Meteorologist, Fellow AMS, USA
• Svend Hendriksen Nobel Peace Prize 1988 (shared), Greenland
• Alan Siddons Climate Researcher, USA
• Bob Ashworth Chem. Eng. (Energy & Environment), USA
• Norm Kalmanovitch Geophysicist, Canada,
• Jim Peden Atmospheric Physicist (Ret.), USA
• Hans Schreuder Analytical Chemist (Ret.)

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John Coleman spoke before the San Diego Chamber of Commerce on the subject of global warming.  Mr. Coleman is not your typical weatherman!  Some say he is the father of the weatherman on TV (not likely) but at the very least he is one one of the most successful.  A full profile is available for him on Wikipedia but among his many accomplishments, he was the first weatherman on the national morning talk shows (remember David Hartman?) and also founded The Weather Channel.

Mr. Coleman is pretty adamant that the current global warming trend (which many question actually exists) is most likely natural in origin and has little to do with the influences of man.

There is no significant man made global warming. There has not been any in the past, there is none now and there is no reason to fear any in the future. The climate of Earth is changing. It has always changed. But mankind’s activities have not overwhelmed or significantly modified the natural forces.

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Worldwide there was a significant natural warming trend in the 1980’s and 1990’s as a Solar cycle peaked with lots of sunspots and solar flares. That ended in 1998 and now the Sun has gone quiet with fewer and fewer Sun spots, and the global temperatures have gone into decline. Earth has cooled for almost ten straight years.

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Charles Keeling, another researcher at the Scripps Oceanographic Institute, set up a system to make continuous CO2 measurements. His graph of these increases has now become known as the Keeling Curve. When Charles Keeling died in 2005, his son Ralph, also at Scripps, took over the measurements. Here is what the Keeling curve shows: an increase in CO2 from 315 parts per million in 1958 to 385 parts per million today, an increase of 70 parts per million or about 20 percent.

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Numerous independent research projects have been done about the greenhouse impact from increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. These studies have proven to my total satisfaction that CO2 is not creating a major greenhouse effect and is not causing an increase in temperatures.

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And, it has lead to the folly of ethanol, which is also partly behind the fuel price increases; that and our restricted oil policy. The ethanol folly is also creating a food crisis throughout the world – it is behind the food price rises for all the grains, for cereals, bread, everything that relies on corn or soy or wheat, including animals that are fed corn, most processed foods that use corn oil or soybean oil or corn syrup. Food shortages or high costs have led to food riots in some third world countries and made the cost of eating out or at home budget busting for many.

You can read his entire speech here.  It is a very convincing read so I suggest you click through and read it.

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Please enjoy and please laugh a little today. Life is short and it is shorter if we don’t laugh. The cartoons below are small images of the actual cartoons – click through to the original site to see the cartoon at full size.

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Technorati Tags: global+warming,cartoons

By Julee Mitchelsin

With all of the fervor these days about the dangers of global warming many people are concerned about the fate of Antarctica. The fears are that the ice that makes up the continent is melting faster than normal and not freezing back as it usually does with a very even ebb and flow. The concerns are that this will eventually raise the sea level enough to put major cities and land masses under water and leave millions of people homeless and/or even dead.

So who are making these claims? Well there are many scientists that have been looking at the earth’s climates and weather systems for a long time and trying to make sense of them. The earliest reason for doing this was not to measure the affect of the greenhouse gases that are magnifying the suns intensity and causing the heat to stay within it. They originally wanted to learn about the earth so that they could by recognizing signs be could warn of natural disasters like earth quakes and hurricanes and tsunamis. Since they have kept data to look for these signs they have noticed disturbing trends in things like the average temperature and the increasing sea level and other things like the sized of the ice cap over Antarctica and they seem to only be going in one direction which spells trouble.

Then they start looking for why this is happening, and the buzzword is generally global warming. They cite the increase in certain gases like CO2 which are purportedly on the rise do to the millions of different engines that burn fossil fuels across the world. Supposedly this changes the qualities of the atmosphere that hold in the energy from the sun much like a green house does. What people don’t realize is that these are all theories to explain trends in the environment that no one has any clue about. We know that Antarctica melts in places and at certain times and since we have been measuring these things it appears that the land mass has gotten smaller—but this is very flawed thinking.

You see we have only been able to make specialized measurements like this for several decades which may seem like a long enough time to make good guesses about the earth which is thousands of years old (some even say billions). You just can’t make definitive statements about trends that may just be natural cycles that are 500 years in length. Even 100 year or 50 year cycles would not have been fully measured yet. So we must cool our jets and take ourselves so seriously. We know a lot less about the melting Antarctica and many other things that seem to be slowly headed toward disaster than we think.

About the Author: Julee Mitchelsin is a grade school science teacher with a PhD in earth science and a skepticism about the media that can make you laugh or cry. If you are still interested in the fate of Antarctica you should visit www.learnantarctica.info

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By Calvin Leonard

Climate Change and Global Warming are indeed a huge debate topic in all its controversy and media hysteria. The majority of people are up in arms over the thought of global warming and indeed they want the United States to sign the Kyoto Treaty and agree to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases.

We cannot say for sure how much the globe may be warming up though, how much is due to human activities versus natural activities, or whether these movements in global temperature would be mostly good or mostly bad for the majority of us.

Recently in an online think tank one person was berated for placing a post in the Global Warming area of the website on a Chinese Flooding event which washed away 90 people and in another province killed 117 folks.

Though Global Warming doesn’t seem that bad, with many people’s idea of it being that of a world wrapped snuggly in a warm blanket, it’s something that needs to be taken seriously and it’s something that could greatly hinder, and destroy the future.

In a nutshell, Global Warming is the gradual increase of the temperature of the earth’s lower atmosphere. Basically global warming is the ascent of the earth’s surface temperature due to chemicals in the atmosphere. Some Global Warming Alarmists believe it is too late to stop the effects of mankind on our atmosphere and that these undesired effects will cause the triggering of major storms, freak weather and catastrophic situations. In order to control and avoid the effects of global warming we must first agree with a fact that it is happening, and take some steps to end or even reduce it. Maybe the whole world needs to rethink the level playing field rules over again and then we can sit down and talk about Global Warming, CO2 emissions and the Kyoto Treaty or a more realistic version of it.

Luckily most of the Global Warming theories are not based on very solid scientific evidence, but our Planet is going through a climate change cycle and this cycle, which is being caused by a series of inter-related cycles are warming areas our Planet among other things. There is no compelling scientific evidence that global warming is caused by anything other than ordinary, natural climatic cycles.Some Global Warming alarmists are now thinking it is time to invest their money in House Boat Stocks and pick out a big ship to live on?

So the debate of climate change battles on and whilst I see no end in site to it the doomsdayers will have you agree the sky is falling ,remember chicken little.So get yourself some scientific knowledge on the subject because if you don’t you’ll end up becoming one of them.

About the Author: Calvin Leonard writes about many topics.His main focus is to teach people how to make money online and global warming is a pet subject presently.

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This story has been floating around the media for some time and I suppose it is time that I discuss it as well. It wouldn’t be such a big deal except that Mr. Al Gore, former Vice President of the United States and Nobel prize winner, declared the debate over and that there was a consensus among scientists. Of course, the first thing that happens with that kind of grandiose statement is the nay-sayers raise their hands REAL HIGH!

That is part of what makes this discussion so interesting (and so frustrating). Seemingly intelligent people with such strong and diverse opinions that are arguing so strenuously. As with most bi-polar discussions, the truth likely lies somewhere in the middle.

Obviously the stakes are high. If global warming is caused by humans then it may cause trillions in damages and untold loss of life.  If global warming is not happening or is not influenced greatly by humans, then it is a waste of huge amount of resources that may go to better and more predictable causes (Bjorn Lomborg speaks on this repeatedly and you can read more here although not everyone agrees with Mr. Lomborg).

I find it disingenuous that Mr. Gore’s spokesperson immediately threw mud at the scientists implying that they were bribed to make their statements. Even if an oil company funds some research, that does not make the research false. Especially since we know that others are funding research that tries to prove global warming. Scientists need funding to do their work. We hope that this funding doesn’t obscure their work and the scientific community would condemn anyone that was blatantly falsifying evidence.

Perhaps this mudslinging is part of the reason that Dr. Paldor states that some scientists are fearful to voice their skepticism on this subject.  This is a shame and does not lend to an informed opinion by public.

My overall advice to everyone is to not take extreme views on this subject.  Just yesterday, I wrote about a new study showing that one of the infallible predictions of global warming (that hurricanes will increase) may not be true and evidence points to a reduction in hurricanes. We simply do not know what is going to happen based on our current understanding of the climate.  If you want to stay informed, subscribe to the feed of this site and I will do my best to give you a balanced perspective.  You can also sign up to have these articles emailed to you.

More than 400 scientists challenge claims by former Vice President Al Gore and the United Nations about the threat of man-made global warming, a new Senate minority report says.

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The scientists … cast doubt on the “scientific consensus” that man-made global warming imperils the planet.

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The endless claims of a ‘consensus’ about man-made global warming grow less-and-less credible every day…

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After a quick review of the report, Gore spokeswoman Kalee Kreider said 25 or 30 of the scientists may have received funding from Exxon Mobil Corp. Exxon Mobil spokesman Gantt H. Walton dismissed the accusation, saying the company is concerned about climate-change issues and does not pay scientists to bash global-warming theories.

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…environmental scientist David W. Schnare of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said he was skeptical because “conclusions about the cause of the apparent warming stand on the shoulders of incredibly uncertain data and models. … As a policy matter, one has to be less willing to take extreme actions when data are highly uncertain.”

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“Many of my colleagues with whom I spoke share these views and report on their inability to publish their skepticism in the scientific or public media,” atmospheric scientist Nathan Paldor, professor of Dynamical Meteorology and Physical Oceanography at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem

You can read the entire article here.

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There has been a great deal of analysis on the costs of curbing emissions to the US economy but very little in analysis on a local scale of the costs of the change in climate if global warming continues. This study allows for causation to be a mixture of natural and human and doesn’t allocate responsibility to either side.

There are a few things in the article that don’t appear to be substantiated.

• pointing to Ponte Vedra Beach as an indicator of the bad things to come for Florida seems like a red herring. Does the study really think any changes at that particular beach are due to the changes in the climate to date? Ocean levels have not increased that dramatically compared to 2 or 3 decades ago
• there is quite a bit of counter-proof regarding increased hurricane activity. I have written on this several times.

Overall, it is important for communities to understand and plan for any changes that are likely to happen. It is important to remember that much of this is conjecture and possible worst case analysis though.

Climate change could cause $27 billion worth of harm to Florida’s tourism, electrical utilities and real estate industries by 2025 if ignored….

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The projection also accounts for the damage caused by increased hurricane activity. It does not include climate change’s effects on insurance costs; its blows to the agriculture, forestry and fishery sectors; or damage to ecosystems….

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Florida is expected to be one of the biggest losers among states because of its large amount of coastline. The state’s gross state product is expected to shrink by 5 percent by the end of the century if action isn’t taken to curb emissions, translating to a loss of about $345 billion.

You can read the rest of the article here.

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If you read this site on a regular basis, this will be no surprise to you. A couple fairly prominent and outspoken scientists are trying to explain that the computer models that are used for predicting the massive problems of the future are not quite as accurate and foretelling as some will have you believe.

Many people will say that the climate projections are good enough and we should go into massive retooling of the worlds economy based on this small amount of information. This is the common theme over at RealClimate. While the jury is still out, in my opinion, as to what the future holds for us, there is no question that we do not have very good evidence on either side of the issue. The current models make numerous assumptions and any errors in the logic will tend to exaggerate over time.

I have written on this subject many times in the past.  Click through here to read some of my other comments.

A new study comparing the composite output of 22 leading global climate models with actual climate data finds that the models do an unsatisfactory job of mimicking climate change in key portions of the atmosphere.

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“The usual discussion is whether the climate model forecasts of Earth’s climate 100 years or so into the future are realistic,” said the lead author, Dr. David H. Douglass from the University of Rochester. “Here we have something more fundamental: Can the models accurately explain the climate from the recent past? “It seems that the answer is no.”

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“When we look at actual climate data, however, we do not see accelerated warming in the tropical troposphere. Instead, the lower and middle atmosphere are warming the same or less than the surface. For those layers of the atmosphere, the warming trend we see in the tropics is typically less than half of what the models forecast.”

Read the rest of the report here.

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This is a very interesting commentary from John Christy, a member of the IPCC and, thus, a partial receiver of the Nobel Peace Prize. In short, it appears that Mr. Christy doesn’t think that he deserves his .001% of the prize.

I was pointed to this commentary by two regular readers (thank you to Scott and to Ron – check out their sites by clicking on their names).

Since this is a commentary, I am hesitant to say too much as Mr. Christy’s words are important. However, I do think it is important to note that he is not saying that the predictions of the IPCC are categorically wrong. He appears to be saying that he does not share the level of confidence and conviction of some of his peers because he feels there is too much data to understand and we do not have computer models that are accurate enough to make these conclusions.  This is very similar to what I have said multiple times in this forum.

I’m sure the majority (but not all) of my IPCC colleagues cringe when I say this, but I see neither the developing catastrophe nor the smoking gun proving that human activity is to blame for most of the warming we see. Rather, I see a reliance on climate models (useful but never "proof") and the coincidence that changes in carbon dioxide and global temperatures have loose similarity over time.

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As we build climate data sets from scratch and look into the guts of the climate system, however, we don’t find the alarmist theory matching observations.

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It is my turn to cringe when I hear overstated-confidence from those who describe the projected evolution of global weather patterns over the next 100 years, especially when I consider how difficult it is to accurately predict that system’s behavior over the next five days.

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…As my high-school physics teacher admonished us in those we-shall-conquer-the-world-with-a-slide-rule days, "Begin all of your scientific pronouncements with ‘At our present level of ignorance, we think we know . . .’"

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…Rather I see jump-to-conclusions advocates and, unfortunately, some scientists who see in every weather anomaly the specter of a global-warming apocalypse. Explaining each successive phenomenon as a result of human action gives them comfort and an easy answer.

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California and some Northeastern states have decided to force their residents to buy cars that average 43 miles-per-gallon within the next decade. Even if you applied this law to the entire world, the net effect would reduce projected warming by about 0.05 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100, an amount so minuscule as to be undetectable. Global temperatures vary more than that from day to day. [Editor's note: this is an interesting statistic that I was not aware of and I have not been able to confirm via another source]

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My experience as a missionary teacher in Africa opened my eyes to this simple fact: Without access to energy, life is brutal and short. The uncertain impacts of global warming far in the future must be weighed against disasters at our doorsteps today. Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus 2004, a cost-benefit analysis of health issues by leading economists (including three Nobelists), calculated that spending on health issues such as micronutrients for children, HIV/AIDS and water purification has benefits 50 to 200 times those of attempting to marginally limit "global warming."

Given the scientific uncertainty and our relative impotence regarding climate change, the moral imperative here seems clear to me.

You can read the entirety of this article here.

You can read Part 1 of 5 here.
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So how did SPPI fair? Personally, I wish they would have been a bit more conservative in their claims. Several times they dinged Mr. Gore twice (or three times) for the same basic error. I tend to write this off as being over-zealous and perhaps trying to get a bigger number for the headline.

In some cases, Mr. Gore made the correct point but used the wrong story or example to illustrate his point. In other cases, I simply couldn’t find any reason to say Mr. Gore was wrong.

Overall, I think that the Science and Public Policy Institute found 20-22 errors in “An Inconvenient Truth”. There are several cases above where I gave them credit for pointing out the error but they gave the wrong reason, in my opinion.

So why did the Institute pile on and come up with 35? I don’t know. I know that as an organization they are against the entire argument for human induced global warming so their extreme stance probably tainted their thinking. I think they could have made just as strong of an argument against the movie with 20 rock solid issues rather than push it over 30 and make people question their motives.

A similar question could be asked of Mr. Gore and his producers. Why did they put out a film with at least 20 half truths and exaggerations? Once again, I don’t know. Similarly, they probably had an argument to be made and simply sticking with the facts was not good enough.

I am reminded of my old high school English teacher, Mr. Jordan. For my senior year (which my kids will say was during the last great ice age) we had to do a slide documentary of issues in our community. My buddy and I wanted to do it on the effects of addiction and wanted to show “staged” scenes to drive home the points. Mr. Jordan correctly scolded us and told us to never fabricate a falsehood just to make a correct point. If we couldn’t say that X causes Y, it didn’t belong in a documentary and instead was an entertainment piece. Mr. Gore discusses his childhood learning in the movie, perhaps he should have had Mr. Jordan for English.

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You can read Part 1 of 5 here.
You can read Part 2 of 5 here.
You can read Part 3 of 5 here.
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ERROR 27 – Shame on Mr. Gore for citing this example! He is trying to link malaria with global warming. There were many malaria outbreaks in Nairobi prior to human induced global warming could be a factor. Mr. Gore’s statements here are pure sham and is probably the biggest reason that I dislike this film as a documentary.

ERROR 28 – This is the same as with ERROR 27. The causality is simply not proven and is only meant to incite reaction.

ERROR 29 – This is the same as ERROR 28. While Mr. Gore was incorrect in his assertions, SPPI is piling on by itemizing every single sentence as a stand-alone fact.

ERROR 30 – I have to give this one to Mr. Gore. The Supreme Court has ruled CO2 as a pollutant; therefore, it is a pollutant. Arguing about it after the fact is a waste of time.

ERROR 31 – Mr. Gore gets this one as well. There was a heat wave that killed thousands of people. Was it caused by global warming? Mr. Gore doesn’t say that it was which means he was playing with the truth a bit but in this case he is still telling the truth.

ERROR 32 – This is spin. Saying that a change is good is short sighted. We don’t know what chaos theory explosion will occur by any change.

ERROR 33 – I give this one to SPPI. AIT is filled with images that show the wrong thing.

ERROR 34 – I can’t find any reference to AIT saying anything regarding the Thames barrier. I am relying on the unofficial transcripts on this as I don’t want to watch the entire movie again just to find this reference.

ERROR 35 – I can’t find this statement by Mr. Gore in the movie. Obviously, it isn’t true as many scientists have questioned global warming and even those people that agree with much of what Mr. Gore claims have problems with some of this movie. However, since I can’t find it in the movie, I need to call it spin.

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You can read Part 1 of 5 here.
You can read Part 2 of 5 here.
You can read Part 4 of 5 here.
You can read Part 5 of 5 here.

ERROR 18 – I can’t find evidence for SPPI’s statement that the Arctic has increased  decreased in temperature 1 deg C in the last 60 years. SPPI falls victim here to the common Gore affliction of pointing out individual instances of information (ice bound ships) and assuming that this is conclusive data. I have called AIT out on this and I need to do the same with SPPI. Unless they can point to a reference for the temperature increase, I need to call this one spin.

ERROR 19 – Sorry, SPPI, this one is spin. NASA mapped the ice and it is adding in some places and subtracting in others but the balance is going down.

ERROR 20 – This one is tough. Gore definitely screws up saying that 40% of the world’s population gets their water from glacial melt. This isn’t true. I can’t find any evidence that snow melt is not decreasing as SPPI claims but since we are judging AIT, we have to give this one to SPPI.

ERROR 21 – There is no question that the glaciers in Peru are receding but as I wrote on this site before, the argument that it is caused by human caused global warming is very tenuous.

ERROR 22 – There is no question that glaciers have been shrinking for some time. Saying that this is caused by humans is very tenuous.

ERROR 23 – Gore definitely takes advantage of human suffering in the film and blames the Sahara on human caused global warming. He makes a poor argument here and this is where he also talks about Lake Chad so in essence this error is the same as 6. This is an example of double dipping so we can’t really say that SPPI was correct in both instances.

ERROR 24 – SPPI has definitely tried to spin this one. Gore was specifically talking about the Larsen ice shelf and it absolutely did recede dramatically in a short amount of time. Yes, much of Antarctica is getting colder but Gore’s facts were correct.

ERROR 25 – I cannot find evidence of where Mr. Gore says that half a dozen ice shelves the size of Rhode Island have broken up. Since I can’t find where it was said, I can’t say that AIT is wrong. I have to mark this as spin for SPPI. I am relying on the unofficial transcripts on this as I don’t want to watch the entire movie again just to find this reference.

ERROR 26 – There is no doubt that the ice shelf at Larsen was larger in history. There is also no doubt that it has changed shape dramatically over the years. I have to give this one to SPPI not because of what they said but because the shelf was so large in 1995. Global warming didn’t just start happening in the last 12 years so I have to call Mr. Gore on this reference since he is blaming global warming on the entire phenomenon. Rather, many scientists attribute this change to Arctic Oscillation and Mr. Gore doesn’t bother to mention this as a possibility.

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You can read Part 1 of 5 here.
You can read Part 3 of 5 here.
You can read Part 4 of 5 here.
You can read Part 5 of 5 here.

ERROR 10 – Actually, SPPI isn’t tough enough on AIT on this one. Mr. Gore says that 350ppm of CO2 is all that keeps a mile of ice off of the top of Cleveland, Detroit, and New York. The last time that happened was 2 million years ago during the Pleistocene era and Mr. Gore’s data doesn’t extend that far back so therefore he is making an unsubstantiated claim.

ERROR 11 – SPPI is correct that Caterina was caused by a cold weather phenomenon that created a situation similar to the warm weather hurricanes of the Atlantic. There is little evidence that global warming caused this to happen although since it is only one data point, it is difficult to make any interpretations. Gore was at least misleading by implying that global warming had something to do with this.

ERROR 12 – This is a bit of a spin. We have less data on typhoon activity than hurricane activity due to the lack of records and the lack of satellite coverage. According to comments by Science magazine, their has been an increase in typhoons but that increase is not statistically significant since the solid data only goes back 30 or 40 years. No inference on the number of typhoons can be made because we haven’t gathered enough data to establish a baseline.

ERROR 13 – SPPI appears to be correct in this one but Mr. Gore is referencing popular scientific belief based on climate models. It is difficult to ding AIT on this one and I have to say that SPPI may be spinning this issue a bit. The SPPI answer is that it hasn’t happened yet and Mr. Gore was saying it would happen in the future. We have a hard time predicting the future which I have written on before (here and here).

ERROR 14 – I was tempted to call this one a tie but since SPPI is calling out AIT, AIT should win ties. It is very subjective to discuss insurance losses increasing since there are so many different variables involved (population growth, population at the site of the disaster, cost of materials, inflation, etc.). If anything, Mr. Gore should not have mentioned it since it is so subjective but the data that he presented appears to be correct. SPPI’s data appears to be correct as well but does refute Mr. Gore’s data. This may be a case where statistics don’t lie but (you can fill in the rest of the old saying)! SPPI is spinning this one.

ERROR 15 – It did flood in Mumbai and the consequences were terrible. However, Mr. Gore didn’t make his case that global warming caused it and SPPI is correct that there doesn’t appear to be any change in the amount of rainfall in that area. In fact, the data is quite good having come from 306 monitoring stations for over a hundred years and a simple plot and linear regression shows that rainfall is actually decreasing in India.

ERROR 16 – Both are wrong. When the measuring device involved is constantly evolving, it is extremely tenuous to make any hard predictions based on history. One can try to factor out bias caused by better detection devices but this is only an approximation. Also, once again, we are in a situation where hard evidence is extremely small and therefore we simply do not have enough data to draw a conclusion. While I gave the tie to AIT above, I need to give this one to SPPI, AIT does not make a concrete argument that increased global warming will bring on more tornadoes when there are several studies that show that it is the cooling in off El-Nino years that the number of tornadoes increases.

ERROR 17 – This one is difficult since the climate models are still evolving. Most of the warming of the ocean due to the sun’s radiance occurs closer to the equator and then that heat is eventually transported to the poles in the form of current. Also, since the angle of incidence on Arctic waters is so low compared to equatorial waters, it’s influence is much less. However, Gore’s statement that the polar ocean absorbs 90% of the light that hits it is false, as far as I can tell. Though it will absorb more light than if it was covered by ice so the blanket statement that the sun would heat up the Arctic is true. SPPI is not totally correct in its explanation but Gore definitely exaggerated this claim.

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Conversely, if you think that all this global warming conversation is hooey, you still should not say that everything out of Mr. Gore’s mouth is biased and wrong. We need to evaluate each claim on its own and seriously discuss the viable issues.

Now I would like to do a review of the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) to see if they were more fair in their analysis. I will let you, my readers, be the judge. You can read their analysis here.

My review of the SPPI claims comes from my own watching of the movie as well as the unofficial transcripts of the movie.

Due to the number of errors that SPPI is claiming, I cannot do this justice in one posting. So I am spreading this out over the next 5 days with the final day being my impression on the entire effort from Mr. Gore as well as the work of SPPI. I am going to not allow comments on the individual posts until after the fifth posting and then you are welcome to point out my mistakes as you wish. All 5 posts are already written, I have just learned that long articles tend to get skipped over so I broke up the finished product.

You can read Part 2 of 5 here.
You can read Part 3 of 5 here.
You can read Part 4 of 5 here.
You can read Part 5 of 5 here.

ERROR 1 – SPPI has this correct from what I understand. This is similar to the error that the UK judge found.

ERROR 2 – I don’t know about the claim that corals grow at ten times the the rate of increase in sea level. Not sure that is relevant in this discussion. However, SPPI is correct that there have been no mass evacuations as Mr. Gore claimed.

ERROR 3 – SPPI has this correct, I believe. Once again, this is the same as what the judge found.

ERROR 4 – I don’t believe that Mr. Gore ever said the words “in each of the last four interglacial warm periods it was changes in carbon dioxide concentration that caused changes in temperature.” This is a bit of spin by SPPI. There is no question that Mr. Gore tried to make people think that CO2 caused the rise in temperature. Once again, this is simply a repeat of the judge.

ERROR 5 – It is pretty well accepted that the primary influence on the snows of Kilimanjaro is humidity levels and the drop in those is likely the activity of man in that area but it is not global warming.

ERROR 6 – SPPI is correct on Lake Chad.

ERROR 7 – I believe that SPPI has this correct as well. While Ms. Kreider is correct that Mr. Gore never specifically said that Katrina was the result of global warming, he definitely made his viewers feel that it was.

I do need to point out here that SPPI threw in a bit of spin on this one. They blamed the Clinton/Gore administration for not adequately building the levees that failed. While this was true, the same argument could be made for the Reagan/Bush, Bush/Quayle, and Bush/Cheney administrations. For that matter, since the current levees were in response to Hurricane Betsy of 1965 we could blame every administration since then for only paying for Category 3 hurricanes.

SPPI is correct that according to NOAA, there has been no abnormal increase in the number of hurricanes however that doesn’t prove much since the sample set is so small – we haven’t been counting ocean based hurricanes for very long.

ERROR 8 – The SPPI is correct that we cannot discern any change in polar bear population due to global warming. To be fair, this is a bad metric and AIT should never have used it. The polar bear population has increased so substantially over the past few decades that it would be impossible to say that climate change was good or bad for these animals. Once again, this is a case for a true discussion of causality and since the current change in population is due to human meddling, we need to stop using the plight of the polar bears.

ERROR 9 – It appears that SPPI is correct on this issue.

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