Tiree. Does it really deserve the world’s largest off shore windfarm?

The renewable energy industry is helping to destroy the UK economy and drive up unemployment says a new report. For every one of David Cameron’s green jobs created in the renewable energy sector (mainly solar and wind), another 3.7 jobs are being lost in the real economy, says the independent study by Verso Economics. In total, measurable policies to promote renewable energy cost £1.4 billion in the UK and £168 million in Scotland in 2009/10. But this doesn’t take into account the additional economic damage inflicted by the erection of enormous, bird-chopping monstrosities all over some of Britain’s most attractive tourist spots including, for example, the hitherto unspoilt island of Tiree.(H/T Michael Daly)

Still, its not all bad news. Until really quite recently, it was only lonely voices like Christopher Booker’s which were prepared to speak out against the great Wind Farm scam (and related Climate Cons). Now, as the Verso Economics report shows, more and more people are waking up to the horrendous economic and environmental damage being done in the name of combatting AGW/climate change/climate disruption/fill in fashionable new phrase here.

Booker lays out the facts yet again in a storming piece in the Daily Mail entitled Why the £250 billion wind farm industry could be the greatest scam of our age. The real villains of the piece, he argues, are our political classes Tories, Labour and Lib Dems alike who are completely out of touch with their increasingly sceptical electorate.

. Our Government has embarked on one of the most reckless gambles in our political history: the idea that we can look to the vagaries of the wind to provide nearly a third of the electricity we need to keep our economy running, well over  90 per cent of which is still currently supplied by coal, gas and nuclear power.

It is true that this target of raising the contribution made by wind by more than ten times in the next nine years was set by the EU.

But it is no good blaming Brussels for such an absurdly ambitious target, because no one was keener to adopt it than our own politicians, led first by Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband and now by David Cameron and the Energy Secretary Chris Huhne.

To meet this target, our Government wants to see us spend £100billion on building 10,000 more turbines, plus another £40billion on connecting them all up to the grid.

According to the electricity industry, we will then need to spend another £100billion on those conventional power stations to provide back-up — all of which adds up to £240billion by 2020, or just over £1,000 a year for every household in the land.

And for this our politicians are quite happy to see our countryside and the seas around our coasts smothered in vast arrays of giant industrial machines, all to produce an amount of electricity that could be provided by conventional power stations at a tenth of the cost.

When pressed on this, politicians talk airily of all the Green jobs which will ensue from investment (ie massive taxpayer subsidy) in renewables and of all the energy security which will result. The chutzpah required to come out with this guff is astonishing given that there is not a scintilla of real-world evidence to back up these claims. We already know that wind and solar power have proved a disaster in Germany, Denmark and Spain (where Dr Gabriel Calzada Alvarez calculated that for every green job the country had destroyed 2.2 jobs in the real economy). We also know that because of the unreliability of wind power, it has to be permanently backed up by conventional power. And we also know that energy security is no longer the problem its cracked up to be because of the shale gas revolution, which will provide us all with cheap, abundant energy for the next 250 years, some of it from as close to home as Blackpool.

Shale gas, as Andrew Orlowski notes here, has everything going for it:

No technology in the world is as disruptive as shale gas right now. Shale disrupts the conventional gas and oil businesses by decoupling the price of natural gas from the price of oil. It disrupts the petroleum industry by providing a cheap alternative to petrol: UPS is putting liquified natural gas-powered trucks into its fleet. It disrupts both by allowing new entrants into the field, which upsets the existing cartels, and state monopolies.

It disrupts the nuclear industry by providing energy buyers with a supply thats cheap and reliable – with no subsidies required. Politically, shale frees much of Europe from a dependence on Russias gas production. It also disrupts the environmental movement in several ways, making the high subsidies that investors demand to build ecologically correct renewable energy, such as wind and solar, hard to justify. An economy dependent on gas, rather than coal, cannot but help but lower its carbon footprint.

With so many vested interests upset by shale, no wonder its so popular!

Yet the economic benefits of an abundance of cheaper energy cant be overstressed: cheaper manufactured goods, energy independence, and an end to the obscenity of fuel poverty, where the poorest freeze – and pay to subsidise solar panels on the roofs of the wealthy. There are 5.5m UK households today living in fuel poverty – and thanks to carbon emissions targets and renewables commitments, the average household will have to pay £300 extra every year to 2020.

Which of course, Orlowski goes on, is why eco-nut politicians like the dreadful Chris Huhe are so determined to stamp on it.

But even if the politicians don’t understand the situation, the markets do.

Heres a report from Bloomberg, for example, on the sudden end of the UK solar gold rush:

Britain is moving faster than any other European country to contain a surge in solar power and prevent the boom-and-bust seen in Spain and predicted for the Czech Republic. The risk is scaring off the investors who would create the “green jobs” Prime Minister David Cameron is seeking to revive the economy.

“It’s going to completely kill the market,” said Tim German, renewable energy manager for the local government in Cornwall at the U.K.’s southwest tip. “Investors are starting to get cold feet.”

Why is this happening? Because the British government has belatedly come to realise what the Spanish government had already discovered months ago: that the renewables industry (being economically worthless in its own right) is only sustainable (tee hee) through massive government subsidy known as feed-in tariffs. These subsidies are so costly to the Exchequer and therefore to the taxpayer that they not only wreak enormous damage on the economy but prove extremely unpopular with voters.

When it comes to saving Mother Gaia and being able to feed and clothe their kids, people can very suddenly become very pragmatic about the threat of Man Made Global Warming. We’ve just seen a delicious example of this in Ireland which has been playing the green energy scam game more enthusiastically than perhaps any other country in the world whose Green party has been utterly destroyed in the recent elections.

I also like to think of it as another important sign of our fast-changing times that Watts Up With That? has won the 2011 Bloggie award for Best Science Blog. Thoroughly deserved of course, but can you imagine this happening even two years ago: an avowedly AGW sceptical blog being lionised in this way? I cant. The AGW industry is collapsing faster than Eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall. All those of you who have done your bit in fighting the great climate wars, I salute you!

Related posts:

1. Green jobs? Wot green jobs? (pt 242)
2. ‘Global warming’: time to get angry
3. What the Chinese really think of ‘Man Made Global Warming’.
4. Climategate: the final nail in the coffin of ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’?

46 thoughts on “The real cost of ‘global warming’”

1. Chris P says:1st March 2011 at 5:43 amDoes it hurt to be brain dead?I’ve never seen so much clueless factually deprived writing. Your “book” is drivel that could be written by teenager.Yes – let’s take Britain back to the coal fires of yesteryear when tens of thousands died of the flu. Let’s use up all the coal we have so there is none left. Yeh – that makes sense – to a clown.
2. Nige Cook says:1st March 2011 at 8:33 amChris, since you evidently haven’t actually read James Delingpole’s How to be right “drivel” (you are always wrong), here’s one of its gems:Kyoto Protocol: “Suppose every signatory … were to implement its proposals, that would still only reduce the world’s surface temperature by 0.07 °C (0.13 °F) in fifty years. … If Kyoto were implemented tomorrow, it might postpone the effects of global warming by six years – i.e., we’d get in 2106 the temperature we might otherwise have got in 2100 – at a cost to the world economy per annum of $150 billion. Yet as Bjørn Skeptical Environmentalist’ Lomborg (qv) has pointed out, for just one year’s worth of that wasted money we could provide clean drinking water and sanitation for every person on the planet. Which do we value more highly: millions of human lives or the neuroses of green scaremongers?”Of course, this Gospel according to St Delingpole implicitly assumes that the reader is not a fanatical, bloodthirsty, anti-humanity Nazi. Nazism lives on in the fanatical groupthink of scaremongering, and ad hominem, “self-superiorism” narcissistic tactics that the “green-mongers” use in attempting to either smear or exterminate (rather than scientifically refute) their critics. I recommend you read Delingpole’s Gospel, and learn the facts from it, instead of throwing ignorant insults at the solid facts of reality.
3. Velocity says:3rd March 2011 at 11:03 amChris P
   Take a look at the 520,000 year long Vostok ice-core record. What it shows is Earths temperature and CO2 record. What that shows is temperature rise leads to CO2 rise, with an 800 year lag to CO2 rising.
   So Temp is the horse, and CO2 is a cart. Cause and effect, got it?
   Now we come to the theory of CO2 which is CO2 rise and CAUSE Temp rise (ie. putting the cart before the horse). But the Vostok record shows high CO2 levels, even above todays 380ppm has NO EFFECT on earths Temp. Instead Earths Tempt continues to decline through high CO2 peaks.
   So forget your CO2 theory, earth already has proven it to be total bollocks.
   So hwo about you go have a lookey at it, learn something even a 12 year old can follow and inform your AGW believers to STFU
4. Martin Lack says:3rd March 2011 at 2:28 pmVelocity,
   I am getting so bored of reading the same old stuff …
   ALL DENIALIST RED-HERRINGS BEBUNKED HERE FOR FREE:
   http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn11462-climate-change-a-guide-for-the-perplexed.html
   For goodness sake, wake up!
5. Martin Lack says:3rd March 2011 at 4:28 pm Why there’s no sign of a climate conspiracy in hacked emails. For example: “…Forget about the temperature records compiled by researchers such as those whose emails were hacked… go out into your garden or the nearby countryside and note when the leaves unfold, when flowers bloom, when migrating birds arrive and so on. Compare your findings with historical records, where available, and you’ll probably find spring is coming days, even weeks earlier than a few decades ago…”A country with no time for climate change scepticism (posted today). For example: “…Opposing the scientific consensus on climate change has become something of an article of faith for the socially conservative religious right in the US. But in Uganda – a deeply religious and superstitious nation infamous for its rampant homophobia – climate change scepticism is nowhere to be seen…”
6. JimmyGiro says:3rd March 2011 at 4:34 pmMartin Lack, wrote:“One of the most often repeated objections of AGW deniers is that global temperature changes have always preceded CO2 changes. However, the fact of the matter is that the two things are mutually reinforcing – changes in one cause changes in the other. Therefore the fact that we have now caused such a massive increase in CO2 levels makes changes in temperature inevitable.”If these are facts, then consider this simple analysis:‘A’ reinforcing ‘B’, and ‘B’ reinforcing ‘A’, should lead to positive feedback. Therefore, by Henry’s law, and your ‘facts’, we would reach saturation in a few days, of which the end state would be solely determined by the suns radiance.
7. Martin Lack says:3rd March 2011 at 4:52 pmJimmy, if you’re so clever, why don’t you write to the New Scientist and tell them they are wrong?Re: the second link in my previous post, may be this will work. If not, copy and paste this URL… http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20928015.300-a-country-with-no-time-for-climate-change-scepticism.html
8. JimmyGiro says:3rd March 2011 at 5:18 pmBecause, Martin, I know I’m not so clever. I know that my lack of superiority would make it wrong to denounce those who have different views than me.Bad science, and bad people, are two different things. To condemn those who are your ‘heretics’, would constitute bigotry. Like those who infer that Johnny Ball is akin to a paedophile, for not agreeing with the AGW mantra.Alas my mediocrity is not sexy enough for NewScientist; they’d probably get more of a hard-on publishing love letters between the better state funded ‘intellectuals’.
9. Martin Lack says:3rd March 2011 at 8:10 pmI really don’t know what you are talking about… Why do you resort to such rambling nonsense? Can you not just “suspend your disbelief” in what the New Scientist have to say long enough long enough to allow it to sink in…?
   However, as I said to Nige Cook yesterday, “You can believe in your conspiracy theory; and I will believe in mine. However, whereas yours requires a multifarious global cosnpiracy to exist; mine only requires a small number of extremely influential scientists to exist and propogate doubt and disinformation (as you and your well-meaning kind do the rest).”
   While you are waiting for climate change to become incontivertable, why don’t you take up smoking? After all, if you believe those that tell you it is not the burning of fossil fuels over the last 200 years that is the problem, you must surely also accept that smoking does not cause lung cancer….
10. JimmyGiro says:3rd March 2011 at 8:20 pmMartin Lack wrote:
    “You can believe in your conspiracy theory; and I will believe in mine. However, whereas yours requires a multifarious global cosnpiracy to exist; mine only requires a small number of extremely influential scientists to exist and propogate doubt and disinformation (as you and your well-meaning kind do the rest).”The “multifarious” and “small number of extremely influential scientists” are the same people.
11. Nige Cook says:4th March 2011 at 10:24 am“Jimmy, if you’re so clever, why don’t you write to the New Scientist and tell them they are wrong?” – Martin LackMartin, I’ve written over a hundred letters to New Scientist about their eco-radiation and H2O bias since 1991. None have been published, whether short or long. I’ve had feature articles and letters published elsewhere, however, e.g. Electronics World. New Scientist censor out all criticism and political incorrectness (basically that means anything new scientifically, unless it has a Nobel laureate, a lot of professional high-budget PR spin, or a famous Dean behind it), unless it is of the strawman variety from people who don’t know the facts, which they are delighted to print, followed by a patronising sneer in italics, pointing out the errors! I think that is straight out of Dr Goebbels’ manual on how to be politically correct in a fascist regime, just after the section on how to burn down the Reichstag, to implement eugenics.
12. Nige Cook says:4th March 2011 at 10:37 am“However, as I said to Nige Cook yesterday, “You can believe in your conspiracy theory; and I will believe in mine. However, whereas yours requires a multifarious global cosnpiracy to exist; mine only requires a small number of extremely influential scientists to exist and propogate doubt and disinformation (as you and your well-meaning kind do the rest).”” – Martin LackMartin, I wasn’t going to reply to you because you failed to reply to the scientific content, you ignored it all yet again and linked to a decrepid old Monty Python video. But since you are now wallowing in your own glory, please note that doom-mongerers have been proclaiming the end of the world every since it began, refusing to answer criticisms, and claiming that within their lifetime or their kids lifetime, they will be proved right. Not good enough! The fact you won’t find the time to answer factual refutations proves that either you don’t find the subject important enough to defend scientifically, or else you can’t defend it. Otherwise, you’d keep the discussion scientific instead of running away from the facts and hiding behind Monty Python’s argument. We can’t agree to disagree, or to wait for some unspecified event to spring your brain into top gear, because the CO2 hot air is diverting money into green-fascist millionaires pockets that should be spent making the world a fairer place, with clean water and sanitation for all.
13. Scott says:4th March 2011 at 11:08 amChris P,
    Totally agree with you its like he’s frightened of being ignored.Did you see his pathetic performance on the Horizon program, when presented with facts he just resorts to the same tired old rants that were left behind in the 1970’s
14. Martin Lack says:4th March 2011 at 4:18 pmNige,
    It seems that you are incapable of being succinct and to the point (and have a penchant for fitting the word “Nazi” into just about every post). However, that is all I have ever tried to be (i.e. succinct rather than a Nazi)!
    I believe that the New Scientist website contains a comprehensive debunking of all your pseudo-scientific mumbo-jumbo, including claiming that water vapour (which has always been a transient component of the atmosphere) is more important GHG than the CO2 (which is well on the way to being double pre-industrial levels).
    When presented with just the CO2 data for the last 500,000 years, even my 15-yr old son could recognise that the the only thing that is “new” or “different” (and therefore must be prime suspect for causation) is the release of fossilised carbon in the last 200 yrs.
15. JimmyGiro says:4th March 2011 at 4:31 pmMartin Lack wrote:“When presented with just the CO2 data for the last 500,000 years, even my 15-yr old son could recognise that the the only thing that is “new” or “different” (and therefore must be prime suspect for causation) is the release of fossilised carbon in the last 200 yrs.”If this is so, then ask your 15 year old son, why there were Ice Ages, waxing and waning?Was it the Tyrannosaurus Capitalists?
16. Martin Lack says:4th March 2011 at 5:18 pmJimmy,This will seem arrogant I know but, for goodness sake stop displaying your ignorance of relevant facts by asking such silly questions. I have probably forgotten more of these facts than you will ever know; as per a BSc in Geology (i.e. “rocks and stuff innit“) and an MSc in Hydrogeology (i.e. “groundwater and stuff like“).Furthermore, although my son probably could not spell “Milankovitch Cycles“, I believe he could explain why the Earth has been in and out of Ice Ages over the last 1M years; and maybe even why it has been much colder than that even further back in geological history (i.e. so-called “Snowball Earth“); and warmer too – neither of which would have been very pleasant!However, none of this changes the significance of what I said (as quoted by you) in any way whatsoever. In fact, what I said sums up why the AGW denialist position is so insane: You have not got an explanation that stands up to scrutiny or logic; and yet you refuse to accept the only explanation that does either of these things.And before Nige (or anyone else) says that I am not offering any facts to back up my “wild” assertions, I have referred you – and will keep referring you – to the peer-reviewed and widely accepted scientific literature (e.g. as summarised on the New Scientist website); whose publication has not led to any editor being sacked (unlike some editors that have chosen to publish contrarian claims).

    If the truth hurts; I suggest that you stop lying to yourself!

17. JimmyGiro says:4th March 2011 at 7:46 pmMilankovitch Cycles; are they an explanation, or just a description of the periodicy of the phenomena, that are Ice Ages?And if these explanatory facts, regarding CO2 causation, are widely accepted, then why bother with peer-review, why not just explain the mechanism?After all, most other scientists do that; Einstein didn’t need a peer-review to prove e=mc^2.
18. JimmyGiro says:4th March 2011 at 8:19 pm“I have probably forgotten more of these facts than you will ever know; as per a BSc in Geology (i.e. “rocks and stuff innit“) and an MSc in Hydrogeology (i.e. “groundwater and stuff like“). ”I bet you drive a big car.
19. Nige Cook says:4th March 2011 at 11:01 pmJimmyGiro: it’s no use trying to reform Nazis by civilized discussion because they just refer you to the Nazi Scientist website! The Nazis know they’re wrong, which is why they won’t discuss facts, just “peer”-reviewed lies. The basic definition of “peer”-review is lying about science. “Peer”-review is what the Nazis did in confirming eugenics to be science, “peer”-review is led to Galileo’s arrest. I fully expect to arrested and decapitated for politically incorrect science when Martin finished his MA in environmental politics and is appointed Witchfinder General by the progressive Nick Clegg, Dave, or (if Martin takes his time), Ed Miliband.“There are two distinct meanings to the word ‘science’. The first meaning is what physicists and mathematicians do. The second meaning is a magical art, about which the general public has superstition. … What is of harm is the blind faith in an imposed system that is implied. ‘Science says’ has replaced ‘scripture tells us’ but with no more critical reflection on the one than on the other. … reason is no more understandable this year than prayer a thousand years ago. Little Billy may become a scientist as earlier he might have turned priest, and know the sacred texts … The chromed apparatus is blessed by distant authority, the water thrice-filtered for purity, and he wears the white antiseptic gown … But the masses still move by faith. … I have fear of what science says, not the science that is hard-won knowledge but that other science, the faith imposed on people by a self-elected administering priesthood. … In the hands of an unscrupulous and power-grasping priesthood, this efficient tool, just as earlier, the Final Man, has become an instrument of bondage. … A metaphysics that ushered in the Dark Ages is again flourishing. … Natural sciences turned from description to a ruminative scholarship concerned with authority. …“But the immense ease with which the data can be shuffled by machine has seduced him. Model after model springs to mind before the huge ink-blot of correlation matrices. He must test them, cautiously, carefully. … On the superstition that reduction to number is the same as abstraction, it permits any arbitrary assemblage of data to be mined for relations that can then be named and reified in the same way as Fritz Mauthner once imagined that myths arise. … Our sales representatives, trained in your tribal taboos, will call on you shortly. You have no choice but to buy. For this is the new rationalism, the new messiah, the new Church, and the new Dark Ages come upon us.”– Jerome Y. Lettvin, The Second Dark Ages, paper given at the UNESCO Symposium on “Culture and Science”, Paris, 6-10 September 1971 (in Robin Clarke, Notes for the Future, Thames and Hudson, London, 1975, pp. 141-50).
20. Martin Lack says:5th March 2011 at 2:16 pmBoth of you would do well to answer the question, Why do you continue to assert that the Sun, or water vapour, or ‘the anything-other-than-CO2 candidate’ is responsible for global warming?“
21. Don Stuart says:5th March 2011 at 2:47 pmStill got that complete Berkshire Hunt ChrisP foaming at the mouth with his teen like wank commentary I see James.But anyway, thanks for that valuable piece of info that coal fires caused the deaths of thousands from flu. Here was me thinking that ‘flu’ was a virus.Still at least ‘Scott’ thinks he speaks sense.
22. Nige Cook says:5th March 2011 at 4:49 pm“Both of you would do well to answer the question, Why do you continue to assert that the Sun, or water vapour, or ‘the anything-other-than-CO2 candidate’ is responsible for global warming?” – Martin Lack7-step disproof of AGW theory: quick summary for the illiterate/retarded/stupid:1. Earth has warmed naturally enough over the past 18,000 years to increase sea levels 120 metres, 0.67 m/year mean with maximum rates of rise much higher at some times (contrasted to 0.2 m/year mean and 0.4 m/year maximum over the past century). Apart from mountain ranges, Tibet, volcanic pollution, and Milankovich cycles in earth’s orbit caused by the positions of other planets, there is also the issue that climate features like the gulf stream and the global oceanic conveyer belt can vary in location or even shut down. Between 1400-1850 AD, the North Atlantic surface water salinity decreased due to massive amounts of fresh water from melting glaciers and ice shelves, so the fresh water (which has lower density than salt water) floated on top instead of sinking. This shut down the North Atlantic water conveyor system, causing the “Little Ice Age” of 1400 to 1850 AD. So global warming and melting ice can actually cause climatic cooling, regulating climate! Earth’s climate is always changing so there is a 50% chance that a rise in CO2 will correlate with a rise in temperature through sheer random luck.2. Dr Phil Jones admitted the tree ring data fails to correlate with thermometer data for global temperature since 1960. This is provably caused by non-temperature effects like the increase of “global dimming” due to pollution and clouds cover, which reduces the amount of sunlight energy getting to the ground. The albedo change from increasing cloud cover reflects more solar energy back into space, countering and cancelling most of the effect of CO2. This is thus the anti-greenhouse effect from having 71% ocean coverage of the Earth. However, the mainstream models ignore the buoyant, convective rise of heated (IR absorbing) moist air to form clouds. Therefore, they assume that moist air due to CO2 evaporating water is stagnant near the surface, amplifying CO2 global warming by absorbing additional IR, instead of rising to form clouds that increase albedo and cancel out CO2 temperature effects on climate!3. Venus has a runaway greenhouse effect because it’s only 108 Gm from the sun compared to 150 Gm for the Earth, so by the inverse square law Venus receives about twice the solar intensity per square metre that Earth gets, and it rotates over two hundred times more slowly than Earth, so carbonate rocks are reduced, releasing practically all the CO2 into the atmosphere. Mars also has an almost pure CO2 atmosphere, but is freezing cold because it’s not as close to the sun, and has about the same length of day as Earth does!

    4. The most prolific period of life on earth was the Cambrian explosion beginning 545 million, which (according to GEOCARB 1.0) led to a CO2 abundance over 15 times higher than today 460 million years ago than it is now, with mean global temperature was 7 Celsius higher than now. Even just 100 million years ago (nothing in the 4.5 billion years long history of this planet), there were no continuous ice caps at the poles (just winter snow): all the ice melted in the summer at the poles, and deciduous rain forests existed within 1,000 km of the poles. This was opposed by the cooling from the interruption to air flow by the Alps, which arose from the result of a collision beginning 120 million years ago between Africa and Eurasia, and beginning 50 million years ago, the rise of the Himalayas and Tibet due to the collision of the plates of India and Eurasia cooled the whole planet by strengthening the monsoon system in southern Asia.

    5. Mars is experiencing natural “global warming” without any human intervention:

    “… for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near Mars’ south pole have shrunk from the previous year’s size, suggesting a climate change in progress.”

    – NASA, September 20, 2005: Orbiter’s Long Life Helps Scientists Track Changes on Mars.

    6. If the mainstream H2O vapour positive-feedback doubling model was correct (amplifying CO2 temperature increases by a factor of two), then H2O vapour itself would have long since saturated the atmosphere made the temperature on Earth rise to boiling point. It can’t, because hot moist air rises to form clouds with a high albedo, that reflects sunlight away from Earth, cooling the planet and regulating climate: H2O opposes CO2, it doesn’t amplify it! The NASA scientist who discovered this resigned in protest when censored, and his associate, Dr. Miklos Zagoni, states: “Since the Earth’s atmosphere is not lacking in greenhouse gases [water vapor], if the system could have increased its surface temperature it would have done so long before our emissions. It need not have waited for us to add CO2: another greenhouse gas, H2O, was already to hand in practically unlimited reservoirs in the oceans.” They can prove it, too: the NOAA data on humidity in air shows a fall in H2O atmospheric water vapour (not the predicted rise!) between 1948 and 2008. H2O is 30 times more important than CO2 as a “greenhouse gas” so the small fall in H2O vapour plus the increase in condensed H2O (cloud cover) offsets the effect of CO2 on temperature. The “greenhouse” gases are in stable equilibrium, with H2O falling as CO2 and CH4 increase, and vice-versa! This is an example of Le Châtelier’s principle of disturbed equilibria.

    7. CO2 absorbing rainforests can’t spread (migrate) very quickly, so they can be easily killed off by temperature fall rates which CO2 emitting animals easily survive by migration of CO2 emitting animals. This proved mechanism increases the atmospheric CO2 level in response to a change in temperature in the geological record. Hence, atmospheric levels of CO2 in geological history have not been driving temperature, but just responding to it. Because of the amazing speed at which tropical vegetation can grow in hot, humid, conditions, a rise in temperature increases CO2 absorbing rainforests faster than animals can proliferate, causing a fall in atmospheric CO2 levels. Therefore, the fossil record correlation between CO2 and temperature is not due to CO2 driving temperature, but is due to temperature driving CO2 changes!

23. JimmyGiro says:5th March 2011 at 6:49 pmMartin Lack wrote:“Both of you would do well to answer the question, Why do you continue to assert that the Sun, or water vapour, or ‘the anything-other-than-CO2 candidate’ is responsible for global warming?“”We all acknowledge that Ice Age cycles exist, you even used the name ‘Milankovitch’ to bolster your credibility. Therefore, since man was not industriously contributing plant food to the atmosphere prior to the last Ice Age, then another mechanism must have been responsible for climate change, thus CO2 is not an exclusive candidate, it may in fact, not even be a candidate at all.
24. JimmyGiro says:5th March 2011 at 6:54 pm@Martin LackFurther, the onus of proof is yours. I answered purely for the purpose of debate.
25. Martin Lack says:5th March 2011 at 9:16 pmWhat level of proof do you want? >50% probability? Beyond reasoanble doubt?Most reasonable people have concluded that we already have the evidence. Sadly far too many are willing to continue to argue about who is to blame and who should be first to take action. Meanwhile, those least able to adapt are the first to feel the effects of change that is already upon is… Here is another quote from Thursday’s New Scientist article about Uganda, “The climate is a constant topic of conversation among ordinary Ugandans. More than 80% of them are farmers, and people are in no doubt that the climate is changing. The seasonal rains that once arrived with precision are now erratic and unpredictable. When your living depends on the fertility of your farmland, the climate is vitally important. In an office in London or New York it is less of a big deal – and the invisibility of climate change in developed countries is a barrier to communicating the risks”.It is already 1 Celsius warmer than 1860AD… How warm will it have to get before you denialists will accept that human activity is changing our climate? How many countries will have to be flooded by rising sea levels? How much desertification will it take? What percentage loss in crop yields? How much consequential migration? How many wars started over access to food or water? (The current revolutions in the Arab world prompted by rising prices are just the beginning…)In a special message to Congress in February 1965, US President Lyndon B. Johnson noted: “This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through . . . a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.” If you want to know why nobody in America took any notice, you really should read Merchants of Doubt but, if you can’t be bothered, this summary of the relevant history (not science) in the Washington Post (2007) tells you all you need to know.
26. Martin Lack says:5th March 2011 at 9:31 pmTherefore, since man was not industriously contributing [CO2] to the atmosphere prior to the last Ice Age, then another mechanism must have been responsible for climate change… – Jimmy Giro. I think your name is very appropriate because, if I was to refute this stupid statement (again), I would definitely be going round in circles.
27. Nige Cook says:5th March 2011 at 10:59 pm“Here is another quote from Thursday’s New Scientist article …” – Martin LackMartin, please see psychology lecturer Dr Helene Guldberg’s 2001 debunking of the fear-mongering basis of global warming used by New Scientist and its editor, “Eco-evangelism”, in Spiked Science, 26 April 2001: http://www.spiked-online.com/Articles/00000002D081.htm She there reports the lying, denialism of natural climate change by the editor of New Scientist, who simply threw the naive, subjective question back at her: “why take the risk?” (USSR: “why take the risk of not ice-axing Trotsky and othe dissenters?”, Nazis: “why take the risk of living with other races?”, etc.) She states: “the history of the planet has been one of far greater temperature fluctuations than those predicted for the coming century”. The “greenhouse effect” occurs on Venus but not on this planet: greenhouses don’t contain oceans, clouds!“It is already 1 Celsius warmer than 1860AD… How warm will it have to get before you denialists will accept that human activity is changing our climate?” – Martin LackThe world has been warming more or less continuously for 18,000 years. We’re in a warming spell. So why do you think our CO2 emissions (which are emissions from fossil fuels, which in turn came from CO2 in the atmosphere in the first place) are causing the warming? Duh! How do you distinguish natural climate change from CO2 effects? What caused the last ice age, which covered Britain with glaciers and caused sea level to be be 120 metres lower than now 18,000 years ago, to thaw? Answer: natural global warming, the same process that is shrinking the dry ice at the poles of Mars, as Nasa reported on September 20, 2005. Do you think there are Martians causing global warming on Mars?As I pointed out above, the mean rate of rise of sea level over the past 18,000 years was 0.67 cm/year, compared to only 0.2 cm/year over the past century! Trivial.

    “How many countries will have to be flooded by rising sea levels? How much desertification will it take? What percentage loss in crop yields? How much consequential migration? How many wars started over access to food or water?” – Martin Lack

    My experience with climate change liars began with “nuclear winter”, hyped in 1983, which claimed that cold weather would reduce the number of frost-free days for farming in Canada and some Northern American states. Now if you have global warming instead of “nuclear winter”, you don’t need Einstein to tell you that warming will allow farming to be extended to previously permafrost areas, “you gain some, you lose some”. People can adapt to global warming by moving farm areas closer to the poles. However, the warming rate is too slow. CO2 isn’t having a long-term effect, because it’s been proven by the censored NASA climate scientists that H2O cloud cover increases oppose CO2, preventing positive feedback from water vapour. So there isn’t a problem, but if there were a problem, the solution wouldn’t be to try to cut CO2 emissions, just to live with it. Cutting annual CO2 emissions just slows down the time taken to pump CO2 into the atmosphere; and it’s cost inefficient even if CO2 was the problem (it isn’t).

    “In a special message to Congress in February 1965, US President Lyndon B. Johnson noted: “This generation has altered the composition of the atmosphere on a global scale through . . . a steady increase in carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels.” ” – Martin Lack

    Actually, Edward Teller in 1958 was using using the CO2 argument against fossil fuels. See Edward Teller and Albert L. Latter, Our Nuclear Future: Facts, Dangers, and Opportunities (Criterion Books, New York, 1958), page 167:

    “If we continue to consume [fossil] fuel at an increasing rate, however, it appears probable that the carbon dioxide content of the atmosphere will become high enough to raise the average temperature of the earth by a few degrees. If this were to happen, the ice caps would melt and the general level of the oceans would rise. Coastal cities like New York and Seattle might be innundated. Thus the industrial revolution using ordinary chemical fuel could be forced to end … However, it might still be possible to use nuclear fuel.”

    Like Teller’s dismissal of Feynman’s path integrals in 1948, he was wrong. I’m sure you’ll also find a hot air “warning” in Jeremiah, Dante, Nostradamus, and every “the end is nigh” opinion piece in the Guardian since its inception in 1821. Scare-mongering doesn’t count as science, no matter what it’s history, no matter how many people supported eugenics, how famous they were, what prizes they received, how wealthy they were, etc. In science, if you’re wrong, you’re wrong. That’s what makes science different from subjective horseshit.

28. Martin Lack says:6th March 2011 at 3:13 pmKum ze revolution, you vill definitely be first on my list. (Are you happy now?)
29. Martin Lack says:6th March 2011 at 7:01 pmIn science, if you’re wrong, you’re wrong. That’s what makes science different from subjective horseshit.” – Nige Cook … Never wias a truer word spoken in jest!By the way, the world came out of the last Ice Age about 11,500 yrs ago and warmed rapidly for about 6,500 years. Thus it was about 5000 years ago that the Sahara became a desert and all the people and animals went south (literally not metaphorically). Since then, global average temperatures have been relatively stable and pretty much as warm as they have ever been in any interglacial period in the last 500,000 years.Therefore, no matter how many times you say that the “…world has been warming more or less continuously for 18,000 years …” it will still be wrong; a bit like Nazi propaganda (funilly enough). Furthermore, we consequently picked a very bad time to start burning fossilised carbon and to trigger the thawing of the permafrost. We also picked a bad tim to pollute the atmosphere with so2 etc (because as we clean it up we eliminate one of the main causes why the warming due to CO2 has not been worse thus far). All in all we humans are a bloody environmental catastrophy that has already happened…
30. JimmyGiro says:6th March 2011 at 8:25 pmMartin Lack wrote:“Furthermore, we consequently picked a very bad time to start burning fossilised carbon and to trigger the thawing of the permafrost.”‘A bad time’, as in: there was something else at play?Careful Martin, you might spontaneously become a fellow denier.Also: “We also picked a bad tim to pollute the atmosphere with so2 etc… ”

    Since you mentioned SO2, what ever happened to the global disaster that was ‘acid rain’?

    Was the problem that acid rain lacked longevity. As the theory of acid rain would result in fairly immediate, and measurable consequences; whereas AGW can go on for ever… “are we there yet?… are we there yet?… are we there yet?”

31. Nige Cook says:6th March 2011 at 9:43 pm“By the way, the world came out of the last Ice Age about 11,500 yrs ago and warmed rapidly for about 6,500 years. Thus it was about 5000 years ago that the Sahara became a desert and all the people and animals went south (literally not metaphorically). Since then, global average temperatures have been relatively stable and pretty much as warm as they have ever been in any interglacial period in the last 500,000 years.” – MartinSea levels were 120 metres lower 18,000 years ago, which is time of the minimum in sea levels. You’re referring to the beginning of the holocene, arbitrarily defined as the time the Wisconsin glaciers receded in North America (around 12,000 years ago), by which time sea level had already risen above its minimum. If we divide the 120 metres sea level rise into 18,000 years to get 0.67 cm/year mean. If we use your suggestion that most of the sea rise occurred over an effective period just 6,500 years, that gives a mean rate of rise of sea level of nearly 2 cm/year, ten times higher than the rate over the past century!Hence, current rates of sea level rise are not unprecedented. We know how much sea levels have risen over the past 18,000 years. If you think most of the rise occurred over a shorter period of time, that means the natural rates of rise was much higher, making present rates of change look even more trivial.Clearly, however, you’re wrong. There was a big fall in temperature from 1400-1850 AD due to natural global water flooding the North Atlantic with fresh water from melting ice, which floated due to low salinity instead of sinking, fouling the convection in the North Atlantic conveyor and causing the Little Ice Age. This indicates global warming in action!“Furthermore, we consequently picked a very bad time to start burning fossilised carbon and to trigger the thawing of the permafrost. We also picked a bad tim to pollute the atmosphere with so2 etc (because as we clean it up we eliminate one of the main causes why the warming due to CO2 has not been worse thus far). All in all we humans are a bloody environmental catastrophy that has already happened…” – Martin

    You’re still assuming that the temperature proxies, “Mike’s Nature trick” of gluing false tree-ring proxies to false weather station data post-1960 (mostly downwind of expanding cities, causing temperature rises by direct heat pollution from central heating, not CO2!), is true. All this data is faked statistics. Tree rings are no temperature proxy because tree growth is provably affected by sunlight/cloud-cover (not the same thing as air temperature!). Tree ring data doesn’t correlate with temperature due, as you suggest to global dimming from sulphur dioxide, much of which comes from natural volcanic pollution, not industry.

    But there is also a cloud cover effect from extra H2O evaporating from slightly warmed oceans, increasing Earth’s albedo. This has a natural cooling effect, and is why Earth is not a greenhouse. To exaggerate this mechanism: if the sun boils the oceans, clouds of steam form which stop the sunlight reaching the oceans. Thus, Earth regulates its temperature automatically, once the oceans heat very slightly.

    Satellite temperature data is also all fake, because it is biased. It can at best only measure surface temperatures in areas not covered with clouds, which is a biased sample because cloud cover has been increasing since 1948 as NOAA data on humidity imply. So you need to know the average temperature under the cloudy skies, and a sensitive measure of exactly how the average cloud cover of the Earth has varied, to get a correct overall average temperature. Cloud cover traditionally was recorded using a subjective glance at the sky and a simple fraction, e.g. 1/4 of sky covered or 1/3rd, which isn’t very accurate.

    However, there is data on the lack of H2O feedback: http://nige.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/new.gif This data proves that water vapour hasn’t been increasing with CO2 emissions! Atmospheric H2O has fallen by 1% since 1946, while CO2 has risen. Since 1 kg of H2O as vapour in the atmosphere (not as condensed cloud droplets!) absorbs 30 times as much solar radiation energy as 1 kg of CO2, it follows that the 1% fall in H2O vapour is equivalent to a 30% fall in CO2 “greenhouse” gas equivalent! This is countering global warming, and NASA banned its researcher Dr Ferenc Miskolczi who discovered this from publishing it! IPCC computer models still assume falsely that H2O amplifies, rather than opposes, CO2.

32. Martin Lack says:7th March 2011 at 10:08 amNige,Your verbal incontinence astonishes me. Am I supposed to be intimidated into submission by it? If so, your bullying tactic is not working; it just puts me off reading most of what you write. This effect is so strong that I almost missed your point about global warming on Mars (where what atmosphere it has is mostly CO2). There are perfectly reasonable explanations for any warming on Mars that do not invalidate my position; nor require the presence Martians (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1720024.ece).However, even if average total solar radiation is increasing (as opposed to sunspot activity) this just increaseas the need for humanity not to make matters worse… This is the point that I keep making, which you seem unable or unwilling to appreciate: Your statistics on previous sea level change are utterly irrelevant… 200 years ago, we were already in a warm interglacial period with high sea levels and high CO2 levels to go with it. Therefore, 200 years ago was not a good time to start releasing 1 million years-worth of fossilised carbon into the atmosphere per year (faster than the oceans can possibly soak it up).Even if we stopped all such emissions tomorrow, atmospheric CO2 levels would take 20-30 years to stabilise; and the temperature 400 years. So, at very least, we need to develop carbon sequestration techniques to take the excess CO2 back out of the atmosphere, but getting off the hydrocarbon habit altogether would be best, even if it does mean embracing nuclear energy.
33. Nige Cook says:7th March 2011 at 3:58 pmMartin: of course there’s a natural explanation to global warming on Mars! That’s my point. It’s not due to human activity. Please see NOAA mean global humidity data http://nige.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/new.gif which proves why recent Earth temperature data shows a cooling here: water vapour absorbs 30 times as much heat from sunlight in the atmosphere, but contrary to IPCC models, it atmospheric water vapour hasn’t been increasing with CO2 emissions! The 1% fall in H2O vapour is equivalent to a 30*1 = 30% fall in CO2 “greenhouse” gas equivalent in that period.Now the usual curve on the CO2 pollution in the atmosphere shows roughly a 20% or so increase in this period. We can roughly double this to take account of your methane emission from bacterial action in thawing permafrost. The overall effect of the fall in H2O equivalent CO2 almost cancels out the increase in atmospheric CO2 and CH4. Don’t you agree? This was discovered by NASA’s contractor Dr Ferenc Miskolczi, who was banned from publishing his mechanism (admittedly he didn’t write his paper very convincingly). The whole flaw in the IPCC models is the theoretical assumption that H2O amplifies global warming. The data show it is doing the opposite. That’s why the climate is now cooling!
34. Martin Lack says:7th March 2011 at 5:18 pmNige,You make an interesting and valid theoretical point but, back in the real world, your presentation of NOAA data does not show that “the climate is now cooling!” Since when has it been cooling? If it is, why have the 20 warmest years on record all been since 1982 (including every single year since 1997)? See also:
    http://climateprogress.org/2010/11/08/the-global-cooling-myth-dies-again/
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/02/18/how-to-handle-climate-cha_n_467671.htmlYou conveniently forget that CH4 is also >20 times more potent as a GHG than CO2 and, therefore, that the ongoing thawing of the permafrost (i.e another positive feedback mechanism) is far more significant than any negative feedback caused by any reduction in average humidity.
35. Martin Lack says:7th March 2011 at 5:52 pmJimmyGiro (not to leave you out):When I said “we picked a bad time“, I simply meant (what I said) that things were already then as warm as they had been for 500,000 years. Nothing more, nothing less.With regard to acid rain, I think you will find it was addressed via the UN convention on Long Range Transboundary Air Pollution (LRTAP); as was the hole in the ozone layer via The Montreal Protocol on Substances That Deplete the Ozone Layer .What a shame it is then that we cannot get the same level of effective international agreement under the UNFCCC? Indeed, the increasing effectiveness of regulation to tackle these other atmospheric pollutants removes the global cooling effect they were having; and means your attempt to pick faults in my argument is completely stuffed!
36. JimmyGiro says:7th March 2011 at 7:37 pmThe UN fairy said: “Let it be so!” And all was sweetness and light.Martin, I’m not picking holes in your argument, because you are not giving an argument, you are hiding behind presumed authority. What I was doing was highlighting the erroneous predictions of yesteryears ‘authorities’ of doom from the environmental ‘sciences’.Nige’s point about the Martian climate change is very important if true; since this debate is about the ‘anthropogenic’ influence, the mechanism is actually irrelevant if all we need to do is find the human source to global warming, or not. The Martian atmospheric temperature increase would be strong correlating evidence, if it shadowed the Earth’s changes, that CO2 from man’s life giving industries, are not necessarily causal to global warming. But I refrain from saying it would be proof, because mere correlation, however close, is not causal proof in itself.By the way, as you are a ‘waterologist’, did you not predict that the UN’s well digging exploits in Bangladesh, would lead to the highest levels of death in that country, due to toxic build-up of Selenium and Arsenic in the groundwater?You have to be careful of the authorities you choose to hide behind, Martin.
37. Nige Cook says:7th March 2011 at 9:01 pm“Nige’s point about the Martian climate change is very important if true …” – JimmiGiroJimmiGiro: please visit http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/mars/news/mgs-092005.html and see the last sentence of the first paragraph:“… for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near Mars’ south pole have shrunk from the previous year’s size, suggesting a climate change in progress.”– NASA, September 20, 2005: Orbiter’s Long Life Helps Scientists Track Changes on Mars. There is EVIDENCE of GLOBAL WARMING on MARS over the past decade, UNLIKE Earth, which has been cooling over the past decade.
38. Martin Lack says:7th March 2011 at 9:43 pmWhich Earth is that then Nige, it doesn’t appear to be this one?This morning on “Start the Week” programme on Radio 4, Andrew Marr interviewed the Australian scientist and explorer, Tim Flannery, who described “Climategate” as… “a very carefully crafted and cynical plot, which involved illegal activities, in an attempt to destroy the possibility of some sort of concerted global action on climate change…”. href=”http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/b00z58b0/Start_the_Week_07_03_2011”> Listen here (from 05:00)The question you need to ask yourself is, “who has stollen my respect for scientific authority and why should I trust them?“
39. Nige Cook says:7th March 2011 at 11:40 pmMartin: authority is anathema to science, which isn’t about politics. Science isn’t about voting for which theory in your opinion looks most pretty or respectable. It’s just about facts. Galileo was imprisoned by scientific authority, and his enemy wasn’t as lefties claim the Pope (who was actually very understanding towards him), but the local professors of astronomy (who refused to look through his telescope, just as Sir Paul Nurse refused to listen to James’s argument that cut and paste data fiddling isn’t science). Please examine NASA’s contractor Dr Ferenc Miskolczi’s censored graph, http://nige.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/new.gif and its implications! Don’t refuse to look:1. NASA’s models assume that H2O vapour is a positive feedback (amplification) effect which doubles the temperature rise of CO2.2. NASA’s contractor Dr Ferenc Miskolczi found NOAA data that global H2O (air humidity between the surface and the top of the atmosphere) has the opposite effect: each kg of H2O vapour absorbs 30 times as much thermal radiation as CO2, and H2O vapour in the atmosphere not been rising as predicted, but instead has been falling.H2O done down about 1% over 61 years, and that 1% fall in H2O is equivalent to a 30% fall in CO2. In the same period, CO2 and CH4 increases have amounted to a roughly similar 30% rise, cancelling out the CO2 effect!The famous CO2 rise data from Mauna Lao, Hawaii, only dates back to 1958, and the graph is always published with a fiddled vertical scale beginning not at zero but at the 310 ppmv (volume) CO2 concentration in and plotting a variation of 315 in 1958 to 388 in 2011. This exaggeration of the vertical scale by starting the vertical axis at 310 ppmv is a subliminal PR trick to fool as many people as possible into believing in a massive 80-fold increase in CO2, when it has only increased by by 23% since 1958!

    The NOAA data show a decrease in H2O vapour by 0.8% since 1958, equivalent to a 30×0.8 = 24% (from 30 x 0.8%) decrease in CO2. Therefore, the H2O vapour decrease is cancelling out the CO2 rise. Your denialism of the H2O fall can’t last forever!

40. Nige Cook says:7th March 2011 at 11:58 pmAlthough NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, USA) data on H2O vapour since 1948 disprove the alleged CO2 effect on temperature (since the fall in H2O cancels it out), their website page http://lwf.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/gases.html#watervapor continues to state the exact opposite and obfuscates with vagueness instead of giving its own data honestly:“Water Vapor is the most abundant greenhouse gas in the atmosphere … The feedback loop in which water is involved is critically important to projecting future climate change, but as yet is still fairly poorly measured and understood.“As the temperature of the atmosphere rises, more water is evaporated from ground storage (rivers, oceans, reservoirs, soil). Because the air is warmer, the absolute humidity can be higher (in essence, the air is able to ‘hold’ more water when it’s warmer), leading to more water vapor in the atmosphere. As a greenhouse gas, the higher concentration of water vapor is then able to absorb more thermal IR energy radiated from the Earth, thus further warming the atmosphere. The warmer atmosphere can then hold more water vapor and so on and so on. This is referred to as a ‘positive feedback loop’. However, huge scientific uncertainty exists in defining the extent and importance of this feedback loop. As water vapor increases in the atmosphere, more of it will eventually also condense into clouds, which are more able to reflect incoming solar radiation (thus allowing less energy to reach the Earth’s surface and heat it up). The future monitoring of atmospheric processes involving water vapor will be critical to fully understand the feedbacks in the climate system leading to global climate change. As yet, though the basics of the hydrological cycle are fairly well understood, we have very little comprehension of the complexity of the feedback loops. Also, while we have good atmospheric measurements of other key greenhouse gases such as carbon dioxide and methane, we have poor measurements of global water vapor, so it is not certain by how much atmospheric concentrations have risen in recent decades or centuries, though satellite measurements, combined with balloon data and some in-situ ground measurements indicate generally positive trends in global water vapor.”This is disgraceful obfuscation. Their own data going back to 1948 shows that H2O vapour hasn’t been rising, and the reason is simple. Hot air rises, carrying moisture up to cold air where it condenses into clouds, that have a high albedo and reflect sunlight away from the planet, offsetting the effects of CO2, CH4, etc.
41. Martin Lack says:8th March 2011 at 11:19 amNige, I did look at your data and I replied at 1718 hrs yesterday. For some reason it did not appear straight away.
    http://delingpoleworld/blog/the-real-cost-of-global-warming-1329/comment-page-1/#comment-10420
    Although unable to edit this post I accept that you did mention methane.
42. Nige Cook says:8th March 2011 at 1:22 pm“You make an interesting and valid theoretical point but, back in the real world, your presentation of NOAA data does not show that “the climate is now cooling!” Since when has it been cooling? If it is, why have the 20 warmest years on record all been since 1982 (including every single year since 1997)? … You conveniently forget that CH4 is also >20 times more potent as a GHG than CO2 and, therefore, that the ongoing thawing of the permafrost (i.e another positive feedback mechanism) is far more significant than any negative feedback caused by any reduction in average humidity.” – Martin LackI’ve already responded to this and included CH4 contributions, above. As James Delingpole explained to natural climate change denialist on BBC’s Horizon in January, “Mike’s Nature trick” of gluing false pre-1960 tree-ring proxy temperature data to fake post-1960 weather station data (mostly downwind of expanding cities, causing temperature rises by direct heat pollution from central heating, not CO2!) to “hide the decline” in the tree-ring data simply isn’t science. It’s like Stalin-era fiddled Lysenkoism “science” (Lysenko headed USSR genetics and tried to return from Darwin to Lamarck’s earlier and wrong “acquired characteristics” evolution, where acquired skills are supposed to be passed on genetically): data is massaged and force-fitted to fit a false theory!1. Tree rings are no temperature proxy, because tree growth is provably affected by sunlight and thus cloud-cover or global dimming, which is not the same thing as air temperature! Sir Paul Nurse himself admitted in his Horizon documentary in January that the tree ring data doesn’t correlated to temperature data since 1960.2. There is an effect of increasing cloud cover upon tree growth from extra H2O evaporating from slightly warmed oceans, increasing Earth’s albedo. This has a natural cooling effect, and is why Earth is not a greenhouse. To exaggerate this mechanism: if the sun boils the oceans, clouds of steam form which reflect back sunlight, cooling the Earth. Thus, Earth regulates its temperature automatically, once the oceans heat very slightly.3. Satellite black body spectrum derived temperature data is also all fake, because of biased: it only measures surface temperatures in those areas not covered with clouds, which is a biased sample. So you need to know the average temperature under the cloudy skies, because about 62% of the Earth’s surface is under cloud cover! To get unbiased global surface temperature you need to know how the temperature has changed under cloud cover, which satellites don’t measure (they can just measure radiation from the cloud tops, thousands of feet above the ground). You also need to know how cloud cover has increased over time, because it cool the Earth.

    See the video of Dr Miklos Zagoni (an Hungarian government adviser) explaining NASA contractor Dr Ferenc Miskolczi discovery of how H2O prevents further global warming: http://pathstoknowledge.wordpress.com/2010/01/13/ferenc-miskolczi%e2%80%99s-saturated-greenhouse-effect-theory-c02-cannot-cause-any-more-global-warming/

    The problem with both Dr Zagoni and Miskolczi is technical obfuscation. They take a crystal clear mechanism supported by NOAA data, but then built a spurious set of calculations based on an idealized model. Critics then ignore the mechanism and the data and simply dispute details the idealized (wrong) model, so the public never hear the facts!

    1. CO2 causes a slight warming of the surface waters in the oceans up to 1997 AD.

    2. The slight warming increases H2O evaporation slightly.

    3. The extra humid sea level air caused by H2O evaporation absorbs sunlight radiation. (Everybody agrees up to this point!)

    4. The sunlight-absorbing humid air is heated by the sunlight it absorbs, and hot air always rises due to bouyancy. Since the temperature and pressure fall with altitude, the humid air which rise like a hot air balloon expands and condenses to form extra cloud cover, which has a high albedo and reflects back more sunlight into space, cooling the Earth. Thus, H2O is a negative-feedback mechanism, and the only reason why IPCC models say the opposite (positive feedback from H2O) is that they omit the bouyancy of hot air!

    In other words, the fact heated air rises disproves current global warming models, which ignore this fact! In science, if you find a gross error in a model and don’t correct it, you know the model is defective. 62% of the Earth’s skies are covered by clouds, and this percentage is a function of CO2. Inject more CO2, and cloud cover increases, regulating temperature. This negative-feedback mechanism was censored from publication by NASA.

43. Martin Lack says:8th March 2011 at 1:54 pmCome of it Nige, that is b*llocks and you know it. The only thing James Delingpole proved on Horizon is that he is no scientist.
    1. The ” trick” referred t in the UEA emails was a standard method of correcting two sets of data that do not fit together even when you know they should.
    2. We are not reliant on tree ring/growth data anymore and, as the New Scientist points out, the evidence that things are now warming more rapidly than ever (since 1850) are all around us (i.e. the shifting seasons etc).
    3. There is no significant difference between recent land-based and satellite-based temperature data.As I said to JimmyGiro, if the truth hurts then I suggest you stop lying to yourself (or listening to liars).
44. Nige Cook says:8th March 2011 at 3:24 pm“… standard method of correcting two sets of data that do not fit together even when you know they should. … We are not reliant on tree ring/growth data anymore … There is no significant difference between recent land-based and satellite-based temperature data.” – Martin LackYes, I wrote that it’s standard malpractice in science or good practice in pseudoscience like Lysenko’s USSR Lamarkian evolution lies. Dr Phil Jones took false tree-ring data which is no proxy of temperature because tree ring growth is sensitive to cloud cover/sunshine, and used it to suppress natural temperature variability up to 1960. Cloud cover increases as temperatures rise, so tree ring growth-proxy temperatures will suppress natural variability: as it gets hotter, more water evaporates so cloud cover increases, so tree ring growth as a temperature proxy tends to smooth out temperature variations in history! Thus, the medieval warm period and the little ice age virtually disappear using tree-ring proxy!Yes, since 1960, Dr Jones used weather station data, but didn’t mark that on his graph. He says in the January Horizon BBC show that the World Meteorological Organization didn’t want the details of the “join” to show on their graph, so like Brezhnev’s apparatchiks he did the right thing and deleted the seam, faking the graph. As explained above, many weather stations in the 1960s and 1970s were in or downwind of expanding cities, whose direct hot air pollution (NOT global CO2) caused misleading temperature data. If your thermometer is downwind of a growing city or expanding power station complex, you’ll see a mean temperature rise that has nothing to do with CO2, get it?Yes, we have had satellite ground temperature data since 1980. I’ve explained above why this is junk: it’s prejudiced in favour of areas with clear skies, when 62% of the Earth’s sky is now covered by cloud. Temperatures are different under the clouds, so you have to do corrections. The data peak in 1998, which is usually attributed to the El Nino that year. NASA’s Terra and Acqu satellites no global warming since 2001, a whole decade. We know the reason: negative H2O feedback is cancelling out CO2.For the proper analysis of satellite data, please see Spencer, Braswell, Christy and Hnilo, “Cloud and Radiation Budget Changes Associated with Tropical Intraseasonal Oscillations”, published in Geophysical Research Letters, August 2007, which gives evidence of negative feedback from cloud cover opposing climate change during 15 tropical intraseasonal oscillations in 2000-5. Dr Spencer presents the data nicely here: http://www.searchanddiscovery.net/documents/2009/110117spencer/ndx_spencer.pdf
45. Nige Cook says:8th March 2011 at 3:43 pmLast December, A. E. Dessler tried to refute negative feedback from cloud cover cancelling temperature changes from CO2 in Science, v330, p. 1523 (December 2010), but he ignored the mechanism of IR heated air rising to form clouds, and he ignored the NOAA data showing the drop in humidity since 1948. He just focussed on the top-of-atmosphere radiation budget from March 2000 to February 2010, during which there was no significant climate change by anyone’s data! So it’s a worthless correlation, a piece of plain obfuscation of the long-term data since 1948, and the well-proved fact that heated air rises. If you want to find a correlation, you need to use a period over which there is significant variations, say 1948-2008 (NOAA data), not 2000-2010 when there was no significant climate change. Dr Spencer’s data indicating negative feedback from H2O in 2000-5 is statistically important, because he focussed not on global averages but cloud cover feedback during 15 specific tropical interseasonal oscillations.
46. Martin Lack says:8th March 2011 at 9:24 pm“So long and thanks for all the fish” (Douglas Adams).

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