GIGO: Garbage In, Garbage Out…

Since the dawn of science, researchers have understood that their experiments and models were only as good as the data collected or presented to the model. For years I have complained or challenged the findings of climate activists and the widespread corruption and dishonesty within the climate science business. And, it is a big business with billions of government dollars flowing through the system – far dwarfing the sponsorship of the big energy companies with investments in fossil fuels.

Let us look through some of the problems…

(1) The UNFCCC (United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change) and the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) are political organizations that seek to use science to justify their political ambitions: one, of creating a perpetual funding mechanism for the United Nations independent of member-state contributions; two, assume a legal posture which is superior to the sovereignty of member-states for the purposes of setting standards, enforcing standards, and collecting taxes, fines, and imposing other penalties; and three, to promote their progressive agenda of a one world government with central planning by its member-states. These organizations do not perform science but cherry-pick existing scientific reports that support their agenda while ignoring, suppressing, or denigrating opposing viewpoints.

(2) The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change mandated that the climate research effort to discover and describe the phenomena of global warming center on anthropomorphic (man-made) causes and the minimum of natural phenomenon. The purpose of the UNFCCC is no secret: “Preventing ‘dangerous’ human interference with the climate system is the ultimate aim of the UNFCCC.” To admit that man cannot control the climate is to acknowledge that efforts to create public policy on that theme are illegitimate, unwarranted, and a fraud perpetrated on its member states.

There is not one climate researcher who has found a way to directly detect, measure, and scientifically describe man’s climate signal against the background noise of climate’s natural and variability.

Ignoring the gross power of the real drivers of climate change (Sun's energy output in all spectral bands, the production of extraterrestrial cosmic rays, the Earth's position relative to the Sun, the Earth's precessional and rotational dynamics, the Earth's vulcanology and plate tectonics, the heat transfer and behavior of deep ocean currents, and the most significant greenhouse gas influence, water vapor) to concentrate on the miniscule effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide makes little sense. That is, until one realizes that by controlling carbon emissions, governments can control the economies of nations and thus impose near-dictatorial powers in the name of preventing a planetary emergency which may be thousands of years in the future, and supposing that nature’s feedback mechanisms will not revert to the mean and produce another ice age. Thus, using an artificial thirty-year time scale in the face of geological time scales to make public policies is an insult to the intellect and the freedom of man.

(3)  There are few ways to overcome the inherent bias of the government’s funding of institutions, scientists, and projects which results in funding select projects that conform to the fashionable science of the patrons to the minimization of the research expressing a contrarian viewpoint. Those holding contrary views are not allowed to participate in so-called “open forums” and are often denigrated as “deniers” – a pejorative used to describe deniers of the Holocaust.

(4)  In their zeal to produce results acceptable to their funding patrons and to secure additional monies, it is not uncommon for activists to fudge the results. Anyone who wants to read the Climategate emails can see this rancorous bias for themselves. The purpose of the scientific method is to produce findings without fear or favor in the pursuit of knowledge, the end result being a paper that can be examined to see if the findings can be replicated and validated, falsified, or simply adding to the common understanding. Thus we see scientists refusing to provide their computer code, data, and research notes using the dodge of proprietary intellectual property – even though the bulk of the research is funded from public sources. We see scientists fudging the results by parameterization – simply plugging in a result to avoid the lack of descriptive equations and the computational load of simultaneously solving complex equations.

(5)  So why should anyone be surprised when we find scientists manipulating the raw data to exhibit a favorable result and calling the methodology “statistical homogenization?” Replacing missing data with data from nearby stations, adjusting the data for site location and altitude, and changing the time of observations. Unfortunately, in many cases, the original raw data has been lost (ostensibly by the cost of storage) forever and the statistical methodologies shrouded in layers of dense code.

But even worse, is knowing that the data you are collecting is damaged by the very location you have chosen for placing your instrumentation. The resultant data pollution or “heat island” effect tends to produce data that suggests hotter temperatures which feed into the meme of global warming. This was readily apparent from the pioneering work of Anthony Watts and a small group of volunteers who visited climate stations to record site problems such as locating a station near recognizable heat sources.

Many who were charged with keeping temperature records vocally disagreed with Watts’ findings that nullified much of the recorded temperature dataset based on poor instrument locations. Even to the extent of NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) funding a multi-year experiment to invalidate Watts’ conclusions about the effects of instrument location. 

The results are in, and it turns out that Watts was right. And it suggests that you find a lower 30-year temperature trend when only high-quality temperature stations which are unaffected by urbanization are used. Using the old methodology overstates the temperature by as much as one-third and suggesting that much of our terrestrial temperature dataset is deeply flawed.

For further analysis of the subject, you may wish to visit WATTS Up With That -- Verified by NOAA – poor weather station siting leads to artificial long term warming.

Bottom line…

There is no doubt that the climate is changing and has changed since the Earth formed an atmosphere and oceans. The real question is, can anyone actually predict what the climate will be in the future given nature’s feedback loops and long timescales? Man’s best option is to adapt – as do those who live in the inhospitable desert and arctic conditions.

As for the bafflegab attempt to whipsaw “We the People” into surrendering our inalienable rights and freedoms based on little more than an unproven hypothesis is not only self-defeating but downright criminal.

We are so screwed.

-- steve