There has been a rash of dubious papers published lately. Many of us suspect that the IPCC is desperate for science that can serve to prop up the ailing global warming science of its upcoming 5th assessment report.
The most recent include papers by Jeremy Shakun et al, who attempt to put CO2 back into the driver’s seat as the climate driver, and by Gerrit Lohmann et al, who hint that dozens of tediously produced temperature reconstructions from proxies may be false because they don’t agree with a simplistic model made by physicists and mathematicians who have very limited or no knowledge of geo-sciences.
German veteran meteorologist Dr. Wolfgang Thüne writes his reaction to the quality of these papers in a commentary posted at the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE) site here.
Thüne, a leading skeptic of the AGW theory in Germany, is not known for mincing words.
In summary, he attacks today’s climate science, comparing the climate science and modeling community to children in a sandbox playing tip-the-bucket. Hans Joachim Schellnhuber and Stefan Rahmstorf proposed the tipping-point back in 2007: Tipping elements in the Earth’s climate system. Since then, climate scientists have spent much time fantasizing about end-of-world tipping scenarios. Thüne writes:
It’s fun playing tip-the-bucket to see what force is needed to reach the balancing point and then tip it over. It’s also a favorite game among children to try to knock each other off balance with sudden shoves.
Experts all over the globe have taken up these child’s games, and are now trying bring the Earth out of balance. But because this cannot be done with the real Earth, they’ve moved the game to the computer where the Earth does what it is commanded. With climate models one can bring about the end of the world, and at the same time have a little fun in an otherwise staid science scene. You can get your kicks out of it, generate lots of research funding, and keep the world in suspense through the media. This is what two science teams in the USA have done, and have published their fun-and-games in ‘Nature’, a publication that has long since stopped being a scientific journal and has become a comic book for climate junkies. Allowed to publish there are only those who play by the rules and profess the guiding theme, which is: ‘Lies and deceit are the integral components of science’!”
No mincing words here. In fact Thüne says of both publications from the science teams of Harvard University in Cambridge and the University of Massachusetts in Amherst:
They so primitively and grossly lie that it can be perceived as an insult to normal common sense. 55 million years ago and then again 18,000 years ago phantoms with an invisible hand threw the Earth off its orbit. The Earth began to teeter so that first Antarctica and then the Arctic warmed. Especially in the ‘South Pole regions humongous amounts of carbon were released’ which then triggered a ‘heat shock’. Also today ‘changes in the Earth’s orbit’ could have similar consequences and precipitate ‘a run-away warming’. Isn’t that just frighteningly awful?”
Climate scientists are really mathematicians and physicists who are much like bored kids in a sandbox armed with computers and reality-detached models. This playground, Thüne writes, is all thanks to governments who shower funding on this “kind of pseudo-science, and then misuse it.”
Politics and science work very closely together in a game that is increasingly about money and power. […] This is indeed a scandal. It is a political scandal. […] It is time to get back to reality, to the weather, and to not waste our intellectual and material energies on proving the chimera that is the “climate catastrophe. We would be much better off focusing on how to protect ourselves from the weather.”
Finally, Thüne cites some examples of “wasted intellectual and material energies”:
– Shakun on our wobbly world’s precession, ocean CO2 fizzing, the last ice age, and all that
– Did Shakun et al. really prove that CO2 preceded late glacial warming? [Part 1]
– Shakun Redux: Master tricksed us! I told you he was tricksy!
– Does CO2 correlate with temperature history? – A look at multiple timescales in the context of the Shakun et al. paper
Climate Change leads to increased suffering for allergics in the future, scientific study finds.
http://www.welt.de/regionales/muenchen/article106187958/Klimawandel-laesst-Allergiker-immer-staerker-leiden.html
The reason, says Prof. Annette Menzel, is increased plant growth and pollen production due to elevated CO2 concentrations and a longer, warmer growth period.
The first half of that is even true. Typical technique, take a fact and spin it to prove what you want to prove.
Quite artfully spun by the professor, is it not? How to get into the news and satisfy the EU funding machine while not even REALLY lying, only kinda.
Sorry for Off-Topic, but it is important
(in German)
Merkel soll polnische Blockade lösen
http://www.handelsblatt.com/politik/international/klimawandel-merkel-soll-polnische-blockade-loesen/6512662.html
Im Streit um die Verschärfung der europäischen Klimapolitik hat der Chef des Umweltbundesamts (UBA) Bundeskanzlerin Angela Merkel (CDU) aufgefordert, sich um die Blockadehaltung Polens zu kümmern. „Der Konflikt ist auf der Ebene der Umweltpolitik allein nicht mehr zu lösen“, sagte UBA-Präsident Jochen Flasbarth,…
Ha. The joke is, the Polish used to worry about Communists that reside to the EAST of them.
Indeed, there is something in this dictum: Yesterday – Moscow, Today – Brussels. We always belong to someone. 😉
Thanks, this is interesting. My feeling is that Poland will give in. Not that it matters though. Countries can make all sorts of pledges, keeping them is another thing, however.
I trust people who refuse to make “promises” they know they can’t keep
a lot more than I trust people who make “promises” that are going to be broken just to please people with a distorted “morality”
So do I, and the reason is the money. On the other hand, there is polish reality and those one on the paper. I refer that to this opinion:
http://tinyurl.com/d2dnklu
Ah well, she wants to peddle her wares. She’s a normal lobbyist.
“Maria Dreger, manager of standards and norms in Rockwool Poland, an expert on the Confederation of Construction and Real Estate.”
OK, Dirk. But I know the reality in Poland – a provisional solution is usually a permanent solution in my country. Please visit us during the EURO 2012. You will see for yourself and understand what I mean. 😆 😆 😆
I’ve been to Warsaw several times in 1996 and worked with Poles. I would describe the attitude of the Poles as pragmatic, along the lines of “Do the simplest thing that could possibly work”. Not much of the German perfectionism. It was a problem when workers dodged the rules and took shortcuts, resulting in bad quality. Well, I survived it, and people were very friendly.
@ DirkH
Warsaw has been changed since 1996. It looks like Frankfurt on the Main now.
The funny part is – the EU wants to “save the climate”; Australia is our ally…
…and that’s it. That’s all. Japan and Canada have quit, everybody else was never on board.
And as soon as Gillard gets massacred, the EU will have to save the world’s climate completely on their own. And that will make it rather more attractive for any member country to quit the EU.
Look at the bright side. In 50 years, when no one is impoverished except Western Europe, and nothing happens to the “climate,” people will look to Europeans and say, “Thanks for saving us.”
Noble, indeed.
Yeah, that would be great. 🙂
“Climate scientists are really mathematicians and physicists … ”
They are not, most of them are charlatans, whose only talent is prognostication of preconceived weather scenarios by sophistry.
The “scientific basis” of this nonsense has been dispensed with by people like Gerhard Gerlich and Gerhard Kramm and some others;
the “climate modelers” deceive themselves only.
[Not really. They appear to admit to themselves how thin and easily dispelled their “science” is]
Agreed .
Any competent mathematician knows that tipping points are rare events , “of measure zero” . The sun has warmed us all the way to about 288k with our total difference from the temperature of a gray ball in our orbit ( ~ 4 celsius ) of about 10 degrees . That can almost surely be explained when someone does the proper computation on our measured spectrum as seen from space .
And any “tipping point” would have to be in our spectrum , consequentially causing a change in our equilibrium temperature . The most obvious “tipping point” around is obviously expansion of the polar ice covers . But we’ve gone back and forth across major changes in our snow cover numerous times and not gotten trapped in any snowball earth .
The understanding of planetary temperature is an issue of applied physics . The “climate science” gang are incompetent charlatans who think they can get by without a real engineer’s or physicist’s hard core mathematical curriculum . They are posers who think they can fake it with a “physics for poets” level intro week in their “environmental studies” BS requirements .
Re: the “Polish blockade”: This is about carbon trading – “Den zum Vorjahr auf weniger als sieben Euro je Tonne halbierten CO2-Preis hält Flasbarth für zu niedrig” (F. considers the price, which was halved last year – of € 7 per ton of CO2 too low) – which is DEAD. Let’s hope the Poles stand their ground. They have nothing to gain from giving in, and, if they are lucky, may cast the first stone that starts the house of cards to topple to the ground. (They started something similar about 30 years ago. Remember Solidarity? And remember the Quislings in the West?) And given that they are going to develop their part in the shale gas & oil bonanza, they are going to be able to stand up against the Bear to the East and the [xxx] to the West, maybe for the first time in more than 200 years. [“xxx” = the German sheepdog? sheep? (more likely) ‘fraidy cats? “personnages des longues oreilles”, as in Saint-Saens’ Carnival des animaux?]
The BBC has found out how climate models work and is ready to tell us we’re all idiots.
“Climate scientists have long realised that their computer models cannot be like those commonly used to simulate processes in, say, chemistry: one size doesn’t fit all as it often does (bar minor details) for chemical reactions, and your best bet is to come at the problem from many different angles and pool the findings.”
“This type of fuzziness does not fit the common perception of science as providing precise answers, and it allows any sceptics who may not properly understand the scientific process to imply that climate models are just ill-informed guesswork.”
http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20120413-climate-control-switches
Only one “tipping point” is involved. It is in the liquid level pouring from the glass containing whatever it is that the “global warmers” are drinking that is causing them to hallucinate.