Thursday 22 January 2015

Climate measurements, as accurate as your memory, almost. But not science.

Most people appear to treat climate science as equal to medical science or engineering. This gives it the veneer of total credibility, but in fact until the invention of global warming it was mainly an academic exercise with nothing more depending on its accuracy or existence than weather forecasting and geological history. Climate was considered till then something passive, something that happened while we observed and adapted, and dare I say it still is in reality, if only the politicians could let it go. Here I will go through the reality, not by my own observations but from direct quotes from the sources for each area. I hope when you have finished you will realise any other area of science with such irregularities and vagueness could never even exist as a discipline, let alone one driving worldwide policies based on so little in reality.

The temperature is of course our starting point. Without a rise of 2C the UN claim the benefits of warming will outweigh the problems. It is only the irresponsible media who find constant reports of current problems, from a rise of 0.8C and impossible to attribute to warming from the very top UN source. While reading a typically shrill piece by The Guardian I came across this little gem:
Uncertainties in measuring temperature

In attempting to convince the audience, with no effort whatsoever, the truth spilled out, as of course, that is all there ever is or was. Despite their incredible sophistication satellites have more problems measuring temperature than the drastically shrinking numbers of land stations. This is a pretty accurate description, and I will add and emphasise the massive alterations made after taking measurements, and the uncanny fact nearly all share an algorithm which makes the present warmer regardless of the issues. All errors should either adjust towards zero, as they normally are random and cancel each other out, or towards lower readings as most are for either urban heat islands or missing data, neither of which are possible to have a single reason to increase.

"Over the past decades, scientists have made many measurements across the globe to characterize how fast the Earth is warming. It may seem trivial, but taking the Earth’s temperature is not very straightforward. You could use temperature thermometers at weather stations that are spread across the globe. Measurements can be taken daily and information sent to central repositories where some average is determined.
A downside of thermometers is that they do not cover the entire planet – large polar regions, oceans, and areas in the developing world have no or very few measurements. Another problem is that they may change over time. Perhaps the thermometers are replaced or moved, or perhaps the landscape around the thermometers changes which could impact the reading. And of course, measurements of the ocean regions are a whole other story.

An alternative technique is to use satellites to extract temperatures from radiative emission at microwave frequencies from oxygen in the atmosphere. Satellites can cover the entire globe and thereby avoid the problem with discrete sensors. However, satellites also change over time, their orbit can change, or their detection devices can also change.
Another issue with satellites is that the measurements are made throughout the atmosphere that can contain contaminants to corrupt the measurement. For instance, it is possible that water droplets (either in clouds or precipitation) can influence the temperature readings."

And if anything they are downplaying the issues.

The sea level measurements are similar, in that it moves constantly and is not the same in any two places by location or timescale. So they are averaged, and the satellite measurements have not corresponded with land measurements, and now they have just claimed the 20th century readings were wrong, they rose 1.2mm per year rather than the accepted 1.6mm. Now if they'd been my doctor or architects I'd have sacked them, it's less important they've corrected the error than the fact they carried it for decades. And if this time they say it's different who's to say they won't fix it again later indefinitely. Bottom line is they are unreliable measurements, and correcting them simply demonstrates this, as had they been reliable then they wouldn't need correcting, and whether it is up or down is irrelevant. Source

Satellites do one thing very well, they see from above. The ice cover is reliable, or is it? When the ice can clearly be seen shrinking and growing, depending which hemisphere you look at, they then point out the Antarctic is nearly all land ice, and they can't measure its depth. They can measure the height and depth to a certain level, then it's lost. Pen Hadow went on a mission to drill it directly, and after a few attempts the drill broke and they came back with virtually nothing. As I said at the beginning, while these measurements are academic we simply don't need them, and unless there's an agenda to push we still don't need them, except to prove the agenda is false. Oops

Basically it's not about which measurements are unreliable, more which aren't, as similar problems affect every single parameter. Past temperatures are probably the worst, as they change constantly despite of course being fixed in the past exactly as they were. But the measurements are so flexible if you even swap one tree ring for another it can vastly change the results. Michael Mann's hockey stick, the foundation of global warming policy, eliminated so many tree rings that (like the 97% consensus claim) he simply waited till a few turned up that made it work. That's not science, it's forgery. The UN didn't use that diagram at all, they used the classic academic chart which was accepted worldwide, and then they replaced it with his. Oddly the following report a few years later then merged the two in a sort of bastard child. Although the greater amount of evidence shows the first is correct (written reports of the period plus artefacts and plant remains) the fact they can change it, and then as it's now flexible, change it again, potentially ad infinitum, takes it out of the realm of science entirely and into one of amateur politics.
 
The conventional view before it was revised in the early 21st century. Showing we are at a fairly standard peak and below many earlier ones. Had the CO2 not risen sharply the temperature would never have been considered unusual, and had the CO2 not been from burning fossil fuel it would be assumed to have been released by the ocean in response to warming as it always has before.




The medieval warm period would kill Al Gore and James Hansen's worst and every other case scenario instantly, as if it was warmer and better then all bets are off and CO2 if it could cause more than fractional warming would be our friend. The UN aren't really that bothered about public opinion as they know few read their publications and politicians ignore the bits they don't need, so plough on regardless and when they write new reports just throw in whatever the biggest guys want. That was why Richard Tol was sacrificed on the fire of man made warming when his claim the economic results of a rise would be a tiny fraction of that previously claimed not only did they rewrite it, along with a list of uncertainties leaked in the draft, and wrecked his career by doing so. They cheated to flatten the past in the hockey stick, This is how they did it, criminal. Nature magazine, the primary peer-reviewed journal, were given the correction and they refused to publish it. They repressed the truth and as a result subjected the world to interminable policies of poverty and arbitrary restrictions on fuel and travel on what was only ever a faked graph.

Now you see it



Now you don't



But it's coming back

And even the fancy one appears to have been made that way after the event

source



This is no different to the doctors who failed to spot cancer for years until it was too late, or operated on a phantom tumour that never existed. Medicine is known to have a sliding scale of certainty and ability to treat, so when they take your temperature it is quite different to testing for prostate cancer. Breast cancer screening is now becoming known (as whistleblowers have said for years, as they always work things out ages before they become admitted officially) as generally pointless, as it has false positives or gives dangerous treatment for tumours which may never have grown etc. Medicine though is known and accepted to have limitations as we all interact with it on a regular basis. But who on earth knew or cared about world climate history before it became a major media and political issue?

Now since the temperature settled down in the late 1990s the game has changed. Now they either focus on tiny changes (2014 hottest year ever!!!!!) or look for the missing heat. The sheer number of different explanations alone proves the only possible conclusion, they don't know. But the popular view was for some reason it's not temperature now that matters (although only that has ever been mentioned by the IPCC and supporters such as Al Gore) but heat, and that has now moved from the air (which we can measure more or less as described) to the sea. The reason is the current folds it over and pushes the heat deep into the ocean where it retains the greenhouse effect but prevents it from being measured in the actual temperatures above. I will investigate that further in a moment, but the point is that the current they talk about are on a 1,000 year scale. That means if they are correct in the most popular reason for the pause in air temperatures while CO2 shoots up, the problem is over, as the heat has been buried for so long it can't come back.

However it is not even the level of a theory as it cannot be tested. The deeper you go the less you can measure. They have started dropping floats deeper and deeper but only in small areas and not representative of the whole as not a large enough sample. But the next article trying to convince the readers something really, really, no, really, bad is happening, came out with this:

"Research from NASA out this week suggesting that the deep oceans below 2km may be cooling has intensified the mystery over so called “missing energy” and underlined the need for new deep diving instruments that can monitor conditions in the dark abysmal depths."
Source

What was that, the need for new instruments that can monitor conditions... Yes, they can't do it at the moment. QED.

Overall the same issues arise in every single area of climate measurements one way or another as attempting to both measure the entire planet and then average it out is a task beyond our capabilities, yet the politicians and media treat them as no different from known technical direct measurements elsewhere. That is as far from the truth as you can get, and then being able to mess with proxies, current temperatures and anything else open to 'homogenisation' (a nice euphemism adopted by the industry for fixing the books) means the gaps and unknowns can be shifted whichever way promotes the agenda. I have written a good deal on that already, based on direct statements made over the last 70 years, and is in no doubt as it has been revealed on a regular basis by those creating it. The data is so soft that like clay it can be moulded in pretty much any way required and as people believe it's solid will treat the end results as such. This misleading and misled, and every single government policy is based in misleading and soft data which in an honest world should never be possible. I have exposed the basics and now whenever a headline is presented you should be able to see right through it to the truth.