Weather v Climate

As my co-blogger on Stones Cry Out, Jim, noted earlier, the increased snow the US has seen is properly called "weather", vs. those who want to call it proof that there is no climate warming.  Equally, he has called out those who find one warmer-than-normal summer and call it definitive proof of warming.  It, too, is weather.

And while he is my co-blogger, Jim’s also my brother-in-law, and I took his note to "good friends and relatives" doubly to myself, as he and I are both of those (the latter if only by marriage). 

And so, in the same spirit, I offer this bit of climate information from Wes Pruden.

The University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit in Britain was regarded as the leader in climate research and the fount of raw data on which the science was based until leaked e-mails between researchers revealed evidence of doctoring of data and manipulation of evidence. The director of the research unit, professor Phil Jones, was regarded as an archbishop in the Church of Global Warming. He was pressured to resign in the wake of the scandal. Now he has conceded to an interviewer from the BBC that based on the evidence in his findings, the globe might have been warmer in medieval times. If so, the notion that fluctuations in earthly temperatures are man-made is rendered just that, a man-made notion.

The learned professor told his interviewer that for the past 15 years there has been no "statistically significant" warming. He conceded that he has lost track of many of the relevant papers — that his office was overwhelmed by the clutter of paper. Some of the crucial data to back up scare stories might be lying under other stuff, but he’s not sure. An environmental analyst for the BBC said the professor told him that his "strengths" include "integrity" and "doggedness" but not record-keeping and "office tidying." He’s just not dogged about keeping things straight.

Granted, 15 years of a reversing trend does not, in and of itself, prove that global warming isn’t happening.  However, it does call into question those computer models that didn’t predict this, it calls into question policies made based on those computer models, and 15 years is a fair bit longer than one winter or summer. 

John Christy, a professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama at Huntsville and once a ranking member of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says the temperature records have been compromised and cannot be relied on. The findings of weather stations that collected temperature data were distorted by location. Several were located near air-conditioning units and on waste-treatment plants; one was next to a waste incinerator. Still another was built at Rome’s international airport and catches the hot exhaust of taxiing jetliners.

Terry Mills, a professor of applied statistics at Britain’s Loughborough University, looks at the U.N. panel’s data and applies a little skepticism. "The earth," he told London’s Daily Mail, "has gone through warming spells like these at least twice before in the last thousand years."

The coup de grace of global warming science, the UN’s IPCC report, itself has had some of it’s claims exposed as fraudulent or included simply based on the biases of its authors.

The biggest issue coming out of this is that all of this information may have been still unknown to the public at large had someone not dumped data and e-mails from East Anglia and created "Climategate".  The only reason we know much of this is that someone broke through this new Iron Curtain and showed that there is more politics going on here than climate scientists were willing to admit.  And now the backpedaling is amazing to see.

So yes, let’s find out "weather" or not man is truly warming the planet, but let’s do it honestly and openly.  Doing it any other way is nothing but a power & money grab.

Filed under: Global Warming

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