Climategate 2, more unethical Team behavior

The second batch of e-mails, (Climategate 2)(you have to register) documenting the “behind the scenes” activities of the scientists that have been some of the stronger advocates for the uniqueness of current global warming over the last two millennia have been released. They have now been perused in running series of posts at various blog sites, and, while there is no immediately obvious major new revelation, the contemptible behavior of these purportedly exemplary individuals is getting an increasing amount of sunlight. It also shows how thick the whitewash was in the “enquiries” into scientific misconduct that followed the release of the original, Climategate 1, e-mails.

As an example, New Zealand Climate Change has shown in two posts ( here and here) how “reputable” scientists (Phil Jones, Michael Mann, Jim Salinger, Tom Wigley, Barrie Pittock, Mike Hulme and others – i.e. "the Team") worked to get Chris de Freitas, then editor of the journal Climate Research fired from that position, and also worked to try and get him fired from his academic position. His “crime” was to allow, following peer review, a paper that challenged the validity of the initial Mann “hockey stick” paper and its conclusions that the late 20th century was the warmest of the last millennium. (That particular conclusion was later changed, by Dr Mann, though much later than these events).

To explain the heinous nature of this particular activity requires some background, and also some information that has only since emerged. And, for the sake of brevity I am only going to summarize the story, though adding some detail not in the NZ post.
At the beginning of the story, back in 1997, the state of historical climate science thinking was that between AD 900 and AD 1300 (roughly) the world was going through a warming period, roughly akin to that we are currently seeing, and known as the Medieval Warming Period (MWP). This was followed by a much colder period that lasted from AD 1400 to AD 1800, known as the Little Ice Age (LIA). Evidence for this can, for example, be found in a study that was carried out looking at the sediments laid down in lakes in Finland. In 2005 Mia Tiljander submitted her thesis on these sediments in which she found, in concurrence with earlier studies of sediments in other lakes in the region that:

During the Roman period there was in AD 140-220 an 80-year-long period in the Lake Korttajärvi area when organic matter deposition and the sedimentation was similar to that during the Medieval Warm Period (MWP), interpreted as milder climate condition. After this period, a clear mineral matter – organic matter varve structure existed, until the beginning of the MWP.

The MWP, AD 980-1250, was an exceptional period. The MWP is characterized by thinly laminated varves rich in organic matter, almost lacking the mineral pulses (i.e. spring floods), indicating mild climatic conditions. This period was interrupted by a colder period from AD 1115- 1145, dominated by mineral-matter-rich varves. The sediment deposited during the MWP was highly organic and dark brownish in colour. Based on pollen and diatom studies (Kauppila 2002), the MWP was a two-stage event. AD 980-1100 was warm and dry, a cold spell (AD 1115-1145) interrupted the warm trend and the following period AD 1145-1220 was again warm and even drier than the first stage.

In light of subsequent discussion of her work (which comes later) it should be noted that the disturbance of the annual sediment layers (the varves) by human activity only occurred in sediments after AD 1720, i.e. towards the end of the LIA. The picture of the historic climate can thus be outlined, as it was understood, by a plot from the first IPCC report.

Global Temperature plot from the first IPCC report (IPCC via John Daly )

This picture was challenged with the publication by Michael Mann, Raymond Bradley and Malcolm Hughes of a paper in Nature in 1998 (MBH 1998) that introduced the “Hockey Stick” plot to the world. Contrary to the prevailing opinion this paper suggested that there was a steady decline in temperatures from 1000 AD to around 1850 AD (the handle of the hockey stick), following which temperatures rose steadily to their present high levels (the blade).

The original “Hockey Stick” from MBH 1998 (MBH via John Daly ) (Note the thickness of the green error bars).

This plot made it easier to argue that current temperatures were a direct cause of industrial activity, due to the generation of increasing levels of carbon dioxide as the world used more fossil fuel. And, as a result, MBH concluded:

Our results suggest that the latter 20th century is anomalous in the context of at least the past millennium. The 1990's was the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, at moderately high levels of confidence.

This conclusion and the elimination of the MWP and LIA, despite the fact that the curve and conclusion over-rode the combined papers of hundreds of scientists who had worked to validate their existence, was seized upon by the Global Warming community and used without further discussion, as the “New Bible.” It was, for example, prominently featured in the 2000 Third Assessment Report of the IPCC. I have seen it used by the current Secretary of Energy as the valid plot of temperatures over the past millennium and thus as justification for the programs he espouses. And this despite the torrent of valid criticism of the curve, and that the original plot only referred to the Northern Hemisphere.

To sustain the credibility of this plot, the warming of the MWP, and the cooling of the LIA, had to be minimized. Both the initial set of e-mails and the new set document that the Team recognized and worked to do this. One immediate challenge was to respond to a paper published in 2003 in the journal Climate Research by Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas which had looked at some of the previous data (which MBH 1998 had neither considered nor shown invalid) to conclude that:

Furthermore, the individual proxies can be used to address the question of whether the 20th century is the warmest of the 2nd millennium locally. Across the world, many records reveal that the 20th century is probably not the warmest nor a uniquely extreme climatic period of the last millennium.

Such effrontery and direct challenge to the authority of the team could not go unanswered, and the Team swung into action, (e-mail 31 ). It is interesting to note that in that correspondence Phil Jones recognizes the work of Jean Grove, an early climate scientist, (who reviewed the data validating the presence of The Little Ice Age in an excellent seminal book), but who died in 2001).

What we want to write is NOT the scholarly review a la Jean Grove (bless her soul) that just reviews but doesn't come to anything firm. We want a critical review that enables agendas to be set.

Which was not how I remembered the text at all, and so I re-read the beginning of that book, and it shows that he was wrong in that statement. Dr. Grove wrote:

Historical evidence of Little Ice Age events is much more plentiful in Europe than elsewhere but the documentation from other continents though scantier, is supported by a great volume of field evidence (e.g. Hope et al 1976, Hastenrath 1984) which is presented in Chapters 7, 8 and 9. It emerges that the Little Ice Age was a global phenomenon and it is shown in Chapter 10 that it was not unique to the Holocene.

But it was not just enough to write a rebuttal paper (which would be normal scientific practice). Although a rebuttal paper was written, with Tom Crowley suggesting that it be in EOS, this was not considered sufficient. Beginning with an e-mail from Mike Hulme (e-mail 2272) ) the Team began to focus on the editor, Chris de Freitas, who had accepted the paper.

Whilst we do not know who reviewed the Soon/Baliunas manuscript, there is sufficient evidence in my view to justify a "loss of confidence" in the peer review process operated by the journal and hence a mass resignation of review editors may be warranted. This is by no means a one-off - I could do the analysis of de Freitas's manuscripts if need be.

I am contacting the seven of you since I know you well and believe you may also have similar concerns to me about the quality of climate change science and how that science is communicated to the public. I would be interested in your views on this course of action - which was suggested in the first place my me, once I knew the strength of feeling amongst people like Phil Jones, Keith Briffa, Mike Mann, Ray Bradley, Tom Crowley, etc. CSIRO and Tyndall communication managers would then think that a mass resignation would draw attention to the way such poor science gets into mainstream journals.

Pressure was brought to bear, initially forcing changes in the editorial practices at the Climate Research journal, and then leading to the resignations of the editor in Chief (Hans von Storch) as well the one who accepted the paper (Chris de Freitas), and two others (Clare Goodess – who was at the University of East Anglia with the CRU group and Mitsuru Ando) who protested the publication, and who were encouraged to resign by the Team (e-mail 4808). It led to an editorial by the publisher, explaining why they could not allow the publication of papers in the journal to be governed by individuals outside the peer-review process (i.e. Team members).

The lack of objectivity of the editors of the journals in which the Team publish(such as Science, for example) is shown by theTeam being solicited by the journals to write opposing articles for them, as a counter to the Soon/Balianas paper. (e-mail 2469).

Phil Jones and I are in the process of writing a review article for Reviews of Geophysics which will, among other things, dispel the most severe of the myths that some of these folks are perpetuating regarding past climate change in past centuries. My understanding is that Ray Bradley, Malcolm Hughes, and Henry Diaz are working, independently, on a solicited piece for Science on the "Medieval Warm Period".

Of course, since then, Mann among others, has admitted to the presence of an MWP and an LIA, but it is a little late . . .

The Team were still not satisfied, and as the New Zealand post points out, they suggested that a letter be sent to the head of the University at which Dr de Freitas works, (e-mail 3052)

I have had thoughts also on a further course of action. The present Vice Chancellor of the University of Auckland, Professor John Hood (comes from an engineering background) is very concerned that Auckland should be seen as New Zealand's premier research university, and one with an excellent reputation internationally. He is concerned to the extent that he is monitoring the performance of ALL his senior staff, from Associate Professor upwards, including interviews with them. My suggestion is that a band of you review editors write directly to Professor Hood with your concerns. In it you should point out that you are all globally recognized top climate scientist. It is best that such a letter come from outside NZ and is signed by more than one person.

The e-mail goes on to suggest the form of the letter that should be sent:

Instead we have discovered that this person has been using his position to promote ‘fringe’ views of various groups with which they are associated around the world. It perhaps would have been less disturbing if the ‘science’ that was being passed through the system was sound. However, a recent incident has alerted us to the fact that poorly constructed and uncritical work has been allowed to enter the pages of the journal.

A recent example has caused outrage amongst leading climate scientists around the world and has resulted in the journal dismissing (??).. from the editorial board. We bring this to your attention since we consider it brings the name of your university and New Zealand into some disrepute. We leave it to your discretion what use you make of this information.

The strength of the punishment that the Team inflicted on the journal and those associated with the story kept the peer reviewed papers “in line” for some time, and so it has only this last September (after some 8 years) that it has been necessary to force the resignation of another editor, Wolfgang Wagner, to remind the scientific press as to who is in charge here.

Let me, however, end this rather lengthy post with another piece of Team dishonesty. You may remember that I began by quoting Mia Tiljander’s work on Finnish lake sediments. Well due to an odd circumstance, when this was examined by the Team the results were inverted. As a result, instead of showing the MWP that actually existed, her results were included as showing that it did not.

This was admitted in the first Climategate release (e-mail 3511) where Darrell Kaufman wrote

Regarding the "upside down man", as Nick's plot shows, when flipped, the Korttajarvi series has little impact on the overall reconstructions. Also, the series was not included in the calibration. Nonetheless, it's unfortunate that I flipped the Korttajarvi data.

In fact that is not a completely true statement either, since, as Mia Tiljander noted, the original data clearly showed an MWP, and if the data was good enough to use inverted to disprove that it existed, surely it should also be used to prove its presence when turned the right way around. But as Steve McIntyre has noted on the subject, while the original perpetrator may have submitted a correction the good Dr Mann has yet to admit that he used data improperly.

Courtesy of Climate Audit, you can judge for yourselves, comparing perhaps to the top figure, as to whether inverting the data made any difference.

How using the Tiljander data properly (New) reveals the MWP and LIA (Tiljander via Climate Audit), while the Team use (Old) hides them.

In further discussion the more recent sediments (which Tiljander noted were disturbed) which upticked in the “OLD” incorrect use, continued to be used by the team. As Andrew Montford noted in "The Hockey Stick Illusion", however:

The big selling point of Mann’s new paper was that you could get a hockey stick shape without tree rings. However, this claim turned out to rest on a circular argument. Mann had shown that the Tiljander proxies were valid by removing them from the database and showing that you still got a hockey stick. However, when he did this test, the hockey stick shape of the final reconstruction came from the bristlecones. Then he argued that he could remove the tree ring proxies (including the bristlecones) and still get a hockey stick – and of course he could, because in this case the hockey stick shape came from the Tiljander proxies. His arguments therefore rested on having two sets of flawed proxies in the database, but only removing one at a time. He could then argue that he still got a hockey stick either way.

And a short P.S. Steve McIntyre has just posted that the Team tried the same nasty tricks to try and discredit Willie Soon at Harvard.

A grudging admission of error, but the world remains unaware

Very gradually the underpinnings to the “hysterical” side of the Global Warming debate are being eroded. I mentioned at the time, that Secretary of Energy Chu still waves the Mann “hockey stick” curve as a justification for spending more time worrying about future global warming, than the shorter term shortages of petroleum products for the United States consumer. There have been a number of revelations that have cast increasing doubt on that particular curve, favored though it is of politicians.

There have been increasing questions on the data that went into generating the “blade” of the hockey stick, which I discussed in an earlier post after it was revealed that the paper that Keith Briffa wrote that led to the generation of the blade, relied on a very small range of trees, including only one that showed the dramatic uptick of the hockey stick. Briffa recently commented

we noted that the final years of the Yamal ring-width chronology (Briffa, 2000; Briffa et al., 2008) should be used cautiously on the basis that the values for the most recent part of this chronology are based on relatively few individual measurement series and this smaller available sample emphasises the faster growing trees.

Given the subsequent history of the use of that data (vide the movie An Inconvenient Truth inter alia) it can hardly be said that those words of caution were heeded, or even recognized.

Questions on the validity of using that particular data continue, and correlations are now being made with actual local temperature measurements in the same regions as the tree data came from. What emerges from that correlation is

“Warmist” tree ring proxy temperature evidence is falsified directly by local thermometer records.

The data analysis is somewhat intense but well worth working through to understand exactly why that statement is justified.

And there has just been a new paper on this subject published by Devi et al. which argues for the consideration of ecotone movement in the analysis of the tree ring data, and shows that there was a change in the way in which the trees grow, a change which correlates with temperature, that can be traced back to early in the 20th century. (Thanks bender). But it blows another leg out from under the support of the shape of the hockey stick at the more immediate end of the line.

Meanwhile, if one travels back to the other end of the line, and the estimation of what the temperatures were like in the Medieval Warming Period, one has to remember that, prior to publication of the Hockey Stick, curve the IPCC did recognize the existence of those warmer temperatures.

Medieval Warming Period (IPCC 1996) and the curve generated from borehole temperature proxies by Huang and Pollack in 1997.

The difference between the IPCC curve, and that proposed by Mann was highlighted in a review of the borehole data, and can be seen in this curve:

Comparison of Mann’s plot (blue) with that of the earlier IPCC prediction (red), and the plot from Moberg (black). (Source )

Now it turns out that there were some significant questions about the data upon which Dr Mann generated those predictions of Medieval temperature. There exist a large number of scientific papers (which I have referred to in earlier posts) that show that the period did exist. (The very first paper that I looked at when I got curious about this subject showed its existence in the Sargasso Sea, for example). However the curve was itself underpinned among others by data from tree ring cores taken from bristlecone pine trees in the Western United States.

Bristlecone pine tree allowing historic temperature data acquisition.

The validity of using those tree rings has been questioned by experts in forestry and other contemporary evaluations have shown the Medieval warming period that Mann’s graphs did not.

However the curve was also based on other proxy data (i.e. other physical phenomena changes that can be correlated with temperature change). It is interesting to note that Dr Mann is now changing the basis on which his curve was produced though all the while arguing that the basic shape remains unchanged.

Mann’s latest plot of historic global temperatures.

Now given that this does not show any decline in temperature between 1940 and 1970, something clearly shown in the record, the accuracy of this plot, as with earlier ones, is up for grabs, but seems to indicate that the consistent valid criticism leveled at the paper by Steve McIntyre has yet to be completely addressed.

The controversy has moved on to the use of lakebed sediments from Lake Korttajarvi in Finland, which were cored by Mia Tiljander as part of a doctoral dissertation (hence the name Tiljander sediments). Analysis of the use of the data by others has recently led Kaufman to admit he made a mistake in the use of the data while reasserting that the correction merely strengthens his original argument.

That a correction that re-inverts the data strengthens a correlation seems to be odd to me, but then this whole basic argument over the data and its interpretation has been redolent with somewhat dishonest and manipulative practices on behalf of those generating the information that is used by the IPCC and our Secretary of Energy.

When one realizes that much of this manipulation comes from folk that work in the government and are supposed to be disinterested in the results it becomes more irritating. But then one must recognize that their funding and jobs do, to a significant extent, depend on Global Warming being real and man-made.

I would recommend reading the review of all this at the Skeptical Climate Science Primer since this story is told there with many more graphs and details than I can put in the posts that I produce.

2009 Energy Conference - Plenary Session

There are two sources that many of us who write about Energy go to, with regularity, to see how, statistically, the world is doing on Energy consumption. The EIA is the most consistent and has become an integral part of the knowledge base that I have used, first at TOD, and now here. Thus my attendance at the EIA Energy Conference in Washington, today and tomorrow. The meeting had seats for some 1200 folk and significantly more than half the chairs were filled, with a fair number, so I was told, of those being from the investment side of the house. It has been an interesting meeting so far, the talks with ultimately be posted by EIA, and should be worth watching. Though I have to say, hearing the speaker from Pemex, the Mexican oil company blithely talk about their sustaining levels of production, in the face of the collapse of Canterell, does give an idea as to where some of the world’s unfounded optimism comes from.

There is no doubt that the Administration has changed, from the presence of “the hockey stick” curve in Dr Chu’s Keynote Address through all three of the Plenary Papers, we, as an audience, were left in no doubt that Climate Change and the problems of carbon, are now a major part of the new agenda. If you want a longer version of Dr. Chu’s remarks, they followed quite closely a talk he gave on the Helios Project a couple of years ago, although in somewhat abbreviated form. He did, however, include a comment on Econbrowser’s note that recessions follow oil price peaks and seemed to agree with the basic thesis that James Hamilton presented. He expressed again his concern that with changing climate the water in the Sierra snows is reducing, and that this does not bode well for that State. Usually a two year decline in water is sufficient to lead to water rationing and he is concerned that these will be worse. (Ed. Note – historically Scott Stine has shown that droughts there in the past have lasted decades).


He pointed to a number of nations that have shown that the standard of living is not proportional to energy consumption and talked a little on the Human Development Index. But in talking about energy he noted that California had stabilized on energy use per person, at a time where the rest of the country had continued to increase demand, and stressed the benefits that can come from increased energy efficiency in use. We need to call ET back home. (Sorry! His joke about an old science fiction movie) Except that now ET is Energy Technology and if we can bring this green technology back, it is something that can’t be outsourced. The likely biggest impact of ET will be on Construction, though to get the maximum gains houses will have to have sensors integrated, in the same way that cars have microprocessors now.

We need four things to make progress, an investment in R&D; some standards of performance; the development of new technology; and the will to go forward. The investment is available through, among other things, the Stimulus Package, with $8.2 billion, for example, going into weatherization, and $11 billion for the smart grid (though he did not mention D.C. this time around). He anticipates that the R&D tax credit will become permanent, and that wind cost will go down several fold in the next 20 years, as increasing percentages of the energy generated are extracted.

In terms of standards and efficiency he noted that refrigerators had dropped to a third the price, yet use less than 25% of the energy they demanded in the 1970’s.

Again he bragged on the scientists in the National Labs (who it increasingly seems likely will get most of the R&D money) noting that they have 88 Nobel Laureates in their midst and have the potential to be the future Bell Labs of the Nation. And in that regard he detailed a little of the work he was doing at Berkeley in using different chemicals from wood lice etc to turn cellulosic material into ethanol. To indicate that success should be anticipated, he quoted the example of Norman Borlaug, who after being told that the world did not have enough food to provide for 6 billion people created the Green Revolution to ensure that it did.

He was followed by Professor Nordhaus a Yale Economist, who again underlined the key issue - that is the Carbon question. His perception is that the world energy supply can be considered as taps filling a bathtub and that you, as a person consuming oil from one of the drains leading from the bath, did not need to know which spigot was supplying what oil from where. (Which only works – with oil as a fungible product – until there is not enough to go around, but Professor Nordhaus did not get into that aspect of the argument). He showed that oil prices between the nations are closely linked and said that it was a fallacy to anticipate the need for America to have energy independence. We should not need to care who causes what oil to be put into the tub only that it is there and available (either directly or indirectly). We should however be prepared to pay the appropriate price (technological, social and that due to microeconomics).

He felt that our effort should be to ensure a stable, long term price for oil that was reasonably low, bt sustainable. It is more critical to get the carbon policy right, since the current energy policy is incoherent, and then to work on oil prices. By encouraging all countries to supply as much oil as they can (without subsidies) prices will be lowered, and the world economy will prosper.

The final speaker of the Plenary Session was John Rowe of Excelon who again reiterated that this was the time for decisive climate change legislation, citing the Waxman-Markey bill. He would prefer a clean carbon tax, but recognizes the advantage that a cap and trade mandate can bring. He cited the Excelon 2020 program. As a utility that takes money from customers every day he is aware how critically they evaluate changing conditions. He also recognizes that we can only get to 35% renewables in the energy mix, if we retire some of the legacy power generation plants. There will still be a cost every $10 a CO2 ton will raise costs $0.01/kWh and so the cost benefits of different techniques must be evaluated. As natural gas prices have changed, so it becomes more difficult to write policy for the different fuel alternatives. He recommends that the whole issue of carbon credit costs be turned over to the market. Then the costs can be assessed and integrated into business plans, He mentioned in this day and age there is no substitution for having had an education that included physics and economics (Ed. Note I recorded that he did not include geology in the list). At present distributed energy often means natural gas (NG) but in the future this could be solar.

From the Little Ice Age to today -rates of climate change

Much of the media coverage of the changing climate relates to the changes in glacier size, and their relative retreat over the past four decades. In the last Saturday post, I quoted the overwhelming scientific evidence for the presence of a global Little Ice Age (LIA) as documented by Jean Grove.

What I would now like to do is show, through the work of Syun-Ichi Akosafu, of the International Arctic Research Center, that the transition from the LIA to today began long before the considerations of Global Warming and carbon dioxide forcings were much thought of, and, with the backing of the solid science that has documented these changes, that these changes have very little sensitivity to the purported effects of increased carbon dioxide levels. Further I would underline his comment that it is not possible to study climate change without long-term data – considering long term to be not 60 years or even 600, but rather the periodicity of climate changes over the last 3000 years. And that requires archaeological information as well as that of proxies alone, particularly as it relates to those that live in the Arctic regions.


In beginning let me note that as the global temperature, over the last decade, has refused to follow the predicted path of those who espouse global warming, so the period over which average temperatures are defined to denote the trend in climate has been extended, from three, to five, to ten, to the latest fifteen year averages. Let us, for the sake of scientific honesty, decide that five years is a reasonable period over which to define a mean, and then move into the discussion.

Akosafu begins by showing that, if we plot this 5-year mean over the past 140 years, then the trend can be divided into a steadily increasing part (the black line) with, superimposed upon it variations that he calls natural, but that will be examined and discussed as we work through the paper.


Figure 1. Global temperature change, shown as a 5-year average and defined by the overall trend, and the variations thereon. (Akosafu Fig 1e).

Given the whole debate about global warming and carbon dioxide levels, it is appropriate to also include his figure 2, which shows the change in both over the last 150 odd years,
Figure 2. Global temperature (5-year smoothing) plotted with CO2 levels

By comparing temperature records from Vardo, in Norway, with the ice core data from Severnaya Zemlya, he shows that the two can be correlated, and then uses the ice core data to show that the temperature it records has been rising since about 1780. This is then correlated with data from coral studies on the island of Guam that similarly show a temperature rise, which started around 1800. The paper ties this date to changes in the time that ice freezes over lakes and rivers, and when it melts. The conclusion is visibly evident that there has been a change, and that it dates back to around 1800.

However much of the response to mention of both an MWP and an LIA has suggested that the events were localized to Western Europe. Now Grove showed through quotations from numerous papers that this was not true, and Akosafu equally strongly refutes that argument with data from both Peru and China,
Figure 3. Oxygen isotope values translated into temperature variations for both China and Peru over the past 400 years (Akosafu Fig 4c)

While many folk seem to prefer to rely purely on the scientific numbers derived from proxy values, I feel that information from contemporary historical documents can be equally or more valid. Thus the reports of cooler summers between 1550 and 1750, which led to deaths because of the poor harvests, and thus famine, provide information that should not be ignored.

The generality of that condition, and the global evidence of a change to a warming trend after about 1800 is well documented. It is this evidence, and the timing of the start of global warming, that shows that it is a natural, rather than an anthropomorphic change. Anecdotal information, such as the fact that Permafrost formed during the LIA around Fairbanks is only now starting to thaw, does not define the depths of the cold that many places saw and he points out (Figure 6a) that for those many places around the globe, the average temperature in the 1700s was considerably below that modeled by Mann et al, in their famous “hockey stick” paper that formed such a central theme to the IPCC report of 2001. In fact he quotes a table from the NRC 2006 report on global temperatures that confirms, with half-a-dozen plots, that temperature started rising somewhere around 1800. He rightly asks the question that, if CO2 levels did not start rising significantly until 1946, what was the cause of the earlier rise?

If, in fact, one examines the trend of temperature rise from 1800 to 1900 and then from 1900 to 2000 and subtracts the rate of change in existence before carbon dioxide effects are postulated to have occurred, then one finds the pre-existing rate to have been 0.5 degC/100 years following 1800. With the IPCC claim of a temperature rise of 0.6 degC/100 years, then the difference due to CO2 initially appears to be 0.1degC/100 years.

Now if the drop in temperature during the LIA was a total of 1.5degC, such a rate would bring us “back” to date only 1degC. And there are records that suggest that the MWP was, in fact, warmer than today’s temperatures. This, however, only deals with the “black line” portion of Figure 1. Akasofu now looks at the variations around that trend, namely what is referred to as the “multi-decadal oscillation.” This can be seen, in Figure 1, to be an oscillation, but to those anxious to prove Global Warming, it is this oscillation above the underlying trend, coincident with the rise in CO2 levels, that is the marker to our future doom.

However, as an initial point, it should be noted that the nature of oscillations is that, after swinging one way in periodic mode, they then start to swing back. And the phase of the oscillation, as seen from Figure 1, is such as to suggest that the return should begin around 2000 – as it did. This variation is around 0.15degC /10 years, and cycles, as shown, around the mean growth.

Studying the changes that this warming is inducing, Akasofu looks in more detail at the actual specificity of occurrences, rather than the generality. Consider, for example, the reduction in the Arctic ice cap. This is not a uniform contraction, which one might anticipate if the cause were a universal warming, but rather is maximized along the Siberian coast, where the currents from the North Atlantic – under the driving force of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO)- have accelerated the melt. The characteristics of that melt – the ice is melting from the bottom, rather than the top, confim that it is a water current related phenomenon, rather than a surface temperature caused result.

In earlier posts I have commented on the retreat of the glacier at Glacier Bay in Alaska, and will take the opportunity of pasting his illustration of this, so that I can refer back to it later. You will note that it shows the glacier retreating to its greatest extent, before 1860.
Figure 4. Glacial retreat at Glacier Park

Similar plots are presented for the Franz Josef Glacier in New Zealand, and the Gangotri Glacier in the Himalayas, as well as the advance and retreat of the glaciers in the west-central Alps.

As I pointed out, when discussing Bangladesh, Akasofu also does an evaluation of the rise in sea levels over the last hundred years, and notes that while the average has been some 1.7 mm/year in recent years, rather than increasing, as one would expect with the glaciers melting, and the ocean warming, in fact the rate has dropped below 1.4 mm/year.

Hidden now, in the heart of the paper, lies some of the more damaging evidence against the modeling of Climate Change that is presumed by so many to be accurately predicting our future.

In the post that induced my departure from The Oil Drum, and as Akasofu confirms, Greenland, as a whole has not been warming in the same mode as the majority of the Arctic regions. When, however, the IPCC Arctic group were asked to run their models to hindcast the behavior of the Arctic regions over the past fifty years, the IPCC models were nowhere near accurate in their predictions of what actually occurred.
Figure 5. IPCC prediction vs reality (on the left)

Further, because the IPCC only focuses on the period following 1975 they neglect the changes in the Greenland ice sheet that occurred during the 1920-1940 period which were substantially greater in magnitude than those now occurring, but which could not have been caused by GHG. And, this after all being an Arctic Research Center, they also point out, contrary to MSM reports that the actual temperature of the permafrost has stopped rising, and in fact the methane levels “off-gassed” have decreased, since about 2000.

I will forego discussion of what might cause the larger cyclic variation (the MWP – LIA cycle) to another time.

So there you have it, to those willing to do "due diligence" on the changes in climate over the past two centuries, the evidence is substantial that the fears so assiduously heightened in the media, are not, in fact, based on fact. We'll get into the MWP and earlier parts of the cycle, in future posts.