On Mon, 07 Dec 2009 21:31:42 -0800, isw wrote:

In article ,
"I M @ good guy" wrote:

On Mon, 07 Dec 2009 00:11:48 -0600, TUKA
wrote:

On 2009-12-07, isw wrote:
In article ,
7 wrote:

Eric Gisin wrote:

Positive cloud feedback is the key to Climate Alarmism, but the science
behind it is questionable. Note how the alarmists cannot respond to
this
important issue, other than with insane rants and conspiracies.

http://www.drroyspencer.com/2009/12/...redictions-be-
tested-with-observations-of-the-real-climate-system/

December 6, 2009, 08:19:36 | Roy W. Spencer, Ph. D.

In a little over a week I will be giving an invited paper at the Fall
meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco, in a
special session devoted to feedbacks in the climate system. If you
don't
already know, feedbacks are what will determine whether anthropogenic
global warming is strong or weak, with cloud feedbacks being the most
uncertain of all.

In the 12 minutes I have for my presentation, I hope to convince as
many
scientists as possible the futility of previous attempts to estimate
cloud
feedbacks in the climate system. And unless we can measure cloud
feedbacks
in nature, we can not test the feedbacks operating in computerized
climate
models.

WHAT ARE FEEDBACKS?


Systems with feedback have characteristic time constants,
oscillations and dampening characteristics all of which are self
evident and measurable. Except if you are an AGW holowarming nut
and fruitcake. You'll just have to make up some more numbers
and bully more publications to get it past peer review.

Climate science needs more transparency.

Thats easy:

1. Put all your emails on public ftp servers.

2. Put all the raw climate data in public ftp servers so that it can be
peer
reviewed.

I don't have any problem at all with *honest* peer review. What I do
have a BIG problem with is making the data available to people who are
certainly NOT "peers" (in the sense of having little or no scientific
training in any field, let alone a specialization in anything relating
to climatology), who furthermore have a real anti-warming agenda, and
who will, either willfully or ignorantly, misinterpret the data to suit
their purposes, and spread the resulting disinformation far and wide.

How do you propose to prevent that?

I don't propose to prevent it at all. Nor does the public who is fully
behind the various freedom of information acts.

You pay for it? Keep it secret all you want. You use my money for it?
You don't get to say in who gets the information.

Those of you who have the arrogance to think you still do? Screw you,
and may you go into disgrace as Jones, Mann, Trenberth, and company
have done.

ISW must be joking, "honest peer review"
only if the Jones' like what the reviewer passes.

The meteorologists who spent a lifetime
documenting the local weather are the ones
who the likes of the cru crowd should apologize
to, mixing tree rings in with station data is
the biggest crock of BS anybody ever tried
to pass off as science.

Those who confuse "local weather" with "global climate" are never going
to understand. Tree ring data is another source of data, probably at
least as accurate as your average meteorologist, and over a far longer
time span too -- *if you know how to interpret it*.

Isaac

A scientific scandal is casting a shadow over a number of recent
peer-reviewed climate papers.

At least eight papers purporting to reconstruct the historical
temperature record times may need to be revisited, with significant
implications for contemporary climate studies, the basis of the IPCC's
assessments. A number of these involve senior climatologists at the
British climate research centre CRU at the University East Anglia. In
every case, peer review failed to pick up the errors.

At issue is the use of tree rings as a temperature proxy, or
dendrochronology. Using statistical techniques, researchers take the
ring data to create a "reconstruction" of historical temperature
anomalies. But trees are a highly controversial indicator of
temperature, since the rings principally record Co2, and also record
humidity, rainfall, nutrient intake and other local factors.

Picking a temperature signal out of all this noise is problematic, and
a dendrochronology can differ significantly from instrumented data. In
dendro jargon, this disparity is called "divergence". The process of
creating a raw data set also involves a selective use of samples - a
choice open to a scientist's biases.

Yet none of this has stopped paleoclimataologists from making bold
claims using tree ring data.

In particular, since 2000, a large number of peer-reviewed climate
papers have incorporated data from trees at the Yamal Peninsula in
Siberia. This dataset gained favour, curiously superseding a newer and
larger data set from nearby. The older Yamal trees indicated
pronounced and dramatic uptick in temperatures.

How could this be? Scientists have ensured much of the measurement
data used in the reconstructions remains a secret - failing to fulfill
procedures to archive the raw data. Without the raw data, other
scientists could not reproduce the results. The most prestigious peer
reviewed journals, including Nature and Science, were reluctant to
demand the data from contributors. Until now, that is.

At the insistence of editors of the Royal Society's Philosophical
Transactions B the data has leaked into the open - and Yamal's mystery
is no more.

From this we know that the Yamal data set uses just 12 trees from a
larger set to produce its dramatic recent trend. Yet many more were
cored, and a larger data set (of 34) from the vicinity shows no
dramatic recent warming, and warmer temperatures in the middle ages.

In all there are 252 cores in the CRU Yamal data set, of which ten
were alive 1990. All 12 cores selected show strong growth since the
mid-19th century. The implication is clear: the dozen were
cherry-picked. http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/09/29/yamal_scandal/