10-minute trainer: Hansen's sea-level daydream vs some data

Japanese quality specialists in industry developed the idea of a '10-minute trainer', by which an instructor or a supervisor would have materials ready to take advantage of any downtime in a process to do some teaching about statistical and other insights or techniques relevant to process improvement.  The idea is to be ready to take advantage of an unscheduled opportunity to do some teaching.  Now in a school of course, teaching is the main process, but sometimes there can be opportunities to go outside of the curriculum.  Perhaps this might apply for the senior years in High School, whenever pupils or teachers have the luxury of being able to spend such time.  I am taking it as read that the curriculum itself is likely to include considerable misinformation about climate, and so these '10-minute trainers' would only be for those willing to be a little radical.  The '10-minutes' is not meant to be taken literally, but rather just to convey a modest amount of time, available with little or no warning.  And perhaps somewhere there are, or will be, examination boards and curricula that would not penalise pupils taking science and data seriously, rather than merely parroting pressure group nonsense and associated political 'correctness'.

We could readily build a set of them for teachers willing to engage classes on the realities of climate and/or of pressure groups and their mentors.  The recent splattergate movie from 10:10 is a reminder of how zealotry, and the ignoring of real data, can so easily lead to ruthless fanaticism. Using simple data sets can be enough to expose, bit by bit, step by step, the emptiness of the fanatics' approach, and at the same time encourage youngsters to discuss, differ, and think for themselves in a civilised manner.

Steven Goddard's blog has some suitable material today which could readily be built-up into a '10-minute trainer', looking at a doom-laden prediction about sea levels around New York city - a prediction made by leading CO2-agitator, James Hansen in 1988 for the year 2008: (http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/correlating-new-york-sea-level-rise-with-co2/):

(1) The predictions (source:http://dir.salon.com/books/int/2001/10/23/weather/index.html) :
'While doing research 12 or 13 years ago, I met Jim Hansen, the scientist who in 1988 predicted the greenhouse effect before Congress. I went over to the window with him and looked out on Broadway in New York City and said, "If what you're saying about the greenhouse effect is true, is anything going to look different down there in 20 years?" He looked for a while and was quiet and didn't say anything for a couple seconds. Then he said, "Well, there will be more traffic." I, of course, didn't think he heard the question right. Then he explained, "The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won't be there. The trees in the median strip will change." Then he said, "There will be more police cars." Why? "Well, you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up." '
(2) The data (source: http://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/50yr.shtml?stnid=8518750&name=The+Battery&state=New+York): a scatterplot of the rate of sea-level rise (in mm per year) against CO2 concentration

And of course, now in 2010, 22 years after Hansen's casual (and causal) talk of sea-level rises bringing flooding to New York in 20 years thanks to the 'greenhouse effect'  [of CO2], we can easily confirm that it has not yet happened - the West Side Highway is not under water due to higher sea-levels.  

(3) Another plot:

(Source: http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010/10/04/the-rumours-of-manhattans-death-are-exaggerated/)

Now class, what can we learn from this?  What other data from New York or elsewhere do you think would be helpful to improve our discussion of these predictions?  How far would you be willing to extrapolate from a such a scatterplot using higher levels of CO2?  Do you think CO2 levels could ever be a reliable predictor of sea level changes?  What would a naive extrapolation of the plot predict for the rate of sea level rise today given that CO2 levels have risen further over the past few years?  What relevance would rainfall levels or storms have to our discussion?  And so on.

Note Added 5 November 2012  Last year, Hansen claimed he never made the forecast for 20 years out, but rather 40 years and the journalist misheard him.  An update on the WUWT 2009 post has been made, and shows that even adding another 20 years to the alarming forecast, it still does not look at all plausible.
More analysis on Hansen's alarmism here:  http://hauntingthelibrary.wordpress.com/2011/01/06/james-hansen-1986-within-15-years-temps-will-be-hotter-than-past-100000-years/

Terrorise the children, control the adults: - a behavioural change strategy at work

By those who want to reduce the levels of a trace gas vital for plantlife.

Why?  Superficially, because they believe that computer models designed to show a big effect of CO2 actually mean that CO2 has a big effect.

But deep down, it seems more likely that they just hate humanity.  Weird, or what?

One day, teachers will refuse to teach the junk 'science' of CO2 alarmism, and the junk geography, sociology,  and politics that drive it.  They will react with anger when 'sensitise the children', and 'behavioural change', and 'sustainable biodiversity', and 'carbon footprint', and all the other apparatus of indoctrination is pushed at them to push in their classes.

Teacher alert: eco-blackshirts promote the killing of non-conforming adults and children

Is this where CO2-alarmism leads?

KILL! KILL! KILL THE UNBELIEVERS!

See: http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2010/sep/30/10-10-no-pressure-film
YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FkB4uiizVo

The luvvies in and behind this despicable film are so convinced of the dangers of CO2 in the atmosphere that they wish to kill those who disagree with them, including children. The film ends with gore from an explosion sliding down the screen.  The film begins with a schoolteacher calmly blowing up two pupils in her class who decline to give in to her political requests , leaving blood over all the others in the classroom.

Now this is at a time when there is not a single piece of observational evidence that anything at all unusual is happening to climate.  The increase in a trace gas is so small that it remains a trace gas.  The role of it in the climate system is far from 'settled', with deeply qualified scientists estimating its effect ranging from a small cooling, through negligible to a modest warming.  A handful of scientists and programmers have created computer models of climate which include an additional hypothesis of postive feedback involving water vapour.  Then and only then do we get more scary scenarios of warming.  We also see in the model outputs a remarkable and pronounced hotter zone in the upper troposphere - one that has not been observed.  Ordinarily, the scientific method would say - 'model prediction not confirmed by observation, model not good enough'.  Some models also predict a hot spot over Antarctica - one that should be clearly detectable by now, but it is not there.  None of the models predicted the break in the warming since around 1998 to the present day.  None of the models include the fact that many weather station records show no overall warming at all in the past century.  The models are not good.  They are not fit for prediction. Yet there is nothing else that deserves an alarmed reaction.  Nothing.  The luvvies want to kill and destroy based on the output of computer models of demonstrably poor quality, in a field where there are substantially different theories about the impact of CO2 on climate.  Only those theories which predict a modest to negligible impact have been supported by observations of the real atmosphere.

Hat tip:
http://nofrakkingconsensus.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/blood-gore-against-global-warming/

Note added 8 Nov 2011.  I regret the term 'eco-blackshirts' in the title.  Although I think such people could readily be recruited, the filmakers themselves did not actually apply real violence to those they deem to be so evil that they, or their children, must be blown up by terrorists acting for the climate cause.  They merely promoted such violence.

Note added 3 Dec 2011.  Prof Jones of UEA, the notorious climate schemer as revealed by CG1 and CG2, put his department into the 10:10 campaign less than a year before the ugly video was released:
'I am a lot more free to push my environmental interests without ongoing critique of my motives and supposed misguidedness - I've signed my department up to 10:10 campaign and have a taskforce of staff and students involved in it...' (29 October 2009, source: http://di2.nu/foia/foia2011/mail/1625.txt)
I wonder if they are still part of it?


Note added 18 Jan 2012. More examples of eco-fascism exposed here: http://toryaardvark.com/2012/01/18/green-environmentalist-wants-eco-gulags-for-climate-change-deniers/


Note added 21 Mar 2012.  Essay on eco-fascism here: http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2012/03/eco-fascists-don-their-jackboots.php


Note added 10 April 2012.   More writing published in Germany on the links between National Socialism and Green political activists: http://notrickszone.com/2012/04/10/news-magazine-focus-writes-on-the-german-green-movements-very-brown-roots/


Note added 28 April 2012:  Violent imagery used by out-of-control EPA bureaucrat: cruxifixion.

 "The Romans used to conquer little villages in the Mediterranean. They'd go into a little Turkish town somewhere, they'd find the first five guys they saw and they would crucify them. And then you know that town was really easy to manage for the next few years."

'A recently surfaced video of an EPA official's rant confirms what many of us already knew about the Obama Administration: they imagine themselves to be the rulers of conquered territories populated by restless barbarians who must be subjugated at any cost, complete with indiscriminate and severe exemplary punishments.'

 http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2012/04/if_only_the_romans_had_the_epa_to_crucify_the_dissenters.html

Note added 05 May 2012.  Donna Laframboise has noted copies of 'No Pressure' disappearing from YouTube.  She has created a Webcite link to the video, and here is another YouTube copy which is currently working: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sE3g0i2rz4w&feature=related

Note added 17 April 2014.   The close relationship of eco-fanaticism with National Socialism in Hitler's Germany is illustrated by this quotation: '"We recognize that separating humanity from nature, from the whole of life, leads to humankind’s own destruction and to the death of nations. Only through a re-integration of humanity into the whole of nature can our people be made stronger. That is the fundamental point of the biological tasks of our age. Humankind alone is no longer the focus of thought, but rather life as a whole . . . This striving toward connectedness with the totality of life, with nature itself, a nature into which we are born, this is the deepest meaning and the true essence of National Socialist thought."

Ernst Lehmann, Biologischer Wille. Wege und Ziele biologischer Arbeit im neuen Reich, München, 1934

See: http://homepage.ntlworld.com/sealed/monbiot/ecofascism.html

See: http://www.spunk.org/library/places/germany/sp001630/peter.html

(hat-tip: commenter esmiff, Apr 16, 2014 at http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2014/4/15/climate-control-in-the-scottish-express.html#comments )

Loaded climatology: what chance have the pupils if their teachers buy into this?

Corruption of schools by politicians and government agencies:

(1) NASA pushes alarmist projections based on woefully inadequate computer models for use by schools.  See how hot we'll be in 2060!!  A withering attack on this at C3 (http://www.c3headlines.com/2010/09/nasas-inaccurate-climate-model-technology-pushed-into-schools-classrooms-incompetence-101-or-propaga.html):

NASA's Inaccurate Climate Model Technology Pushed Into Schools' Classrooms: 'Incompetence 101' or 'Propaganda 101'?

Read here . Big government bureaucrats, whose entire careers are based on incompetence and wasting billions of tax dollars, have now decided that students should learn about the government's inaccurate, non-reliable, CO2-centric computer climate models.


Are they really unreliable and inaccurate? Well, the facts do speak for themselves. As everyone knows from real world day-to-day experience, weather computer models are notoriously inaccurate for weather projections out past a few days. Seasonal forecasts by weather/climate models are even worse, to the point that experts are no longer relying on them. It has become established scientific fact that the inaccuracy of computer model's increases exponentially over time, making them entirely useless as thermometer predictors for any future period.'

More on NASA's predictive skills on climate here: http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010/09/30/nasa-at-the-halfway-mark/

(2) US Representative, Sarbannes calls for deliberate indoctrination of schoolchildren to profit from the totalitarian strategy of using children for political pressure. (see: http://www.cnsnews.com/news/article/75645   via http://icecap.us/index.php/go/political-climate  H/tip: thanks Dave)

'
(CNSNews.com) - Rep. John Sarbanes (D-Md.) told CNSNews.com at a “Sustainability Education Summit” hosted by the U.S. Education Department on Tuesday that environmental education in schools can “promote the agenda” of climate change and population growth through the influence it has on children.


“Like I keep saying over and over again, if you get young people invested in those ideas early on, that will result in those kinds of positive policy developments,” Sarbanes told CNSNews.com. “So, whether it’s climate change, whether it’s population growth, whether it’s all these factors that impact the health of our world, raising that awareness early among young people is only going to promote the agenda.”  '


(3) Here in the UK, there are websites pushing the climate dogma on to teachers, e.g. this one in Scotland  (http://www.ltscotland.org.uk/exploringclimatechange/index.asp ) where it says:

'Our climate is changing. The planet is warming faster than at any time in the last 10,000 years. Global average temperatures have risen by 0.8ºC since the late 19th century, and 0.2ºC per decade over the past 25 years. Man-made greenhouse gas emissions have caused, and continue to cause, most of the observed temperature rise since the mid 20th century. Millions of tonnes of greenhouse gases are produced every day by human activity. These constant emissions into the Earth’s atmosphere continue to drive global warming. '


Here are some things their pupils may find on the internet to infuriate any teacher taken in by the thrust of the above paragraph, i.e. that there is something unusual about recent climate, and that human activity is driving it.


The global temperature rises according to the UK Hadley Centre, a venue not noted for any anti-establishment position on global warming, have been occuring at much the same rate in the late 20th century as earlier in the 20th century with some cooling phases in between despite a sustained increase in CO2 levels in the late 20th century. If the pattern repeats, we can expect some cooling for the next 20 years or so:

Here is a plot based on temperature reconstructions over the last 2000 years.  Once again, nothing unusual about the 20thC:

(more context for this plot here: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/09/28/loehle-vindication/#more-25461

And over the past 10,000 years or so of the Holocene, this plot shows nothing unusual in our bit of this pleasantly warm interglacial, but unfortunately with an overall cooling trend for the past 6,000 years as we approach the next glaciation of our ice age:

(more context and source for this plot here: http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/GW_Part1_PreHistoricalRecord.htm

(4) In Australia, the Australian Science Teachers Association endorse this insidious website with its game for 8 year-olds an up: http://www.footprintsgame.com.au/game.

'FootprintsTM is a challenging learning game for players aged 8 and over. It is specifically aimed at middle school students, encouraging them to learn more and act on saving our environment. FootprintsTM is about the greatest challenges facing humanity today... global warming and climate change.'

How will the children themselves deal with this if their teachers are overwhelmed by all this pressure and toe the line?  

Depression and dismay, a hatred of technology, a horror of the future?  Cannon fodder for eco-terrorists? Or will some of them when they are old enough, make use of the internet to expose the nonsense and embarrass their teachers?

Time will tell.  Perhaps some teachers will lead the way instead.  Although in so doing,  they will put their careers at risk in our current environment.  But perhaps that is preferable to risking those of any pupils who dare challenge the disgraceful and anti-scientific orthodoxy of alarmism which is being imposed upon them.

One day, and I hope it is soon, our schools will be free to encourage both realism and optimism about our environment, and show how our technological systems have brought so much benefit - coal-fired power stations included.  There is a great deal to be pleased and excited about, but the sickening flood of ill-founded alarmism about CO2 is poisoning the minds and spirits of a generation.

Naive climatology: what chance have the teachers when the Government Science Advisor holds such views?

Naive climatology in high places.  Sir John Beddington, UK Government Chief Scientific Adviser and Head of the Government Office for Science, has produced some web pages to elaborate his position (http://www.bis.gov.uk/go-science/climatescience).  His covering letter begins thus:

'The science of climate change

'Few areas of science have such profound implications for public policy and society as the study of climate change.

As one consequence, scientists who may have begun their careers in relative backwaters of research now find themselves thrown into the limelight.

Scientific points, and occasional errors, have become the subject of emotive debate and strong media interest. Frequently this has generated more heat than light, with polarised and ill-informed debates across the blogosphere - and indeed at times in the mainstream media.

My aim in developing these web pages is to set out what I believe to be key aspects of the scientific evidence on climate change. In a field so broad the material is necessarily selective, but I hope it presents in a clear and scientific manner an overview of some of the most important areas of study.

The evidence is compelling that climate change is happening, that human activities are the major driver for this and that the future risks are substantial. This evidence includes wide-ranging, long term and robust observations of changes that are taking place, and projections of possible future changes that are based on basic physical laws.'

I want to examine the last paragraph quoted, phrase by phrase:

'The evidence is compelling that climate change is happening'   

         Agreed.  The climate has never stopped changing.  Ever.  This is a platitude, used I suspect to deploy the phrase 'the evidence is compelling' in the hope that the naive reader will assume that applies to human influence as well.  Only the artificially contrived hockey-stick temperature plot showed little change (in temperature) until the 20th century, but it has now been exposed as an artifice involving peculiar choices in a particular statistical analysis of a noisy and complex set of data (1).

'that human activities are the major driver for this'

         No.  There is no compelling evidence for this - it is a theoretical speculation, enshrined as an added effect in computer models of climate, and that is all.  Of course human activities affect both climate and weather - the debate is about how much and in which direction.  Nothing extraordinary has been seen recently in any of the climate measures such as temperatures, ice extents, storm frequencies and intensities, rainfall, sea levels, etc.  The climate remains within bounds, but within these bounds there is a great deal of variation.   Attempts to match CO2 levels with climate measurements have been particularly disappointing for those alarmed by this possibility.  The warming and cooling cycles of the past 150 years or so, superimposed on a slowly rising (beneficially so, I would add) global temperatures (as 'averaged' in various ways - none of which are immune from problems) do not link convincingly to the rising CO2 level as a cause.  The last ten years or so have seen another break in this long-term rise in global 'average' temperature, and it is quite plausible that we are now in a cooling cycle that could last at least another 20 years.  With regard to CO2, there are massive natural fluxes in and out of the air, such that the human-caused emissions (whose magnitude is only crudely guestimated) amount to a few percent (some say c. 3%).  That alone makes the qualifier 'major'  subject to doubt.  Distinguished scientists are on record with their strong reservations e.g. (2), (3).

'and that the future risks are substantial'

             Of course.  Another platitude given that we are probably near the end of a mild inter-glacial period, and if so, a return of permanent ice cover to the UK and elsewhere is inevitable.  There are substantial challenges from cooling, arguably far more challenging than from the more credible end of the range of warming projections promoted by the IPCC.  The response by some to the threat of warming has been to call for a crippling of our primary sources of reliable energy - coal, gas, oil, and even nuclear, and for a burden of new taxes to be added to other industries. This kind of self-harm does not seem a sensible thing to do when in fact more energy means more scope for dealing with climate challenges, as does more economic growth, not least in the poorer countries.

'This evidence includes wide-ranging, long term and robust observations of changes that are taking place,'

            This is presumably referring to rising CO2 levels.  Or is it another attempt to piggy-back on ordinary climate variation in order to bolster a weak case?  There is evidence that rising temperatures cause increases in atmospheric CO2 on short and on geological timescales, the very reverse of the IPCC position, e.g. (4).

'and projections of possible future changes that are based on basic physical laws.'

              Not exactly.  This would have been more accurate: 'based on deliberately set parameters in global climate models whose own developers admit are not fit for making predictions'.  Hence the term 'projections'.  


The physical laws bit deserves further elucidation.  I think the alarmists have now conceded that the optical properties of glass (specifically the ability to transmit visible light far more readily than infra-red) are not important for real greenhouses getting hot - their high temperatures are due to the dramatic reduction in mixing with outside air, and not from any 'trapping of infra-red'.  How many school textbooks recognise this?  It was established by experiment about 100 years ago.  


The idea that just adding more CO2 must mean higher temperatures is also naive.  Physicists, notably in Germany (5) (6), and from Hungary (7) and Russia (8), are arguing that if anything, it could lead to a small cooling (due to slightly increasing the density of air, and due to increasing the radiation of infrared into space higher up in the atmosphere).  There are other arguments, in particular the saturation effect, the logarithmic rather than linear response of the radiative effect of CO2 in a chamber of gas - so providing less thermal impact for each additional ppm of CO2 (9), and a broad one of negative feedback stability that is, I think, a bit more plausible than any positive feedback.  Core features of the 'greenhouse effect' modeling in the atmosphere have also been challenged (10), (11).  Here is an example of a scientifically sceptical overview of the alarmist approach to climate science: (12).

The statements and position adopted by Professor Beddington are surely going to be influential.  Any education authority or teacher wishing to take a broader, dare I say 'more inclusive', view of climate has to be ready to challenge such authority, and its ex-cathedra announcements.  What are the chances of that happening soon?  Low I guess, although I am convinced that it will happen eventually, as and when sound science, observation, and reasoning push speculative computer models back to where they belong - which is hidden away from the public gaze and from vulnerable and/or opportunistic politicians and environment campaigners.

References

(1) http://www.amazon.co.uk/Illusion-Climategate-Corruption-Science-Independent/dp/1906768358/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1280857992&sr=1-1


(2) http://kirkmyers.wordpress.com/2010/07/14/harvard-astrophysicist-dismisses-agw-theory-challenges-peers-to-take-back-climate-science/

(3) http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703939404574567423917025400.html

(4) http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/06/09/a-study-the-temperature-rise-has-caused-the-co2-increase-not-the-other-way-around/

(5) http://www.suite101.com/content/greenhouse-gas-hypothesis-violates-fundamentals-of-physics-a240478


(6) http://climateresearchnews.com/2009/03/new-peer-reviewed-study-falsification-of-the-atmospheric-co2-greenhouse-effects-within-the-f

(7) http://www.aim.org/aim-column/blacklisted-scientist-challenges-global-warming-orthodoxy/

(8) http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.com/2010/04/adding-to-list-1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9-10-11.html

(9) http://stevengoddard.wordpress.com/2010/09/05/quantifying-the-greenhouse-effect-in-the-tropics/

(10) http://arxiv.org/abs/1002.0883  (link to a paper by Kramm and Dlugi)

(11) http://multi-science.metapress.com/content/9p72043270187318 (link to a paper by Clark)

(12) Overview of the case for human-caused warming being worthy of alarm: http://www.junkscience.com/Greenhouse/