Scientists Increasingly Dissent With Global Warming Proponents.

In April 2001, just after the release of the TAR, then Chairmen Robert Watson and Sir John Houghton gave a news conference in which they dismissed the idea of substantial disagreement with the IPCC Report:

Watson, described by many diplomats as the world's most authoritative voice on global warming, dismissed suggestions that there was a 50-50 split in the scientific community over climate change or humanity's role in producing it.

“It's not even 80-20 or 90-10 (in percentage terms). I personally believe it's something like 98-2 or 99-1,” said Watson, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)...

John Houghton, a British expert who co-chairs an IPCC panel investigating climate change, said his work involved between 600 and 700 scientists writing and reviewing 5,000 papers. “That's a very large body of scientists,” he said. Houghton said that worldwide there were no more than 10 scientists active in the field and well-versed in the arguments who disagreed with the notion of human-induced climate change.

Examples of "consensus" claims made by promoters of man-made climate fears:

Former Vice President Al Gore (November 5, 2007): "There are still people who believe that the Earth is flat." (LINK) Gore also compared global warming skeptics to people who "believe the moon landing was actually staged in a movie lot in Arizona." (June 20, 2006)

CNN's Miles O'Brien (July 23, 2007): "The scientific debate is over," O'Brien said. "We're done." O'Brien also declared on CNN on February 9, 2006 that scientific skeptics of man-made catastrophic global warming "are bought and paid for by the fossil fuel industry, usually."

On July 27, 2006, Associated Press reporter Seth Borenstein described a scientist as "one of the few remaining scientists skeptical of the global warming harm caused by industries that burn fossil fuels."

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, Chairman of the IPCC view on the number of skeptical scientists as quoted on Feb. 20, 2003: "About 300 years ago, a Flat Earth Society was founded by those who did not believe the world was round. That society still exists; it probably has about a dozen members."

Agence France-Press (AFP Press) article (December 4, 2007): The article noted that a prominent skeptic "finds himself increasingly alone in his claim that climate change poses no imminent threat to the planet."

Andrew Dessler in the eco-publication Grist Magazine (November 21, 2007): "While some people claim there are lots of skeptical climate scientists out there, if you actually try to find one, you keep turning up the same two dozen or so (e.g., Singer, Lindzen, Michaels, Christy, etc., etc.). These skeptics are endlessly recycled by the denial machine, so someone not paying close attention might think there are lots of them out there -- but that's not the case."

The Washington Post asserted on May 23, 2006 that there were only "a handful of skeptics" of man-made climate fears.

UN special climate envoy Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland on May 10, 2007 declared the climate debate "over" and added “it's completely immoral, even, to question” the UN’s scientific “consensus."

The UN Framework Convention on Climate Change Executive Secretary Yvo de Boer said it was “criminally irresponsible” to ignore the urgency of global warming on November 12, 2007.

ABC News Global Warming Reporter Bill Blakemore reported on August 30, 2006: "After extensive searches, ABC News has found no such [scientific] debate" on global warming.

Earlier ... a group of prominent scientists came forward to question the so-called “consensus” that the Earth faces a “climate emergency.” On April 6, 2006, 60 scientists wrote a letter to the Canadian Prime Minister asserting that the science is deteriorating from underneath global warming alarmists.

“Observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future…Significant [scientific] advances have been made since the [Kyoto] protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases. If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary,” the 60 scientists wrote.

Over 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called "consensus" on man-made global warming. These scientists, many of whom are current and former participants in the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), criticized the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore.

The new report issued by the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee's office of the GOP Ranking Member details the views of the scientists, the overwhelming majority of whom spoke out in 2007.

Even some in the establishment media now appear to be taking notice of the growing number of skeptical scientists. In October, the Washington Post Staff Writer Juliet Eilperin conceded the obvious, writing that climate skeptics "appear to be expanding rather than shrinking." Many scientists from around the world have dubbed 2007 as the year man-made global warming fears "bite the dust."

The UN global warming conference currently underway in Poland is about to face a serious challenge from over 650 dissenting scientists from around the globe who are criticizing the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore. Set for release this week, a newly updated U.S. Senate Minority Report features the dissenting voices of over 650 international scientists, many current and former UN IPCC scientists, who have now turned against the UN. The report has added about 250 scientists (and growing) in 2008 to the over 400 scientists who spoke out in 2007. The over 650 dissenting scientists are more than 12 times the number of UN scientists (52) who authored the media hyped IPCC 2007 Summary for Policymakers.

... it is an opportune time to examine the recent and quite remarkable momentum shift taking place in climate science. Many former believers in catastrophic man-made global warming have recently reversed themselves and are now climate skeptics. The names included ... are just a sampling of the prominent scientists who have spoken out recently to oppose former Vice President Al Gore, the United Nations, and the media driven “consensus” on man-made global warming.

Whether such “mistakes” are made in genuine error or are part of a politicized push for man-made global warming to be universally accepted, and the evidence clearly suggests that latter is the case, the fact is that we can no longer tolerate the cry that “the debate is over” on man-made global warming in light of such gargantuan falsehoods.

Likewise, the push for carbon emissions to be reduced by 80 per cent or more, a figure that would completely cripple western economies and lower living standards to a near third world level, can no longer be accepted as a reasonable course of action now that the primary authority on man-made global warming, the UN IPCC, has been proven to be using fraudulent data to make its case.

Senator James Inhofe (R-OK), Ranking Member of the Environment and Public Works Committee, delivered a more than two-hour floor speech on October 26, debunking fears of man-made global warming.

The fourth and final essential point deals with how the media and climate doomsters insist that there is an overwhelming scientific "consensus" of man-made global warming. The notion of a "consensus" is carefully manufactured for political, financial and ideological purposes.

While it may appear to the casual observer that scientists promoting climate fears are in the majority, the evidence continues to reveal this is an illusion. Climate skeptics -- the emerging silent majority of scientists -- receive much smaller shares of university research funds, foundation funds and government grants and they are not plugged into the well-heeled environmental special interest lobby.

On the other side of the climate debate, you have an comparatively well funded group of scientists and activists who participate in UN conferences, receiving foundation monies and international government support and also receive fawning media treatment.

The number of skeptics at first glance may appear smaller, but the skeptics are increasingly becoming vocal and turning the tables on the Goliath that has become the global warming fear industry.

We often hear how the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) and the American Meteorological Society (AMS) issued statements endorsing the so-called "consensus" view that man is driving global warming. But what you don't hear is that both the NAS and AMS never allowed member scientists to directly vote on these climate statements.

Essentially, only two dozen or so members on the governing boards of these institutions produced the "consensus" statements. It appears that the governing boards of these organizations caved in to pressure from those promoting the politically correct view

Of 528 total papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of the consensus. If one considers "implicit" endorsement (accepting the consensus without explicit statement), the figure rises to 45%. However, while only 32 papers (6%) reject the consensus outright, the largest category (48%) are neutral papers, refusing to either accept or reject the hypothesis. This is no "consensus."

The figures are even more shocking when one remembers the watered-down definition of consensus here. Not only does it not require supporting that man is the "primary" cause of warming, but it doesn't require any belief or support for "catastrophic" global warming. In fact of all papers published in this period (2004 to February 2007), only a single one makes any reference to climate change leading to catastrophic results.

More than 500 scientists have published evidence refuting the current man-made global warming scare, according to a new analysis of peer-reviewed literature by the Hudson Institute.

The newest analysis was released by Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Dennis Avery, who said of the 500 scientists who have refuted at least one element of the global warming scare, more than 300 have found evidence that a natural moderate 1,500-year climate cycle has produced more than a dozen global warmings similar to the current circumstances since the last Ice Age and that such warmings are linked to variations in the sun's irradiance.

"This data and the list of scientists make a mockery of recent claims that a scientific consensus blames humans as the primary cause of global temperature increases since 1850," he said.

The hockey stick debate is about two things. At a technical level it concerns a well-known study that characterized the state of the Earth’s climate over the past thousand years and seemed to prove a recent and unprecedented global warming. I will explain how the study got the results it did, examine some key flaws in the methodology and explain why the conclusions are unsupported by the data. At the political level the emerging debate is about whether the enormous international trust that has been placed in the IPCC was betrayed. The hockey stick story reveals that the IPCC allowed a deeply flawed study to dominate the Third Assessment Report, which suggests the possibility of bias in the Report-writing process. In view of the massive global influence of IPCC Reports, there is an urgent need to bias-proof future assessments in order to put climate policy onto a new foundation that will better serve the public interest.

A surreal scientific blunder ... raised a huge question mark about the temperature records that underpin the worldwide alarm over global warming. On Monday, Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), which is run by Al Gore's chief scientific ally, Dr James Hansen, and is one of four bodies responsible for monitoring global temperatures, announced that last month was the hottest October on record.

This was startling. Across the world there were reports of unseasonal snow and plummeting temperatures last month, from the American Great Plains to China, and from the Alps to New Zealand. China's official news agency reported that Tibet had suffered its "worst snowstorm ever". In the US, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration registered 63 local snowfall records and 115 lowest-ever temperatures for the month, and ranked it as only the 70th-warmest October in 114 years.

So what explained the anomaly? GISS's computerised temperature maps seemed to show readings across a large part of Russia had been up to 10 degrees higher than normal. But when expert readers of the two leading warming-sceptic blogs, Watts Up With That and Climate Audit, began detailed analysis of the GISS data they made an astonishing discovery. The reason for the freak figures was that scores of temperature records from Russia and elsewhere were not based on October readings at all. Figures from the previous month had simply been carried over and repeated two months running.

A GISS spokesman ... explained that the reason for the error in the Russian figures was that they were obtained from another body, and that GISS did not have resources to exercise proper quality control over the data it was supplied with. This is an astonishing admission: the figures published by Dr Hansen's institute are not only one of the four data sets that the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relies on to promote its case for global warming, but they are the most widely quoted, since they consistently show higher temperatures than the others.

I downloaded and plotted both of these datasets myself, plus did polynomial fit trend lines. Note that missing data from 1920 has not been plotted on this graph, but simply skipped.

The visual result of the before and after adjustments by NASA GISS speaks for itself:

What was down, is now up.

To qualify as a properly maintained temperature station, sensors must be placed in elevated, slatted boxes on flat ground surrounded by a clear surface on a slope of less than 19 degrees with surrounding grass and [vegetation] ground cover of less than 10 centimeters high. The sensors must be located at least 100 meters from artificial heating or reflecting surfaces, such as buildings, concrete surfaces and parking lots.

Watts' concerns about the temperatures being used to gauge whether global warming is actually taking place began when he read a 1997 study by the U.S. National Research Council that concluded the consistency and quality of temperature stations was "inadequate and deteriorating." Meanwhile, he learned, the U.S. Historical Climatological Network, responsible for maintaining the stations, was doing nothing to address the problems.

So Watts decided to take up the challenge himself. After surveying a few randomly chosen temperature stations and being shocked at the shortcomings, he set forth on a plan to survey all 1,221 stations, taking photographs along the way. With the help of volunteers, Watts has systematically surveyed one-third of the official weather stations.

The vast majority of the stations surveyed to date fail to meet the prescribed standards.

What he has found elsewhere are temperature stations with sensors on the roofs of buildings, near air-conditioning exhaust vents, in parking lots near hot automobiles, barbecues, chimneys and on pavement and concrete surfaces – all of which would lead to higher temperature recordings than properly established conditions.

Using a scale of 1 to 5, with 1 reflecting proper maintenance and standards and 5 representing facilities that are severely compromised, Watts says 70 percent of those stations surveyed received a 4 or 5 rating, while only 4 percent received a grade of 1.

All of the most egregious violations he has observed in the study would result in artificially higher temperatures being recorded.

Steve McIntyre, of Toronto operates www.climateaudit.org and began to investigate the data and the methods used to arrive at the results that were graphed by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS).

What he discovered was truly amazing. Since NASA does not fully publish the computer source code and formulae used to calculate the trends in the graph, nor the correction used to arrive at the “corrected” data. He had to reverse engineer the process by comparing the raw data and the processed data.

He further refines his argument showing the distribution of the error, and the problems with the USHCN temperature data. He also sends an email to NASA GISS advising of the problem.

He finally publishes it here, stating that NASA made a correction not only on their own web page, attributing the discovery to McIntyre, but NASA also issued a corrected set of temperature anomaly data...

According to the new data published by NASA, 1998 is no longer the hottest year ever. 1934 is.

Four of the top 10 years of US CONUS high temperature deviations are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the leaderboard, behind even 1900.

It was never supposed to be a trick question. Which year is the hottest on record? Depending where one looks, there are three different answers: 2006, 1998 or 1934. Until last week, the answer was supposed to be 2006, but it might have been 1998. Now, citing corrections of faulty data, NASA says it was actually 1934. The National Climactic Data Center disagrees; it still says 1998.

The differences are a matter of tenths of a degree Celsius, which might seem to diminish the significance of the corrections. Except that unusually warm years in the 1920s, 1930s and 1950s are themselves only a few tenths of a degree Celsius away from the purportedly dangerous hot temperatures of the present. Only one thing is certain: The political debate over global warming has rushed far ahead of the science.

When researchers checked, they found that the agency had merged two data sets that had been incorrectly assumed to match.

When the data were corrected, it resulted in a decrease of 0.27 degrees Fahrenheit in yearly temperatures since 2000 and a smaller decrease in earlier years.

That meant that 1998, which had been 0.02 degrees warmer than 1934, was now 0.04 degrees cooler.

Schmidt said that researchers had always known that the difference between 1934 and 1998 was so small, it was virtually impossible to rank them.

Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).

NASA is not the only source of long-term temperature data used to evaluate climate change. Like NASA, the UK Meteorological Office's Hadley Center for Climate Studies depends on a network of ground-based weather stations using thermometers. Both are limited by their number of stations, the heat-island effects on many of the sites located in urban areas, changes in thermometer types over time and the loss of station sites over the historical periods being measured. Data gathered from these systems often has to be adjusted to remove "noise" caused by the local environment so it can be standardized for analysis.

The University of Alabama at Huntsville and Remote Sensing Systems provide data gathered by Earth-observation satellites. Satellite temperature data has the advantage of being gathered across the entire surface of the Earth, except for regions near the two poles, but it is unavailable for the period prior to 1978.

How do these other data sources compare to NASA?

According to Hadley's data, worldwide temperatures have declined since 1998 and the Earth is not much warmer now than it was than it was in 1878 or 1941.

Both the UAH and RSS satellite data agree with Hadley and show temperatures declining over the past decade with only a slight increase above the 30-year average between 1978 and 2008.

More recently, NASA temperatures indicated March 2008 was the third-warmest March in history. RSS and UAH showed the same month as only slightly above average globally and the second-coldest ever in the southern hemisphere.

Global climate change isn't just a problem of the industrial age. Dinosaurs had to cope with it, too, geologists have found.

The carbon and nitrogen content of ancient rocks retrieved from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean 1,000 miles east of Japan indicate that ocean surface temperatures fluctuated by as much as 11 degrees Fahrenheit during the Cretaceous period 120 million years ago.

Previous research had found evidence of a changeable climate in the Atlantic Ocean around the same period, but not much was known about what was going on in the Pacific, said Indiana geologist Simon Brassell, who led the new study.

Brassell said the evidence of climate change so long ago during a period without humans could influence the modern-day understanding of global warming.

"If there are big, inherent fluctuations in the system, as paleoclimate studies are showing, it could make determining the Earth's climatic future even harder than it is," he said. "We're learning our climate, throughout time, has been a wild beast."

...scientists discovered a strong link between regional temperatures and the solar activity in the period 1250-1850, concluding that the sun was an important driver of preindustrial temperature changes in the Altai. The observation that the reconstructed temperatures followed the solar forcing with a delay of 10 to 30 years is particularly interesting.

The ships' logs of great maritime figures such as Lord Nelson and Captain Cook have cast new light on climate change by suggesting that global warming may not be an entirely man-made phenomenon.

Scientists have uncovered a treasure trove of meteorological information contained in the detailed logs kept by those on board the vessels that established Britain's great seafaring traditition including those on Nelsons' Victory and Cook's Endeavour.

Every Royal Naval ship kept a detailed record of climate including air pressure, wind strength, air and sea temperature and major meteorological disturbances.

A paper by Dennis Wheeler ... recounts an increasing number of summer storms over Britain in the late 17th century.

Many scientists believe that storms are caused by global warming, but these [occurred] during the so-called Little Ice Age that affected Europe from about 1600 to 1850.

The records also suggest that Europe saw a spell of rapid warming, similar to that experienced today, during the 1730s that must have been caused naturally.

Boston (MA) - Scientists at MIT have recorded a nearly simultaneous world-wide increase in methane levels. This is the first increase in ten years, and what baffles science is that this data contradicts theories stating man is the primary source of increase for this greenhouse gas. It takes about one full year for gases generated in the highly industrial northern hemisphere to cycle through and reach the southern hemisphere. However, since all worldwide levels rose simultaneously throughout the same year, it is now believed this may be part of a natural cycle in mother nature - and not the direct result of man's contributions.

The sun’s magnetic field may have a significant impact on weather and climatic parameters in Australia and other countries in the northern and southern hemispheres. According to a study in Geographical Research, the droughts are related to the solar magnetic phases and not the greenhouse effect.

The study uses data from 1876 to the present to examine the correlation between solar cycles and the extreme rainfall in Australia.

New satellite measurements have revealed that the Earth's upper atmosphere 'breathes' every five, seven or nine days.

Each 'breath' represents a response to changes in the solar wind, which is produced by particles escaping the Sun's upper atmosphere.

The wind fluctuates as the Sun rotates, alternatively heating the upper air of Earth's atmosphere and allowing it to cool. When the atmosphere is hot, it expands; when it is cool, it contracts.

Scientists have long known that the Earth's atmosphere changes in response to solar fluctuations - but previously it was thought that these fluctuations occurred in cycles of 11 years, 27 days and 24 hours, corresponding to the sunspot cycle and the rotation of the Sun and Earth.

Nobody expected to find variations occurring at other intervals, however.