They say maybe the cooling was caused by SO2 (sulphur dioxide) produced by industry. But they say it mumbling under their breath, because they know it makes no sense. Thanks to China and the rest, SO2 levels are far, far higher now than they were back then.

Dumb question : does anyone know who actually measures SO2 levels ? Where do they publish ?

Martin Durkin-Daily Telegraph UK

‘The Great Global Warming Swindle’, broadcast by Channel 4, put the case for scepticism about man-made climate change. The programme sparked a heated debate and charges of scientific inaccuracy. Here, its director, Martin Durkin, responds to the critics.

On March 8, Channel 4 broadcast my programme. Since then, supporters of the theory of man-made global warming have published frothing criticism. I am attacked for using an “old” graph depicting temperature over the past 1,000 years. They say I should have used a “new” graph – one used by Al Gore, known as the “hockey stick”, because it looks like one.

But the hockey stick has been utterly discredited. The computer programme used to generate it was found to produce hockey-stick shapes even when fed random data (I refer readers to the work of McIntyre & McKitrick and to the Wegman Report, all available on the internet). Other than the discredited hockey stick, the graph used by us (and published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is the standard, accepted record of temperature in this period.

A critic claims that one of the graphs cited by us, illustrating the extraordinarily close correlation between solar variation and temperature change, has since been “corrected”. It most certainly has not. The graph was produced by Prof Eigil Friis-Christensen, the head of the Danish National Space Centre, who says it still stands. But if the global-warmers don’t like that graph, there are plenty of others that say the same thing.

No one any longer seriously disputes the link between solar activity and temperature in earth’s climate history. I urge readers to look up on the net: Veizer, Geoscience Canada, 2005; and Soon, Geophysical Research Letters, 2005.

In the film, we used three graphs depicting temperature change in the 20th century. On one there was an error in the dates on the bottom. This was corrected for the second transmission of the programme, on More4, last Monday. It made no difference. Global-warmers can pick whichever graph they like. The problem for them remains the same. The temperature rise at the beginning of the century (prior to 1940, when human emissions of CO2 were relatively insignificant) was as great, most graphs show greater, than the temperature rise at the end of the century.

So what else do they hit me with? Prof Carl Wunsch, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who appeared in the film, later claimed he was duped into taking part. He was not.

The remarkable thing is not that I was attacked. But that the attacks have been so feeble. The ice-core data was the jewel in the global-warming crown, cited again and again as evidence that carbon dioxide ‘drives’ the earth’s climate. In fact, as its advocates have been forced to admit, the ice-core data says the opposite. Temperature change always precedes changes in CO2 by several hundred years. Temperature drives CO2, not the other way round. The global-warmers do not deny this. They cannot.

During the post-war economic boom, while industrial emissions of CO2 went up, the temperature went down (hence the great global-cooling scare in the 1970s). Why? They say maybe the cooling was caused by SO2 (sulphur dioxide) produced by industry. But they say it mumbling under their breath, because they know it makes no sense. Thanks to China and the rest, SO2 levels are far, far higher now than they were back then. Why isn’t it perishing cold?

Too many journalists and scientists have built their careers on the global-warming alarm. Certain newspapers have staked their reputation on it. The death of this theory will be painful and ugly. But it will die. Because it is wrong, wrong, wrong.”

Link

From Lobell & Fields:

“yields for all crops increased substantially since 1961”

“Gridded monthly temperature (minimum and maximum) and rainfall data at 0.5° à— 0.5° for the same time period were obtained from the Climate Research Unit. Spatially weighted averages of the CRU data were computed for each crop, with weights defined by the spatial distribution of crop area from Leff et al, resulting in crop-specific monthly time series of `global’ temperatures and rainfall for 1961′€”2002.”

Temperature was from Mitchell T D and Jones P D 2005, of course. So, corrected for precipitation:

“For wheat, maize and barley, there is a clearly negative response of global yields to increased temperatures. Based on these sensitivities and observed climate trends, we estimate that warming since 1981 has resulted in annual combined losses of these three crops representing roughly 40 Mt or $5 billion per year, as of 2002.”

What do we know…I am wondering, bristlecone pine also grows slower on warm year, precipitation being the same?

This is post-modernism writ big. While I am happy enough about playing the post-modern game in literature, semiotics or philosophy, it has no role in science. I suspect that Hulme’s Guardian article will come to be seen as something of a turning point.

Perhaps post-modernism is the inevitable consequence and final conclusion of the cult of the individual which has so characterized western civilization. In the late 19th century the scope of the concept of the individual began to be extended to notions of self-fulfillment and self-determination (Ibsen’s The Doll’s House is a common example), and in the 1960s/70s, the elevation of self-esteem to unprecedented heights led to labelling the baby-boomers as the ‘me-generation’. From the focus on the importance of self follows an exaggeration of the importance of subjectivity and personal belief. Subjectivity and truth, however, have only an accidental relationship. With post-modernism now apparently influencing science, we are risking a return to the world of medieval superstition, a point implied by Sallie Baliunas in her account of the witch hunts which followed extreme weather events during the LIA (see first link at #264 above).

A relevant anecdote from the first Crusade: In 1098 Peter Bartholomew, a servant, had a vision of where the lance used to stab Jesus in the side was buried at Antioch. After digging all day, nothing was found. Peter then jumped into the trench and, bidding all to pray, triumphantly produced an old piece of iron. Many, including church officials, were deeply suspicious, but because the find had encouraged the troops, no one was prepared to publicly voice any doubts. Peter gained a lot of prestige from this, and having the wit to realize that he was onto a good thing, announced several subsequent visions, culminating in the claim that Christ, St Peter and St Andrew all demanded an immediate attack on Arqua. The army however was beginning to smell a rat, and suspecting that these visions had a political motive, became openly skeptical, even doubting the authenticity of the lance itself. Peter still had many supporters, but, stung by the questioning of his credibility, he demanded to be able to defend himself by the ordeal of fire. Two piles of logs were set up in a narrow passage and set alight. Peter, clutching the lance, leapt through the flames. He emerged horribly burnt, and died after twelve days of lingering agony. (see Runciman, The First Crusade, pages 241, 273-74, CUP).

The laws of thermodynamics, it would seem, are quite indifferent to human beliefs.

We know that Gore is in the carbon credit market, but I wonder how many others are.

I was less than impressed by the article. They admit up-front that farmers could change their cropping practices to obviate the effects of temperature changes on their present crops but basically accuse farmers of being too stupid to know what’s good for them. Wrong! Two thumbs down on the logic behind the article and a big raspberry for the editors who agreed to publish it.

w.

This is especially true given that your article states that “The report does not include national or regional breakdowns.” Say what?

w.

I also read Akosofu’s article Is the Earth still recovering from the “Little Ice Age”? A possible cause of global warming . As a neophyte, I found it very clear and straightforward. The most telling point I thought, apart from his point that the warming in trend is so linear and constant over 100 years that it is hard to extract the CO2 effect, was his demonstration that current GCM cannot demonstrate their validity by “hindcasting”, that is reproduce historical temperature records. This for me is very telling since it suggests that the models are more about tuning than accurately modelling actual climate processes.

I would find any comments from the more informed on Akosofu’s article helpful.

Warming temperatures damage cereal crops, report says