Climategate Options

[Omega892R09]

Now back on Climategate, or accurately Vapourgate.

Of the many emails that have been twisted by the denialosphere one has to do with Kevin Trenberth and satellite data. There are many lessons in this not least that when politics gets to define science then trouble ensues, especially when an ideology driven presidential entourage takes charge at a vital time, i.e. the Bush years.

Please take the trouble to read the following before launching into diatribes about scientists being 'caught with their hands in cookie jars' or similar ill-informed, irresponsible slurs.

As I warned when the story broke - context is everything - and the only GW is a hoax traction from these emails comes with omissions and distortions. Now what other document so familiar to us is a classic example of such behaviour?

Mitchell Anderson
The Real “Climategate” Story – Current Climate Satellites are Woefully Inadequate

The media missed the real story about the so-called “climate-gate” scandal.

After thousands of emails were mysteriously stolen from the University of East Anglia and distributed just before the climate conference in Copenhagen, many news outlets seemed content to report the story as it was presented to them rather than bothering to read the emails in the context they were written.

A closer look at these candid messages reveals a very different problem than the supposed scientific conspiracy theory that’s been in high rotation in the media. This previously unreported story also shows why launching the long-mothballed Deep Space Climate Climate Observatory (DSCOVR) is more urgent now than ever.

Lets start with perhaps the most widely distributed and misunderstood of the stolen emails, of October 12, 2009 from Dr. Keith Trenberth to Michael Mann, which reads:

The fact is that we can't account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can't.


Out of more than a thousand emails dating back 13 years, this single sentence was seized on by some commentators as evidence that decades of climate research by hundreds of scientists is instead a global conspiracy.

If you are going to put that much weight on a single email, you may as well finish reading it. Here’s what Trenberth says in the following sentence:

The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate.

Allow me to translate this dense jargon into English. CERES stands for Clouds and the Earth s Radiant Energy System – a five-satellite network launched by NASA dating back to 1997 to monitor heat flow in the upper atmosphere.

The story you haven’t heard is that scientists can’t get the numbers to add up using existing climate satellites. After billions of research dollars spent and over a decade of trying, the energy budget of planet as measured by CERES and other low- Earth orbit satellite systems is out of whack by about 6 watts per square meter.

That stubborn error in the satellite data is about six times larger than what is scientifically possible, and several times larger than the effect scientists are trying to see, namely planetary warming caused by continued massive emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

While this is a very big deal, it does NOT remotely suggest that climate change is a hoax. For evidence of that, you don’t need a satellite, you can look out your kitchen window.

Sea ice is disappearing from the arctic so fast it could be gone forever in as little as 30 years. The Met Office predicts 2010 may be the hottest year on record and that this decade was the hottest ever “by far”. Australia is currently enduring the hottest six months since record keeping began in the 1800’s.

What Trenberth is saying in this now infamous email is that it is a “travesty” that scientists cannot accurately measure from space what is plainly obvious here on Earth. More than that, he is lamenting that our “observing system” is inadequate to be able to accurately balance the planet’s energy budget.

Dr. Trenberth is one of the world’s most respected climate researchers. To hear him directly explain this problem himself, have a look at this video. If you happen to have a PhD in atmospheric physics (or just have trouble sleeping) you may also want to read his thorough research paper on the topic.

It’s not that the CERES experiment is a bad project or staffed by incompetent people. But the fact of the matter is that our satellite systems have failed to provide coherent data to explain the defining issue of the 21st century. This important but esoteric problem is largely unknown to the public, but widely acknowledged within the scientific community.

So what’s the problem with the data? In science, such unexplained phenomena are not a “problem” – they are the most interesting things to look at. They reveal clues about things we don’t yet fully understand, or hint that long-accepted methods of measurement need to be reassessed.

Which brings us back to the limitations of CERES and other low Earth orbit instruments. These satellites are traveling at more than seven kilometers a second and see our planet in thin strips as narrow as ten kilometers wide. Most take about 24 hours to get back where they started.

From this vantage it is like trying to map an elephant using a microscope. By the time you look at the same spot twice, the Earth (and the elephant) is doing something else.

There are far better instruments for observing elephants: Binoculars.

The long-mothballed DSCOVR spacecraft, still languishing in clean storage here on Earth, is just such an instrument. Rather than seeing the planet from hundreds of kilometers away, DSCOVR was designed to track our orbit around the Sun from 1.5 million kilometers away.

From a unique gravitational dimple called “L1”, the spacecraft would continuously monitor the entire sunlit disc of our planet, providing an entirely new way of collecting data on the Earth’s energy budget. This coincident data would compliment and calibrate more detailed measurements from CERES and other satellites that observe the Earth from much closer.

Yet of the $160 billion given to NASA from the US taxpayer since DSCOVR was built in 2000, they have stubbornly maintained that launching this already fully completed spacecraft is either too expensive or simply not important.

For the record, the most inflated estimate to launch and operate DSCOVR of $250 million would represent 0.15% of that public largesse. In fact, the true cost to NASA to operate DSCOVR for seven years is likely less than $50 million due to cost sharing opportunities with other agencies, and use of cheaper launch vehicles such as a SpaceX rocket.

The reasons for NASA's apparent resistance to exploring new methods of Earth observation probably have more to do with internal bureaucratic inertia than anything else. As they say, old dogs have a hard time learning new tricks and NASA has being doing low Earth orbit for more than forty years.

They recently committed a further $1 billion on a low Earth orbit replacement to CERES called CLARREO that won't be launched until at least 2016. Whether or not this experiment will finally make the numbers add up remains to be seen, and the results will not be known for another six years at the earliest.

In the meantime, climate change proceeds apace, "skeptics" make specious arguments using glaring errors in the satellite data, and DSCOVR dozes in its storage box here on Earth waiting for 1/20th of the money required for a re-do the failed CERES experiment.

If there is a bright side to the sinister theft of thousands of emails just before the Copenhagen Conference, it is that we can now start to have a more intelligent conversation on the glaring discrepancies in our Earth observation instruments.

And lets not be too hard on NASA. After eight years of George Bush in the Whitehouse and billions diverted from worthwhile science towards inter-planetary photo ops like the manned mission to Mars, the space agency is understandably just now picking up the pieces.

The fabulously expensive (and scientifically useless) International Space Station will also have funneled off $140 billion in scarce research dollars when it finally plunges into the ocean in 2016.

These outside political pressures forced NASA to drop so many Earth-observing missions that by 2006 leading scientists were warning our climate monitoring system was “at risk of collapse”. Four years later, the public was granted a rare glimpse of the frustration within the scientific community in Trenberth’s now famously misinterpreted message.

What about the stolen emails and global conspiracy theories? I suggest a more plausible alternative: The next time the media encounters a such an obvious stick being thrown for them, maybe they should instead chase the mysterious person doing the throwing.

As for DSCOVR, it is interesting that an experiment that could help resolve glaring uncertainties abound this century’s defining issue has somehow never been launched.

For some powerful interests far beyond NASA, continued uncertainty can be a very valuable commodity. To quote a notorious leaked strategy document from Big Tobacco when they were seeking to delay costly regulation of their dangerous industry in the 1960’s: “doubt is our product.”

Next post: DeSmog Blog talks to leading scientists about the DSCOVR mission

Now please visit the original article to explore links. Education is a virtue remember.

EDIT:

The above should read Kevin Trenberth rather than Kieth Trenberth. The author clearly had in mind also that other example of egregious out of context distortion of Kiet Briffa's email WRT 'hiding the decline' which was refering to interpretation of tree-ring data.

This post has been edited by Omega892R09: Jan 15 2010, 10:33 AM

[Sanders]

Which is probably related to climate change, like the C7 degree C rise of temperature at the North Pole melting loads of ice upsetting the circumpolar circulation (jet streams) and putting tons of extra moisture in the air to fall out as cold wet stuff. Note that the circumpolar current has a wave outline with some parts being further south than others.

Didn't you get the memo?...

Oh, stop it. We are, and have been for a while now, in a cooling trend. Even many of the "sky-is-falling" - "status-quo"-aligned climatologists admit it. Argo sensors around the oceans measure it. The crisp winter this year supports it ... the current weather of course doesn't prove anything, but adds weight to that analysis. "Climate-gate" drove the nail in the coffin. The anthropomorphic-climate-change apologists are all full of s#$t, and they have been promoting this garbage (and fudging the numbers) to please their sugar-daddies, thus providing a means to fund expanded international governance. I have known it for a long time, many are finally waking up.

That said Omega, you seem to really be 100% behind the global-warmists ... I suspect you could make a lucrative career out of it if you tried. The rest of us, who (IMO) see through the bulls#$t, will probably lose out to the corporate media-blitz and wind up paying more taxes for our earth-killing carbon-footprints.

Carbon-Dioxide (the stuff that plants breath) is a poison!!!

Man-bear-pig !!!


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[Omega892R09]

Oh, stop it. We are, and have been for a while now, in a cooling trend.

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How much more evidence do you need before you understand that we ARE NOT IN A COOLING trend!

Those that say we are are lying to you. All indicators from acceleration of ice melt at both poles with rising ocean temperatures and levels to biosphere changes inform us that warming has continued.

Is global warming still happening?

Breaking: 2009 hottest year on record in Southern Hemisphere and tied for second globally

and before you go on about Antarctic Sea Ice see here:

Antarctica is Losing Ice Quickly, Melting Away Another Climate Skeptic Myth

I could provide many more examples but those will serve for now.

Now if you had bothered to read a fraction of the material behind the links and quotes I have included over the last 2 years (I find your simplistic and continued replies in the face of all this rather insulting) then you would not be thinking the same old bullshit that APGW is an excuse to tax you to hell or subvert national independence. Such stories \are put about by those trying to delay action and those cranks supporting them. Look at the recent crap that Monckton was spouting before Copenhagen. His behaviour at Copenhagen indicates that he is becoming unhinged. He is to do, or doing a tour of Australia, teaming up with that demonstrable (see Deltoid) fraud Plimer - that should be fun! Birds of a feather eh!

Seriously Sanders it is you who should stop this simplistic repeated rhetoric which has no basis in fact whatsoever. How you can ignore the malign influence here of such as the CEI, Heartland, George C Marshall, Cato and Fraser institutes is beyond me as is the alignment of your thinking with Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and co' . Now that seems to be a classic demonstration of cognitive dissonance.

It would help also if you took the time to study some of the science, and I have repeatedly supplied links to online material available in the form of video lectures with supporting material (Archer).

Now if you cannot be bothered to take the steps to INFORM yourself and continue to believe the same tosh that Glenn Beck, Rush Limbaugh and co' spout then how do you expect me to take you seriously on this issue.

You think and STOP IT!
(IMG:http://pilotsfor911truth.org/forum/style_emoticons/default/wall.gif) (IMG:http://pilotsfor911truth.org/forum/style_emoticons/default/nonono.gif)

Otherwise (IMG:http://pilotsfor911truth.org/forum/style_emoticons/default/salute.gif)

[Sanders]

Now if you cannot be bothered to ... <s>... then how do you expect me to take you seriously on this issue.

I don't.

I've stated my opinion, and don't expect you will be persuaded one iota. That's fine. I have read many of the links you've posted over the time this debate has been alive, and I've posted many of my own, which you invariably poo-poo as propoganda.

I've said enough.

Cheers.

[Omega892R09]

...and I've posted many of my own, which you invariably poo-poo as propoganda.

Well much of your ouput has been demonstrably based upon propaganda, case in point your:

We are, and have been for a while now, in a cooling trend...

See here:

If It’s That Warm, How Come It’s So Damned Cold?

Extract

The past year, 2009, tied as the second warmest year in the 130 years of global instrumental temperature records, in the surface temperature analysis of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS). The Southern Hemisphere set a record as the warmest year for that half of the world. Global mean temperature, as shown in Figure 1a, was 0.57°C (1.0°F) warmer than climatology (the 1951-1980 base period). Southern Hemisphere mean temperature, as shown in Figure 1b, was 0.49°C (0.88°F) warmer than in the period of climatology.

Now do yourself a favour and try to understand the reasons behind this truth by reading the full article.

If that is too tough then try this instead:

It's Cold, so there is no Global Warming

You should hang around there and watch some other stuff so that you do not end up be classed with Rush, Glenn, Bill, Sean and the other FOX shills.

Now as for your:

The anthropomorphic-climate-change apologists are all full of s#$t, and they have been promoting this garbage (and fudging the numbers)

That is specious nonsense as I have demonstrated in a post above.

The onus is on you to back up that fudging the numbers bit, which I take as a ref' to the CRU imbroglio, with explained examples as to why you come to such a conclusion. I pretty much put lunk on the same spot and what happened? Silence.

[Sanders]

You're way too serious about this, O.

There are mountains of literature from both sides, but there is no crisis. "Climate-gate" confirmed it.

Over-and-out.

[lunk]

Global Warming Skepticism:
The Freedomain Radio Interview with Warren Meyer
(1 hour 11 minutes)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jgKgDCR5KKQ