Is the Kyoto agreement based on "bent" data?

TomF

This may not be welcome news to those who see George W. Bush as the Devil Incarnate and the USA as the Focus of All that is Evil, but there is some smoke curling up to the sky about a study that apparently is part of the scientific basis of the Kyoto agreement, and maybe part of the basis for fear of Global Warming, too.

"This has been a nightmare of a year for aficionados of the Kyoto Accord. After Canada's ratification of the treaty in late 2002, environmentalists had every reason to believe that few climate experts would dare continue to publicly oppose Kyoto's science, Russia would quickly ratify the accord and it soon would become international law.

Instead, as illustrated at this month's World Climate Change Conference in Moscow, exactly the opposite has happened. The growing number of scientists who dispute the treaty's scientific foundation have become increasingly vocal, regularly pushing their case in the media as groundbreaking studies continue to be published that pull the rug out from under Kyoto's shaky edifice.

Of these, none may have the long-term impact of the paper published yesterday in the prestigious British journal Energy and Environment, which explains how one of the fundamental scientific pillars of the Kyoto Accord is based on flawed calculations, incorrect data and a biased selection of climate record."

http://www.nationalpost.com/financialpost/story.html?id=06C603EF-5B3F-49CF-ACAC-50D9F895E7DE

Vader

Those who dispute the scientific basis of Kyoto are looking for funding or following their own political agenda.

Anyone may disagree, fine Im not a scientist but are you?

A good example of "bent" scientists are those working for tobacco industries. They have both proved that smoking doesnt kill, passive smoking isnt dangerous and that a venalation system colud be built to clean the air in pubs 8 times a second. How the hell do you do the last one without creating some sort of vacume?

TomF

A brief lexicon of research literature phrases.

"It has long been known that..."
- I haven't bothered to look up the reference.

"While it has not been possible to provide definite answers to these questions..."
- The experiment didn't work out, but I figured I could at least
get a publication out of it.

"Typical results are shown..."
- The best results are shown, i.e. those that fit my prejudice.

Agreement with predicted curve:
"Excellent" = fair
"Good" = poor
"Satisfactory" = Doubtful
"Fair" = Imaginary

"Correct within an order of magnitude..."
- Wrong.

"Of great theoretical and practical importance..."
- Interesting to me.

"It is suggested that... it is believed that... it appears that..."
- I think.

"It is generally believed that..."
- A couple of other people think so too.

"The most reliable results are those obtained by Jones..."
- Jones was my graduate student.

"Fascinating work..."
- Work by a member of our group.

"Of doubtful significance..."
- Work done by someone else.

TomF

There is a good site on the Internet that looks like a place to review the data behind the disputed paper and to help think about the honesty of the critics and the one criticised.

http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/trc.html

star gazer

Weather patterns...evidence.
If we waited for scientific evidence we would never progress, sometimes you have to go with your gut and try to prove a point.

TomF

Here's more Canadian comment on the uproar about the sandy foundation of the Kyoto agreement.

http://www.canada.com/search/story.aspx?id=309a5bd5-a66f-48fb-959f-9aa2688a3743

"Kyoto critics better duck"
Global warming industry doesn't want to hear that their pet project is flawed

Tuesday, November 04, 2003

Michael Campbell
For the Calgary Herald

When you question a multi-billion-dollar windfall, you'd better look out and, make no mistake about it, the Kyoto protocol translates into monster money for many researchers, bureaucrats and public institutions.

Kyoto is also perhaps the most potent weapon in the arsenal of those who oppose western capitalism and push instead for massive intervention.

That's why Toronto-based analyst Steve McIntyre and University of Guelph economics professor Ross McKitrick had better be battening down the hatches. Their paper, published last week in the respected British journal, Energy and Environment, is arguably the most damaging attack to date on the science behind Kyoto.

In a nutshell, they convincingly reveal that flawed calculations, incorrect data and a biased selection of climate records led Kyoto linchpin Michael Mann of the University of Virginia to declare that the 20th-century temperature rise was unprecedented in the past millennium. After correcting the data and then employing Mann's own methodologies, they found no such increase in global temperature variations had taken place, which places Kyoto's whole rationale in question.

The Canadian study comes on the heels of a recent Harvard climate study that made headlines in the scientific community by arguing that we are not living in the warmest period in the past 1,000 years, as Kyoto proponents claim. The authors, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas, reviewed more than 250 research papers in the peer-reviewed scientific literature on past climate and concluded temperatures were higher in medieval times, from about 800 to 1300, than they are now.

Upon reviewing the study, David Legates, director of the Centre for Climatic Research at the University of Delaware, stated that it should lead the scientific community to the "inescapable conclusion that climate variability has been a natural occurrence."

A year ago, respected scientist Christopher Essex observed, "global warming ceased to be the subject of scientific debate years ago," but that sorry state of affairs now seems to be changing as an increasing number of scientists, even before the recent Canadian study, were recoiling against the political hijacking of the debate.

In September, at the closing session of the UN's World Climate Change Conference in Moscow, the conference chairman acknowledged that scientists who questioned the Kyoto "consensus" made up 90 per cent of the contributions from the floor. They pointed to numerous flaws and doubts in the scientific case underlying worries about climate change.

Keep in mind that this new research focuses on the science of climate change and doesn't include the numerous attacks on the economic analysis and modelling in Kyoto that John Reilly of the MIT Joint Program on the Science and Policy of Global Change declared were "an insult to serious analysis."

Asked why he changed his position on a particular issue, John Maynard Keynes once responded, "Sir, the facts have changed and when the facts change, I change -- what do you do, sir?"

In the case of Kyoto, the answer is predictable -- shoot the messenger. Both McKitrick and McIntyre can expect an avalanche of personal attacks from the politically motivated. In Canada, far too much money is at stake to derail the Kyoto juggernaut.