Bertster7 wrote:
Ah the lovely OISM petition. The initial document that was circulated had signatories such as 'Dr' Geri Halliwell, better known as Ginger Spice and Micheal J. Fox.
Scientific American published an article in which they tried to track down some of the 'expert' signatories of the petition, a random sample of the signatories revealled that 1/10th of the signatories within the sample group were actually anything close to 'experts'.
Where did I attack their source of funding? Institutions being funded by the government is no cause for their research to be discredited. In fact the NAS are the scientific body who receive most funding from the US government who until recently denied global warming existed, their views do not coincide with what the body funding them wanted to hear - they are not a biased source. Nor are any of the other academies of science, who ALL subscribe to the idea of global warming being caused (by that I mean rate of increase massively accelerated) by carbon emissions.
What is cause for sources of funding to be called into question and grounds for research to be questioned is when small unknown scientific bodies suddenly present reports, which the recognised scientific community do not agree with, that governments (such as the US government) base their decisions on rather than the research carried out by other reputable institutions.
Why would governments try to promote the issue of global warming through funding research institutions? Governments stand to lose a lot of money by implementing legislation to cut carbon emissions. It would be far more convenient for them to deny global warming and carry on as usual. Why would the UN 'make up' global warming. I don't see what anyone has to gain by making false claims about it, other than to deny it. Therefore your whole government backed research being biased argument falls through.
Scientific American wrote:
Scientific American took a random sample of 30 of the 1,400 signatories claiming to hold a Ph.D. in a climate-related science. Of the 26 we were able to identify in various databases, 11 said they still agreed with the petition—one was an active climate researcher, two others had relevant expertise, and eight signed based on an informal evaluation. Six said they would not sign the petition today, three did not remember any such petition, one had died, and five did not answer repeated messages
Link to Article3 of 30 had releveant expertise. Real experts signing their petition then.
Scientific refutation;
OISM Petition wrote:
The empirical evidence actual measurements of Earth's temperature shows no man-made warming trend. Indeed, over the past two decades, when CO2 levels have been at their highest, global average temperatures have actually cooled slightly.
That graph from the US National Climatic Data Center (sorry it doesn't show up very well on this background - meant to be on white background) would seem to contradict that statement entirely.
All other records of global climate also contradict this statement. Certainly all those I have ever seen.
The petition only uses US temperature records from the same source as I have quoted (US National Climatic Data Center) rather than looking at the global picture of temperature change - which is what is important.
Exclusion of facts like these is what makes the findings of the report so redundant.
In fact,
EPA wrote:
The 20th century's 10 warmest years all occurred in the last 15 years of the century
Doesn't quite seem like cooling in the past two decades does it?
Seems to show a rise in average temperature. A very basic fact which the OISM petition denies. Over the past two decades global average temperatures have actually cooled slightly, now that
is poppycock.
If they make such fundamental errors as that, they clearly haven't conducted a very reliable report.
They also use data obtained from the MSU satellites, which have been shown to be unreliable in studies by the National Center for Atmospheric Research. The trends shown by the MSU satellite do not tie in with observations made from the ground.
Spurious trends in satellite MSU temperatures from merging different satellite records - James W. Hurrell & Kevin E. Trenberth - National Center for Atmospheric Research wrote:
Analysis of global surface air temperature records has indicated that recent years have been among the warmest since the late nineteenth century, with 1995 being the warmest year on record. But the rate of global annual mean surface warming of 0.13 °C per decade during the period 1979−95 differs substantially from the global lower-tropospheric cooling trend of − 0.05 °C per decade Inferred from the record (MSU-2R) of radiance measurements by the satellite Microwave Sounder Unit (MSU). Accordingly, the satellite record has been widely cited by sceptics as evidence against global warming. However, a substantial fraction of the measured radiance originates not from the atmosphere but from the Earth's surface, and gives rise to high noise levels. This noise can lead to errors when merging temperature time series obtained from different satellites. Here we present comparisons among different MSU retrievals, sea surface temperatures (SSTs), and equivalent MSU temperatures derived from an atmospheric general circulation model forced with observed SSTs. The comparisons, focused on the tropics where atmospheric temperatures are closely tied to SSTs, strongly suggest that two spurious downward jumps occur in the MSU-2R record coinciding with changes in satellites, and that the real trend in MSU temperatures is likely to be positive, albeit small.
There are several other reports questioning the reliability of data obtained from the MSU satellites one of which, by the American Meteorological Society can be found
here.
Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) are the group funded by the NOAA Climate and Global Change Program to analyse the data from the MSU satellites. They are the experts in the field when it comes to the MSU satellite.
RSS wrote:
The MSU and AMSU instruments were intended for day to day operational use in weather forecasting and thus are not calibrated to the precision needed for climate studies.
not calibrated to the precision needed for climate studies and yet that is exactly what they are being used for, incorrectly, in the OISM petition.
It claims the IPCC figures are higher than will occur. In the years since the 2001 IPCC report actual recorded change has been in line with the models predictions (the IPCC do not only use computer models, which do differ
slightly from the predictions calculated by many scientists, they use an overlay of both sources), in fact the rate of change recorded over the past 5 years has been slightly higher than the IPCC predicted, but following the predicted trend.
The validity of the long term sea surface temperatures chart used in the OISM petition has also been called into question. The technique of using isotope ratios of marine organism remains in sediment at the bottom of the sea (which is what they did), has been questioned because it does not fit in with other data known about the periods.
Paul N. Pearson, Peter W. Ditchfield, Joyce Singano, Katherine G. Harcourt-Brown, Christopher J. Nicholas, Richard K. Olsson, Nicholas J. Shackleton and Mike A. Hall wrote:
Climate models with increased levels of carbon dioxide predict that global warming causes heating in the tropics, but investigations of ancient climates based on palaeodata have generally indicated cool tropical temperatures during supposed greenhouse episodes. For example, in the Late Cretaceous and Eocene epochs there is abundant geological evidence for warm, mostly ice-free poles, but tropical sea surface temperatures are generally estimated to be only 15–23 °C, based on oxygen isotope palaeothermometry of surface-dwelling planktonic foraminifer shells. Here we question the validity of most such data on the grounds of poor preservation and diagenetic alteration. We present new data from exceptionally well preserved foraminifer shells extracted from impermeable clay-rich sediments, which indicate that for the intervals studied, tropical sea surface temperatures were at least 28–32 °C. These warm temperatures are more in line with our understanding of the geographical distributions of temperature-sensitive fossil organisms and the results of climate models with increased CO2 levels.
You can find this report and the authors credentials
here.
OISM petition wrote:
Moreover, claims that global warming will cause the Antarctic ice cap to melt and sharply increase this rate are not consistent with experiment or with theory.
Yet strangely enough the Antarctic ice caps are melting. 16200 sq km of ice shelves have fallen in to the sea and melted. (Source: NASA and BAS) Warming seas will only accelerate this process. This has come as quite a shock to the scientific community and is amongst the reasons acceptance of the IPCC models and global warming predictions has become almost universal.
It is ommissions of other important information and using data from unreliable or irrelevant sources that make the petition so misleading. The dodgy signatories do nothing to increase my confidence in it's reliability either.