It was the fraudulent hockey stick designed to make the MWP "go away" that was at the heart of Climategate .... and the hockey stick is still broken.
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The father of modern climatology, HH Lamb, founded CRU in 1972, and the building the academics work in takes his name. When Lamb contributed to the first IPCC report in 1980 the historical temperature record looked like this.
regmedia.co.uk
By 2001, it looked like this.
regmedia.co.uk
What Climategate is largely about, then, is whether the academics were justified in making that Medieval Warm Period disappear.
Unfortunately, none of the three 'independent' reviews have grappled with this. The absence of anomalous warming doesn't, as some skeptics say, make the problem go away.
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Yet in the academics' own words, we learn that the recent burst of warming, while real, is far from unusual.
One of the leading CRU academics, Keith Briffa, wrote that:
“I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. We don’t have a lot of proxies that come right up to date and those that do (at least a significant number of tree proxies ) some unexpected changes in response that do not match the recent warming. I do not think it wise that this issue be ignored in the chapter...
"For the record, I do believe that the proxy data do show unusually warm conditions in recent decades. I am not sure that this unusual warming is so clear in the summer responsive data. I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1000 years ago.”
In an interview in February, CRU director Phil Jones agrees that recent warming isn't statistically significant, and is matched by previous periods in the instrumental record - such as 1860 to 1880.
The sensible end of the climate debate hinges on how much of a lasting consequence an increase in CO2 has on the climate system. Some prominent scientists who as recently as 2001 were lead authors for the IPCC don't dispute there's an effect, but maintain that once it's worked itself out, the effect is small.
Proponents of large positive CO2 feedbacks have pointed to various 'fingerprints' which are absent, or refuse to manifest themselves. Greenhouse gas warming was supposed to create a telltale warming of the troposphere, but instrumental readings show no such evidence. More recently, they have posited that CO2 must have caused warming, but this is still trapped in the oceans. This "missing heat" has yet to be found, and in the Climategate archive we find US scientist Kevin Trenberth expressing frustration: "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," adding that "we can't definitively explain why surface temperatures have gone down in the last few years. That's a travesty!"
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theregister.co.uk |
