Wednesday, August 13, 2008

French Climate Sceptic Passes Away

As reported on the Climate Sceptic mailing list, retired professor of climatology Marcel Leroux passed away on Tuesday, August 12th, in Marseille, France.

Here is an example of his work.

2 comments:

Oldschool said...

Word is he froze to death!!! lol

Did you know that many more people every year die from the cold than die from heat?

little story out of NZ
Dr David Evans
7 August 2008
Global Warming Science Moves On
On global warming, public policy is where the science was in 1998. Due to new evidence, science has since moved off in a different direction.
The UN science body on this matter, the IPCC, is a political body composed mainly of bureaucrats. So far it has resisted acknowledging the new evidence. But as Lord Keynes famously asked, "When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?"

Four things have changed since 1998.
First, the new ice cores shows that in the six global warmings over the past half a million years, temperature rises and falls occurred on average 800 years before the accompanying rises and falls in atmospheric carbon. The carbon rises could not have either started or ended the temperature rises. So there must be natural influences on global temperatures that are more powerful than atmospheric carbon levels.
This 800 year lag became known and past dispute by 2003, which is significant. The old ice core data, collected from 1985 to 1998, was low resolution: the data points were more than a thousand years apart. It showed carbon and temperature moving in lockstep, and it was the only supporting evidence we ever had for the notion that carbon caused temperature. It seemed too good to be true—it appeared we could control the temperature of the plant just by adjusting the levels of a minor gas!
Watch Al Gore’s movie carefully. The old ice core data is the only evidence he presents for believing that carbon emissions cause global warming. But by 2003 we had found the 800 year lag, so then we knew that temperature caused carbon, not the other way around as previously assumed. Al Gore’s movie was made in 2005 so it was misleading of him not to mention the new ice core data. Would anyone have believed his pitch if he had mentioned that the alleged cause (rising and falling carbon levels) happened 800 years after the effect (rising and falling temperatures)?
Secondly, with the reversal of the ice core evidence, there is now no evidence that carbon emissions cause significant global warming. None.
Evidence is a set of observations by people of events. The scientific method demands evidence—theory, politics, and vested interests are all trumped by evidence. The scientific method evolved as our best method for obtaining reliable information, precisely because it was immune from forces such as power and superstition.
It is important to realize what is not evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming. There is ample evidence that global warming has occurred, but it says nothing about the causes of that warming. Serious theoretical calculations for the amount of warming by 2100 range from an inconsequential 0.24°C to a catastrophic 6.2°C, but theory (including computer models) is not evidence. Comparison of model outputs to observed results is not evidence, because it cannot prove that the model is always right, only that it was right in that instance. Existing computer models treat clouds simplistically and unrealistically, and omit the effects of cosmic rays on clouds, so we cannot begin to be confident that they might approximate reality.
Western governments have spent $50b on global warming since 1990, yet have found no evidence. We are constantly bombarded with evidence that the world has warmed. Don’t you think we would have heard all about any evidence that carbon emissions cause global warming, if there was any?
Thirdly, the warming trend that started in 1975 ended in 2001. The global temperature has been flat since 2001, and has dipped sharply in the last few months. The warmest recent year was 1998. This is a very different picture from that presented by the IPCC in 2001, of overpowering warming due to carbon emissions for the foreseeable future. Obviously there is some other influence on global temperatures at work, more powerful than our carbon emissions. The IPCC are silent on what those causes might be (hint: probably something to do with clouds).
So why do some people say temperatures are still rising, apart form being out of date? Satellite data is the only temperature data we can trust, but it only goes back to 1979. The satellites go around 24/7, measuring the temperature across broad swathes of the world, everywhere except the poles. Three of the four world temperature records use satellite data partly or exclusively, and they all say that the world stopped warming in 2001 and that temperatures have recently dipped.

Bigcity . . .
Many scientists are figuring this scam out . . . why not you? Could it be your belief system overrides facts?

John Mashey said...

oldschool is a very *Slowwwwwwwwwww* denialist to have only noticed this gem now.

Evans is a software engineer who claims to be a rocket scientist, i.e., serious problems with reality.

This was well-covered weeks ago at DeSMogBlog, at Delotid, almost a month ago.

Evans is so silly that he takes a 1990 Lorius & Hansen *prediction* confirmed many times, and claims it's a problem for climate sceince, and you seem to believe that.

See Skpetical Science list of bad arguments, of which #10 is co2lag is #10, i.e., popular junk.

Evans might as well say:

"I let go of this ball and it fell to Earth, so this is serious trouble for Newton's theory of gravity!"

Total cluelessness, and actually from OZ, not NZ. You have higher quality denialists in Canada, why import them from OZ via NZ?