I had a chance to speak with some of my peers in the renewable energy industry in conference calls these past 2 weeks over the holiday. My firm is involved in several large scale renewable energy utility projects and many questions were raised on the issue of data reliability on climate patterns and trends globally. Some of the individuals that were in these conference calls were speechless as speaker after speaker from the scientific community pointed to data sets on multiple levels supporting global warming. I was in New York City early last week prior to christmas and the groups that were touting the data as fake had absolutely no response to the overwhelming data that global warming was a realistic trend based on human interaction.
Anyways, here is the article this gentleman wrote, and he was at the conference last week. A real eye opener for me, I was sitting on the fence about this issue until I had concrete evidence that is was plausable that global warming had been accelerated by humans.

The climate conspiracy that isn’t

By Michael E. Mann
SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON POST

I cannot condone some things my colleagues wrote or requested in the e-mails stolen from a climate research unit at a British university. But the messages do not undermine the scientific case that human-caused climate change is real.

The hacked e-mails have been mined for words and phrases that can be distorted to misrepresent what the scientists were discussing. In a Dec. 9 oped, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin argued that “The e-mails reveal that leading climate ‘experts’ . . . manipulated data to ‘hide the decline’ in global temperatures.” Yet the e-mail she cites was written in 1999, just after the warmest year ever recorded (1998) to that date. It could not possibly have referred to the claim that global temperatures have declined over this decade — a claim that is false (the current decade will go down as the warmest on record).

In one case, professor Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia refers to a “trick” regarding temperature data that he attributes to an article that co-authors and I published in the journal Nature in 1998. We showed one up-to-date temperature data set from thermometer measurements along with a longer data set, based on calculations from natural “proxy” records such as ice cores, corals and tree rings, that ended in 1980. The “trick” (by which scientists generally mean a clever solution, i. e., a “trick of the trade”) was that the longer-term record could be viewed in the context of recent temperature measurements.

There was nothing secret about this. Both temperature curves were clearly labeled in our Nature article, and anyone could download the data we plotted. The National Academy of Sciences reviewed this work in 2006. Members of the peer-review panel said they “saw nothing that spoke . . . of any manipulation” and that the study was “an honest attempt to construct a data analysis procedure.”

In the same e-mail, Jones uses the phrase “hide the decline” in reference to work by tree-ring expert Keith Briffa. Because tree-ring information has been found to correlate well with temperature readings, it is used to plot temperatures going back hundreds of years or more.

Briffa described a phenomenon in which the density of wood exhibits an enigmatic decline in response to temperature after about 1960. This decline was the focus of Briffa’s original article, and Briffa was clear that these data should not be used to represent temperatures after 1960. By saying “hide the decline,” Jones meant that a diagram he was producing was not to show those data during the unreliable post-1960 period.

The conspiracy theories about the e-mails are fueled in part by their criticisms of the quality of two papers regarding global warming and a suggestion that at least one of the papers be kept out of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report. As Nature noted in a recent editorial, neither the e-mail writers nor the IPCC suppressed any findings. Both papers were included in the IPCC’s report. Some statements in the stolen e-mails reflect poor judgment — for example, a colleague referring to deleting e-mails that might be subject to a Freedom of Information Act request — but there is no evidence that this happened.

Palin wrote that Alaska’s climate is changing but referred to “thawing permafrost and retreating sea ice” as “natural, cyclical environmental trends.”

In fact, such changes are among the effects scientists predicted would occur as greenhouse gas levels increase. Scientific evidence for the reality of human-caused climate change includes independently replicated data documenting the extent of warming; unprecedented melting of glaciers; rises in global sea levels; increasingly widespread continental drought; and models that predict all of these things but only when human impacts are included. Those same models project far more profound and potentially damaging impacts of climate change if we do not take action to stabilize greenhouse gas levels.

The scientific consensus regarding human-caused climate change is based on decades of work by thousands of scientists around the world. The National Academy of Sciences has concluded that the scientific case is clear.

Michael E. Mann, the author of “Dire Predictions: Understanding Global Warming,” is a professor in the meteorology department at Penn State University and director of the Penn State Earth System Science Center.

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Lord Stanley's Cup is what its all about.
Mr. Pegula, your destiny awaits you sir.

You didn't get the memo....
You're not supposed to call it "Global Warming" anymore... use the term "Climate Change" since the Earth has actually been getting colder since 1998.
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm? ... 32747616f9

Furthermore:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/12/08/t ... rwin-zero/

Using their own methodology, we can change what is in reality an over all cooling into the magic hockey stick...wow.
Defend that "science".

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Correct crosscheck, the conference I was at didn't get me off of the fence, I just found it interesting that Mr. Mann spoke on the caution of using the data then wrote an article to object to the use of emails that may prove some provocative behaivor.
Nothing at the conference from either side of the debate really was anything new, but it did give me some time to see New York City, hadn't been there since early Sept. of this year.
Both sides of the debate and data sets offered compelling facts on whether or not human interaction has caused none, little, some or alot of acceleration on the warming trend. It was actually quite an interesting debate with niether side of the issue actually gaining traction.
I came away from the calls and trip feeling the same way I did before making the trip. Not enough data to sell me on the idea one way or the other.

_________________
Lord Stanley's Cup is what its all about.
Mr. Pegula, your destiny awaits you sir.

Well I certainly wish our our elected officials and the UN had 1/2 the skepticism you do.
And that says a lot since you could stand to financially gain from AGW being proven and they may not (well directly anyway...who the hell knows, they're all corrupt).

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Actually crosscheck, my industry stands on the fossil fuel supply and demand issue. It really was dragged into the climate debate as "alternatives" to emissions.
Alot of the top minds in the Solar, Wind and bio-fuels industries tend not to speak at events like this. Although I did have some very good interaction with leading industry company reps from several manufacturers and developers. Believe it or not, there is alot of good that can come from renewable/alternative energy sources. But ya, many in my industry, including myself are not sold on this idea without solid data to back one position or another.

_________________
Lord Stanley's Cup is what its all about.
Mr. Pegula, your destiny awaits you sir.

Oh I know it's not an industry driven thing. I have a college friend that's been engineering in the solar field for 5 years or so and he's never even mentioned AGW to me.

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the industry in the USA , Australia, China and co really don't care about the environment.

but the people can do a lot to help our environment.

water (without industry)
USA: 295 liters/person/day
GER: 129
AUT: 169

oil
USA: 26,0 Barrel/person/year
GER: 11,7

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HOCKEY IS BACK!

energy/person
2008
Nordamerika 17,0 kg Oeläquivalent/day/person
Schweiz 10,6 kg
West-Europa 9,5 kg
Rest der Welt 3,0 kg

(http://www.erdoel-vereinigung.ch/de/erd ... g/faq.aspx)

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We use more because we DO more.

Gross Domestic Product Per Capita
Rank Country $intl
6 United States 47,440
.
.
.
.
12 Austria 39,887
.
.
.
.
21 Germany 35,539

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_co ... per_capita

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Hold my beer and watch this...

I hope that was a joke of you. PLEASE
that stat makes a tiny tiny difference.
for instance Switzerland has more , but not because their industry. luxemburg over 100,000 hihi
lies lies lies lies lies .
keep the BIP out of the discussion.


in addition: http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liste_der_ ... t_pro_Kopf


BIP
Austria 50,098 12.
USA 46,800 15.
Germany 44,600 19.

BIP PPP
USA 47,000 6.
Austria 40,000 13.
Germany 35,500 22.

PS: nobody knows the number of people in the USA.

Yhoshi says bye bye to this thread.

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HOCKEY IS BACK!

And what difference does the water consumption of a US citizen have to do with bloody anything? Much less global warming.

Americans work more and produce more than Austrians and Germans. I'm sorry if that fact offends you.

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1. you simply don't know what the BIP is about.

2. an average American need so much more energy.

so ridiculous arguments. sorry, but stop lying yourself.
shame on you.


(hope that fact doesn't offend you.)

you made my hmmm at least evening.

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Nor do I care.

That's to power how awesome we are.

This is a global warming thread and you came in here saying Americans use too much water.
I'm intentionally trying to piss you off now.

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Hold my beer and watch this...

you started with the BIP and that was a very ridiculous argument.

water is very important.

but you don't want to accept the fact that the USA wasting the oil, energy and don't care about the planet.

even compared to richer countries or countries on the same level of living standard.

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HOCKEY IS BACK!

No.
You have a chip on your shoulder when it comes to your country.

The US is reducing CO2 emissions (remember, this isn't about energy consumption, it's about emissions) while China is increasing theirs.
As a matter of fact, China has overtaken the US as the worlds largest CO2 emitter.

and GDP isn't a "ridiculous" argument

Carbon Dioxide Emissions of the three biggest polluters:
The USA EU Countries China Total
Population of world: 4.6% 6.3% 21% 31.9%
World economy: 30% 23% 3.2% 56.2%
CO2 Emissions: 24% 14% 13% 51%

The US is 30% of the worlds economy and contributes 24% of the CO2.
Burning fossil fuel is the current price of industry. If you have a solution to that fact, the world is waiting to hear it.

Go complain to China.

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economy (this includes not only the real economy, but also the financial sector that is very big in the USA)
and
USA 4.6 30 24
EU 6.3 23 14 is much beeeeeeeettter

I don't want to talk about your nationalism/patriotism.

the stats are old. wait for the new one.


over and out

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Remind me to invite you to my annual Chinese New Years party crosscheck

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Lord Stanley's Cup is what its all about.
Mr. Pegula, your destiny awaits you sir.

Yhoshi,

Just so you are aware, crosscheck is correct, water consumption has nothing to do with the article posted or emissions for that matter.

I have to wonder why water consumption is such a big issue to you, you live in Austria, in the Alps I assume, cause your in Innsbrook. Your water flows from the mountains, no?
Well, the last time I checked, Austria was across a big body of water called the Atlantic Ocean, I don't think Americans using Water from the Rocky and Appalachian Mountain rangers, as well as the Great Lakes, really affects your water, does it?

Unless of course, you sneaky Austrians have found a way to funnel our water over to Europe, you rascrally wabbits you.............

_________________
Lord Stanley's Cup is what its all about.
Mr. Pegula, your destiny awaits you sir.

I care about the planet earth, not only the country i live in. I know that in Austria has a lot of clean water.

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HOCKEY IS BACK!

So do we Yhoshi.
We happen to live right on the Great Lakes here in North America, Hell, I live on an Island right in the middle of the Niagara River, I just looked out my window....................Yep, there is still water in the river, so I think were ok over here................

_________________
Lord Stanley's Cup is what its all about.
Mr. Pegula, your destiny awaits you sir.