Timothy Birdnow

It just doesn't stop. Despite no evidence of planetary warming in 20 years the purveyors of Global Warming alarmism continue to push the meme that Earth is warming - and keep playing games with the historical record and with temperature data. Here is the latest such attempt.

From the article in Physorg:

"The oceans may be storing 13 percent more heat than previously estimated, according to a new study co-authored by scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR).

The finding, published in the journal Science Advances, is based on a new analysis of how ocean temperatures have changed since 1960. The research team, led by Lijing Cheng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, compared their results to estimates published in the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2013.

"In other words, the planet is warming quite a lot more than we thought," said NCAR scientist Kevin Trenberth, a study co-author."

End excerpt.

Ah, now we are finding a familiar name; Kevin Trenberth featured quite prominently in the CRU e-mail scandals.

Back in 2009 Trenberth admitted in a hacked e-mail:

"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. The CERES data published in the August BAMS 09 supplement on 2008 shows there should be even more warming: but the data are surely wrong. Our observing system is inadequate."

And he has been feverishly trying to prove the missing heat has gone into the deep oceans - despite there being no theory whatsoever to explain how heat moves DOWNWARD into an increasingly dense ocean. Anybody who has seen a hot air balloon fly knows that heat rises and cold sinks.

And Trenberth ignores the fact that the number of Argo probes - floating buoys designed to measure ocean temperatures - has been systematically reduced over the last decade.

Well, actually Trenberth knows it, and has an answer. From the Physorg article:

"The finding, published in the journal Science Advances, is based on a new analysis of how ocean temperatures have changed since 1960. The research team, led by Lijing Cheng of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, compared their results to estimates published in the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2013.

"In other words, the planet is warming quite a lot more than we thought," said NCAR scientist Kevin Trenberth, a study co-author.

The vast majority of excess heat trapped on Earth by greenhouse gas emissions—about 90 percent—is stored in the oceans, but measuring how the heat content of the oceans has changed over time has been a challenge due to sparse observations.

Historically, the temperature of ocean waters was measured by a variety of ships, but this limited observations to areas where ships traveled. In more recent decades, measurements of ocean heat have increased, thanks to new observational techniques. In 2000, scientists began deploying a network of thousands of floats called Argo to profile conditions in the top layer of the ocean extending down 2,000 meters (6,562 feet). Argo achieved near global coverage in 2005, though some remote regions are still not sampled.

To fill the large gaps in the historical ocean temperature record, the research team used a combination of statistical techniques and model output to determine how useful a single observation can be for inferring information about the surrounding area, as well as how the temperatures in different parts of the world's oceans relate to one another. They found that, in most regions, a single ocean observation could provide valuable information about conditions as far as 2,000 kilometers (1,243 miles) away.

To check if they were correct, they used Argo observations. At first, they chose data from only a small number of floats in the network to mimic the scarcity of observations that would have been available in the mid-20th century. Then they used their new technique to create an entire ocean temperature map based on those few observations. When they checked their map against the full complement of Argo observations, they found that their reconstruction tracked closely with reality.

"The results were remarkable," Trenberth said. "They give us much more confidence about what the ocean heat content was, stretching back to the late 1950s."

End excerpt.

So his answer to the problem of decreasing actual physical measurements is to, well, guess. Since he thinks the heat is there he is simply going to extrapolate any data that makes this case. And they use these results to REWRITE HISTORICAL DATA thus furthering their meme.

We have always been at war with Eastasia!

If a corporation did this there would be indictments and jail sentences; you would be guilty of attempting to swindle investors. But a government-funded scientist is held to a different standard.

Look at it this way; suppose instead of actually counting votes in every precinct in the last election we simply took samples from big cities and extrapolated it. The result? Madam President. The reality is that you can't do what this group is trying to do, because it is inaccurate. Actually, what Ternberth and co. are doing is worse; trying to change previous elections based on a statistical sampling from the last sample. They are taking a few "votes" and saying "this is how everybody voted and always have". It's not just unscientific but ridiculous.

Of course, they couch it in statistical terms, but in the end a rose by another name is still a rose - and a cowpie still stinks.

And let us remember that Kevin Trenberth was one of the driving forces in a letter sent to Barack Obama asking him to use RICO statutes to silence Global Warming critics. He is hardly an unbiased seeker after Truth.

In fact, this is no doubt little more than advocacy couched as science, and the science journals like Physorg fall right in line with it. The fundamental principle in Science is doubt, not Belief. This issue has become a matter of Faith.

Posted by: Timothy Birdnow at 11:57 AM | Comments (2) | Add Comment
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