ECM sent me this article from the Economist concerning some recent research that was published in the prestigious peer-reviewed journal Science.

Excerpt:

Climate science is famously complicated, but one useful number to keep in mind is “climate sensitivity”. This measures the amount of warming that can eventually be expected to follow a doubling in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, in its most recent summary of the science behind its predictions, published in 2007, estimated that, in present conditions, a doubling of CO2 would cause warming of about 3°C, with uncertainty of about a degree and a half in either direction.

[…]But a paper published in this week’s Science, by Andreas Schmittner of Oregon State University, suggests it is not. In Dr Schmittner’s analysis, the climate is less sensitive to carbon dioxide than was feared.

Existing studies of climate sensitivity mostly rely on data gathered from weather stations, which go back to roughly 1850. Dr Schmittner takes a different approach. His data come from the peak of the most recent ice age, between 19,000 and 23,000 years ago. His group is not the first to use such data (ice cores, fossils, marine sediments and the like) to probe the climate’s sensitivity to carbon dioxide. But their paper is the most thorough. Previous attempts had considered only small regions of the globe. He has compiled enough information to make a credible stab at recreating the climate of the entire planet.

[…]The group’s most likely figure for climate sensitivity is 2.3°C, which is more than half a degree lower than the consensus figure, with a 66% probability that it lies between 1.7° and 2.6°C. More importantly, these results suggest an upper limit for climate sensitivity of around 3.2°C.

I think that it is a good thing for the reputation of scientists that articles like this can be published at all. I have lost a lot of confidence in government-funded science lately, especially when the conclusion of the government-funded research supports the need for more government and high taxes.

In case you missed my recent post on the newly-release Climategate e-mails, then you should read that to see how biased climate scientists can be.

Here are the latest surface temperature measurements.

The UK Telegraph’s James Delingpole writes in the Wall Street Journal.

Excerpt:

Last week, 5,000 files of private email correspondence among several of the world’s top climate scientists were anonymously leaked onto the Internet. Like the first “climategate” leak of 2009, the latest release shows top scientists in the field fudging data, conspiring to bully and silence opponents, and displaying far less certainty about the reliability of anthropogenic global warming theory in private than they ever admit in public.

The scientists include men like Michael Mann of Penn State University and Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia, both of whose reports inform what President Obama has called “the gold standard” of international climate science, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

[…][A]t least one scientist involved—Mr. Mann—has confirmed that the emails are genuine, as were the first batch released two years ago.

[…]Consider an email written by Mr. Mann in August 2007. “I have been talking w/ folks in the states about finding an investigative journalist to investigate and expose McIntyre, and his thus far unexplored connections with fossil fuel interests. Perhaps the same needs to be done w/ this Keenan guy.” Doug Keenan is a skeptic and gadfly of the climate-change establishment. Steve McIntyre is the tenacious Canadian ex-mining engineer whose dogged research helped expose flaws in Mr. Mann’s “hockey stick” graph of global temperatures.

One can understand Mr. Mann’s irritation. His hockey stick, which purported to demonstrate the link between man-made carbon emissions and catastrophic global warming, was the central pillar of the IPCC’s 2001 Third Assessment Report, and it brought him near-legendary status in his community. Naturally he wanted to put Mr. McIntyre in his place.

The sensible way to do so is to prove Mr. McIntyre wrong using facts and evidence and improved data. Instead the email reveals Mr. Mann casting about for a way to smear him. If the case for man-made global warming is really as strong as the so-called consensus claims it is, why do the climategate emails show scientists attempting to stamp out dissenting points of view? Why must they manipulate data, such as Mr. Jones’s infamous effort (revealed in the first batch of climategate emails) to “hide the decline,” deliberately concealing an inconvenient divergence, post-1960, between real-world, observed temperature data and scientists’ preferred proxies derived from analyzing tree rings?

What I can’t believe is that we’ve spent billions of dollars funding myths. They lied because they were being paid by the government to lie. The government wanted a crisis that would require more government control over businesses and consumers. And the scientists found that evidence in their “research”, because that’s what the government was paying them to do.

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