Posted by The Leakegate scandal keeps getting worse. Jonathan Leake, already in trouble for his habit of deliberately concealing facts that contradicted the story he wanted to spin is back with a story that reads like it was ghost written by Mark Morano. Leake wants to spin a tale that the world isn’t really warming, so he trots out the usual collection of discredited papers.
Leake first cites John Christy:
“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”
For which, see Bonfils, Duffy and Lobell in the Journal of Climate:
the interpretation that irrigation explains the rise in nighttime temperature does not seem supportable. Neither the results from gridded or meteorological station datasets nor the seasonality of the trends can support this hypothesis. According to the observational datasets used here, the rise in minimum temperatures has occurred across the entire state (although it is not significant everywhere), affected all elevations (Fig. 1 ), and accelerated during the second half of the twentieth century, which suggests a large-scale influence on California climate.
Second, Leake cites Ross McKitrick:
“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said.
If only McKitrick hadn’t confused degrees with radians, his results might be worth something.
Third, Leake cites Anthony Watts:
His study, which has not been peer reviewed, is illustrated with photographs of weather stations in locations where their readings are distorted by heat-generating equipment.
Leake, of course, doesn’t mention Menne et al which was peer-reviewed. Menne analyzed Watt’s data and found that poorly sited stations produced a cooling bias.
Fourth:
Terry Mills, professor of applied statistics and econometrics at Loughborough University, looked at the same data as the IPCC. He found that the warming trend it reported over the past 30 years or so was just as likely to be due to random fluctuations as to the impacts of greenhouse gases.
Looks like Leake ran out of people he could present as saying that it wasn’t warming. Even if Mills is correct he is not saying that it isn’t warming.
February 14, 2010
February 14, 2010
February 14, 2010
February 14, 2010
February 14, 2010
February 14, 2010
February 14, 2010
February 14, 2010
February 14, 2010
February 16, 2010
February 16, 2010
February 19, 2010