Don't forget Mark speaks live at the International Conference on Climate Change Friday morning at 8.30 Eastern. You can watch the livestream below:
Be On the Look-Out for Michael E Mann's white-shoe Big Tobacco lawyer, believed to be on the loose in the New Jersey Avenue area. Dr Mann's (and Joe Camel's) attorney John Williams had to be escorted from the conference after trying to sneak in without paying. (Mann's check a little late this month?)
Of course, this is just more of the systemic racism that's dividing America. When black youths gatecrash a pool party in Texas, cops start cussing 'em out, draw their guns, and shove bikini-clad teenagers to the ground. But when Mann's $1,200-an-hour white-shoe lawyer gatecrashes the climate deniers' pool party, he just gets politely asked to leave - no tasing, no nuthin'. Racist!!! Still, I'm nervous that any minute now the Reverend Sharpton will be outside with "No justice, no peace, no billable hours" placards, and bussed-in Mann-case paralegals will begin looting the neighborhood and chanting "White-Shoe Lives Matter!"
When John Williams was cornered, he said blandly, "I'm just here to get some more information about climate change" - which is an interesting admission from Mann's lawyer, considering that his client's position is that nobody here has any information about climate change. Nevertheless, my admiration for Mr Williams, an awfully genial fellow on the occasions we've met, has gone up enormously. In order to infiltrate and blend in with the massed ranks of deniers, he'd ditched the fancy lawyer suit and was in deep cover in an anonymous open-neck blue shirt and creased khaki pants. Very cunning. I'm typing this from the joint across the street, and now I think about it it occurs to me the strangely attentive busboy eying me from across the room looks vaguely familiar...
No need to parachute onto the hotel roof and rappel down the ventilation shaft, Counselor. You can see my remarks, and all the other far more eminent speakers, such as Princeton Professor William Happer, livestreamed on the Internet. I'll be speaking Friday morning live at 8.30am Eastern, although upon the advice of counsel I won't be mentioning the Mann case at all (titter).
~I'm in Washington for a couple of days to speak at the Heartland Institute's 10th International Conference on Climate Change. I'm glad to say the conference has sold out, but it is being "livestreamed", as they call it. There's the usual sad climate "activists" trying to pass themselves off as accredited media and waving their cellphone cameras at you as you say, "My Koch brothers check came this morning. How about yours, Congressman?"
The conference is called "Fresh Start" - because that's what climate science could use right now. We're 18 years into the global-warming "pause", and no one other than a few hardcore alarmists is in the mood for another two decades of Michael E Mann hockey-stick hysteria. A different approach is needed.
But no, just in time for the conference, Big Climate has announced it's business as usual: The warm-mongers have declared that there is, in fact, no warming "pause", no "hiatus". Sure, the thermometers said the whole planet-broiling thing from the mid Nineties has ground to a halt - but that was before NOAA "adjusted" its figures. And, as I said on Rush, NOAA's are the most dramatically adjusted figures since, well, Caitlyn Jenner's three days earlier. Be that as it may, Judith Curry is not impressed:
The greatest changes in the new NOAA surface temperature analysis is to the ocean temperatures since 1998. This seems rather ironic, since this is the period where there is the greatest coverage of data with the highest quality of measurements – ARGO buoys and satellites don't show a warming trend. Nevertheless, the NOAA team finds a substantial increase in the ocean surface temperature anomaly trend since 1998.
In my opinion, the gold standard dataset for global ocean surface temperatures is the UK dataset, HadSST3. A review of the uncertainties is given in this paper by John Kennedy. Note, the UK group has dealt with the same issues raised by the NOAA team. I personally see no reason to the use the NOAA ERSST dataset, I do not see any evidence that the NOAA group has done anywhere near as careful a job as the UK group in processing the ocean temperatures.
I am also unconvinced by NOAA's gap filling in the Arctic, and in my opinion this introduces substantial error into their analysis.
What I find so weird is that there are only three designated Keepers of the Global Surface Temperature - one British, two American (NOAA and NASA, so the usual US never-use-one-agency-when-you-can-have-two approach). How long are the French and the Japanese and the Russians and the Germans and the Chinese going to let les Anglo-Saxons dictate the global temperature? Especially when they're in effect declaring that they don't care what the thermometer actually said when you went out to read it at the crack of dawn on a freezing morning in 1999. They're going to tell you 16 years later what it ought to have said, to comply with their "models".
And as the early 21st century has had to be warmed up, so the early 20th century has had to be cooled down:
The overall net effect of the transition from GHCN-M version 2 to version 3 is to increase global temperatures before 1900, to decrease them between 1900 and 1950, and to increase temperatures after 1950.
The diagram below exemplify adjustments made by NCDC [part of NOAA] since May 2008 for two single months (see arrows in diagram above); January 1915 and January 2000.
Do click through and check out that graph: before the "adjustments", there was less than two-fifths of a degree's difference between January 1915 and January 2000. Since then, NCDC/NOAA has made regular "adjustments" cranking up 2000 and dialing down 1915. If these computers are that good, it makes you wonder why anybody bothers keeping an observed daily instrumental temperature record at all.
Clearly, with each revision of data, NCDC is making the past cooler and the near present warmer through their adjustment process of the original data. To revisit something said in regards to a previous news story about NCDC's tendency to adjust data as time goes on, so much so that they can't even tell us with certainty anymore which month in the past century was the warmest on record, this is still applicable:
"Is history malleable? Can temperature data of the past be molded to fit a purpose? It certainly seems to be the case here, where the temperature for July 1936 reported ... changes with the moment," Watts told FoxNews.com.
"In the business and trading world, people go to jail for such manipulations of data."
Hold that thought, because NCDC is at it again.
~Climate Change: The Facts is flying off the shelves so fast at Amazon that they're having difficulty keeping it in stock. But we've got it here at the SteynOnline bookstore, and I'll be delighted to autograph it for you. Or, if you can't wait for the postman, you can be reading it within 90 seconds via Kindle, Nook at Barnes & Noble, or Kobo at Indigo-Chapters in Canada and around the world.
Meanwhile, Big Climate flack Bob Ward is getting ever more desperate in his shrieks of objection, so embarrassed is he by the sales performance of his chum Doctor Fraudpants' book. If you're just trying to get my attention so we'll send you a review copy of Climate Change: The Facts, Bob, all you have to do is shoot me an email. C'mon, Bob, why be the last kid in the neighborhood not to have read this year's Number One Climatology Hit Parade blockbuster?
