The final part of a read-it-all post from Burning Our Money:
BOM correspondent NN suffered a seizure while watching a BBC news report on Wednesday about salt traders in Timbuktu. According to the report – a NEWS report note – said traders have apparently had to swap their transport camels for great big climate destroying trucks, because global warming has made the camels too tired and thirsty to do the work (well there is also the small matter of the always biddable truck being able to haul in one week what it takes the moody camels seven to achieve, but the real villain is definitely global warming). After a strong dose of smelling salts, NN emailed – “They sent a sodding reporter and camera crew and translator to sodding Timbuktu for this garbage. By camel? I would be willing to wager that they flew in a nice shiny aeroplane and then carted all their gear on one of the very same evil trucks that cause climate change. At least I hope so. The thought of BBC reporters earning 45 days of per diems while lugging their crap around on 1st century technology is truly alarming. What could have been a really good example of creative destruction and new technologies replacing old for the good of all involved becomes a truly loopy example of green non-thought. And spare a thought for the Tuareg salt-trader. Who wouldn’t rather spend 45 days in blistering heat and thirst with a load of wheezing camels than seven days in an air-conditioned truck listening to Timbuktu FM. Of course it was climate change what done it. Aaaaargh. I think I need to leave the country to escape the madness, – by horse.” We may join him.
Only half heard this “story” from the other room-this WAS on the news wasn`t it?
Unbelievable half-baked tripe from the (as you say) air conditioned gas guzzler and sent back to Blighty!
Still it “raised awareness” I`m sure.
Presumably they were all told that their plane flies on lavender oil!The science up at BH isn`t quite what it was-Magnus Pyke seems not to have been replaced!
The BBC report about climate change on the 10:15PM news was a disgrace. Yet again we see very camp looking male beeboids twisting the truth. A minority are not converted claimed camp beeboid. Really? Opinion polls show a clear MAJORITY think climate change is a scam. And as for the Met Office, they wouldn’t be funded by the Government by chance would they? Oh and up the arse of the BBC?
I heard the met office bloke speaking to camp beeboid, yes we know the sometimes glaciers melt etc but at no time did he provide ANY proof that this was due to rising CO2 levels either alone or for the most part. Nor did he explain away the falling global temperatures since 1998.
The BBC seems to be working itself into an utter frenzy over climate change. Is there some really bad Cocaine going around Islington or something?
I don’t know where this common internet meme of temperatures falling since 1998 comes from.
In fact 1998 was the warmest year since instrumental records began, but 2002, 2005 and 2007 were warmer still.
Whether this is evidence of human or natural-caused change (or a mixture of both) is another matter, but to say temperatures have fallen since 1998 is simply wrong.
Love the hockey stick graph Ed, where did you get those figures for the anomly?
There are a few problems with selective graphs showing cherry picked figures and using selected year/temp scales though.
Perhaps it might be more instructive to show the entire temperature series from 1998-2009 in full using sattelite data?
Using a decadal graph actually shows a decline NOT a rise, but then again graphs can be used to show any biased opinion?
Ground station measurements are now useless and discredited, they have been corrupted by those with a vested interest in faking a rise in temperatures.
Show us a sattelite based graph of the last decade and we might just take your post a little more seriously.
Ooops,
I should have added that yearly anomolies may show increases but the decadal anomoly is still negative.
I think you’re mixing your graphs Cassandra. The (in)famous “hockey stick” graph was something entirely different. It was the graph that purporterd to show a long-term cooling over the last 1500-2000 years followed by a sharp increase in the 20th century. Hence the term “hockey stick”.
This graph shows a much shorter more recent period since instrumental records began in the late 19th Century and bears no resemblance to any hockey stick I have ever seen as it shows an increase from 1880 to about 1940, then a decrease to around 1975 followed by a sharper increase till the present day . As it shows every year from 1880 to 2008, I’m not sure how it can be cherry picked. In any case, we were specifically talking about whether or not there had been cooling since 1998.
The figures used come the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration of the USA: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/anomalies/index.html
I’m also intrigued by the suggestion that the decadal anomaly has decreased as I’m unable to find any reference to this and some quick arithmetic on the data here does not support it. Perhaps someone was mixed up because 2008 was not as warm as 1998 (forgetting the warmer years in between)?
If you don’t believe that graphs or data can really show anything, or can be interpreted any way you want, then essentially one may believe whatever takes your fancy. In which case there is really no point in measurements or data or science at all and no point in even discussing the matter.
Climategate leads to the huge suspicion that your graph was doctored to show these results.
From the leaked emails from the CRU it would appear that individual or groups of scientists have falsified things for personal, professional or political reasons.
But is it really conceivable that the entire global intrumental record, gathered in many countries by goodness knows how many researchers over almost 130 years has been systematically falsified?
That would be an extraordinary conspiracy, but if true would certainly mean we have very little to go on.
In fact, if one averages the anomalies by decade the trend becomes if anything more striking rather than less. The average temperature anomaly for 1999-2008 was 0.52 C while that for 1989-98 was 0.34, 1979-88 was 0.19.
Note that in this grouping of years, the extremely warm year of 1998, which was said to be the end of the warming trend falls in the previous decade (1989-98) and not this last decade. Thus it cannot be said that the grouping of years has been cherry picked to put this unusually warm year into the latest decade to skew the figures towards the warm side.
Source: US National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration annual global (land and ocean combined) anomalies: http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/oa/climate/research/anomalies/index.html
The data used is polluted though isnt it? The entire ground based temperature series has been contaminated.
NOAA still insists on using ground based temperature records when in fact they have a sattelite based series.
Sattelite data shows a decline in global temperatures from 1998-2008, the decline is hidden by the ground based series because that ground based series is not only contaminated by manipulation of raw data but also thinly spread,badly placed and sparse cherry picked ground stations.
The raw data for the UK and US and the methods of adjustment are being hidden and for good reason, they are faked to show higher temperatures.
The only reliable series now availible is from sattelites and they show a cooling trend, the planet is cooling and no wonder the fraudsters talk of hiding the decline.
If you must show graphs then use graphs based on sattelite data. The scale of the fraud has not yet sunk in Ed, the climate science comunity is guilty of fraud on an epic scale, they were determined to show warming and they manipulated the data to show it, no wonder GISS/CRU are trying to hide and delete the evidence and trying to evade FOI requests, when the raw data and their methods come out they will be exposed as liars and frauds.
The entire global temperature reconstruction based on ground station measurements are in effect useless UNTILL they can be independently verified and the adjustment mechamisms used by GISS and CRU become availible.
There is no hocky stick, there is no global warming, there is only criminal fraud.
Actually the satelite records appear to tally pretty well with the land based records as seen below. UAH (University of Alabama Huntsville) and RSS (Remote Sensing Systems) are satelite based records in the figure below.
This is why I find it hard to believe that the data has been so falsified as to be useless. It has been gathered by different methods, such as satelites and weather stations, by a huge number of different teams and yet the different records broadly agree. Either there has been an enormous conspiracy involving huge numbers of people all in league with each other to make their data similar, or the similarity lends weight to the reliability of each one.
Corrupt scientists at one university or even at several is conceivable, likely it even seems now. A conspiracy large enough to get all this data into broad agreement is just too much for me to believe is probable.
I believe the real issue is to respond to climate change in a way that avoids a leftist or third-worldist political colouration rather than whether or not there is really an anthropogenic cause.
Just my two cents and I’m not a climate scientist so I do not claim to understand the full complexities of the issue, though I have studied biology and environmental sciences.
Satelite and ground temp. graph
There’s a cracking piece of propoganda on the BBC this morning.
A scientist has two plastic bottles each containing a thermometer probe.
She then fills one bottle with copious amounts of CO2 and turns on a couple of lights to heat the bottles. What a surprise. The CO2 filled bottle warms mush faster than the non CO2 filled bottle.
Care to repeat the experiment with just a TRACE of CO2, or perhaps water vapour?
Hm, I though not.
Shameful BBC!
Are you saying the Earth isn’t shrouded in a big plastic envelope and has an atmosphere composed almost entirely of carbon dioxide? Shame on you, you horrid, horrid denier. Why, you’re basically the same as Hitler.
They were at least killing two birds with one stone with their trip to Timbuctu. A new centre has been opened to collect, preserrve and dispay the mass of mediaeval Arabic manuscripts that still exist in this former university town. Interestingly enough, the Beeboid, in a Reporters programme on News24, played the story around the idea that Africans had a sophisticated, scientific civilisation while we were still living in mud huts / up trees (depending on how ignorant they think the audience is of their own history in the middle ages). Timbuctu was in fact an outpost of an expanding Arab/ Islamic cultural imperialism – it’s typical of that the BBC should choose to identify this as virtually synonymous wIth African culture.