Climate Science 101: Holdren, Lubchenco Take Congress Back to School

Ugh. I despise global Warming!

In 1938 the earth's population was 3 Billion people.In 2008, earth's population doubled to 6 Billion people. In another 70 years, it will be 12 Billion. One more time, 70 years later, it will soar to 24 Billion, (with a commensurate increase of livestock and agricultural needs). Do you want to provide life-giving water for them?
70% of the earth's FRESH water is stored in the Antarctica, (which is melting), whether or not, man is the cause! NOTE: NASA believes the Sun is mainly responsible, (with little help from mankind). Nature has been successfully regulating global temperatures for Billions of years. Man should NOT attempt to control/legislate it!
With the advent of renewable-energy electricity-producing systems, water from the oceans will be desalinated, and distributed by pipeline, from places where there is too much, to places where there is too little. EONS from now, if more water is yet needed, with copious amounts of electricity available, fresh, potable water, will be synthesized!
Carmine Cifaldi

Dear Sean

Thank you for your comment below. Do you have a last name and credentials you would like to share so that our readers could verify that you are indeed a climate scientist, as you say?

Does your "outreach program" include publishing peer reviewed literature, or is it limited to commentary in the court of public opinion?

I am a climate scientist, and part of the "outreach" for my research program seeks to place facts in the public domain. Here they are:
• We have known for years that the Mann hockey stick model (the one in Gore's movie) was wrong, and we know why it was wrong (Mann used only selected data to normalize the principal component analysis, not all of it). He retracted the model.
• We know that the Medieval Warm period existed, where the temperatures were higher than they are now (Chaucer spoke of vineyards in northern England). Long before ClimateGate it was known that the IPCC people were trying to fudge the data to get rid of the MWP. And for good reason.
• If the MWP is "allowed" to exist, this means that temperatures higher than today did not then create a "runaway greenhouse" in the Middle Ages with methane released from the Arctic tundra, ice cap albedo lost, sea levels rising to flood London, etc. etc.), and means that Jim Hansen's runaway greenhouse that posits only amplifying feedbacks (and no damping feedbacks) will not happen now.
• We have known for years that CO2 increases have never in the past 600,000 years caused temperature rise (CO2 rise trails temperature increase). Jones et al. know this too (see their "Copenhagen Diagnosis"); we know that their mathematical fudges that dismiss the fact that CO2 has not been historically causative of temperature rise are incorrect as well.
• We have known for years that the alleged one degree temperature rise from 1880 vanishes if sites exposed to urban heat islands are not considered. We have long known that Jones's paper dismissing this explanation (Jones, et al. 1990. Assessment of urbanization effects in time series of surface air temperature over land, Nature 347 169- 172) is wrong and potentially fraudulent (see the same data used to confirm urban heat islands in Wang, W-C, Z. Zeng, T. R Karl, 1990. Urban Heat Islands in China. Geophys. Res. Lett. 17, 2377-2380).
• Most of us (except Briffa) know that the Briffa conclusions are wrong, and why they are wrong; groups in Finland, Canada (lots of places actually) show cooling by this proxy, not warming; the IPCC even printed the Finn's plot upside down to convert the fact (cooling) into the dogma (warming).
• We have also long known that Jones, Mann, and the other IPCC scientists have been gaming peer review, blackballing opponents, and doing other things that show that they are not the political ingenues that you suggest. We have tolerated years of their refusal to release data (now, we know, much of these data were discarded), something that would in any other field of science lead to disbarment.
• We have been annoyed by Al Gore, who declared this science "settled", refused to debate, and demonized skeptics (this is anti-science: debate and skepticism are the core of real science, which is never settled).
New in ClimateGate are answers to two question:
(1) To what extent did the East Anglia people engage in simple self-deception (which happens often in science) or fraud? I am not willing to crucify Jones on the word "trick". Nor, for that matter, on the loss of primary data, keeping only "value added" data (which is hopelessly bad science, but still conceivably not fraud).
But the computer code is transparently fraudulent. Here, one finds matrices that add unexplained numbers to recent temperatures and subtract them from older temperatures (these numbers are hard-programmed), splining observational data to model data, and other smoking guns, all showing that they were doing what was necessary to get the answers that the IPCC wanted, not the answers that the data held. They knew what they were doing, and why they were doing it. If "peer review" was functioning, and the IPCC reports are rigorously peer reviewed, why was this not caught? The answer: The politics of climate have corrupted peer review so thoroughly that it could not catch even these obvious scams.
(2) Will this revelation be enough to cause the "global warming believers" to abandon their crusade, and for people to return to sensible environmental science (water use, habitat destruction, land use, this kind of thing)? Perhaps. First, we have not lost just one research project amid dozens of others that survive to still support human-caused climate warming. A huge set of primary data are gone. Satellite data are scarcely 40 years old. Everything is interconnected, and anchored on these discredited studies. Even without the corruption of the peer review process, this is as big a change as quantum mechanics was in physics a century ago.
Accordingly, no "consensus" exists. The "2500 scientists agree" number that one hears (including from the Obama administration yesterday) is fiction. God knows who they are counting, but to get to this number, they must be including referees, spouses, and pets). 

That said, religious people are intrinsically committed to their faith, and climate warming believers are exactly this. The Pope will not become a Protestant even if angel Gabriel taps him on the shoulder and asks him to. Likewise, the author of this may believed until the day he retires that there remains "overwhelming support" human caused global warming, even if every last piece of data supporting it is controverted. As a graduate student, I was told that fields do not advance because people change their minds; rather, fields advance because people die.