Apres la (Copenhagen CarbonFest) deluge, a Very Inconvenient Coldspell

Poor Al Gore (not to mention poor CBC – and David Suzuki, along with Bob McDonald, aka the Canadian High Priests of the Church of Settled Science)

I’m a Bridgeplayer, so – with your indulgence – I’d like to review the bidding (Note to fellow-Bridgeplayers: [Spoiler] Alert – this is a grand slam, doubled and redoubled, for all AGW “skeptics”; and a spectacular defeat for the IPCC sponsored “Hockey-Stick” Team)

First, a very brief summary of the pre-COP15 diagnosis bidding history to date:

Once upon a time, there were some “climate scientists” aka “global warming disaster advocates” who were determined to secure a magificent amount of government funding for their “research” – by selling their post-modernist “scientific” souls to the IPCC devil’s den mantra of “C02 is the primary cause of ‘global warming'”.

Now, a brief summary of the post-COP15 diagnosis:

Alas, to the very great (but to this day denied and … uh… well-hidden) dismay of the “climate scientists” – and their totally dedicated AGW believer acolytes – the Great Green Hope (aka Almighty Stopper of Global Warming, Obama) let them down:

The Great Green Presidential Accendant Promise, according to the Institution of Chemical Engineers:

US PRESIDENT ELECT Barack Obama has signalled a renewed respect for the integrity of the scientific process by nominating four renowned scientists that will help his administration formulate sound science and technology policy that will fight climate change, […]

[…]

Obama says his science and technology team will work to slow global warming and create 21st century jobs through innovation: “Today more than ever before, science holds the key to our survival and our prosperity […] Promoting science isn’t just about providing resources but protecting free and open enquiry, [ensuring] facts are never overturned by politics and ideology, and listening to what our scientists have to say especially when it’s inconvenient.”[emphases added -hro]

(Sorry about that … it’s the Lewis Caroll in me thinking that folks should “say what they mean and mean what they say”. I know, Obama said the above a mere year ago. Clearly, as usual, Obama did not say what he meant – nor, apparently, did he mean what he said)

But, as mentioned above, Obama did let them down. Even according to the “Obama-can-do-no-wrong” New York Times:

The final accord, a 12-paragraph document, was a statement of intention, not a binding pledge to begin taking action on global warming — a compromise seen to represent a flawed but essential step forward.

[…]

But many delegates of the 193 countries that had gathered here left Copenhagen in a sour mood, disappointed that the pact lacked so many elements they considered crucial, including firm targets for mid- or long-term reductions of greenhouse gas emissions and a deadline for concluding a binding treaty next year.

Even President Obama, a principal force behind the final deal, said the accord would take only a modest step toward healing the Earth’s fragile atmosphere.

Many participants also said that the chaos and contentiousness of the talks may signal the end of reliance on a process that for almost two decades had been viewed as the best approach to tackling global warming: the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change and a series of 15 conventions following a 1992 climate summit meeting in Rio de Janeiro.
[…] [emphasis added -hro]

OMG, as if the blanket of (IPCC unpredicted?!) snow covering Copenhagen wasn’t bad enough, all those delegates in such a “sour mood” that the Great Green Hope, aka, “Mr. The time for talk is over“, had let them down.

Sidebar: “The time for talk is over” turns out to be one of Obama’s favourite rhetorical flourishes, which he had used during his first speech in Copenhagen. After his second speech, he fled snowbound Copenhagen for snowbound Washington. And speaking of the flight of The One … Anthony Watts invited readers to provide a caption for this photo by Doug Mills/The New York Times:

My humbly submitted contribution: “The time for talk is over: Blame Canada“

And speaking of “Blame Canada” ….Back to the “bidding”!

The National Post sponsored (Team Canada) Terence Corcoran bid “7 spades” on Dec. 18. Here’s a description of his “hand”:

My climategate email cameo

[…] This cameo walk-on role doesn’t amount to anything in the great 13-year epic chronology of science warfare found in the email cache, but it is still satisfying to be there — even more satisfying because my bit part appears in a small chain of emails that leads right up to one of the top dogs in Climategate, Phil Jones.
[…]
[one Kibbitzer noted:]

Congratulations Mr. Corcoran. Your work on this file puts you in the courageous ranks of journalists of Woodward and Bernstein.

So refreshing compared to the cowered and brainwashed parrots masquerading as journalists at the Globe, CBC or BBC… or CTV most of the time.

Michael “Hide the decline” Mann (representing the Hockey-Stick Team) “doubled” (no doubt on the strength of his very weak “clubs”) in an OpEd in the Washington Post:

E-mail furor doesn’t alter evidence for climate change

I cannot condone some things that colleagues of mine wrote or requested in the e-mails recently stolen from a climate research unit at a British university. But the messages do not undermine the scientific case that human-caused climate change is real.

[….]

[Miann mistakenly thought he was closing the bidding by falsely concluding:]

The scientific consensus regarding human-caused climate change is based on decades of work by thousands of scientists around the world. The National Academy of Sciences has concluded that the scientific case is clear. As world leaders work in Copenhagen to try to combat this problem, some critics are seeking to cloud the debate and confuse the public.

Perhaps Mann did not count the points in his hand very carefully. Or maybe, he had misread the bid of his silent partner, William Connelly – guardian of all things green at Wikipedia – who was in cahoots with the “Hockey-Stick” team.

You see, over at the National Post, on Dec. 19, Corcoran’s partner, Lawrence Solomon, “redoubled”, so to speak. Here’s a description of his hand:

Wikipedia’s climate doctor

How Wikipedia’s green doctor rewrote 5,428 climate articles

The Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm.

The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.

The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history.

[…] [emphasis added -hro]

So, Team Canada’s Corcoran is Declarer, playing a Grand Slam, doubled and redoubled. On Saturday, he began:

A 2,000-page epic of science and skepticism

The context for all this, much of it conducted over the Internet between sometimes warring camps in Britain and the United States, is the greatest scientific research story ever told, an attempt to accomplish two main objectives under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN agency set up in 1988 to orchestrate global reaction to the perceived threat of man-made global warming.

The 13-year email exchange, while often chaotic and disjointed, follows two main tracks that, in the end, must somehow converge. The first is to develop a convincing history of global temperature going back over thousands of years. The second is to develop models and scenarios that allow the scientists and the IPCC to forecast climate change to 2100 and beyond.

[…]

By my reading, the emails contain many disquieting revelations about the state of climate science and the process. Other readers, investigators, scientists and activists on all sides of the climate issue will of course make up their own minds on this. But as the email story unfolds over the years, it is clear that the history of climate and temperature change over the past 10,000 years remains mostly speculative and largely unknown. The emails also imply that, in part because the past is so unknown, any attempt at long-range forecasts is, at best, uncertain.

[…]

He’s playing his hand quite superbly (so be sure to read the whole article). And don’t miss Corcoran’s “finesse” against Mann:

Climategate: What’s the “trick” and what did it “hide”?

In a new famous email, Phil Jones, then head of the Climactic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, wrote on Nov. 16 to climate research colleagues in the United States and at his own CRU:

“Dear Ray, Mike and Malcolm,
Once Tim’s got a diagram here we’ll send that either later today or first thing tomorrow.
I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) and (sic) from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline…”

What’s the trick and what did it hide? The man who knows most about this subject and who’s willing to talk about it is Steve McIntyre. In a recent positing, McIntyre outlined the trick and its place in the history of official climate science as fashioned by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Another good but more accessible explanation of the trick appeared in London’s Daily Mail, along with these graphs.

[…]