It is snowing again! I live near Cincinnati and last year by reckoning was the coldest winter since we moved here in 1999. It was cold and we had several snow storms that snowed us in. This year was colder and we seemed to have more snow. I had two 30 mile commutes that took nearly 4 1/2 hours due to snow and ice. Without a doubt it was cold. My car has a thermometer that measures outside air. The previous record low I had seen on my car thermometer was zero degrees. This year I saw multiple record low temperatures with the final record being ”“10 degrees. I am amused that the smart climate science are just now beginning to realize the obvious. The World Climate report posted this congressional testimony, Subcommittee on Energy and Environment Testimony. Duh!

Climate Audit pointed out an interesting article by Bruce McCullough and Ross McKitrick entitled Check the Numbers: The Case for Due Diligence in Policy Formation. They point out a common fallacy  ”˜peer reviewed’ journals is that no one checks the data. This becomes more than a academic journal problem when the report is used to formulate public policies.

Empirical research in what are commonly called ”˜peer-reviewed’ academic journals is often used as the basis for public policy decisions, in part because people think that ”˜peer-review’ involves checking the accuracy of the research. That might have been the case in the distant past, but times have long since changed. Academic journals rarely, if ever, check data and calculations for accuracy during the review process, nor do they claim to. Journal editors only claim that in selecting a paper for publication they think it merits examination by the research community.

Check the numbers; From the U. S. subprime crisis to global warming, bad research is driving disastrous public policy

Early in my college career I learned that I needed to check my work if I wanted to pass the courses. I am pretty sure it was one of my engineering professors who recommended that I develop a way to quickly estimate the answer as a way of confirming my answer. He said I was far more likely to receive partial credit if I could show an estimate that was close to the actual answer as part of my answer. From his viewpoint a correct estimate showed that I had a clue how to solve the problem even though my calculations may of come up with the wrong answer. I called this process,  “Passing the Laugh Test”.  On the other hand if my answer was way off and I could not demonstrate that I had a clue about what the answer should look like, I was out of luck. If I tried to go to the professor and ask for partial credit, I was going to get laughed at. It was cruel but it worked. Creating a “Laugh Test” estimate on a variety of problems has kept me out of a lot of embarrassing mistakes over the years.

That brings me to one of the great chuckles of the week. NASA screwed up the temperature graphs again. Despite anecdotal incidents of cold weather in the Northern hemisphere such as snow on the same day as the Parliament debate on global warming last month, NASA reported a 10 degree temperature jump in the October temperature data from Russia. I cannot imagine what the NASA folks were thinking. They had to know that the folks over at Climate Audit are going over their data with a fine tooth comb and NASA cannot implement a simple “Laugh Test” to avoid public humiliation. Any college sophomore could have created a simple year to year comparison test to avoid this problem. It did not take the folks at Climate Audit very long to come to the conclusion that NASA was using exactly the same temperature data for September and October. They knew that NASA’s answer was wrong and they had a pretty good idea how NASA made the mistake. If the folks at NASA making the mistake were college sophomores trying to scrounge up some partial credit on a missed answer, they would have been laughed at by their professor. They failed the “Laugh Test”. The only folks not laughing is the coal industry and the electrical utilities.

One of the best explanations of the blunder comes in this article from the Telegraph, The world has never seen such freezing heat.

I am not sure how this happens but tonight we had a snow flurry at the same time 60 Minutes was showing a piece about global warming. I thought our recent record cold weather would save us for a few months from Big Media’s over-hyping of global warming predictions. The gist of their piece was that this scientist was doing major public harm by having a view on climate science contrary to the “consensus” opinion. CBS was trying real hard to make the scientist look like a fool. It was an unnecessary hatchet job. Thirty minutes later I am reading a blog and I find this article from The Australian. This article reminded that I had read another similar article about a month ago. That article wondered why the actual temperature measurements were significantly lower than the recent IPCC predictions and speculated on the causes of the divergence. My guess is that many scientists recognize that there are serious problems with the temperature models and have quietly moved to the neutral position. It must have been a slow news night at CBS. Fact checking continues to be an optional exercise for CBS.

CATASTROPHIC predictions of global warming usually conjure with the notion of a tipping point, a point of no return.

Last Monday – on ABC Radio National, of all places – there was a tipping point of a different kind in the debate on climate change. It was a remarkable interview involving the co-host of Counterpoint, Michael Duffy and Jennifer Marohasy, a biologist and senior fellow of Melbourne-based think tank the Institute of Public Affairs. Anyone in public life who takes a position on the greenhouse gas hypothesis will ignore it at their peril.

Duffy asked Marohasy: “Is the Earth still warming?”

She replied: “No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not what you’d expect if carbon dioxide is driving temperature because carbon dioxide levels have been increasing but temperatures have actually been coming down over the last 10 years.”

Duffy: “Is this a matter of any controversy?”

Read the rest at Climate facts to warm to | The Australian

Over 400 prominent scientists from more than two dozen countries recently voiced significant objections to major aspects of the so-called “consensus” on man-made global warming. These scientists, many of whom are current and former participants in the UN IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), criticized the climate claims made by the UN IPCC and former Vice President Al Gore.

.: U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works :: Minority Page :.

I am not surprised that there are 400 scientists who object to being included in the “consensus”. It sounds like these scientists are getting pissed off that the rhetoric is outrunning and demeaning the process of independent scientific verification of the global warming predictions.