Santer is the Man.
by Anthony Cox
I recently wrote this response
to Naomi Oreske’s panegyric about Ben Santer the scientist.
Santer had been very busy making sure the scam of AGW has
the requisite ‘scientific’ evidence to keep the money pouring in. His specialty
had been the Tropical Hot Spot, that mythical Holy Grail for AGW science which
is yet to be found.
Now Santer has turned his attention to the heating of the
oceans, Ocean Heat Content [OHC] in a new
paper co-authored by him and his Australian brethren, including John Church
of the CSIRO.
In interviews with
the AGW friendly ABC, Dr Church makes no bones about it, this paper on OHC is:
the most comprehensive study of changes in ocean heat content to date by quite some margin.
And the new paper also:
has allowed the group to rule out that the changes are related to natural variability in the climate system.
The AGW scientists love OHC; the oceans are so big you can
hide anything down there, including Trenberth’s“missing
heat”, and the lack of warming in the atmosphere for the last 15 years.
And the AGW models will always find it for you.
But right at the start of the new paper we see the usual lacuna
between those models and reality. Santer and his buddies acknowledge:
The infilling method of DOM employs statistics of observed ocean variability estimated from altimeter data. We compare the spatially complete infilled estimates (1TIF) with subsampled 1T data (1TSS) restricted to available in situ measurements (see Methods). Not surprisingly, the 1TSS variability in Fig. 1b is greater than that of 1TIF, particularly at the times/locations of the sparsest sampling (early in the record and in the southern oceans; Supplementary Fig. S1).\
The “infilled estimates” are the
models and the “subsampled data” is the real stuff; and the difference between
them is greater than the alleged temperature increase! That is, the temperature
variation, up and down, in the actual measured ocean, the bulk of it, the Southern
Ocean, is both too sparse to base any conclusions on and inconsistent with how
the models have developed trends.
The paper does concede that
measurement of OHC has been subject to problems in the past. This is an
understatement. In reality accurate measurement of OHC only began in 2003 with
the ARGO network and even this sophisticated system, which supposedly overcame
the “biases” of previous measurement regimes, is incredibly
sparse and hardly representative.
The fact is that the measurement of
OHC is subject to the same modelling biases as every other bit of evidence to
support AGW. The temperature record of OHC saw a remarkable jump at the time of
the transition to the ARGO system as this NOAA graph shows:
As is apparent there is a huge jump at
the beginning of 2003 when the ARGO system was introduced. David Stockwell has
calculated that this jump has a probability of being real of 0.001; in other
words it is an outlier reflecting some problem with coordinating the data
during the transition to the ARGO system.
Santer’s paper deals with the top 700
meters of the ocean and it is this part of the ocean which deals with most the
variation in OHC. Given this it is extraordinary that the OHC
since the most accurate measurement was introduced in 2003, has been basically
flat and far less than the model projections:
These are the same models Santer is
now using to tell us that the OHC is increasing and it’s the fault of human
emissions of CO2 and there is a “human-induced fingerprint” in the oceans.
As I noted before Santer could not
prove there was another fingerprint in the form of a Tropical Hot Spot. He has
moved on to now prove there is a fingerprint in the OHC. As with the Tropical
Hot Spot the evidence is against him.
Santer admitted to having made up the IPCC summary for policy makers years ago, yet nothing was done at the time, and I guess that nothing will be done now either. These people are no better than outlaws, and snake-oil salesmen of the old wild west. When will the force of Law be brought to bear against these climate fraudsters?
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