A CLOSER LOOK AT CLIMATE CHANGE (PART 8)

THE IPCC's FUZZY MATH

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a group of influential scientists under the auspices of the United Nations whose main function is to peer review and approve papers written by various climate scientists from all over the world for publication. It's a selective group whose members and associated scientists have a clear mandate to toe the line, which means they must adhere to the official, "mainstream" position that the Earth is undergoing a climate crisis of Brobdingnagian magnitude - a crisis wholly caused by us dastardly, irresponsible humans. A primary function of this panel is to direct or influence policy makers around the world so they will compel their constituents - by means of rigid enforcement, if necessary - to quell their use of fossil fuels and stop "polluting" the planet. It's a disturbing example of the politicization of science to create or influence policies that can adversely affect millions.
Every few years the IPCC sponsors a summit - their last one was in December 2009 in Copenhagen, Denmark - where they try to persuade heads of state and other policy makers to pass stiffer laws against carbon dioxide "polluters". Like the ones before, nothing got done except the blowing of a lot of hot air. And that's probably a very good thing.

OK, here comes the science part. I'm going to play with some of the IPCC propaganda and use their formulas and equations to try to show how they're trying to manipulate the world's governments, media, and citizens. If the technical details don't interest you, please feel free to skip over the next few paragraphs and pick back up again when I resume my commentary, where the dark-blue typeface resumes.


At the heart of the IPCC's argument in favor of human-induced global climate change is a parameter called the climate sensitivity factor l (lambda). It's a numerical value derived from computer models dealing with radiative forcing parameters associated with a hypothetical doubling of the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere from its pre-industrial count of 280 ppmv. The IPCC's accepted value for l falls within a range of 0.8 - 1.2.  A l value of 0.8° yields a 3° C increase while a l value of 1.2 yields a more broadly accepted 4.5° C rise in global temperature with a doubling of CO2. One chart even shows a projected temperature increase guided by a l value as high as 1.7 (described below) - which would truly be catastrophic if it were only true. Meanwhile, those in the so-called skeptic camp suggest the true value of lambda (l) is well below 0.1, which works out to a temperature increase of less that 1/2° C if the atmospheric CO2 concentration doubled to 560 ppmv from its pre-industrial count of 280 ppmv. This number, l, is a value derived from purely arbitrary assumptions based on how hot it will get if the CO2 reaches 560 ppmv.  

Math is pure logic, and I've included the following paragraph to make a purely logical argument in favor of 1.) lowering the value of l to a substantially lower value than the currently accepted minimum l value of 0.8, and 2.) make an argument that even when using the IPCC's rather liberal numbers, there is alarmist propaganda out there that is ridiculously misleading.  

There is formula that is used to determine the hypothetical value of lambda (l) after which lambda (l) can be plugged into another formula to see how hot it's going to get with a rising CO2 complement of the earth's atmosphere. Here they are:


DT_S = l D F 

where DT_S  is the rise in global temperature, and
D F   is the increase of radiative forcing due to the increase in the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere. 
                                                                      
Here's the formula for finding the radiative forcing value D F       

DF = 5.35 X ln C/C_O W m^-2

[Radiative forcing is the term used to describe a sort of back pressure caused by the trapping of outgoing infrared radiation by greenhouse gasses (GHG) much as pressure inside a balloon keeps it from deflating to a flaccid state by air pressure trapped inside it.
Just as there is a slight pressure differential inside the balloon that keeps it from going limp, the radiative forcing of a GHG translates to an equal amount of extra radiation from the sun reaching the earth if the radiative back pressure were discounted.]

The efficacy of the DF formula (above) is not currently being disputed for calculating forcings for CO2 concentrations by most scientists on either side of the AGW divide, although one paper (Myrhe, et. al. 1998) asserts the relationship breaks down below 915 ppmv because it's a logarithmic function. What is being debated is the value of lambda, the climate sensitivity parameter, which is purely hypothetical.


OK, let's have some fun. Here's an alarmist chart that spells doom for the planet:

OOPS! DAMN!  This blog server is rejecting all of my attempts to post images!  I can't even upload an image of my dog!? I wonder if the global-warming storm police are trying to shut down my ability (or right) to clearly communicate my reality-based views? Probably not - maybe it's just a server glitch. But.... one never knows, does one?
So I'll make my point without the chart - you'll just have to take my word that I'm not making this stuff up. If I am able to upload charts and photos in the future, I'll replace this paragraph with the visual aids I prefer to use to get my point across.

NOTE: HERE ARE LINKS TO THE CHARTS I WAS UNABLE TO UPLOAD: 

http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/natural-vs-agw_warming.png
http://wattsupwiththat.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/heating_effect_vs_measured_co2.png

I have a column chart here that resembles a steep bluff arising from a flood plain. The "bluff" arising steeply towards the upper right of the chart is an alarmist perspective of what the global temperatures will do if CO2 levels keep increasing - all the way up to 560 ppm, which is twice the pre-industrial level. Superimposed on this chart is the predicted increase in temperatures based on the much more conservative model of Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi (2009). These superimposed values represent the continuation of the gradual upslope and virtual leveling off of the flood plain.


According to the data based on Lindzen-Choi model, the global temperature will warm up by 0.2° C in the event the atmospheric CO2 doubles from where it was in the 1700s, which was around 280 ppm. Plugging that 0.2° C increase into the formula, we get a value for the climate sensitivity parameter, lambda (l), a value of 0.08. This is 1/10th of the most conservative "official" values of lambda - 0.8. But there's more!

According to the chart, the temperature has already risen 2.2° C, and by the time the CO2 has doubled, the temperature will have risen 6.2° C! That's where it was back in the steamy dinosaur days! Here, the value for the climate sensitivity parameter lambda is 1.68. This would be pretty dire stuff, if it were true. But it can't be true, because the consensus is that temperatures have gone up only about 0.6° C since the Keeling CO2 measurements began 50 years ago - not 2.2° C.  I have another chart that I was going to include in this post that is based on identical data and parameters, but it has a different layout, and would have been an excellent compliment to the "bluff" chart.
OK, let's see what the value l might be if we consider the consensus rise in the Earth's temperature over the last half-century and a 34.5% increase of CO2. Here we go:

C = 390 ppm (the current count)

CO  = 315 ppm (the count at 1957 per Keeling)

Using the formula for CO2 forcing we get 5.35 X ln (390/315)=1.143 Wm^-2

That's our value for DF
Now, to find lambda (l) using the first formula

DF, the increase in radiative forcing, is

1.143 Wm^-2

DT_S , the temperature change is about 0.6° C
according to data compiled by Dr. Phil Jones of the CRU in East Anglia UK. Plugging 0.6° C into the formula to find l yields:

l = DT_S / DF = 0.6° C / 1.143 = 0.525
 

Now, when the atmospheric CO2 concentration doubles, we get a radiative forcing  

DF of 3.71 Wm^-2

How do we know that? Plugging the numbers into the formula  we get:

C / CO = 560/280 = 2. The natural logarithm (ln) of 2 is 0.693 so 0.693 X 5.35 = 3.71 Wm^-2


That’s our radiative forcing value DF
Now, when you plug in our derived values for l


DT_S = lDF = DT_S = 0.525 X 3.71 = 1.95° C


OK, we're done with the math - you can start reading again. So, if the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere were to keep rising to 560 ppm from the 390 ppm we have now, we'd (allegedly) see a temperature rise of 1.95°C - not 3° or 4.5° or even 6° C as the IPCC claims.

Now, what are we to make of this? This result is far smaller than what the IPCC is threatening will happen. Yet it's far larger than the 0.15° to 0.2° C rise postulated by Lindzen and Choi based on the quantum mechanical behavior of CO2.


There are still plenty of questions. One, the formulas are the IPCC's formulas, and they were derived from computer models that are at best questionable and often don't agree with one another. And two, (very important here) these equations assume that the 0.6° C rise in the earth's temperature during the 53 years of David Keeling's measuring of atmospheric CO2 is due to the CO2 and not the sun, which appears to be increasingly active, on average, over the last 100 plus years. If the sun is what's warming the earth, and not CO2, then the Lindzen-Choi climate sensitivity parameter (l= .04) may be closer to the mark. 

With this presentation (above) I've tried to show directly by means of alarmist charts the type of fear propaganda the IPCC and its minions are trying to bamboozle us with. If you looked at these charts and didn't know any better you would be afraid. Very afraid. That's part of the problem - some of the people who don't know any better - they wouldn't know science if it punched them in the face - they buy into this stuff hook, line, and sinker. They believe everything they hear and devote their attention to the most dire, most dramatic scenarios we're told may happen or will happen, depending on the source. The people I'm referring to are the policy makers - the politicians who are angling to write laws that will make us stop "polluting" the air with CO2. Such monstrosities as Cap'n'Trade, utility taxes over and above the taxes we already pay on utilities, and other maneuvers that are supposed to make us conserve. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for not wasting energy, whether it's gasoline or electricity. But the politicians - people like Reps. Henry Waxman and Edward Markey, who co-authored the cap'n'trade bill in the house that the Senate wisely killed - are vying to run up the costs of utilities to "encourage" conservation and "encourage" people to get rid of their old appliances and cars and buy new (and expensive) energy efficient appliances and cars. The well-to-do can certainly afford to buy this expensive new stuff and feel good about themselves for doing so. They can afford to upgrade their homes (and mansions) to make them more energy efficient as well, but what about the less fortunate? What about the people who would like to save on their utility bills but are stuck with their old, energy-inefficient beaters and leaky refrigerators and vintage electric stoves and microwaves, and live in drafty, ramshackle apartments without insulation? 
Last year we had a "Cash for Clunkers" program that benefited the well-to-do but hurt the less fortunate who couldn't afford to buy sleek new cars (See my post of 8/9/2009 - Cash for Clunkers - a bad idea).  Moreover, low-income people had trouble finding used cars at a price affordable to them because the CforC program depleted the used car market and made used cars more expensive. President Obama, whom I support on many issues, is allowing the IPCC to lead him by the nose. He is a prime example of a prominent world leader (one of many) who's been snared by the alarmist dogma of the IPCC and its associated apocalypse-mongers. There's a real danger here. IPCC-affiliated scientists, with a lot of help from the media (who think the global warming issue makes good copy), are propagating a dangerous and potentially devastating agenda for no good reason other than to make a lot of money for themselves. The IPCC, part of the UN, is a political organization with policy objectives that suit their own ends. They get billions in funding approved by sympathetic but ignorant government bureaucrats worldwide and are, by extension, depriving funds for scientists who practice climate science as a dispassionate search for the Truth. Not only that, they are impeding the publication of research papers by scientists who don't agree with their views on this issue. Further, they're influencing government bureaucracies to implement harmful policies that will, or are, being hurtful to ordinary people. A case in point: The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has recently declared CO2 a pollutant, for crying out loud! I guess that means every human being on Earth is spewing pollution out of their mouths with every breath - about 1.6 billion metric tonnes worth per year. And that's just the people! Factor in the animal and plant life in the entire biosphere and you have a staggering amount of "pollution" being emitted. It makes no sense to arbitrarily call it pollution.
With the EPA now invoking CO2 as a pollutant we can look forward to even higher electric bills, which are already high, because of heavy taxation, brutally cold winters and stifling hot summers and existing restrictions.

As someone with a rich background in science, I can see what's going on through the weeds of propagandistic proclamations and dogmatic boilerplate by a cadre of people who must think I'm stupid, and must think everybody else is stupid as well. In many cases they're right about that. Unfortunately many politicians, bureaucrats, and media types are missing the boat, but fortunately..., an increasing number of people are waking up to what's going on, and they're not buying it any more. At some point this alarmist movement will finally become discredited and piddle out, like the infamous "hockey stick" chart by Mann, et.al. (see CLCC - 5  Quack Science - posted on 11/14/2010). We can only hope this movement's demise doesn't come too late.  With my next post (CLCC - 9) I'll discuss one notable (and noble) scientist who thinks it's all a lot of malarkey, and what the apocalyptics are saying about him. Stay tuned.

A CLOSER LOOK AT CLIMATE CHANGE (PART 5)

QUACK SCIENCE

Updated 07/22/2011: Link to informative Deming article added.


I once worked with a guy in a laboratory environment who had an hypothesis he was sure would turn out to be valid. He tested his hypothesis from a number of different angles - he attacked it this way and that. Sometimes his data worked, sometimes it didn't. He wanted very badly for his hypothesis to check out - he had personal prestige riding on his idea, so he did what any quack scientist would do. He cheated.
He culled the data that didn't support his hypothesis and kept the data that did. His rationale for culling the data that didn't support his hypothesis was that it was "bad" data - it was some kind of artifact or anomaly that just wasn't supposed to be. So he threw it out.

Needless to say, the procedure he was trying to develop didn't work out - in fact, it blew up in his face. And the reason it blew up in his face was that he deviated from the Scientific Method. The Scientific Method goes something like this:

1. Make an observation
2. Develop an hypothesis
3. Test your hypothesis by conducting experiments
4. Assemble and analyze your data and draw a conclusion
5. Publish your results

That's how it should be done, but it's not always done that way. Here's how the apocalyptic global warming scientists appear to practice the Scientific Method, according to those who've perused the leaked University of East Anglia (UEA) email communications between scientists associated with the university:

1. Make an observation: You notice that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere is increasing.

2. Develop an hypothesis: The earth is warming, or will experience warming, and it's getting warmer because of the accumulation of CO2, a greenhouse gas. Humans are causing the earth to warm by ever increaing emmisions of greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere in an irresponsible manner. If we don't arrest the accumulation of greenhouse gasses (particularly CO2) we'll reach a tipping point and experience a runaway greenhouse scenario similar to what happened on Venus eons ago.

3. Test the hypothesis with experimentation: Carefully monitor the temperatures as measured by reliable thermometers at certified facilities, and in a parallel endeavor, continue to carefully monitor CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere. Get collaborators to develop computer modeling programs to forecast future scenarios of global devastation due to unrestrained greenhouse gas emissions. Make sure the results of the testing of your hypothesis can be repeated by independent research - conducted by your friends and accomplices, of course. And most of all, be sure to carefully cull your data, or even invent data, if you must, that will support your hypothesis.

4. Analyze your data and draw a conclusion: According to your data, the global temperature will keep rising, the anthropogenic CO2 levels keep rising, and your computer models are saying we're going to be living in a perpetual steam bath within fifty years. You conclude we're on our way to becoming another Venus.

5. Publish your results: Gather up a politically connected cabal of peers to facilitate the peer-review process and publish your results in any number of prestigious publications.

You've published a landmark paper that will save the planet! You're a hero!

Oops! Damn! Somebody outside of your circle couldn't obtain repeatable results when testing your hypothesis independently, while somebody else couldn't get your data to add up. And then someone dug around and found out you fudged your numbers. And they even want to look at the code your models are based on. What a drag!

Let's enter into evidence the "Hockey Stick" graph.

This famous graph of global temperature patterns during the last millennium was featured prominently in Al Gore's documentary An Inconvenient Truth. It purports to show how temperatures have literally skyrocketed since about 1910. When you look at the labels of the chart, you see a thousand year's worth of temperature data all bunched up in a four inch graph, with a dramatic warming spike depicted in the final 3/8 inch (~1 cm). One can also see that the temperature data range is about 1° C (which exagerates the visual scale of the temperature spike, with most of the graph showing temperatures muddling along below the line expressing the mean temperature of a recent three decade interval (1961 - 1990). The upshot is this: The structure of the chart amplifies the global temperature data in the mind of a lay citizen who tends to see it as a picture rather than a graph of data points plotted with a narrow range of parameters.

When you look at this chart, you don't see anything that looks like the the so-called Medieval Warming Period (MWP) that began about 950 A.D. and lasted to about 1400 A.D. In the Northern Hemisphere, at the very least - and probably worldwide - temperatures were much warmer than they are now, and as far as anyone knows, mankind wasn't the cause of that particular warm-up.  
Likewise, the "Little Ice Age" (LIA), from about 1550 A.D. to 1700 A.D. doesn't seem to show up either.
These periods were reflected on older charts based on data derived from tree rings, ice cores, and anecdotal historical accounts of the people who lived through these periods. Here's an older chart (below) that was compiled prior to the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) craze of the last two decades. It was published by Hubert Lamb, who was more or less the founder of modern climatology and was an expert on historical climate. Lamb, incidentally was also the founder of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in 1971 (more on the CRU later in this post). He served as Director of the facility until 1978, when he was more or less ousted by a staff scientist, Tom Wigley, who was instrumental in founding the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Wigley is a passionate apocalyptic and has endeavored tirelessly (and successfully) to politicize the global warming issue. He has brought his protege, Dr. Phil Jones, on board at the CRU to assist in the management of the agenda. Jones is currently the Director of Research at the CRU.  

                      
   
Lamb's chart (Bottom) is juxtaposed to the IPCC Hockey Stick graph (top) that was compiled by Michael E. Mann, et. al. on behalf of the IPCC. It is instructive that the bottom chart was included in the IPCC's 1990 Assessment Report, while the top chart was published in the 2001 Assessment Report. Same organization, same historical records, yet totally different charts.
The data for these charts and others like them comes primarily from analysis of tree rings and ice cores, but there are also historical records consisting of paintings by European artists and archaeological study of settlements in the Far North and elsewhere. For example, during the MWP Vikings sailed through ice-free seas in the North Atlantic to establish thriving colonies on Greenland and in Nova Scotia where people raised livestock and grew crops. These colonies were more or less killed off in the 1400s by the onset of the Little Ice Age - much like a hard freeze kills agricultural output. This period was characterized by periods of ice cover on the Thames, Rhine,  Elbe, and other European rivers. Paintings of the period depicted people ice skating on European rivers, Dutch canals, the Hudson River, New York Harbor, and Chesapeake Bay. European paintings from the MWP era depict little or no snow, whereas paintings from the LIA period prominently depict snow covered landscapes and ice-covered rivers. This is compelling evidence that conveniently supplements the derived evidence from tree rings, etc. - evidence that these climate anomalies did in fact happen. But they don't show up on Professor Mann's graph. In fact, the IPCC is no longer using the graph in its literature because the chart has been so thoroughly discredited. Nevertheless, official publishings from the IPCC maintain that these climate anomalies were regional, not global, and should be discounted as part of the global record. Archaeological evidence obtained from tree rings, sediment cores, and other sources (called proxy evidence), however, support the occurrence of a significant cool period in Central America, South America, South Africa, and in the Pacific during the LIA time frame. 

So why exactly does the Hockey Stick graph not show these climate anomalies?
Professor David Deming published a paper on historic temperature trends in the journal Science in 1995 that was non-committal on the issue of climate change, but he somehow got mistaken for an AGW ideologue by another climate scientist associated with the IPCC - Dr. Jonathan Overpeck of the University of Arizona. Dr. Overpeck sent an email to Dr. Deming that said, essentially: "We must get rid of the Medieval Warm Period". Dr. Deming went public with Dr. Overpeck's strategy of re-writing history to accommodate the IPCC's position that we are currently experiencing the warmest period in millennia (and took a lot of heat for doing so). Three years later came the seminal paper authored by Mann, et. al. which included the Hockey Stick chart. Sure enough, the MWP was nowhere to be found. The LIA, in fact, shows up as being warmer than the period from the early 1800s to about 1900, which was after the LIA had supposedly ended. Go figure. To paraphrase Weather Channel co-founder John Coleman: "How can that be?"
Demming published an article entitled Global Warming is a Fraud in which he describes climate scientist Stephen Schneider's proclivity of exaggerating his scientific findings. In a 1989 article in Discover Magazine, Schneider says "we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have." Schneider concluded "each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest." Schneider's position is not unusual. In 2007, Mike Hulme, the founding director of the Tyndall Center for Climate Change Research in Britain, told the Guardian newspaper that "scientists and politicians must trade truth for influence."


Here's a link to the entire article by Deming:

http://lewrockwell.com/orig9/deming3.html



Stephen McIntyre is a Canadian statistician who at first was curious about how the AGW was handled - he wondered if there was some kind of manipulation going on. After careful analysis of numerous papers, he concluded that everything wasn't on the up and up, so he started a website called Climate Audit where he puts claims and data by AGW proponents under withering scrutiny. 
McIntyre has asked James E. Hansen if he could audit the code for his models, which forecasts dramatic upheavals in the Earth's climate within the coming century. Hansen has refused to divulge the code and the algorithms the code uses to churn out the dramatic numbers it churns out. So McIntyre took matters into his own hands - he managed to reverse engineer the code from the NASA website. What McIntyre found was that Hansen's algorithms exaggerated recent temperatures and diminished temperatures from decades past, at least in the United States. He found that the hottest year on record for the U.S. was really 1934 (during the heart of the Dust Bowl phenomenon). That knocks 1998 down to second place. 1921 came in third. Furthermore, according to the revised data, five of the top ten warmest years on record occurred before 1940, with four of the top ten occurring within the past ten years. Moreover, prior to 1934 (inclusive) eight of the previous ten years would have been the all time hottest. Funny, nobody during the 1930s was saying it was a global warming crisis, nor that the warming was man's fault.
What is particularly instructive of this discovery is that NASA (Hansen's employer) has confirmed that McIntyre's finding was accurate, but has been very low-key in publically coming clean about it. They don't want anybody in the wider populace to know.
McIntyre is looking at global data, and expects to revise those data as well, since the same code used to analyze U.S. temperatures was used to to analyze global data. 
Efforts by watchdog groups to audit climate models used by other AGW researchers have been rebuffed. McIntyre and fellow Canadian Ross McKitrick began their pursuit of examining climate models used by the CRU that predict catastrophic outcomes for the earth's climate. Predictably, modeling codes and algorithms are being kept under lock and key at the CRU facility. Freedom of Information (FOI) requests for the CRU had been rebuffed by Phil Jones time and again, but Michael Mann, author of the "Hockey Stick" graph did allow Climate Audit to review his data. What McIntyre and McKitrick discovered was that Mann had used statical tricks to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period and amplify the more recent warming trends of the 20th century. But there was a problem. When McIntyre and McKitrick tried to publish their findings in Nature they were rebuffed. Apparently the peer review editors at Nature - obviously under the sway of the interconnected CRU and IPCC, decided their paper was "too technical" and unlikely to be understood by other scientists who peruse and publish in Nature. This, of course, is hogwash - climate scientists routinely publish in Nature, which is a top-tier scientific journal where top-tier scientists from other disciplines routinely publish as well. What Nature's editors did do was allow Mann himself to publish a revision to the "Hockey Stick" data, in which Mann and McIntyre/McKitrick met halfway. It was, at best, a partial fix. The graph has since been discredited and removed from the IPCC's literature.

To further cast a shadow on the secret inner workings of the AGW scientific community, and the CRU in particular (where research is conducted with all the security of the Manhattan Project), Climategate happened! The leaked emails paint a rather sinister picture of the mindsets of the researchers at the CRU. There are emails expressing contempt and hatred towards climate skeptics on a personal level - one email even expressed joy at the recent death of John Daly, an AGW skeptic. Others discussed collaborating to have a journal editor removed who had the temerity to publish papers that countered the prevailing AGW dogma. There were many emails between scientists discussing the falsification and manipulation of historical records to, among other things, make temperatures from the past cooler than they really were in order to make it appear that we're hotter now by comparison. Other emails discussed hiding the decline of global temperatures in the 1960s and 1970s (remember the global cooling worries of the 1970s?). The writing of modeling software deliberately designed to show dire consequences for the planet with the continuing discharge of greenhouse gasses was discussed. And much more.

So the question is: Why would scientists and academics deliberately pursue such unethical ends to advance their careers? Why would they perpetuate outright fraud on such a massive scale to push their ideas? And the answer is: Money! 

Consider-

In 2005 the George C. Marshall Policy Outlook Institute, a watchdog group based in Washington DC, published a report of Federal and private funding on various research projects. According to the report, the overwhelming majority of the private funding for climate research was directed to pro-AGW scientists. Federal funding - even during the Bush years, when it's reasonable to assume funding for science was down - almost all of the funds for climate research were directed to scientists and institutions conducting pro-AGW research. 

There are no surprises here. Virtually all of the Federal money and most of the total funding from private foundations (representing special interests) has gone to AGW proponents, while little or none has been awarded to scientists who disagree with the AGW hypothesis. Scientists who disagree with the anthropogenic model are largely funded by conservative foundations and energy companies. Does that negate the validity of their research? There is no known evidence that data was falsified, but AGW proponents can make an equally persuasive argument that AGW skeptics have an agenda of their own.

Astrophysicist Dr. Willie Soon is a scientist and author who is currently at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics. He believes the sun has been getting hotter over time and is causing the warming trend on Earth. According to Dr. Soon, global warming is not our fault, it's the sun's fault.  Interestingly, Dr. Soon has had his research funding completely withdrawn by the U.S. Government because of his views. That's the price he paid for going against the grain and practicing real science. It doesn't pay to be an AGW opponent but it sure does pay to be an AGW proponent! A lot of people are getting rich by pushing the pro AGW science.
A case in point: Professor Phil Jones, Director of the CRU at East Anglia, has received over £2,750,000 in grant money since 1990. That works out to £137,500 a year - or more than $220,000, if you will. That's just grant money - it doesn't include his salary or speaking fees. And that's just one researcher. There are thousands more worldwide just like him. What a racket!

So that's the rub. It boils down to cheating to get more money. My former co-worker wanted a promotion because of his research. He got one, oddly enough, even though his project blew up in his face. It worked out for him after all, just like it's probably going to work out for the scientists practicing quack science around the world, even though Climategate blew up in their faces by exposing their fraud. What a racket!