Climate Data Information

If you’ve found this review you probably know the story but basically it is this. Temperatures before the middle of the 19th century can only be estimated indirectly from proxies: physically measurable characteristics of plants or animals which lived at earlier times and which respond to temperature changes. In 1999 a young climate researcher, Michael Mann, and colleagues published a paper in Nature which suggested that temperatures at the end of the 20th century were higher than at any time in the previous 600 years. The graph of this, shaped like an ice-hockey stick, became iconic and appeared several times in the IPCC 2001 technical assessment report and elsewhere. In 2002 a retired mining engineer, Steve McIntyre, became suspicious of the fact that the paper both contradicted conventional wisdom and gave an ideal message for climate change activists that he started to investigate. His findings led to Congress setting up to two high level technical enquiries and a congressional comm

The Reader’s Digest magazine used to publish what they referred to as “unexpurgated abridgements.” By this they meant that they had left in the exiting bits and cut out the boring bits. This book could be considered an “unexpurgated abridgement” of the IPCC 2004 Technical Assessment Report. A lot of the detailed science has been left out but the elevated temperatures and other symptoms associated with an attack of ‘dire era’ are given lurid prominence. The book does give a clear and approachable synopsis of how our climate operates and how human activity can lead to changes. As an introduction to the science, the book is quite good. It is clearly written and has good supporting material. It also tackles some of the issues raised by sceptics. In a recent double interview in Discover magazine with Judith Curry and Michael Mann, Judith Curry drew a nice distinction between ‘political sceptics’, who do not want climate change to be true, and ‘scientific sceptics’, whose opinions are based

“I feel that it is important to not let bad, politically motivated science stand unchallenged.“ This is a quote we could all agree with and is part of the motivation behind our site. Only too often both ‘deniers’ and ‘warmists’ select a sub-set of the available science and then push it beyond reasonable limits to further their cause. Our mission is to sort out the justifiable from the bogus. The authors of this book are, to use the current term, ‘warmists’. Their book is based largely on the IPCC 2007 assessment report which both of them contributed to. To their credit the authors have managed to avoid some of the recent brick-bats thrown at the IPCC. They do not repeat the scientifically dubious claims regarding Himalayan glaciers, African agriculture or the Amazonian rain forest. What is more they found no space in their book for any reference to Dr Pachauri, Chairman of the IPCC, whose commercialisation of the IPCC in the interest of organisations he is associated with has attract