Two Alarmist Professors Suspects in Climate Fraud
Professor Will Steffen, Executive Director of ANU Climate Change Institute College of Asia and the Pacific and The Australian National University and Professor Lesley Hughes Head of the Department of Biological Sciences at Macquarie University are named and shamed for alleged fraudulent public presentations last month.
In a damning open letter (July 9, 2013) by Australian scientists, Dr Judy Ryan and Dr Marjorie Curtis, professors Steffen and Hughes are being called out for their biased and unscientific presentations given at the Canberra Community Forum on June 17th 2013. The professors are accused of not only making “misleading” and “false” statements but it is being suggested their bogus climate claims may rise to the level of actual fraud.
Drs Ryan and Curtis have now made their letter open to the wider scientific community and the public so they may judge for themselves how egregious are the cherry picked claims of professors Steffen and Hughes.
Below we publish the full Ryan/Curtis letter so our readers can get the full picture of this sorry tale:
From: Judy Ryan
Date: 8 July 2013 3:08:19 PM AEST
Dear Professors Will Steffen and Lesley Hughes,
I recently had the pleasure of listening to you both at the June 17th Canberra Community Forum . However, I have some grave concerns about the content of your presentation.
The Climate Commission’s webpage states that it was “established to provide all Australians with an independent and reliable source of information about the science of climate change”.
Accordingly the Australian people trust you to provide them with reliable, evidence-based information. That means no exaggeration of effects, no misleading allegations and no omission of evidence that does not support your hypothesis.
As a discipline, science imposes very high standards on its practitioners. Conscious that their high standing in the community has been earned by centuries of strict objectivity, scientists themselves have adopted a strong standard themselves, see definition of the term “fraud” (see Appendix 1d of the CSIRO document http://www.conscious.com.au/docs/new/1d_appendix.pdf):
Fraud is, according to Black’s Law Dictionary, quote: “a false representation of a matter of fact, whether by words or by conduct, by false or misleading allegations, or by concealment of that which should have been disclosed, which deceives and is intended to deceive another so that he shall act upon it to his legal injury.”
We are all suffering “legal injury” as a result of the Carbon Tax and a host of other policies and administrative decisions driven by advice regarding the science of climate change. Is that advice false or misleading? Does it deceive by concealing relevant facts?
Underlying the activities of the Commission is an alarming forecast that there will be dangerous manmade global warming over coming decades if current economic activities continue unconstrained. Despite its importance for the very existence of the Commission and you and your colleagues roles, the basis of the forecast is very doubtful indeed. For example consider the audit conducted by Kesten Green and Scott Armstrong http://www.forecastingprinciples.com/files/WarmAudit31.pdf which found that the IPCC procedures violated as many as 72 of the 89 relevant forecasting principles (p. 997). Professor Armstrong is a founder of the International Institute of Forecasters, International Symposium on Forecasting, and International Journal of Forecasting. He is also editor of the Principles of Forecasting handbook.
Also consider the “Validity of Climate Change Forecasting for Public Policy Decision Making” International Journal of Forecasting 25 (2009) 826–832 by the same authors with astrophysicist Willie Soon. They found that errors in the projections of the IPCC’s scenario of exponential CO2 growth for the years 1851 to 1975 were more than seven times greater than the errors from a no change from previous year extrapolation method:
http://www.kestencgreen.com/gas-2009-validity.pdf.
Professors Steffen and Hughes, towards the end of the question time at the forum you were asked a penetrating question by Peter Bobroff who was in the audience. The question was:-
“Are we to take what you’ve said as a prospectus to the world. You’re asking the world to prescribe trillions of dollars based on your vision of the future. Are you prepared to stand by your prospectus. Are you prepared to go to jail for omission and exaggeration if that were to be the case? (53 minutes on the audio recording).
Professor Steffen you responded to the affirmative. You said “I stand behind that” when referring to 97-98{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} scientific consensus based on the peer reviewed literature (Audio 53-55 minutes).
Professor Hughes, you also responded yes to the question. However, you then attempted to redefine the definition of Peer Reviewed Literature to include the summary reports of international organizations such as the International Energy Agency (audio). Since when have reports by corporate organizations been subjected to scholarly peer review. The evidence also indicates that you have included the recommendations and writings of Greenpeace and other non governmental organizations in your “Scientific Consensus” based on Peer Reviewed Literature. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Donna_Laframboise. Both of you are recognized as prominent scientists and scholars in the field of “Climate Change”. Therefore, you are expected to act in accordance with the dictates of the Scholarly Peer Review Process.
The Wikipedia definition of scholarly peer review is … is ‘the process of subjecting an author’s scholarly work…to the scrutiny of others who are experts in the same field, before it is published…….Peer review requires a community of experts in a given (often narrowly defined) field, who are qualified and able to perform impartial review.’
The only published peer reviewed survey, that we know of, which mentions 97{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} is the one conducted by Doran and Zimmerman where the two researchers whittled down an already selective sample of 10,000 to just 77. They then reported 97{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} “scientific consensus” on the basis of two questions neither of which even mentioned CO2. http://probeinternational.org/library/wp-content/uploads/2010/12/012009_Doran_final1.pdf We believe that the publication of this seriously flawed study in a peer reviewed journal is an example of a corrupted peer review process in your field of “Climate Change.”
All other references to 97-98{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} scientific consensus on climate change are based on a system of circular referencing of each other in selected peer reviewed literature.
www.conscious.com.au/docs/new/CSIROh_20130201a.pdf
The evidence indicates that over the same time frame editors of academic journals have been bullied into either retiring from their position or rejecting research papers that do not support the CAGW hypothesis.
http://newzealandclimatechange.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/climategate-2-and-corruption-of-peer-review/
Another recent example of the corrupted peer review process in the field of Climate Change” is the fundamentally flawed Marcott hockey stick which was quietly withdrawn within a week of publication in a peer reviewed journal.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/03/14/marcotts-hockey-stick-uptick-mystery-it-didnt-used-to-be-there/ See Image 1
Professor Steffen, about 10 minutes into the presentation at the community forum you evocatively described the greenhouse effect as acting like a doona surrounding the earth which traps some of the heat that would otherwise go back out to space. You did not mention that although a warming effect of CO2 occurs in the lower atmosphere it has the opposite effect in the upper atmosphere, where it acts as a cooling agent.
To quote Dr James Russell’s work on the Nasa’a web site. “For the three day period, March 8th through 10th 2012 , the thermosphere absorbed 26 billion kWh of energy. Infrared radiation from CO2 and NO, the two most efficient coolants in the thermosphere, re-radiated 95{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of that total back into space.
http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/sunearth/news/solarstorm-power.html See Image 2
Why did you omit to mention that important fact. Do you not concede that if it is correct we are wasting trillions of dollars trying to find a solution to a non-existent or insolvable problem.
Professor Hughes at about 16 minutes in you stated “most of the observations are matching the climate models pretty closely, but in some cases the climate models are proving to be a bit too conservative”.
In my opinion that is an extremely misleading allegation, because as you must be aware, the recent analysis of 73 IPCC climate models by John Christie and Roy Spencer shows the opposite. As you can see below every model overestimated the degree of global warming when compared to direct satellite and balloon observations.
http://www.drroyspencer.com/2013/06/still-epic-fail-73-climate-models-vs-measurements-running-5-year-means/ See Image 3
My question (40 mins audio) addressed this disparity between direct observations (i.e reality) and the IPCC climate change models. Professor Steffen you blithely dismissed the evidence of direct observations as a short pause in global warming, and assured the audience that when you look at a longer time frame the warming “trend” is clearly apparent. Can you please explain why you say the warming trend is clearly apparent over a longer time frame, because it cannot be detected in either of these two graphs. The graphs clearly show that global warming is nowhere near being statistically significant at a level which warrants any departure from the null hypothesis.
Source: Murry Salby August 2011 (See Image 4)
Source: Teaching Material from Dr Marjorie Curtis (Note that the scale of the left hand side is condensed to fit on the page) (See Image 5)
Professor Steffen, I particularly object to the misleading manner in which you use the word ‘trend’. As you know the statistical definition of trend is non significant change, i.e. could have occurred by chance and/or could be natural variation. To imply that a trend is apparent and something to be concerned about, in my opinion, is a false allegation.
Its also interesting that the short discussion that occurred before my question, when it was realized that the microphone had been given to a known skeptic, is not on the audio, which we captured live at the forum. In my opinion, this is robust evidence of a failed attempt to prevent disclosure of research and evidence that would have contradicted the CAGW hypothesis. In my opinion you attempted to deceive the people of Canberra who attended that forum.
Finally to show a movie at the forum which contained incorrect and clearly misleading graphics, such as the screen shot, below is misleading and false. As you well know CO2 is an odorless, transparent, nontoxic, essential greenhouse trace gas, yet you depict it as black and polluting.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rn5p0IhVVAo&feature=player_embedded (To watch Video) (see Image 6)
For further information regarding unscientific practice please refer to Appendices 9b and 9e of the CSIROh document http://www.conscious.com.au/docs/new/9_appendix.pdf.
In closing, Dr Curtis and I believe that as ethical scientists it is our duty to bring these issues to your attention and that of other concerned scientists and citizens. If you think that anything we have said here is untrue please click ‘reply all’ and let us know and we will apologize. We have also sent this email by mail to both of you, so that even if you are unable to access your email for a few days you will still get this important letter and have the opportunity to respond. Please do this before the 1st August 2013.
by
Dr Judy Ryan and Dr Marjorie Curtis
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