Believe what you like
Christopher Booker in the Telegraph:
The chief defence offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC’s last 2007 report is that they were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document. OK, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035; that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent; that sea levels were rising dangerously; that hurricanes, droughts and other “extreme weather events” were getting worse. These were a handful of isolated errors in a massive report; behind them the mighty edifice of global warming orthodoxy remains unscathed. The “science is settled”, the “consensus” is intact.
But this completely misses the point. Put the errors together and it can be seen that one after another they tick off all the central, iconic issues of the entire global warming saga. Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves all becoming more frequent.
All these alarms were given special prominence in the IPCC’s 2007 report and each of them has now been shown to be based, not on hard evidence, but on scare stories, derived not from proper scientists but from environmental activists. Those glaciers are not vanishing; the damage to the rainforest is not from climate change but logging and agriculture; African crop yields are more likely to increase than diminish; the modest rise in sea levels is slowing not accelerating; hurricane activity is lower than it was 60 years ago; droughts were more frequent in the past; there has been no increase in floods or heatwaves.
Furthermore, it has also emerged in almost every case that the decision to include these scare stories rather than hard scientific evidence was deliberate. As several IPCC scientists have pointed out about the scare over Himalayan glaciers, for instance, those responsible for including it were well aware that proper science said something quite different. But it was inserted nevertheless – because that was the story wanted by those in charge.
In addition, we can now read in shocking detail the truth of the outrageous efforts made to ensure that the same 2007 report was able to keep on board IPCC’s most shameless stunt of all –- the notorious “hockey stick” graph purporting to show that in the late 20th century, temperatures had been hurtling up to unprecedented levels. This was deemed necessary because, after the graph was made the centrepiece of the IPCC’s 2001 report, it had been exposed as no more than a statistical illusion. (For a full account see Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion, and also my own book The Real Global Warming Disaster.)
Al Gore in the NYT:
We can’t wish away climate change…I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.
It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.
But the scientific enterprise will never be completely free of mistakes. What is important is that the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged. It is also worth noting that the panel’s scientists — acting in good faith on the best information then available to them — probably underestimated the range of sea-level rise in this century, the speed with which the Arctic ice cap is disappearing and the speed with which some of the large glacial flows in Antarctica and Greenland are melting and racing to the sea.
Because these and other effects of global warming are distributed globally, they are difficult to identify and interpret in any particular location. For example, January was seen as unusually cold in much of the United States. Yet from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.
Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.
One of these days, something’s probably got to give.
March 3rd, 2010 at 9:58 am
” from a global perspective, it was the second-hottest January since surface temperatures were first measured 130 years ago.”
This is how Al Gore continues to fool the media and the public. Back 130 years ago what were we using to measure temperature? Old inaccurate thermometers. And how many surface temperature readings were taken back 130 years ago? A few hundred perhaps. And where were these temperature measurements taken? Primarily at a few places like at universities in eastern Europe, along the US eatern seaboard and a few other limited locations in Asia and Australia, Russia. There is no way you can say that a few hundred inaccurate temperature reading taken at a limited series of locations can even come close to representing a global average temperature. There is no global perspective as Gore says. Gore makes it sound like temperature readings taken 130 years ago are just as good as those taken today. What a showman.
The only global temperatures which count are those taken by satelite, and they start in the 1970′s. That’s only 35 years of readings.
March 3rd, 2010 at 10:21 am
When ALL errors serve to more strongly support a conclusion, they can’t be random. They aren’t errors. They are lies. Liars merit suspicion and distrust. They’ve earned it.
The problem now is not merely convincing me. It’s getting me to pay attention to a liar.
March 3rd, 2010 at 2:07 pm
So, you really want to trust only satellite data? — “January, according to satellite (data), was the hottest January we’ve ever seen,” said Neville Nicholls of Monash University’s School of Geography and Environmental Science in Melbourne. “Last November was the hottest November we’ve ever seen, November-January as a whole is the hottest November-January the world has seen,” he said of the satellite data record since 1979. He said, “It’s not warming the same everywhere but it is really quite challenging to find places that haven’t warmed in the past 50 years.”
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) said in December that 2000-2009 was the hottest decade since records began in 1850, and that 2009 would likely be the fifth warmest year on record. WMO data show that eight out of the 10 hottest years on record have all been since 2000. Of course, as long as it’s snowing somewhere, scientists will still have the wearisome task of reminding the less complicated folks among us that there’s a difference between weather and climate: “Global warming is a trend superimposed upon natural variability, variability that still exists despite global warming,” said Kevin Walsh, associate professor of meteorology at the University of Melbourne.
March 3rd, 2010 at 4:32 pm
I’m perfectly willing to believe that the global mean temperature has increased since 1850, but there’s something badly wrong with that excerpt–we don’t have 50 years worth of satellite temperature data.
Steve, please try to contribute something useful to the discussion, rather than this random garbage.
March 4th, 2010 at 4:06 am
Those old temps can also be played with, and have been. There are many instances of deliberate fraud, where a warmer location (usually in a city, rather than rural) was chosen because it fit the warming agenda.
Once you have a study with consistent alteration of facts to fit an agenda, you really have nothing at all. There is a clear bias, and it goes beyond just the unintended kind … this was deliberate.
We need a new batch of studies by new scientists that won’t get more money or prestige, by coming up with a preferred outcome.
March 4th, 2010 at 4:21 am
Steve,
Yes, I’ll take sat data. But you’re right, not just by itself. ALL of the other data must be included. That means all of the Canadian readings (not just a select 20% to 25% of those available) and all of the Russian readings (including those–approximately 1500 I believe–that were not included in CRU’s work). At the same time we should leave out the unsubstantiated observations of mountain climbers, readings from particulate matter collection sites that are sited downwind of active volcanoes and all of the readings from sites that even NOAA says are in hot spots that don’t meet their collection standards.
As a marketing person, I’m used to working with numbers. I can just about make them say anything I want them to. But the science they are grasping at–if as serious as they and you say it is–deserves to be worked with honestly and seriously and be totally open to review. After all, they are not trying to figure out the cleverest way to sell cereal!
March 4th, 2010 at 2:47 pm
I’m leaning toward revising my position that we need to start over and do a whole new study … we probably don’t need to spend billions more researching whether there is a half degree of warming, or waste money guessing about all the hundreds of contributing factors.
There will always be bias, and we will probably never change the weather anyway. If it was one degree warmer or cooler 100 years ago, does it really matter?
March 7th, 2010 at 7:43 am
One leading Republican, Sen. Lindsey Graham of South Carolina, warned his party last week that embracing climate change deniers could pose long-term problems. Graham has been trying to hammer out a compromise climate and energy bill with Sens. John Kerry, D-Mass., and Joseph Lieberman, I-Conn.
“You can have a genuine debate about the science of climate change, but when you say that those who believe it are buying a hoax and are wacky people, you are putting at risk your party’s future with younger people,” Graham told New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman.
White House officials and environmentalists lobbying for a bipartisan climate bill say the science scandals have not cost them any potential swing votes, Republican or Democrat.
Many of the same polls that show Americans doubting climate science also show support for emissions limits to boost energy independence and create “clean energy” jobs — the arguments supporters have used to sell the climate bill for more than a year.
“The vast majority of people support the bill because of the benefits,” said Tony Kreindler, a spokesman for the Environmental Defense Fund, “and not because of the science.”