GORE LIED:
Two years ago, British High Court Justice Michael Burton characterized Gore's film as "alarmism and exaggeration in support of his political thesis." The court, responding to a case filed by a parent, said the film was "one-sided" and could not be shown in British schools unless it contained guidelines to balance Gore's attempt at "political indoctrination."FOUR CENTURIES OF REAL ACCURATE AND CONSISTENTLY TAKEN BRITISH RECORDS SHOW NO WARMING:The judge based his decision on nine inaccuracies in the movie. The Gore-loving U.S. media largely ignored the story, but starting premiere night Oct. 18, Americans will hear it in Not Evil Just Wrong. To set the stage, here is a recap of Gore's claims and why they are flawed:
- The claim: Melting in Greenland or West Antarctica will cause sea levels to rise up to 20 feet in the near future. The truth: The Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change concluded that sea levels might rise 20 feet over millennia -- and it waffled on that prediction. The IPCC envisions a rise of no more than 7 inches to 23 inches by 2100. Gore's claim is "a very disturbing misstatement of the science," John Day, who argued the British case, says in Not Evil Just Wrong. The judge said Gore's point "is not in line with the scientific consensus.
- The claim: Polar bears are drowning because they have to swim farther to find ice. The truth: Justice Burton noted that the only study citing the drowning of polar bears (four of them) blamed the deaths on a storm, not ice that is melting due to manmade global warming. The Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, furthermore, found that the current bear population is 20,000-25,000, up from 5,000-10,000 in the 1950s and 1960s. Day says in Not Evil Just Wrong that the appeal to polar bears is "a very clever piece of manipulation."
- The claim: Global warming spawned Hurricane Katrina in 2005. The truth: "It is common ground that there is insufficient evidence to show that," Burton wrote in his ruling. A May 2007 piece in New Scientist refuted the Katrina argument as a "climate myth" because it's impossible to tie any single weather event to global warming.
- The claim: Increases in temperature are the result of increases in carbon dioxide. The truth: Burton questioned the two graphs Gore used in An Inconvenient Truth. Gore argued that there is "an exact fit" between temperature and CO2, Burton said, but his graphs didn't support that conclusion. Recent data also do not support it: The global temperature has been declining for about a decade, even as CO2 levels continue rising.
- The claim: The snow on Mount Kilimanjaro is melting because of global warming. The truth: The melting has been under way for more than a century -- long before SUVs and jumbo jets -- and appears to be the result of other causes. Justice Burton noted that scientists agree the melting can't be blamed primarily on "human-induced climate change."
- The claim: Lake Chad is disappearing because of global warming. The truth: Lake Chad is losing water, and humans are contributing to the losses. But the humans in the lake's immediate vicinity, rather than mankind as a whole using fossil fuels, are to blame. Burton cited factors like population, overgrazing and regional climate variability.
- The claim: People are being forced to evacuate low-lying Pacific atolls, islands of coral that surround lagoons, because of encroaching ocean waters. The truth: By their very nature, atolls are susceptible to rising sea levels. But Burton said pointedly in his ruling, "There is no evidence of any such evacuation having yet happened."
- The claim: Coral reefs are bleaching and putting fish in jeopardy. The truth: In his ruling, Burton emphasized the IPCC's finding that bleaching could kill coral reefs -- if they don't adapt. A report released this year shows that reefs already are thriving in waters as hot as some people say ocean waters will be 100 years from now. Burton also said it is difficult to separate coral stresses such as over-fishing from any changes in climate.
- The claim: Global warming could stop the "ocean conveyor," triggering another ice age in Western Europe. The truth: Once again, Gore's allies at the IPCC disagree with that argument. Burton cited the panel in concluding that "it is very unlikely that the ocean conveyor ... will shut down in the future." The fact that the scientific understanding of how the conveyor belt works remains unsettled further exposes the flaw in Gore's claim.
No Global Warming in 351 Year British Temperature Record
The Central England Temperature (CET) record, starting in 1659 and maintained by the UK Met Office, is the longest unbroken temperature record in the world. Temperature data is averaged for a number of weather stations regarded as being representative of Central England rather than measuring temperature at one arbitrary geographical point identified as the centre of England.
A Scottish statistician, Wilson Flood, has collected and analysed the 351 year CET record. Here is the comparison of the 18th Century with the 20th Century:
Wilson Flood comments:
“Summers in the second half of the 20th century were warmer than those in the first half and it could be argued that this was a global warming signal. However, the average CET summer temperature in the 18th century was 15.46 degC while that for the 20th century was 15.35 degC. Far from being warmer due to assumed global warming, comparison of actual temperature data shows that UK summers in the 20th century were cooler than those of two centuries previously.”
THE FAMOUS HOCKEY STICK WAS DELIBERATELY FALSIFIED TO SHOW WARMING WHERE THERE IS NONE:
Ross McKitrick: Defects in key climate data are uncovered
Only by playing with data can scientists come up with the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph of global warming
By Ross McKitrick
B
eginning in 2003, I worked with Stephen McIntyre to replicate a famous result in paleoclimatology known as the Hockey Stick graph. Developed by a U.S. climatologist named Michael Mann, it was a statistical compilation of tree ring data supposedly proving that air temperatures had been stable for 900 years, then soared off the charts in the 20th century. Prior to the publication of the Hockey Stick, scientists had held that the medieval-era was warmer than the present, making the scale of 20th century global warming seem relatively unimportant. The dramatic revision to this view occasioned by the Hockey Stick’s publication made it the poster child of the global warming movement. It was featured prominently in a 2001 report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as government websites and countless review reports.
Steve and I showed that the mathematics behind the Mann Hockey Stick were badly flawed, such that its shape was determined by suspect bristlecone tree ring data. Controversies quickly piled up: Two expert panels involving the U.S. National Academy of Sciences were asked to investigate, the U.S. Congress held a hearing, and the media followed the story around the world.
The expert reports upheld all of our criticisms of the Mann Hockey Stick, both of the mathematics and of its reliance on flawed bristlecone pine data. One of the panels, however, argued that while the Mann Hockey Stick itself was flawed, a series of other studies published since 1998 had similar shapes, thus providing support for the view that the late 20th century is unusually warm. The IPCC also made this argument in its 2007 report. But the second expert panel, led by statistician Edward Wegman, pointed out that the other studies are not independent. They are written by the same small circle of authors, only the names are in different orders, and they reuse the same few data climate proxy series over and over.
Most of the proxy data does not show anything unusual about the 20th century. But two data series have reappeared over and over that do have a hockey stick shape. One was the flawed bristlecone data that the National Academy of Sciences panel said should not be used, so the studies using it can be set aside. The second was a tree ring curve from the Yamal Peninsula in Siberia, compiled by UK scientist Keith Briffa.
Briffa had published a paper in 1995 claiming that the medieval period actually contained the coldest year of the millennium. But this claim depended on just three tree ring records (called cores) from the Polar Urals. Later, a colleague of his named F. H. Schweingruber produced a much larger sample from the Polar Urals, but it told a very different story: The medieval era was actually quite warm and the late 20th century was unexceptional. Briffa and Schweingruber never published those data, instead they dropped the Polar Urals altogether from their climate reconstruction papers.
In its place they used a new series that Briffa had calculated from tree ring data from the nearby Yamal Peninsula that had a pronounced Hockey Stick shape: relatively flat for 900 years then sharply rising in the 20th century. This Yamal series was a composite of an undisclosed number of individual tree cores. In order to check the steps involved in producing the composite, it would be necessary to have the individual tree ring measurements themselves. But Briffa didn’t release his raw data.
Over the next nine years, at least one paper per year appeared in prominent journals using Briffa’s Yamal composite to support a hockey stick-like result. The IPCC relied on these studies to defend the Hockey Stick view, and since it had appointed Briffa himself to be the IPCC Lead Author for this topic, there was no chance it would question the Yamal data.
Despite the fact that these papers appeared in top journals like Nature and Science, none of the journal reviewers or editors ever required Briffa to release his Yamal data. Steve McIntyre’s repeated requests for them to uphold their own data disclosure rules were ignored.
Then in 2008 Briffa, Schweingruber and some colleagues published a paper using the Yamal series (again) in a journal called the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, which has very strict data-sharing rules. Steve sent in his customary request for the data, and this time an editor stepped up to the plate, ordering the authors to release their data. A short while ago the data appeared on the Internet. Steve could finally begin to unpack the Yamal composite.
It turns out that many of the samples were taken from dead (partially fossilized) trees and they have no particular trend. The sharp uptrend in the late 20th century came from cores of 10 living trees alive as of 1990, and five living trees alive as of 1995. Based on scientific standards, this is too small a sample on which to produce a publication-grade proxy composite. The 18th and 19th century portion of the sample, for instance, contains at least 30 trees per year. But that portion doesn’t show a warming spike. The only segment that does is the late 20th century, where the sample size collapses. Once again a dramatic hockey stick shape turns out to depend on the least reliable portion of a dataset.
But an even more disquieting discovery soon came to light. Steve searched a paleoclimate data archive to see if there were other tree ring cores from at or near the Yamal site that could have been used to increase the sample size. He quickly found a large set of 34 up-to-date core samples, taken from living trees in Yamal by none other than Schweingruber himself! Had these been added to Briffa’s small group the 20th century would simply be flat. It would appear completely unexceptional compared to the rest of the millennium.
Combining data from different samples would not have been an unusual step. Briffa added data from another Schweingruber site to a different composite, from the Taimyr Peninsula. The additional data were gathered more than 400 km away from the primary site. And in that case the primary site had three or four times as many cores to begin with as the Yamal site. Why did he not fill out the Yamal data with the readily-available data from his own coauthor? Why did Briffa seek out additional data for the already well-represented Taimyr site and not for the inadequate Yamal site?
Thus the key ingredient in most of the studies that have been invoked to support the Hockey Stick, namely the Briffa Yamal series, depends on the influence of a woefully thin subsample of trees and the exclusion of readily-available data for the same area. Whatever is going on here, it is not science.
I have been probing the arguments for global warming for well over a decade. In collaboration with a lot of excellent coauthors I have consistently found that when the layers get peeled back, what lies at the core is either flawed, misleading or simply non-existent. The surface temperature data is a contaminated mess with a significant warm bias, and as I have detailed elsewhere the IPCC fabricated evidence in its 2007 report to cover up the problem. Climate models are in gross disagreement with observations, and the discrepancy is growing with each passing year. The often-hyped claim that the modern climate has departed from natural variability depended on flawed statistical methods and low-quality data. The IPCC review process, of which I was a member last time, is nothing at all like what the public has been told: Conflicts of interest are endemic, critical evidence is systematically ignored and there are no effective checks and balances against bias or distortion.
I get exasperated with fellow academics, and others who ought to know better, who pile on to the supposed global warming consensus without bothering to investigate any of the glaring scientific discrepancies and procedural flaws. Over the coming few years, as the costs of global warming policies mount and the evidence of a crisis continues to collapse, perhaps it will become socially permissible for people to start thinking for themselves again. In the meantime I am grateful for those few independent thinkers, like Steve McIntyre, who continue to ask the right questions and insist on scientific standards of openness and transparency.
Ross McKitrick is a professor of environmental economics at the University of Guelph, and coauthor of Taken By Storm: The Troubled Science, Policy and Politics of Global Warming.
Top 10 GISS U.S. Temperature deviation (deg C) in New Order 8/7/2007
Year Old New 1934 1.23 1.25 1998 1.24 1.23 1921 1.12 1.15 2006 1.23 1.13 1931 1.08 1.08 1999 0.94 0.93 1953 0.91 0.90 1990 0.88 0.87 1938 0.85 0.86 1939 0.84 0.85
CO2 IS HARMLESS.
AGW = BS.
AGW ALARMISTS: STFU.
OBAMA: REPEAL THE EPA CO2 REGS.
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