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an hir series 1 2 3 4
Introduction In Part
1 of this series, we presented evidence
and arguments to support all of the following: 1) Contrary to media insistence and
popular belief, many—perhaps even most—climate scientists disagree that
global warming is man-made (‘anthropogenic’). 2) What proponents of the anthropogenic
hypothesis have touted as their ‘best’ evidence—the Antarctic ice-core
record—actually contradicts the hypothesis: changes in CO2 concentrations
always follow temperature changes (not the other way around) in the 650,000
years that the ice-core record covers (known as the “CO2 lag.”) 3) Proponents of the anthropogenic
hypothesis do not have a good comeback to the challenge of the ice-core
evidence. 4) Proponents of the anthropogenic
hypothesis have used data-sets with a warm bias in order to increase the
apparent temperature increase in the years 1979-1998. 5) Proponents of the anthropogenic
hypothesis have actively censored, suppressed, and misused the work and names
of those scientists who disagree with them (this scandal is now known to the
public as ‘Climategate’). The above is
impossible without the collaboration of important centers of power such as,
for example, the UN and its IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change),
or the Nobel committee that awards ‘peace’ prizes. Such collaborating centers
of power are multifarious and, I claim, include the mainstream media. As a test of
my claim, consider this. Governments all over the world are considering—and
even implementing—profound policy changes on the basis of the anthropogenic
hypothesis. This is a big issue. Since the evidence that was supposedly the
most dramatic in its favor—the Antarctic ice-core record—contradicts the hypothesis, isn’t this a major scandal? In a free
market for information, shouldn’t we expect this to be newsworthy? Wouldn’t
it be fun to embarrass Al Gore (especially after his ‘peace’ prize) for
posing with the ice-core graph as if it were his take-home trophy? Wouldn’t
this sell a lot of magazines and newspapers, and bring more viewers to TV
news shows? So I ask: Has anybody in the mainstream Western media bothered to
inform the public about this? I posed the
question to the search-engine Lexis-Nexis, which contains a database of most
of the important mainstream news sources in the West. I asked it to give me
any mentions of “CO2 lag,” for this is the label commonly employed to talk
about how CO2 always lags temperature changes in the ice core record. And I
asked Lexis-Nexis to search everywhere: “Major US and World publications,”
“News Wire Services,” and “TV and Radio Broadcast Transcripts,” leaving out
only the non-English language sources. The grand total was… six results.
These are not from world media powerhouses but from The Advertiser (Australia), the Sydney Morning Herald (Australia), The Toronto Sun (Canada), and Business
Wire.[1] The earliest
result is from 2005. And yet the first scientific study showing that changes
in CO2 concentrations always lagged temperature changes was published in Science in 1999.[11b] So
we have 6 results spread over 11 years, or less than one result per year.
This is the statistical equivalent of total, absolute silence in the
mainstream Western media. That seemed too little, so I tried a little harder. I asked
Lexis-Nexis for any mention of “ice core” and the number 800, for that is the
average number of years that CO2 lags temperature changes. This found some
more articles that mentioned the problem without using the label ‘CO2 lag,’
and a couple even went as far back as 2001 (a sampling in the footnote).[1a] They were
only a few, however, and once again not from world media powerhouses but
mostly wire services (that nobody except professional journalists use) and
relatively small newspapers, such as the Coventry
Evening Telegraph. I looked among the results for The New York Times and The
Washington Post: they didn’t figure. The Wall Street Journal? Nothing. The Financial Times? Nothing. The International
Herald-Tribune? Nothing. The
Economist? Zip. Among the major TV news services only FOX commented on
this (and it did so lightly). This helps
explain why every hand goes up when I ask my university students if they
believe in man-made global warming. But it raises numerous questions. Something is
definitely wrong with the media. A
comprehensive survey of the media’s behavior on this topic would consume too
much space, so I have chosen instead to focus closely on one prominent and
representative example: Newsweek. ____________________________________________________________ Newsweek
explains “climate change denial” On 13 August
2007 Newsweek published a cover
story by senior editor Sharon Begley with the title “The Truth About Denial” which the Wikipedia article on “Climate Change
Denial” considers important.[2] The label suggests a psychopathology (as in
“living in denial”), a moral deficiency (as in “Holocaust denial”), or both.
According to Begley, there is a massive and malicious “campaign” afoot to
“deny” what she insists is the reality of man-made global warming. She
writes: “Since the late 1980s, this well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by
contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a
paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change. ...‘They patterned what they
did after the tobacco industry,’ says former senator Tim Wirth, who
spearheaded environmental issues as an under secretary of State in the
Clinton administration. ...‘That’s had a huge impact on both the public and
Congress.’ ”[3] For Begley it
is impossible that any climatologists with honest doubts about global warming
can exist. These are, rather, “contrarian scientists” backed by “industry” in
a vast right-wing (or “free market”) conspiracy against the anthropogenic
hypothesis. But instead of documenting this “well-coordinated, well-funded
campaign” Begley limits herself to quoting a politician who lobbies for
greenhouse-gas reductions and who considers his intellectual opponents no
better than tobacco companies. According to
another politician quoted by Begley, skeptics are no better than oil companies: “Sen. Barbara Boxer had been chair of the Senate’s Environment
Committee for less than a month when the verdict landed last February.
‘Warming of the climate system is unequivocal,’ concluded a report by 600
scientists from governments, academia, green groups and businesses in 40
countries. Worse, there was now at least a 90 percent likelihood that the
release of greenhouse gases from the burning of fossil fuels is causing
longer droughts, more flood-causing downpours and worse heat waves, way up
from earlier studies. Those who doubt the reality of human-caused climate
change have spent decades disputing that. But Boxer figured that with ‘the
overwhelming science out there, the deniers’ days were numbered.’ As she left
a meeting with the head of the international climate panel, however, a
staffer had some news for her. A conservative think tank long funded by
ExxonMobil, she told Boxer, had offered scientists $10,000 to write articles
undercutting the new report and the computer-based climate models it is based
on. ‘I realized,’ says Boxer, ‘there was a movement behind this that just
wasn’t giving up.’ ” Notice, once
again, that Begley does not have an in-depth investigation. Or an
investigation. She reports what a politician invested in the policy changes
demanded by the anthropogenic camp, Barbara Boxer, said that one of her staffers told
her. (Begley is senior editor at Newsweek
and a recipient of multiple awards—this is journalism.) And what did the
staffer say? With a properly inflammatory interpretation, that skeptical
scientists were receiving money from a think tank funded in part by Exxon
Mobil. It will be
useful here briefly to rehearse why science works. Those who publish in
scientific journals are expected to make their data available, to explain how
they were obtained, and to justify logically how the data support the
conclusions. Such requirements of transparency make it possible for others to
challenge the data, the methods, or the logic. Popular belief holds that
scientists should be unbiased or impartial, but this is a gross
misunderstanding that misses the point entirely. Science is in fact quite
similar—in this respect—to the adversarial system of law, where the biased
motivations of the opposing lawyers are depended upon to make the system
work. If different scientists didn’t have opposing biases, and therefore an
incentive to prove each other wrong, there could be no science—it would be another dogmatic religion where nobody
ever learns anything new. For a Nobel Prize in ‘peace’ one may star in one’s
own movie (Al Gore) or launch a terrorist career killing Jews (Yasser
Arafat), but for a Nobel in science it will be better to show that an entire
generation of one’s fellow scientists had been wrong. So the last thing we
want is for debate to stop merely because “600 scientists from governments,
academia, green groups and businesses in 40 countries” agree with Al Gore. If
think tanks—even “free market” think tanks partly funded by oil
companies—support skeptical research, this is good for science. Now, Begley writes
as if the skeptics have an overwhelming advantage in funds. But according to
Senator James Inholfe’s blog, when Begley
did that, “Newsweek knew
better,” because “reporter Eve Conant,” who collaborated with Begley on that
article, “interviewed Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the Ranking Member of the
Environment & Public Works Committee, [and] was given all the latest data
proving conclusively that it is the proponents of man-made global warming fears
that enjoy a monumental funding advantage over the skeptics. (A whopping $50 BILLION to a paltry $19
MILLION and some change for skeptics…)”[3a] $50,000,000,000
to $19,000,000... That’s a big difference. A 3 to 1 difference, say, would
already have been worrisome. But here we are talking about a whole different
ballpark: 2,632 to 1. Such astronomical numbers help explain why many
scientists would join the ‘consensus’ supporting the anthropogenic
hypothesis. It also helps
explain what we covered in Part
1: We’ve seen a prominent physicist
explain that global warming models all agree on greenhouse gases as the main
culprit because the big research money is actually for scientists who support
the anthropogenic hypothesis, so the modelers tweak their parameters to get
the dollars. In Begley’s
representation, powerful “industry,” Goliath,
creates a “denial machine...running at full throttle” to “shape…government
policy” over the helpless protests of David
(anthropogenically-minded scientists), but the facts she herself reports
suggest otherwise. She writes: “[L]ast September Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger signed a landmark law
committing California to reduce statewide emissions of carbon dioxide to 1990
levels by 2020 and 80 percent more by 2050. And this year both Minnesota and
New Jersey passed laws requiring their states to reduce greenhouse emissions
80 percent below recent levels by 2050. In January, nine leading
corporations—including Alcoa, Caterpillar, Duke Energy, Du Pont and General Electric—called
on Congress to ‘enact strong national legislation’ to reduce greenhouse
gases.” Plenty of
greenhouse-gas reductions are being approved. Industrial giants such as
“Alcoa, Caterpillar, Duke Energy, Du Pont, and General Electric” want
more—much more. And I learn from The
Economist that “BP,” or British Petroleum, no less, is “the most
prominent corporate advocate of action on climate change.”[4] An oil
company! So the anthropogenic hypothesis has powerful allies in Big Business
and Government. Where is the “well-coordinated, well-funded campaign” by
“industry” to silence this hypothesis? Are we supposed to agree that finding
one think tank giving out mere ten-thousand-dollar awards—in a science that
costs millions of dollars—will count as evidence? Or does it become a
“well-coordinated, well-funded campaign” if some of that money came from one oil company? Begley’s
argument would be stronger if she could show, for example, that oil companies
intimidate scientists who agree with the anthropogenic hypothesis, but she
documents no such harassment. She does not even accuse that it happens. And
as the Climategate scandal revealed, it appears that partisans of the
hypothesis are the ones who feel strong enough to bully and censor the
skeptics into silence (Part
1). Consistent
with this, three weeks before Begley’s article appeared in Newsweek, an incident was reported in
the Washington Times that Begley
doesn’t mention (but which perhaps motivated her piece as a kind of ‘damage
control’): [Quote from the Washington Times
begins here] Green bully The heat is obviously getting to Michael T. Eckhart, president of the
American Council On Renewable Energy (ACORE). Two weeks ago, this column published a threatening letter he wrote to
Marlo Lewis, senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI),
concerning ‘global warming.’ Then last week, Mr. Eckhart issued an apology,
expressing regret for calling Mr. Lewis disparaging names and threatening to
“destroy” his “career” as a “liar” - all because Mr. Lewis does not share Mr.
Eckhart’s opinions on the cause of climate change. [Quote from Washington Times
ends here] I interrupt to
point out that Marlo Lewis’s criticisms of the anthropogenic warming
hypothesis are extremely weak. And, contrary to what the Washington Times states, he does not appear to disagree “on the
cause of climate change.” He says, for example, that “global warming is real
and much of the warming since the mid-1970s is likely due to rising
greenhouse gas levels from fossil energy use and other human activities.” I
thought that was Al Gore’s
argument. This is a skeptic? Lewis’s differences with Al Gore are just these
two: he disagrees that warming will be catastrophic, and he believes
economically viable alternatives to fossil fuels do not exist.[5] But this is enough to send Michael Eckhart
spinning with rage, for he threatens to “destroy” Marlo Lewis. It is also
enough to prompt Sharon Begley’s accusations of a vast conspiracy to ‘deny’
global warming. For as we see below, Marlo Lewis’s Competitive Enterprise
Institute is the very think tank—unnamed in Begley’s article—that gets some
of its money from Exxon Mobil. [Quote from Washington Times
continues here] Now, Inside the Beltway learned that Mr. Lewis isn’t the only
recipient of Mr. Eckhart’s vitriol. He wrote to Competitive Enterprise Institute President Fred Smith on
Sept. 25, 2006. “Following up on our meeting at the Rocky Mountain retreat
last spring with Al Gore, I am writing to say that I am very unhappy to see
this continuing false analysis coming out of CEI, seeking to refute the issue
of global warming.” He said it’s surprising a “scientist” like Mr. Smith could “refute”
global warming, and “your voice and that of CEI ... will have the ultimate
effect of putting my two daughters’ lives at greater risk, and even more so
for their children.” “The only explanation that I can see is that you are doing this
because you are paid by Exxon Mobil and other clients to do so. I find this
outrageous, that my children will have a lesser life because you are being
paid by oil companies to spread a false story. “As I said to you at the time, I would give you 90 days to show that
CEI is reversing its position on this, or I will take every action I can
think of to shut you down,” Mr. Eckhart wrote. “I am writing to demand that
you and CEI reverse course on this, and do so loudly and publicly, within 30
days, or I will personally file on Oct. 25, 2006, two complaints: “1. A complaint with the IRS to have CEI’s tax exemption revoked, on
the basis that CEI is really a lobbyist for the energy industry; 2. A
complaint with Phi Beta Kappa that your key should be withdrawn for using
your mathematical skills to do the world harm ... You have 30 days to speak
the truth, or face the IRS and PBK.”[6] [Quote from Washington Times
ends here] Why would
Eckhart behave this way? Aside from
certain components of personality that are necessary for such outbursts, it
is relevant that Eckhart’s professional future as President of ACORE
(American Council on Renewable Energy) presumably depends on convincing ACORE
members that he is making renewable energy an important part of the economy.
Thus, for example, when Congress and the Bush administration approved a bill
with “an array of tax and production credits that go to either the consumers
of renewable energy or to the estimated 20,000 companies, most of them small
businesses, that harness renewable energy sources,” the New York Times reported that Eckhart was not even close to
satisfied. “Yes, some companies will benefit, he concedes, but not enough for
renewable energy’s share of the market to grow.”[7] Eckhart would like the US government to do much more to bend the
market in favor of renewable energies. What might
help him achieve this? The hypothesis that burning fossil fuels will soon
produce a global catastrophe appears heaven-sent. So Eckhart threatens to
“destroy” skeptics if retractions are not forthcoming within 30 days. He
obviously thinks that he can wield as weapons both Phi Beta Kappa and the
IRS. Apparently he can also wield Newsweek. That suggests
real power. Compared to Newsweek—a newsmagazine with worldwide
distribution—a regional US paper like the Washington
Times (not to be confused with the Washington
Post or the New York Times) is
small potatoes. A tiny spud. Moreover, the Washington Times revelations about Eckhart were buried on page A10
and shared space in the same column with a different story, listed first.
Hardly anybody saw this. So it is interesting that a couple of weeks later, Newsweek, rather than give Eckhart’s
behaviors a wider exposure, rushed a cover story that everybody saw, by
senior editor Sharon Begley (no less), to convince the public that Great
Power is on the other side. The irony: in so doing Begley demonstrates that
Big Media favors not the skeptics
but rather those who spread fears of anthropogenic global warming. Now,
certainly, since one could reasonably imagine that limitations on “greenhouse
gas” emissions may impose a cost on oil companies (at least in the short
term), one might expect oil companies to have a bias against the
anthropogenic hypothesis, and thus an incentive to support skeptical
research. It would hardly be surprising, therefore, to find a think tank
funded in part by Exxon Mobil awarding some money to skeptical scientists.
What is surprising, in context, is
that US oil companies—indeed very powerful, and guilty in other cases of
massively corrupting the scientific field, the political process, the
government bureaucracy, foreign and domestic policy, the educational
establishment, the unions, and the media[8]—are
in this case doing so little. The think tanks they support have the weakest
and most superficial disagreements imaginable with Al Gore. How to account
for this? The paltry
sums that, according to Newsweek, an
ExxonMobil-funded think tank awards to ‘skeptics’—Begley’s only ‘evidence’
for a grand skeptical ‘campaign’—should perhaps receive an interpretation
that fits. They are, perhaps, more plausibly represented as the bare minimum that oil companies must
do to reassure ‘conservative’ or ‘free market’ activists that they dislike
the politics of ‘global warming.’ In other words, perhaps the wealthy people
behind the US oil companies—traditionally the most influential in the
US—really agree with other American industrial giants mentioned by Begley
that a policy of ‘greenhouse gas reductions’ should be pursued. Perhaps what
happens on the pages of Newsweek is
an elaborate piece of Orwellian theater: the powerful Establishment runs a
“well-coordinated, well-funded campaign” in order 1) to propagate the idea of
man-made global warming, and 2) to represent everything upside down, accusing
that a vast conspiracy is on the other
side. Exxon Mobil does its small part to appear guilty, which then helps
convince all sorts of innocent environmentalists (traditional haters of Exxon
Mobil in particular) that the
anthropogenic hypothesis must be right. If not, why is Exxon Mobil—i.e. The
Evil One—fighting it? Clever. In
this way, well-meaning people who want to see themselves as fighting the
Establishment are recruited instead to support Establishment policies (and
are never the wiser). But perhaps
the powerful movers and shakers are so
clever that they save the pocket change and just get Newsweek to accuse them. It was in August 2007 that Sharon
Begley’s article claimed that Exxon Mobil was giving out minuscule $10,000
awards to skeptical scientists through CEI (Competitive Enterprise
Institute). But two months earlier,
in June 2007, The Economist had
written: “These days very few serious businessmen will say publicly either that
climate change is not happening or that it is not worth tackling. Even Exxon
Mobil, bête noire of the
climate-change activists, has now withdrawn funding from the CEI and appears
to accept the need for controls on carbon emissions.”[9] And the week after Begley’s piece appeared, Robert
J. Samuelson, a contributing editor of Newsweek, corrected Begley in Newsweek as follows: “NEWSWEEK implied... that ExxonMobil used a think tank to pay
academics to criticize global-warming science. Actually, this accusation was
long ago discredited, and NEWSWEEK shouldn’t have lent it respectability.”[9a] (Of course,
this was a one-page column buried in the middle, not a cover story like
Begley’s. And Samuelson affirmed, by the way, that man-made global warming is
real).
Sharon Begley was
recipient in 2004 of an “Honorary Doctorate of Humane Letters for
contributions to the public understanding of science from the University of
North Carolina”; she was author of the ‘Science Journal’ column at the Wall Street Journal for five years;
and, according to Newsweek, where
she is senior editor, has become “widely known for her ability to break down
complex scientific theories and write about them in simple prose.”[10] With this kind of science-writer curriculum
one expects that Sharon Begley—Newsweek’s
expert on global warming—will be up-to-date on the ice-core data. I think she
probably is. But she does not mention it. This is
curious. In his movie, An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore posed
in front of a gigantic representation of the ice-core data and waved at the
graph confidently as if it self-evidently supported his thesis. As he waved,
he smirked and declared that doubting his own position on global warming was
the “most ridiculous thing I ever heard.” Meanwhile, the skeptics whom Begley
decries maintain that Al Gore is little better than a clown, for the ice core
data in fact refute his thesis. The lay public obviously needs someone to
explain who is right. Who better than Sharon Begley, known for explaining
“complex scientific theories” in “simple prose”? After all, Begley’s article
on “climate change denial” appeared a good three years after Jeff Severinghaus’s piece on RealClimate.org, considered
(by anthropogenic partisans) the best defense of the hypothesis from the ice
core embarrassment (see Part
1). Begley, however, did not mention
Severinghaus’s effort. She didn’t even mention the ice core data. Why not? Hoping to find
out, I visited a Newsweek question-and-answer
online forum titled “Resisting Change: Global Warming Deniers,” where Begley,
immediately following her article, further enlightened her readers. In the
opening lines she writes: “Hi everyone. This is Sharon Begley; I wrote this week’s cover story
on the campaign to cast doubt on the science of climate change. This story
described the 20-year history of that campaign rather than delving into the
empirical research on global warming, something I have written about too many
times to count both here and during my five years at The Wall Street Journal (starting with Newsweek’s first cover story on the greenhouse effect, in 1988).
But I am happy to take questions on either the science or the PR.” [11] We’ve already
seen that Begley has never written the words “CO2 lag” in Newsweek. But since she boasts that
she has written “too many times to count” on “the empirical research on
global warming,” I tried a little harder and did a search in her Newsweek articles for any mention of
“ice cores.” I wanted to find out if Begley had explained that for 650,000
years temperature always rises first, followed about 800 years later by rises
in CO2 (not the other way around). I found that
in 1981, when research on the Antarctic ice was just beginning, Begley wrote: [Quote from Newsweek begins
here] To the scientists who work there, Antarctica is a figurative deep
freeze as well as a literal one: within its ice cores it preserves the record
of the world’s climatic past—the ice ages and the warn spells—and may hold
clues to future weather as well. ‘The best data on the world's climate is
locked up in the ice sheets,’ says Edward Todd of the National Science
Foundation (NSF). ‘Antarctica exerts a greater influence on the world’s
environment than any other piece of real estate.’ Many scientists endure the sounds of silence in the hope of answering
two basic questions of Antarctic research: is the ice sheet getting bigger or
smaller, and what effect do rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2)
have on it? ... Scientists can run computer models on these possibilities
until the next ice age, but they won't really know how CO2 affects
Antarctica's 7 million cubic miles of ice until they understand how it did so
in the past. ‘Nature doesn’t pay attention to our models,’ says Todd. ‘To get
answers to whether Antarctica is growing or shrinking, you have to go down
there and make measurements.’ Echoes: Using precise chemical tools, scientists will identify the
kinds of gas trapped in the ice to learn the composition of the ancient
atmosphere.[11a] [Quote from Newsweek ends
here] Begley made
clear, in 1981, that the ice core studies would be the key to establishing
the effect of CO2 concentrations on temperature in times past. The greenhouse
warming models claimed that increasing concentrations of CO2 led to higher
temperatures, but as Edward Todd pointed out, “Nature doesn’t pay attention
to our models,” and so to find out what is true we have to investigate
nature, which in this case means the Antarctic ice cores. When the early
studies found a correlation between CO2 and temperature, partisans of the
anthropogenic hypothesis such as Begley jumped to the conclusion that CO2 was
the agent of world temperatures. But as every first-year statistics student
learns, correlation is not causation.
We have to find out what rises first, CO2 or temperature? Starting in 1999,
better resolution in the ice core studies showed that, invariably,
temperatures rose first, followed several centuries later by rises in CO2
concentrations.[11b]
Did Begley ever explain this to her readers? The answer appears to be no.
This is what she wrote in 2007: “When scientists measured a rise in Earth’s average temperature of 1
degree F over the past 50 years, they... scurried to the record books, both
man’s and nature’s -- that is, to historical weather archives as well as tree rings and ice cores
that preserve records of ancient temperatures -- to search for
precedents. ...The temperature increase since the 1950s ‘is not like anything
seen in the paleoclimate data,’ says atmospheric scientist Joyce Penner of
the University of Michigan.”[12] Mentioned
entirely in passing with other data sets, the ice core data supposedly
support an interpretation of the temperature increase since the 1950s as so
dramatic that humans must be guilty. Several problems with this. It is false,
first of all, that the world has not seen temperatures like this. It has seen
them recently in the so-called Medieval Warm Period (warmer than our current
temperatures, and we weren’t burning fossil fuels then). Another problem is
that, though temperatures began rising around 1979, they had been falling for
years prior (the media, including Newsweek—with “THE COOLING WORLD” for headline in 1975[12a]—were
fanning a global hysteria over a coming ice age); and yet during the same
cooling postwar period human production of CO2 skyrocketed. Another problem
is that the temperature increase since 1979 is actually a moderate one
according to the satellite data, better than the very biased terrestrial
station data which anthropogenic partisans prefer (see Part
1). But the biggest problem is that the
ice cores give us a 650,000-year record that shows, every single time, CO2
rising after temperature increases, not the other way around, making it impossible
for changes in CO2 concentrations to have anything to do with the end of
glaciations (see Part
1). This suggests that human CO2
production (quite modest compared to natural CO2 production, anyway) probably
has absolutely nothing to do with planetary temperatures. Begley says not a
word about this. But perhaps, I
thought, Begley would address the issue on her online forum, in reply to
readers’ questions. I found her exchange with one Richard King illuminating.
First, the question: [Quote from Newsweek begins
here] San Diego, CA: My question is: If scientists are labeled “skeptics”
because part of their funding comes from the oil industry, does this make their
scientific argument or observation irrelevant? I have read “A skeptics Guide to An Inconvenient Truth” by Marlo Lewis
and feel that he raises numerous questions concerning consensus on global
warming and of the science referred to in Al Gore’s book and movie. I believe
these questions need to be addressed from scientists before they are
presented to policy makers. During the build up to the current Iraq war, skeptics were dismissed
as deniers, kooks, and of being misinformed. After 4 years of war the skeptics
view now seems to have been right given the real information we have learned
during this time. If a vote for war was to be taken today I am certain there
would be a different choice taken. The question of human contribution to Global Warming seems to be
taking the same path. We are told that the debate is over. All scientists
have agreed except for the deniers, kooks and the misinformed. This all
sounds familiar except that now the very premise of science and the
scientific method is being ignored. The job of a scientist is to always
question and attempt to prove something to be false.[11] Richard King [Quote from Newsweek ends
here] Mr. King’s
defense of how science is supposed to work is also my own. Notice also that Mr.
King is reading Marlo Lewis from CEI, one of the people whom Michael Eckhart
from ACORE threatened to “destroy” merely because Lewis has some very minor
disagreements with Al Gore (see above). Here is the reply: “Sharon Begley: ‘Skeptic’
is a compliment, as far as I’m concerned. Scientists should be, and are,
skeptical, for the reasons you note. Notice I never said in this story or any
other that ‘the debate is over;’ in science, it never is. The question is
whether the science is sound, whether it has been converging on a single
conclusion, and finally whether the preponderance of evidence is sufficient
to justify policy steps. When those steps bring other benefits---less
dependence on Saudi and Venezeulan oil, anyone?---the scales tip even
further. Also, it is wrong to think that the ‘skeptics’ arguments have gone
unanswered. One group of climate researchers does this very well, at
http://www.realclimate.org/ ” [11] Isn’t that
interesting. According to Sharon Begley the arguments of skeptics have been
answered on RealClimate. But this is the website that, as we showed in Part
1, failed to defend the anthropogenic
hypothesis from the refutation contained in the ice core data. I continued
reading and noticed that whenever there was a question about the science,
Begley referred readers either to IPCC documents or to RealClimate.
Obviously, RealClimate has succeeded in its stated mission of ‘educating’
journalists. What
about Climategate? The University
of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit, in Britain, is a prominent
institution that has spread the anthropogenic hypothesis worldwide. It is the
source of much of the most important data on global temperatures that other
scientists use. Recently, hackers penetrated the CRU server and retrieved
thousands of documents, including many emails, that were subsequently
published online. The emails and other documents appeared to implicate the
CRU scientists in misuse of data and censorship of those who disagree with
them. The resulting scandal was called ‘Climategate’ (see Part
1). Sharon Begley’s interpretation for Newsweek readers appeared in December
of 2009 and was titled: “THE TRUTH ABOUT ‘Climategate’: Hacked e-mails have
compromised scientists—but not the science itself.”[13] Almost
coquettish, isn’t it, how Begley begins her ‘global warming’ articles with
“The Truth About” (such grand Orwellian style). Is she winking at someone?
And what is “the truth”? She writes: “Those of you who know I consider the
science of anthropogenic global warming solid probably expect me to explain
that the hacked e-mails don’t mean what they seem, and that, even if they
did, it would not undercut the multiple lines of evidence showing that
greenhouse-gas emissions are causing climate change. All true.” She has
advice for climate scientists who, after having their emails exposed, are now
the butt of jokes or the target of vitriol: “respond to misinformation with
physics, data, and analysis as, for instance, the RealClimate blog does.” Fascinating.
It seems the entire case for anthropogenic global warming revolves around
RealClimate. This, I remind you, is the website we refuted in Part
1. ____________________________________________________________ More
Prestigious Media I know what
you are thinking. That’s Newsweek.
What about a serious magazine—so serious you may socially index your
astuteness by announcing that you read it? So focused on research that it has
Intelligence Units on all sorts of things? So bold that every article is an
editorial? So clever it is full of mordant British wit? So authoritative its
anonymous oracles are penned by Ph.D.’s in economics? What about The Economist? We can subject
The Economist to the same two
tests: 1) What has it told the public concerning the consistent CO2 lag in
650,000 years of ice-core data?; 2) What has been its reaction to the
Climategate scandal? CO2 lag – let’s not mention it In 2003 The Economist wrote approvingly of one
Dr. William Ruddiman, of the University of Virginia, who claimed that global
temperatures in centuries past—not merely in the 20th c.—were a consequence
of human activity. His argument was that right before the coming of agriculture,
“most of the land cultivated by early farmers in the Middle East, Europe and
southern China would have been forested,” but the farmers then changed that:
“When the trees that grew there were cleared, the carbon they contained ended
up in the atmosphere as carbon dioxide, a greenhouse gas.” Notice the
argument: “Dr Ruddiman’s hypothesis is grounded on recent deviations from the
regular climatic pattern of the past 400,000 years. This pattern is
controlled by what are known as the Milankovitch cycles, which are in turn
caused by periodic changes in the Earth’s orbit and angle of tilt toward the
sun. One effect of the Milankovitch cycles is to cause regular and
predictable changes in the atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and
methane. These changes
can be followed by studying ice cores taken in Antarctica.”[14] And yet, as we
pointed out above, it had become clear starting in 1999 that increases in CO2
concentrations always follow rises in
temperature, on average by 800 years (see Part
1). A serious magazine should have
explained that the ice-core data contradict the most important pillar of the
anthropogenic warming hypothesis: the idea that rises in CO2 concentrations
contribute to planetary temperature increases. Mordant British wit should
have been heaped on Al Gore, for his movie came out in 2006, well after this
result was established. But The
Economist, as we see above, has been pushing the anthropogenic hypothesis
in defiance of the “CO2 lag” result. In the years after the article quoted
above, there were just a few mentions of “ice cores,” all of them suggesting
falsely that the ice-core data support anthropogenic warming. The Economist
celebrated Al Gore, predicting correctly that he would win an Oscar and a
Nobel Prize, and speculated whether he should run for president.[14a] Climategate: it means nothing Next: How did The Economist react to Climategate? In
an article titled “Mail-strom; Climate change” it writes: “Is global warming a trick? That is what some saw in a huge batch of
e-mails and documents taken from the servers of the Climate Research Unit
(CRU) at the University of East Anglia, in England, and put up anonymously on
the web. The result has been a field day for those sceptical of the idea of
man-made climate change, who have combed through them, pouncing and
pronouncing on snippets that seem to show scientific malfeasance.”[15] This is
careful prose. On a quick read the style may suggest impartiality, but
slowing down we can appreciate, in the last phrase, the art of subtlety:
“pouncing and pronouncing” is a rush to judgment; “snippets” are brief
remarks taken completely out of context; and if they only “seem to show
scientific malfeasance” then there is no real malfeasance. Next: “The CRU specialises in studies of climates past. For parts of the past
where there were no thermometers to consult, such studies use proxy data,
such as tree rings. Reconstructions based on these tend to show that the
planet’s temperature has risen over the 20th century to heights unprecedented
for centuries and perhaps millennia.” If The Economist wished to communicate
that skepticism is legitimate, it would write that the CRU claims recent temperatures are wholly unprecedented. And
it would also share with its readers that the CRU’s estimate of 20th c.
temperatures rely on what some accuse are horribly tainted data (see Part
1); data that, moreover, CRU director
Phil Jones appears to have misplaced (according to the Daily Mail he refused Freedom of Information requests to produce
it).[16] But The
Economist writes instead as though there is no reason to doubt the CRU or
its tree-ring data. For good measure, it adds that the tree rings are “...far from the only evidence for believing in climate change as a
man-made problem, but they are important, and the sharp uptick they show has
taken on iconic value.” No mention of
what this other ample evidence—besides the tree rings—might be. But it cannot
be the Antarctic ice cores, which suggest that CO2 concentrations have little
or nothing to do with major planetary temperature shifts (Part
1). And neither can it be glacial boreholes,
according to which there was “a warm period centered around A.D. 1000, which
was warmer than the late 20th century
by approximately 1°C” (emphasis added).[17]
This is called the ‘Medieval Warm Period,’ and its existence roundly denies
that late-20th c. temperatures are shockingly high. As for the
“iconic value,” this is because those who defend the anthropogenic hypothesis
have staked their reputation on “a tree-ring reconstruction known as the
‘hockey stick.’ ” It has received this name because the reconstruction shows
temperatures forever flat and then “unprecedented 20th-century warming,” so
it has the shape of a hockey stick. It has become quite famous, as it is
crucial to the IPCC and its most stalwart defender: Al Gore. This graph,
explains The Economist, “has been a particular target of criticism by sceptics. It was
published in 1998 by Michael Mann (then at Yale, now at Pennsylvania State
University) and his colleagues, and featured prominently in the 2001 report
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).” For some
unknown reason The Economist does
not explain that Dr. Ross McKittrick, who independently analyzed Mann’s
statistical program, testified before the British House of Lords that the
program had an interesting problem: “The flawed computer program can even
pull out spurious hockey stick shapes from lists of trendless random
numbers.”[17a]
This is already a devastating critique of Mann et al., and sufficient reason never to trust them again, but in
fact it is only one from among a great multitude of quite serious problems
with the all-important ‘hockey stick’ graph. For example,
another criticism is that to further enhance the drama of supposedly
unprecedented warming in the 20th c., Mann et al. removed the Medieval Warm Period from their dataset. The Sunday Telegraph explains: “The greatest embarrassment for the believers in man-made global
warming is the fact that the world was significantly warmer in the Middle Ages
than now. ‘We must get rid of the Medieval Warm Period,’ as one contributor
to the IPCC famously said in an unguarded moment. It was Dr Mann who duly
obliged by getting his computer-model to produce a graph shaped like a hockey
stick, eliminating the medieval warming and showing recent temperatures
curving up to an unprecedented high.”[18] Mann’s
colleague, “Professor [Phil] Jones,” reports the Daily Mail, has now “conceded the possibility that the world was
warmer in medieval times than now—suggesting global warming may not be a
man-made phenomenon.”[16] Now, you may
remember this pair—Jones and Mann—from Part
1, where we saw them at the center of
the Climategate controversy. Jones, in one of his exposed emails, wrote to
Mann: “[We] will keep them [the skeptics] out somehow -- even if we have to
redefine what the peer-review literature is!’ ”[20] Or even better: deny them access to the
data. “It took nearly eight years and direct action from the US House of
Representatives before the data and the computer programs for the 1998 Mann et al. ‘hockey stick’ were released.”
Prior to this Mann refused to let anybody see the underlying basis for his
result. It is obvious why: those who were finally able to independently
analyze Mann’s data and methodology 1) demonstrated that Mann et al. were wrong, and 2) came away
feeling that Mann et al. had
cheated for political reasons.[20a] A letter Mann
received from the US Congress requesting his data was authored by Joe Barton,
Chairman of the House Subcomittee on Oversight and Investigations (we saw
Barton in Part 1 confronting Al Gore on the question
of the CO2 lag in the ice-core evidence). Barton’s letter complains that the
IPCC did not do an independent review of Michael Mann’s work: “We understand
that you were a lead author of the IPCC chapter that assessed and reported
your own studies, and that two study co-authors were also contributing
authors to this very same chapter.”[21]
For obvious reasons, in scientific peer review it is others who must evaluate the quality of a scientist’s work, but
such standards of rigor are simply thrown out the window at the IPCC. (But if
there is any question just how shockingly low the standards of evidence at
the IPCC, they are dispelled by the scandal concerning the Himalayan glacier claims
reproduced to the right of this column.) Subsequently,
Mann was summoned to testify before the US Senate. At these hearings, the
influential blog we keep encountering was referred to as “Dr. Mann’s RealClimate.org
website.”[24] Coming back to
The Economist, we find that, not
content with defending the tree-ring data and the resulting “hockey-stick”
graph, the magazine follows with an explicit defense of Michael Mann and Phil
Jones: “Hence the eagerness with which bloggers fell on one of the stolen
e-mails, sent in 1999 by Phil Jones, the CRU’s director: ‘I’ve just completed
Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last
20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the
decline [in temperature].’ Trickery associated with Dr Mann was catnip to the
sceptics. But Dr Jones has clarified that ‘The word trick was used here
colloquially as in a clever thing to do. It is ludicrous to suggest that it
refers to anything untoward.’ The ‘hiding’ concerned the decision to leave
out a set of tree-ring-growth data that had stopped reflecting local
temperature changes. That alteration in growth pattern is strange, and
unexplained, but eliminating it is not sinister.” There is no
investigation here. A statement by Phil Jones in his own defense is
reproduced as a proper and sufficient answer to the accusations against him:
“Dr Jones has clarified...” For good measure, The Economist editorializes that what Phil Jones did is “not
sinister.” Shouldn’t a serious magazine find out instead of simply taking
Jones at his word? After all, the removed data suggested a decline in
temperature. Some lines below there is another passionate editorial: “None of
this is evidence of fraud.” Any trace of subtlety has disappeared. The Economist goes on to say that, even if some
criticisms made by skeptics are reasonable, none of them affect the
fundamental claim of man-made global warming. To further support this, the
magazine states: “[T]he idea of anthropogenic climate change rests on a great deal more
than just tree-ring records, useful as they are for providing context to the
current warming. A spate of recent claims of global cooling, for example,
rely on comparing 1998, the second-hottest year in the modern record (going
to 1880), with 2008, which was relatively cooler. Yet, according to the
Goddard Institute for Space Studies, a part of NASA, America’s space agency,
2008 was the ninth-hottest year on record. 2009 is shaping up to be the
sixth-hottest. All of the ten hottest years recorded have come since 1997.
And retreating Arctic sea ice provides even more visible data to support
conclusions of warming.” The problem
with relying on NASA’s numbers, according to a report by the Science and
Public Policy Institute, is that “Recent revelations from the Climategate emails, originating from the
Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia showed how all the
data centers, most notably NOAA [National Oceanic and Atmospheric
Administration] and NASA, conspired in the manipulation of global temperature
records to suggest that temperatures in the 20th century rose faster than, in
reality, they actually did.”[22] (see the last section of Part
1 for more context). And concerning
the Arctic sea ice, the US National Snow and Ice Data Center’s website
reports that in January 2010 the extent of the ice sheet is lower than
expected given that temperatures have
been cooling. Since it is granted that temperatures have been cooling,
the anomalously low extent of ice cannot be argued as a proxy for increasing
temperature! I point out, further, that the NSIDC data has the Arctic sea ice
growing steadily in the period 2006-2009, and dipping somewhat in 2010
(though it is still 10% above the 2006 level).[23] If
the cold winter of 2010 is an indication, it may soon return to growth. In
March 2010, a study by Japanese scientists defended the hypothesis that the
loss of ice in the Arctic has more to do with swirling wind patterns than
temperature changes (which can explain why there is ice loss even when
temperatures are cooling).[23a]
Contrary to what The Economist
writes, the performance of Arctic sea ice in the last few years does not make
a clear statement either way concerning the claims of cooling over the last
decade. Enough: The Economist has made its
position—and its standards—clear. How to close?
It is tempting to quote The Economist
sounding a lot like Newsweek (a low
blow?): “attacks on climate scientists, sometimes paid for by carbon-emitting
industries when global warming first became a public issue, have made many
researchers in the field nervous and defensive.” Anthropogenic
partisans are insecure creatures. When caught lying, Newsweek and The Economist charge
valiantly in their defense, yet
campaigns that “carbon-emitting industries” have not mounted against them can still leave them “nervous and
defensive.” Could it be that they don’t have a case? I like that
ending. But perhaps we can top it: “Gavin Schmidt, a scientist at NASA,”
writes The Economist, is “the
keeper of realclimate.org, an anti-sceptic blog.” Worthy of
note. NASA, accused of distorting data to suggest dramatic warming in the
20th c., is behind “Dr. Mann’s RealClimate.org website,” the blog at the
center of everything, and advertised for free by world media such as Newsweek and The Economist. THE END. P.S. But why? Why so much effort to convince us
that there is man-made global warming? Stay tuned for Part 3.
____________________________________________________________ Footnotes and Further Reading [1] “In fact, there's no evidence that CO2 is damaging to nature.
Also, there is solid scientific evidence that CO2 lags average temperature
rises by several centuries. CO2 levels were higher at the end of the last ice
age (114,000 years ago) than during the much warmer period 43 million years
earlier. CO2 levels are higher today than the relatively hot period 17
million years ago. Scientifically, there seems little relation between CO2
levels and warmth.” SOURCE: “THE MYTH OF KYOTO; PETER WORTHINGTON
SAYS GLOBAL WARMING IS A LIB-LEFT FICTION”; The Toronto Sun, January 9, 2005
Sunday, NEWS; Pg. 37, 740 words, BY PETER WORTHINGTON, TORONTO SUN “Expert after expert in this film [The Great Global Warming Swindle]
blasts craters into the theory that CO2 -- which only makes up 0.054% of the
earth's atmosphere -- has ever driven climate. Ice core records, in fact,
prove the opposite, that CO2 lags warming by as much as 800 years.” SOURCE: “Debunking global warming myths”; The
Toronto Sun, March 14, 2007 Wednesday, EDITORIAL/OPINION; Pg. 20, 623 words,
BY LICIA CORBELLA [Quote from Business Wire begins here] A fundamental
scientific error lurks in a book calculated to terrify schoolchildren about
"global warming", Robert Ferguson, SPPI president, announced today:
‘The Down-To-Earth Guide to Global Warming,’ by Laurie David and Cambria
Gordon, is intentionally designed to propagandize unsuspecting school
children who do not have enough knowledge to know what is being done to them. A new SPPI
[Science and Public Policy Institute] paper
(http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/other/childrensbookerror.html) briefly
examines a cardinal error, found on page 18 of the David book, where she
mousetraps children: “The more the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the
higher the temperature climbed. The less carbon dioxide, the more the
temperature fell. You can see this relationship for yourself by looking at
the graph. What makes this graph so amazing is that by connecting rising
CO2to rising temperature scientists have discovered the link between
greenhouse-gas pollution (sic) and global warming.” The SPPI paper
states, in part: “What really makes the David-Gordon graph ‘amazing’ is that it's
egregiously counterfactual. Worse, in order to contrive a visual
representation for their claim that CO2 controls temperature change, the
authors present unsuspecting children with an altered temperature and CO2
graph that reverses the relationship found in the scientific literature. The manipulation is critical because David's central premise posits that
CO2 drives temperature, yet the peer-reviewed literature is unanimous that
CO2changes have historically followed temperature changes.” [Quote from Business Wire ends here] SOURCE: “SPPI Exposes Fundamental Scientific
Error in Laurie David's "Global Warming" Book for Children”;
Business Wire, September 13, 2007 Thursday 1:52 PM GMT, 358 words “Solar warming Earth's oceans, seven miles deep, takes years. Close
resolution analysis of ice cores spanning 800,000 years shows atmospheric CO2
lags temperature by 400 to 800 years.” SOURCE: “Earth now cooler”; The Advertiser
(Australia); July 4, 2009 Saturday; OPINION; Pg. 71, 144 words “The third
problem for the panel [IPCC] hypothesis is that CO2 lags behind temperature
in the Ice Age era, which has been explained by the delayed release of stored
CO2 from oceans, but the panel model has CO2 and temperature rising together
since 1850. ‘Either temperature and CO2 go up and down at the same time or
they don't ... You can't have it one way during the ice ages and another way
today.’ ” SOURCE: “Science cooks the books, driving
sensible people to screaming point”; Sydney Morning Herald (Australia),
November 12, 2009 Thursday, NEWS AND FEATURES; Opinion; Pg. 17, 1057 words,
Miranda Devine “Climatologists argue about the
causes of these dramatic temperature shifts, and whether they might be a
result of solar cycles or changes in the global oceanic circulation, or other
phenomena. But they clearly cannot be explained in terms of changes in the
use of fossil fuels. Indeed, recent studies of Antarctic ice-core samples
going back over 400,000 years suggest that temperature rises precede
increased concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.” SOURCE:
Discount the doomsayers; Courier Mail (Queensland, Australia), September 21,
2002, Saturday, FEATURES; Pg. 30, 986 words, Ron Brunton “WITH global warming ‘stone cold
dead’, road tax and fuel prices must fall, says the Association of British
Drivers. The ABD claims research published
earlier this year has killed the man- made global warming theory. The suggestion that man's activities
are causing damaging warming to our planet has been in doubt since a leading
climate scientist described Tony Blair's prediction for climate change as
‘the one that's not going to happen’. Now it has been shown that global
warming, as portrayed by politicians, isn't happening. The ABD says recent scientific
research paper shows that, instead of causing higher temperatures, higher levels
of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere actually follow rises in the Earth's
surface temperature. Monnin studied temperature changes
from the last ice age to the present day using data from the Greenland ice
cores, and found that the start of carbon dioxide increases lagged behind the
start of the temperature increases by up to 800 years. This means that carbon dioxide levels
are a result, not a cause, of global temperature changes, so attempts to
influence climate through emissions controls are futile. ABD environment spokesman Bernard
Abrams comments: ‘Under these now discredited policies, private and business
car drivers have seen the cost of motoring go through the roof, with further
rises in the pipeline.’ ” SOURCE:
DRIVE TIME: MOTORING: Cars 'no threat
to planet'; Coventry Evening Telegraph, May 11, 2001, 226 words, STEWART
SMITH “The popular notion is that
humans burning fossil fuels increases carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and
thus drives a dangerous increase in temperature. Pointing to ice core data,
politicians have argued that past CO2 changes also caused large temperature
changes. They conveniently fail to mention that the scientists who work on
those ice cores know that the temperature changes actually preceded the CO2
changes - by about 400 to 800 years. In the context of Earth's
history, today we are a carbon-starved planet. The 385 parts per million
(ppm) CO2 levels today are at the lower range of comfort. The more welcoming
levels of CO2, for both plants and animals, have been 2000 to 3000 ppm.” SOURCE:
“Carbon’s upside; A story of man, termites and climate hubris”; The
Washington Times, August 17, 2007 Friday, OPED; A19, 864 words, By John
Linder, SPECIAL TO THE WASHINGTON TIMES “While some environmentalists might
concede that the IPCC report is a political document, they would also point
to what they see as Mr Gore's knockout punch, a dramatic video based on the
world's climate record preserved in ice cores. The air of ancient times is trapped
inside ice, so scientists drill into ice at the poles and take these ice
cores back to the lab where the sealed ancient air is released under
carefully controlled conditions to study its carbon levels. A chicken and egg question IN HIS presentation, Mr Gore shows how
ice core data translate into a sawtooth graph of the world's temperature
fluctuations from eons past. He then strategically places below this graph
yet another one of carbon level changes in the atmosphere over the same
period. The two graphs obviously move in
lockstep with each other, he says. With great panache, Mr Gore concludes that
when carbon goes up, temperature inevitably follows. As surely as night follows day? Yet if the graphs are mapped onto each
other instead of being counterposed one above the other, as Mr Gore does, it
becomes very clear that, very consistently, every temperature rise actually
precedes the carbon rise by some 800 years. This undeniable time lag is critical
since what it says is that more carbon in the air did not lead to global
warming in times past. If so, factors other than carbon must have set off the
various periods of global warming in times past. If so, the most fundamental assumption
of the carbon theory of human-induced global warming rests on shaky ground.
In fact, carbon is a bad candidate for such a theory. After all, methane is
27 times more powerful than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.” SOURCE:
“Who or what is the real culprit?; Not all experts agree that man is to
blame; others point the finger at oceans or the sun.” The Straits Times
(Singapore), May 1, 2007 Tuesday, REVIEW - OTHERS, 1625 words, Andy Ho,
Senior Writer “Was CO2 ever responsible for
past climate warming? No. The ACIA report states that past temperature
increases were "associated with" atmospheric CO2 levels, which act
as a climate driver. However, careful analysis of ancient atmospheres locked
in the glacier ice cores shows that the dramatic shifts from cold to warm
climates in the past were followed by major increases in CO2. The build-up of
CO2 in the atmosphere consistently lagged temperature increases by about 800
years. CO2 has never before shown evidence that it can behave as a
significant climate driver, despite large variations in its concentration.
The tremendous fluctuations in global temperature over the millennia are
intimately linked to changes in the solar energy the Earth receives.
Atmospheric CO2 concentrations have changed in response to temperature
changes through changes in the amount of terrestrial vegetation and the
uptake of CO2 by our vast oceans. But surely the unprecedented
increase in CO2 over the past century is responsible for the Arctic warming
today. Again, no. Research over the past decade has demonstrated a very close
correlation between solar activity and Earth's temperature. A variety of real
data sources from sunspot cycles and measurements of cloudiness to tree rings
and ice cores show that the rise in temperature over the past 100 years, and
in particular over the past three decades, occurs at a time of greatly
increased solar activity. So it seems that global temperature has risen due
to increased output of energy from the sun, not only as visible light that we
see, but also in the solar wind and the solar magnetosphere which affect our
climate. Even the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has shown that
CO2 is incapable of generating the warming that has been observed. So what about the predictions
of catastrophic warming over the next century? The forecasts of a 1.5 to 4.5
degreesC increase in global temperature are made by computer models that are
incapable of accurately modelling changes in the most important greenhouse
gas -- water vapour. Further, the warming that the models generate with
increased CO2 is minimal, and does not account for present or future warming.
The predictions of a warmer future are based on the untested hypothesis that
a little warming by CO2 generates much greater warming by water vapour. Given
that CO2 has never behaved in this way in the past, and that these models
cannot accurately model the complications of clouds and aerosols (which
reflect light energy back into space), the computer simulations of future
climates have very large uncertainties. Despite the progress that has been
made by the intrepid community of climate modellers, their predictions remain
highly speculative.” SOURCE:
“Catastrophic predictions fade with the light of day: Close correlation
between solar activity and Earth's temperature”; National Post's Financial
Post & FP Investing (Canada), November 25, 2004 Thursday, FINANCIAL POST:
COMMENT; Pg. FP13, 955 words, Ian Clark, Financial Post “In the 1980's, we dug up long ice
cores from both Greenland and the Antarctic. At the showed moderate natural
1500 year cycle. We have had 600 warmtion [sic] in the last million years. And the ice cores and the sea bed
sediment show. This and none of the past has found CO2 coinciding with
temperature change. In fact, Mr. Gore in his Antarctic scenario says
temperature and CO2 have moved radically and together through the last four
ice ages and that's true. What he doesn't tell us is that the temperatures
changed 800 years before the CO2 levels.” SOURCE:
Global Broadcast Database - English, January 30, 2007 Tuesday, 201 words;
SHOW: FOX NEWS 9:00 PM FOX “Gore repeatedly labels carbon
dioxide as "global warming pollution" when, in reality, it is no
more pollution than is oxygen. CO2 is plant food, an ingredient essential for
photosynthesis without which Earth would be a lifeless, frozen ice ball. The
hypothesis that human release of CO2 is a major contributor to global warming
is just that -- an unproven hypothesis, against which evidence is
increasingly mounting. In fact, the correlation
between CO2 and temperature that Gore speaks about so confidently is simply
non-existent over all meaningful time scales. U of O climate researcher
Professor Jan Veizer demonstrated that, over geologic time, the two are not
linked at all. Over the intermediate time scales Gore focuses on, the ice
cores show that CO2 increases don't precede, and therefore don't cause,
warming. Rather, they follow temperature rise -- by as much as 800 years.
Even in the past century, the correlation is poor; the planet actually cooled
between 1940 and 1980, when human emissions of CO2 were rising at the fastest
rate in our history. Similarly, the fact that water
vapour constitutes 95% of greenhouse gases by volume is conveniently ignored
by Gore.” SOURCE:
“The gods are laughing: Scientists who
work in the fields liberal arts graduate Al Gore wanders through contradict
his theories about man-induced climate change”; National Post's Financial
Post & FP Investing (Canada), June 7, 2006 Wednesday, FINANCIAL POST:
COMMENT; Pg. FP19, 1834 words, Tom Harris, National Post “In addition to carbon dioxide, the
cores also contain information on methane, a powerful greenhouse gas, and
nitrous oxide. In a separate study from the same
cores, the rise and fall of methane also tracked closely with that of CO2 and
temperatures. Both sets of results appear in Friday's edition of the journal
Science. The triggers for the changes in gas
concentrations remain a mystery, Brook acknowledges. They tend to lag the
temperature record by some 800 to 1,000 years. Some have argued that this gap rules
out a connection between rising CO2 and the warming climate. But Brook explains that the gap most
likely signals a ‘positive feedback’ in the climate system. In short, warmth
begets more CO2 in the atmosphere. This raises temperatures further,
which leads to more CO2 released into the air. The shift between these
glacial periods and warm ‘interglacial’ periods has been linked to long-term
changes in Earth's tilt as it orbits the sun.” SOURCE:
“Old ice gives new clues to climate change”; Christian Science Monitor,
November 28, 2005, Monday, USA; Pg. 25, 503 words, Peter N. Spotts Staff writer
of The Christian Science Monitor “The ice cores show that every
interglacial period started with a sharp increase of temperature, followed,
some 600-800 years later, by a sharp rise in atmospheric carbon dioxide.
Therefore, clearly, rising temperatures caused the rising levels of carbon
dioxide and not the other way around. Since carbon dioxide is about two times
more soluble at 0° C. than at 20° C., it is obvious that rising temperatures
caused it to outgas from the enormous reservoir of seawater; later,
decreasing temperatures returned it to solution.” SOURCE:
“Climate and plague”; Oil & Gas Journal, January 18, 2010, LETTERS; Pg.
14, 454 words, Jamil Azad, Geoscientist, Calgary “Antarctic ice studies show global temperatures tracking closely with
atmospheric CO2 levels over the past 400,000 years. However, Singer and Avery
note the studies also show that temperature changes preceded the CO2 changes
by about 800 years. Thus, more warming has produced more atmospheric CO2,
rather than more CO2 producing global warming. This makes sense, say the
authors, because the oceans hold vastly more CO2 than the air, and warming
forces water to release some its gases.” SOURCE:
“Global Warming: An Unstoppable 1,500-Year Cycle”; New Book Debunks
Greenhouse Fears and Points to Natural 1,500-Year Warming Cycles; PR Newswire
US, November 9, 2006 Thursday 7:25 PM GMT, 925 words “The International Panel On
Climate Change tells us that global warming is brought about by man producing
too much CO2 - but many scientists say this is not the case. People like Al Gore will show
you graphs of polar ice core records in which the rise and fall of
temperature and CO2 are directly related. It all looks as if this is the
proof we need. What he doesn't tell you is
that the warming comes first, and up to 800 years later, the CO2 rises. So
CO2 is not the cause of warming, but more likely the result of warming. He and people like him tell you
there is no more discussion, accept what the IPCC tells you. If we accept what we're told
without being able to debate the issue, we deserve to be falling off the edge
of the flat world.” SOURCE:
“Exploding the myth on climate change”; Bristol Evening Post, July 1, 2008
Tuesday, Pg. 10, 308 words [2]
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“Resisting Change: Global Warming Deniers”: NEWSWEEK's Sharon Begley
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UNITED STATES EDITION, SCIENCE; Pg. 72, 1630 words, SHARON BEGLEY with RITA
DALLAS in London and RON GIVENS in New York
Reports Ice Core Records
of Atmospheric CO2 Around the Last Three Glacial Terminations Hubertus Fischer,
Martin Wahlen, Jesse Smith, Derek Mastroianni, Bruce Deck Air trapped in bubbles in
polar ice cores constitutes an archive for the reconstruction of the global
carbon cycle and the relation between greenhouse gases and climate
in the past. High-resolution records from Antarctic ice cores show
that carbon dioxide concentrations increased by 80 to
100 parts per million by volume 600 ± 400 years after
the warming of the last three deglaciations. Despite strongly decreasing
temperatures, high carbon dioxide concentrations can be sustained
for thousands of years during glaciations; the size of this phase
lag is probably connected to the duration of the preceding warm
period, which controls the change in land ice coverage and the
buildup of the terrestrial biosphere. Scripps Institution of
Oceanography, Geosciences Research Division, University of California San
Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0220, USA. Previous studies of
Antarctic ice cores (1-3) revealed that atmospheric CO2
concentrations changed by 80 to 100 parts per million by
volume (ppmv) during the last climatic cycle and showed, together
with continuous atmospheric measurements (4), that anthropogenic emissions increased CO2
concentrations from 280 ppmv during preindustrial times to more
than 360 ppmv at present, an increase of more than 80% of the
glacial-interglacial change. Variations in atmospheric CO2 concentrations
accompanying glacial-interglacial transitions have been attributed
to climate-induced changes in the global carbon cycle (5, 6), but they also amplify climate variations
by the accompanying greenhouse effect. Accordingly, the relation
of temperature and greenhouse gases in the past derived from ice
core records has been used to estimate the sensitivity of climate
to changes in greenhouse gas concentrations (7) to constrain the prediction of an anthropogenic
global warming. This procedure, however, requires the separation
of systematic variations representative for all climatic cycles
from those specific for each event, as well as a more detailed
knowledge of the leads and lags between greenhouse gas
concentrations and climate proxies. To resolve short-term
changes in the atmospheric carbon reservoir, to constrain the onset and end
of major variations in CO2 concentrations, and to test
whether these variations are temporally representative, we expanded
the Antarctic Vostok CO2 record over the transition
from marine isotope stage (MIS) 8 to MIS 7 [about 210 to
250 thousand years (ky) before present (B.P.)] and analyzed the
time interval around the penultimate deglaciation (about 70 to
160 ky B.P.) at a high resolution of 100 to 2000 years (8). This data set was supplemented by a CO2
record recently derived from the Antarctic Taylor Dome (TD) ice
core (6, 9) covering the last 35,000 years.
The internal temporal resolution of ice core air samples is
restricted by the age distribution of the bubbles caused by the
enclosure process (10). This age spread is about
300 years for Vostok (11) and 140 years for the TD ice core
(9) at present but about three times higher
for glacial conditions (11). The depth-ice age scale used for
terminations II and III in the Vostok core is a recently expanded
version of the extended glaciological time scale (12). The dating uncertainty (on the order of
10,000 years for termination III) is considerable; however, the
absolute time scale is not so important as long as we consistently compare
Vostok CO2 with the Vostok isotope temperature ( More important is the
relative dating of ice and air at a certain depth. The ice age-air age
difference ( In Fig. 1, our data and previously published CO2
concentration records (1, 6, 9, 11, 15, 16)
are compared with Antarctic isotope (temperature) ice core records
(13, 17-19). Note that the CO2
concentrations represent essentially a global signal. In contrast,
the geographical representativeness of isotope temperature records
may vary from a synoptical to hemispherical scale and accordingly
within different cores with increasing variability for shorter
time scales. The Vostok and TD CO2 data presented here
are in good agreement with previous CO2 values. On a 10,000-year
time scale, CO2 covaries with the isotope temperatures with
minimum glacial CO2 concentrations of 180 to
200 ppmv, glacial-interglacial transitions accompanied by a
rapid increase in CO2 concentrations to a maximum of
270 to 300 ppmv, and a gradual return to low CO2 values
during glaciation. On a shorter time scale, however, a much more
complex picture evolves. Fig. 1. Records of atmospheric CO2
concentrations and isotope temperature records derived from the Antarctic
Byrd, Vostok, and TD ice cores during the deglaciation and glaciation events
around the last three glacial terminations. Error bars in CO2
concentration data represent 1 The onset of the atmospheric
CO2 increase during termination I recorded in the TD record is at
19 to 20 ky B.P. The rise in the long-term trend in CO2
concentrations seems to be about 1000 years earlier than the rise
in Vostok A dip in CO2
concentrations at 135 ky B.P. precedes the start of the increase in CO2
concentrations during termination II, which reaches a maximum of
290 ppmv at 128 ky B.P. Like in the Holocene, CO2
concentrations decrease after this initial maximum to ~275 ppmv.
The onset of the major warming during termination II is hard to
define, but during the penultimate warm period, CO2
concentrations reach their maximum 400 ± 200 years later than
Antarctic temperatures. In the following 15,000 years of the
Eemian warm period, CO2 concentrations do not show a
substantial change despite distinct cooling over the Antarctic ice
sheet. Not until 6000 years after the major cooling in MIS
5.4 does a substantial decline in CO2
concentration occur. Another 4000 to 6000 years is
required to return to an approximate in-phase relation of CO2
with the temperature variations. Finally, termination III
starts with a CO2 concentration of 205 ppmv at 244 ky
B.P., slightly higher than that for the beginnings of terminations
I and II. At that time, temperatures had already increased since
the glacial temperature minimum at ~260 ky B.P. CO2
concentrations rise slowly from 244 to 241 ky B.P. and then rapidly
to more than 300 ppmv at 238 ky B.P. Keeping the rather coarse
resolution of the Comparison of the sequence
of events for the three time intervals described above suggests that the
carbon cycle-climate relation should be separated into (at least)
a deglaciation and a glaciation mode. Atmospheric CO2
concentrations show a similar increase for all three terminations,
connected to a climate-driven net transfer of carbon from the
ocean to the atmosphere (6). The time lag of the rise in CO2
concentrations with respect to temperature change is on the order
of 400 to 1000 years during all three glacial-interglacial transitions.
Considering the uncertainties in The situation is even more
complicated for the interglacial and glaciation periods. During the extended
Holocene and Eemian warm periods, atmospheric CO2
concentrations drop by ~10 ppmv after an initial maximum,
attributable to a substantial increase in the terrestrial
biospheric carbon storage extracting CO2 from the atmosphere.
In the case of the Eemian, CO2 concentrations remain
constant after the initial maximum in MIS 5.5 despite slowly decreasing
temperatures; during the Holocene, atmospheric CO2 concentrations
even increase during the last 8000 years. Application of a
carbon cycle model to CO2 and During further glaciation in
MIS 5.4, CO2 concentrations remain constant, although
temperatures strongly decline. We suggest that this reflects the
combination of the increased oceanic uptake of CO2
expected for colder climate conditions and CO2 release caused
by the net decline of the terrestrial biosphere during the
glaciation and possibly by respiration of organic carbon deposited on
increasingly exposed shelf areas. These processes, however, should
terminate (with some delay) after the lowest temperatures are
reached in MIS 5.4 and ice volume is at its maximum at 111 ky
B.P. (22). In agreement with this hypothesis, CO2
concentrations start to decrease in the Vostok record at about 111 ky
B.P. Another possibility to explain this delayed response of CO2
to the cooling during MIS 5.4 would be an inhibited uptake of
CO2 by the ocean. In any case, about 5°C lower temperatures on
the Antarctic ice sheet during MIS 5.4 (17) are difficult to reconcile with the
full interglacial CO2 forcing encountered at the
beginning of this cold period and again question the
straightforward application of the past CO2-climate relation to
the recent anthropogenic warming. Another scenario is
encountered during MIS 7, in which no prolonged warm period is observed.
Although temperatures at the end of termination III are comparable
to those at the end of termination II and CO2
concentrations are even slightly higher, a much shorter lag in the
decrease of CO2 relative to the Antarctic temperature decrease
in MIS 7.4 is found. Comparison with the SPECMAP record (23) shows that during the preceding interglacial MIS
7.5, ice volume was much larger than during the Holocene and the
Eemian warm periods. Accordingly, the buildup of the terrestrial biosphere
during MIS 7.5 is expected to be much less and sea level changes
smaller, leading to a smaller net release of CO2 into the
atmosphere during the following glaciation, which is not able to
fully counterbalance the CO2 uptake by the ocean. REFERENCES AND NOTES 1.
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single measurement (as essentially determined by the standard deviation of
multiple frequency tunings of the diode laser) is better than 5 ppmv.
The laser spectroscopic method enables the use of very small samples (~4 g),
allowing us to pick crack-free ice and to measure replicate samples at the
same depth interval. In general, all given CO2 concentrations
correspond to the average and standard deviation of at least three replicate
samples. On average, the variability of such replicate measurements is
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A. Indermühle et al., Nature, in
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J.-M. Barnola, P. Pimienta, D. Raynaud, Y. S.
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and air age time scales were kindly provided by J. Jouzel and J.-R.
Petit. Ages were assigned to sample depths after slight depth corrections for
the Vostok 5G core (17) by linear interpolation of the depth-age scale. A
publication describing the calculation of the expanded time scales, which is
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407 (1993)], is in preparation. 13.
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Phase relations were determined by comparison of
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isotope temperatures as represented by spline approximations. Given errors
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T. Blunier, et al., Geophys. Res. Lett.
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1 (1987) . 23. J. Imbrie et
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We thank J.-M. Barnola and D. Raynaud for
helpful comments and for sharing with us their unpublished Vostok CO2
record of the last four glacial-interglacial cycles during our sample
selection process. This study was funded by NSF grants OPP9615292,
OPP9196095, and OPP9118534. Financial support of H.F. has been provided by
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. 30 November 1998; accepted
29 January 1999 [12] “Which of These Is Not Causing Global
Warming Today?; A. Sport utility vehicles; B. Rice fields; C. Increased solar
output”; Newsweek, July 2, 2007, COVER: WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW NOW:
ENVIRONMENT; Pg. 48, 1758 words, By Sharon Begley and Andrew Murr [12a] THE COOLING WORLD, by Peter Gwynne There are
ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns have begun to change
dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food
production - with serious political implications for just about every nation
on earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only ten
years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great
wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the north, along with a
number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas - parts of India,
Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia - where the growing season is
dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon. The evidence
in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that
meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have
seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a
resultant over-all loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons
annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator
has risen by a fraction of a degree - a fraction that in some areas can mean
drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of
tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused
half a billion dollars' worth of damage in thirteen U.S. states. Trend: To
scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs
of fundamental changes in the world's weather. The central fact is that after
three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth's
climate seems to be cooling down. Meteorologists disagree about the cause and
extent of the cooling trend, as well as over its specific impact on local
weather conditions. But they are almost unanimous in the view that the trend
will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century. If the
climatic change is as profound as some of the pessimists fear, the resulting
famines could be catastrophic. "A major climatic change would force
economic and social adjustments on a worldwide scale," warns a recent
report by the National Academy of Sciences, "because the global patterns
of food production and population that have evolved are implicitly dependent
on the climate of the present century." A survey
completed last year by Dr. Murray Mitchell of the National Oceanic and
Atmosphere Administration reveals a drop of half a degree in average ground
temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere between 1945 and 1968. According to
George Kukla of Columbia University, satellite photos indicated a sudden,
large increase in Northern Hemisphere snow cover in the winter of 1971-72.
And a study released last month by two NOAA scientists notes that the amount
of sunshine reaching the ground in the continental U.S. diminished by 1.3 per
cent between 1964 and 1972. To the layman,
the relatively small changes in temperature and sunshine can be lighly
misleading. Reid Bryson of the University of Wisconsin points out that the
earth's average temperature during the great Ice Ages was only about 7
degrees lower than during its warmest eras - and that the present decline has
taken the planet about a sixth of the way toward the Ice Age average.Others
regard the cooling as a reversion to the "little ice age"
conditions that brought bitter winters to much of Europe and northern
American between 1600 and 1900 - years when the Thames used to freeze so
solidly that Londoners roasted oxen on the ice and when iceboats sailed the
Hudson River almost as far south as New York City. Just what
causes the onset of major and minor ice ages remains a mystery. "Our
knowledge of the mechanisms of climatic change is at least as fragmentary as
our data," concedes the National Academy of Sciences report. "Not
only are the basic scientific questions largely unanswered, but in many cases
we do not yet know enough to pose the key questions." Extremes:
Meteorologists think that they can forecast the short-term results of the
return to the norm of the last century. They begin by noting the slight drop
in over-all temperature that produces large numbers of pressure centers in
the upper atmosphere. These break up the smooth flow of westerly winds over
temperate areas. The stagnant air produced in this way causes an increase in
extremes of local weather such as droughts, floods, extended dry spells, long
freezes, delayed monsoons and even local temperature increases - all of which
have a direct impact on food supplies. "The
world's food-producing system," warns Dr. James D. McQuigg of NOAA's
Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, "is much more
sensitive to the weather variable than it was even five years ago."
Furthermore, the growth of world population and creation of new national
boundaries make it impossible for starving peoples to migrate from their
devastated fields, as they did during past famines. Climatologists
are pessimistic that political leaders will take any positive action to
compensate for the climatic change, or even to allay its effects. They
concede that some of the more spectacular solutions proposed, such as melting
the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers,
might create problems far greater than those they solve. But the scientists
see few signs that government leaders anywhere are even prepared to take the
simple measures of stockpiling food or of introducing the variables of
climatic uncertainty into economic projections of future food supplies. The
longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with
climatic change once the results become grim reality. SOURCE: The Cooling World; Newsweek, April
28, 1975, UNITED STATES EDITION, SCIENCE; Pg. 64, 947 words, PETER GWYNNE
with bureau reports [13] “THE TRUTH ABOUT 'Climategate'; Hacked
e-mails have compromised scientists--but not the science itself”; Newsweek;
December 14, 2009; U.S. Edition; By Sharon Begley; SECTION: ENVIRONMENT; Pg.
64 Vol. 154 No. 24 [14] The Economist; December 20, 2003 U.S.
Edition; “Time and chance”; SECTION: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY; 1383 words [14a] “Waiting
for Al: America's next president”; The Economist, February 24, 2007, UNITED
STATES, 395 words [15] The Economist; November 28, 2009 U.S.
Edition; “Mail-strom; Climate change”; SECTION: SCIENCE & TECHNOLOGY;
1440 words; HIGHLIGHT: The climate-change e-mail controversy [16]
“Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has
been no global warming since 1995”; By Jonathan Petre; Last updated at 5:12
PM on 14th February 2010 [17] Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the
Last 2,000 Years (2006), pp 81,82 Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate
(BASC), National Academy of Science. [17a] quoted in: Plimer, I. (2009). Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the
Missing Science. New York: Taylor Trade Publishing. (p.98) [18] The Sunday Telegraph (United Kingdom);
January 25, 2009 Sunday; SCIENTISTS FIND GAPING HOLES IN POLAR ICE FACTS; by
Christopher Booker; 748 words [20] “Climate Emails Stoke Debate: Scientists'
Leaked Correspondence Illustrates Bitter Feud over Global Warming”; Wall
Street Journal; NOVEMBER 23, 2009; by Keith Johnson [20a] The quote in the text is from Ian
Plimer’s book Heaven and Earth: Global
Warming, the Missing Science, p. 482. Ian
Plimer is twice winner of Australias highest scientific honor, the Eureka
Prize. He is professor in the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at
the University of Adelaide and Emeritus Professor of Earth Sciences at the
University of Melbourne. He is Australia’s best known geologist. Here follow
lengthy excerpts from the above mentioned book, with my comments, concerning
the independent analyses of the ‘hockey stick’ graph: [Quote
from Heaven and Earth begins here] The
methodology of science is such that new data and the resulting conclusions
are critically analyzed, repeated, refined, or rejected. This ‘hockey stick’
graphic was contrary to conclusions derived from thousands of studies using
boreholes in ice, lakes, rivers and oceans, glacial deposits, flood deposits,
sea level data, soils, volcanoes, wind blown sand, isotopes, pollen, peat,
fossils, cave deposits, agriculture, and contemporary records. When
extraordinary conclusions are made, there needs to be extraordinary data in
support. This
is exactly what happened with the Mann study. It was demolished on the basis
of statistics. Two Canadians, Steven McIntyre and Ross McKitrick, requested
the original data from Mann that underpinned his study. This was like
extracting teeth. After much bluster, stonewalling and hiding behind the veil
of confidentiality, the data was provided in dribs and drabs. The original
data set provided for validation and repeatability, a normal process of
science, was incomplete. Because US federal funds had been used to support Mann’s
study, by law the data had to be made available. In other jurisdictions, it
may not be possible to obtain the primary data for government-supported
research. It
seemed clear that no reviewer of the Mann et
al. paper in Nature had
requested the original data upon which the paper was based, for otherwise Nature would not have published a
paper using such incomplete data. This is not the place to speculate on
whether this was a lapse in editorial standards or whether Nature was following another agenda.
However, extraordinary conclusions and the dismissal of thousands of previous
scientific studies on the Medieval Warming and Little Ice Age should have
stimulated reviewers and editors of Nature
to view the primary data and calculations as a normal part of scientific due
diligence. McIntyre
and McKittrick found that the Mann data did not produce the claimed results: “due
to collation errors, unjustifiable truncation or extrapolation of source data,
obsolete data, geographical location errors, incorrect calculation of
principal components and other quality control defects.” The
IPCC used the Mann diagram in 2001 as the central tool to show that
human-induced global warming started in the 20th Century. It is clear that
Mann’s data used to construct the ‘hockey stick’ was meaningless, that
adequate due diligence was not undertaken by the authors, reviewers and
editors. …Mann
et al. issued a ‘correction’ later
which admitted that their proxy data contained some errors but ‘none of these
errors affect our previously published results.’ This means that Mann was
quite happy to publish work that he had either not checked or he knew was
wrong. Mann was unable and unprepared to argue against the statistics of
McIntyre and McKittrick and dogmatically stated that he was correct. He did
not address the issue that bristlecone pine growth, his principal data set
for his ‘hockey stick,’ was unrelated to temperature. The
‘hockey stick’ graphic used by the IPCC sent a very misleading message to the
public. Furthermore, the 1996 IPCC report showed the Medieval Warming and
Little Ice Age. Mann’s ‘hockey stick was used in the IPCC’s 2001 report and
the Medieval Warming and Little Ice Age were expunged from the record of
modern climates. In the next IPCC report, the Medieval Warming and Little Ice
Age mysteriously reappeared. This
suggests that the IPCC knew that the ‘hockey stick’ was invalid. This is a
withering condemnation of the IPCC. The ‘hockey stick’ was used as the
backdrop for announcements about human-induced climate change, it is still
used by Al Gore, and it is still used in talks, on websites and in
publications by those claiming that the world is getting warmer due to human
activities. Were any of those people who view this graphic told that the data
before 1421 AD was based on just one lonely alpine pine tree? Mann
had not released all his data and calculation methods to McIntyre and
McKittrick, and was reported in public as stating that he would not be
intimidated into disclosing the algorithm by which he obtained his results.
This attracted the interest of the US House Energy and Commerce Committee.
Its members read the McIntyre and McKittrick articles and became concerned
about allegations that Mann had withheld adverse statistical results and that
his results depended upon bristlecone pine ring widths, well known to be a
questionable measure of temperature. In June 2005, they sent questions to
Mann and his co-authors about verification statistics and bristlecone pines,
asked Mann for the algorithm he used, and asked pro forma questions about federal funds used in their research.
This caused a storm with allegations of intimidation. Various learned
societies, none of which had been offended by Mann’s public refusal to
provide full disclosure, were outraged that a House committee (representing
the taxpayers who had paid for the results) should be trying to find out how
Mann derived his results. A
turf war started. The House Science Committee felt its jurisdiction had been
ipinged upon. After a few months of battles, the House Science Committee
asked the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) to evaluate criticism of Mann’s
work and to assess the larger issue of historical climate data
reconstructions. The NAS agreed but only under terms that precluded a direct
investigation of the issues that prompted the original dispute – whether Mann
et al. had withheld adverse results
and whether the data and methodological information necessary for replication
were available. [Quote
from Heaven and Earth ends here] What
happened? The NAS assessment essentially agreed that the Mann et al. study was deeply flawed: the
‘hockey stick’ was based on bad science. This is not, however, what the NAS said
in the press release, where they
suggested that there was no problem with the Mann et al. Ian Plimer believes that: [Quote
from Heaven and Earth begins here] “In
the political heat, it would not have been politically possible for the NAS
to state that the Mann et al.
papers were fraudulent, wrong or biased. This would have unstitched the IPCC.
However, the detailed NAS report shows extensive criticism of the methodology
of Mann and states: “Some
of these criticisms are more relevant than others, but taken together, they
are an important aspect of a more general finding of this committee, which is
that uncertainties of the published reconstructions have been
underestimated.” The
House Energy and Commerce Committee appointed an eminent team of statisticians
led by Dr. Edward Wegman to investigate. The conclusions of the Wegman
investigation were confirmed by another independent statistical analysis of
Mann’s data. Wegman’s committee had some interesting statements about the
Mann et al. publication. “It
is important to note the isolation of the paleoclimate community; even though
they rely heavily on statistical methods they do not seem to be interacting
with the statistical community. Additionally, we judge that the sharing of
research materials, data and results was hap[hazardly and grudgingly done. In
this case we judge that there was too much reliance on peer review, which was
not necessarily independent. Moreover, the work has been sufficiently
politicized that this community can hardly reassess their public positions
without losing credibility. Overall, our committee believes that Dr Mann’s
assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the
millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be
supported by his analysis.” It
appears that the science of Mann is porrly communicated. “The
papers of Mann et al. in themselves
are written in a confusing manner, making it difficult for the reader to
discern the actual methodology and what uncertainty is actually associated with
these reconstructions. Vague terms such as ‘moderate certainty’ (Mann et al. 1999) give no guidelines to the
reader as to how such conclusions should be weighed. While the works do not
have supplementary websites, they rely heavily on the reader’s ability to
piece together the work and methodology from raw data. This is especially
unsettling when the findings of these works are said to have global impact,
yet only a small population could truly understand them. Thus, it is no
surprise that Mann et al. claim a
misunderstanding of their work by McIntyre and McKittrick.” and “In
their works, Mann et al. describe
the possible causdes of global climate change in terms o atmospheric
forcings, such as anthropogenic, volcanic, or solar forcings. Another
questionable aspect of these works is that linear relationships are assumed
in all forcing-climate relationships. This is a significantly simplified
model for something as complex as the earth’s climate, which most likely has
complicated non-loinear cyclical processes on a multi-centennial scale that
we do not yet understand. Mann et al.
also infer that since there is a part6ial correlation between global mean
temperatures in the 20th century and CO2 concentration, greenhouse-gas
forcing is the dominant external forcing of the climate system. Osborn and
Briffa make a similar statement, where they casually note that evidence for
warming also occurs at a period where CO2 concentrations are high. A common
phrase among statisticians is correlation does not imply causation. Making
conclusive statements without specific findings with regard to atmospheric
forcings suggests a lack of scientific rigor and possibly an agenda.” and “Specifically, global warming
and its potentially negative consequences have been central concerns of both
governments and individuals. The ‘hockey stick’ graphic dramatically
illustrated the global warming issue and was adopted by the IPCC and many
governments as the poster graphic. The graphic’s prominence together with the
fact that it is based on incorrect use of PCA puts Dr Mann and his co-authors
in a difficult face-saving problem.” The network analysis of Mann
and 42 other authors by Wegman’s statisticians shows diagrammatically how
they foirmed a closed coterie, who not only co-authored but also refereed
each other’s publications. This phenomenon is, of course, not new, but has
never been so powerful in world affairs. The report finds that: a. Mann
et al. misused certain statistical
methods in their studies which inappropriately produce ‘hockey stick’ shapes
in the temperature history. b. The
claim that the 1990s were the warmest decade of the millennium could not be
substantiated. c. The
cycle of the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age disappeared from
Mann et al. analysis, thereby
making it possible to make the claim about the hottest decade. d. A
social network analysis revealed that the small community of paleoclimate
researchers appear to review each other’s work, and reuse many of the same
data sets, which calls into question the independence of peer review and
temperature reconstructions. e. It
is clear that many of the proxies are re-used in most of the papers. It is
not surprising that the papers would obtain similar results and so cannot
claim to be independent verifications. f. Although
the researchers rely heavily on statistical methods, they do not seem to be
interacting with the statistical community. The public policy implications of
this debate are financially staggering and yet apparently no independent
statistical expertise was sought or used. g. Authors
of policy-related science assessments should not assess their own work. It is
especially the case that authors of policy-related documents like the IPCC
report, Climate Change 2001: The
Scientific Basis should not be the same people that constructed the
academic papers. Policy-related climate science should have a more intensive
level of scrutiny and review involving statisticians. h. Federal
research should involve interdisciplinary teams to avoid narrowly focused
discipline research. i. Federal
research should emphasise fundamental understanding of the mechanisms of
climate change and should focus on interdisciplinary teams to avoid narrowly
focused discipline research. j. While
the palaeoclimate reconstruction has gathered much publicity because it
reinforces a policy agenda, it does not provide insight and understanding of
the physical methods of climate change. The Chairman of the NAS
committee was later asked at the US Senate House Energy and Commerce hearings
whether or not the NAS agreed with Wegman’s harsh criticisms. “Chariman [Joe] Barton: Dr North, do you dispute the conclusions
or the methodology of Dr Wegman’s report? [Quote from Heaven and Earth ends here] Despite the above, Mann claims that
the NAS vindicated him! Now, are we talking about the honest
mistakes of a group of 40 spectacularly incompetent palaeoclimate scientists
who organize around Mann, or are we talking about deliberate deception? Here
is Ian Plimer’s take on this: [Quote from Heaven and Earth begins here] In many fields of science, this
would have been considered as fraud. In many fields of endeavour, Mann would
have been struck off the list of practitioners. In the field of climate
studies, he was thrashed in public with a feather and still gainfully
practices his art. Mann should be grateful for being dealt with in such a
gentle manner, given his rather thuggish behavior in trying to prevent valid
criticism being published. I’m, sure St Peter will judge Mann accordingly! A dispassionate reading of Dr
Steve McIntyre’s exposure of Mann shows the systematically dishonest manner
in which the ‘hockey stick’ graph was used to show that it was far warmer
today than in the Medieval Warming. This was adopted as the poster child for
climate panic by the IPCC in 2001 and retained in the 2007 report despite
having been demolished in the scientific literature. The original work of
McIntyre and McKittrick showing that Mann et
al. were, at best, misleading has been expanded and independently
validated by many others. After reading the history of the ‘hockey stick’ no
one could ever again trust the IPCC or the scientists and environmental
extremists who author the climate assessments. The IPCC has encouraged a
collapse of rigour, objectivity, and honesty that were once the hallmarks of
the scientific community. McKittrick stated that had the IPCC undertaken the
kind of rigorous review that they boast of: “they would have discovered
that there was an error in a routine calculation step (principal component
analysis) that falsely indentified a hockey stick shape as the dominant
pattern in the data. The flawed computer program can even pull out spurious
hockey stick shapes from lists of trendless random numbers.” [Quote from Heaven and Earth ends here] SOURCE: Plimer, I. (2009). Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the
Missing Science. New York: Taylor Trade Publishing. (pp.89-98) [21] Here follows the letter Michael Mann
received from the House Subcomittee on Oversight and Investigations, chaired
by Joe Barton and Ed Whitfield: [Text of the letter begins here] June 23, 2005 Dr. Michael Mann Dear Dr. Mann: Questions have been raised, according to a February 14, 2005 article
in The Wall Street Journal, about
the significance of methodological flaws and data errors in your studies of
the historical record of temperatures and climate change. We understand that
these studies of temperature proxy records (tree rings, ice cores, corals,
etc.) formed the basis for a new finding in the 2001 United Nation’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Third Assessment Report
(TAR). This finding – that the increase in 20th century northern hemisphere
temperatures is “likely to have been the largest of any century during the
past 1,000 years” and that the “1990s was the warmest decade and 1998 the
warmest year” – has since been referenced widely and has become a prominent
feature of the public debate surrounding climate change policy. However, in recent peer-reviewed articles in Science, Geophysical Research Letters, and Energy & Environment, researchers question the results of
this work. As these researchers find, based on the available information, the
conclusions concerning temperature histories – and hence whether warming in
the 20th century is actually unprecedented – cannot be supported by the Mann
et al. studies cited in the TAR. In addition, we understand from the February
14 Journal and these other reports that researchers have failed to replicate
the findings of these studies, in part because of problems with the
underlying data and the calculations used to reach the conclusions. Questions
have also been raised concerning the sharing and dissemination of the data
and methods used to perform the studies. For example, according to the
January 2005 Energy & Environment,
such information necessary to replicate the analyses in the studies has not
been made fully available to researchers upon request. The concerns surrounding these studies reflect upon the quality and
transparency of federally funded research and of the IPCC review process –
two matters of particular interest to the Committee. For example, one concern
relates to whether IPCC review has been sufficiently independent. We
understand that you were a lead author of the IPCC chapter that assessed and
reported your own studies, and that two study co-authors were also
contributing authors to this very same chapter. Given the prominence these
studies were accorded in the IPCC TAR and your position and role in that
process, we seek to learn more about the facts and circumstances that led to
acceptance and prominent use of this work in the IPCC TAR and to understand
what this controversy indicates about the data quality of key IPCC studies. As you know, sharing data and research results is a basic tenet of
open scientific inquiry, providing a means to judge the reliability of
scientific claims. The ability to replicate a study, as the National Research
Council has noted, is typically the gold standard by which the reliability of
claims is judged. Given the questions reported about data access surrounding
these studies, we also seek to learn whether obligations concerning the
sharing of information developed or disseminated with federal support have
been appropriately met. In light of the Committee’s jurisdiction over energy policy and
certain environmental issues, the Committee must have full and accurate
information when considering matters relating to climate change policy. We
open this review because this dispute surrounding your studies bears directly
on important questions about the federally funded work upon which climate
studies rely and the quality and transparency of analyses used to support the
IPCC assessment process. With the IPCC currently working to produce a fourth assessment
report, addressing questions of quality and transparency in the process and
underlying analyses supporting that assessment, both scientific and economic,
are of utmost importance if Congress is eventually going to make policy
decisions drawing from this work. To assist us as we begin this review, and pursuant to Rules X and XI
of the U.S. House of Representatives, please provide the following
information requested below on or before July 11, 2005: 1. Your curriculum vitae, including, but not limited to, a list of all
studies relating to climate change research for which you were an author or
co-author and the source of funding for those studies. 2. List all financial support you have received related to your
research, including, but not limited to, all private, state, and federal
assistance, grants, contracts (including subgrants or subcontracts), or other
financial awards or honoraria. 3. Regarding all such work involving federal grants or funding support
under which you were a recipient of funding or principal investigator,
provide all agreements relating to those underlying grants or funding,
including, but not limited to, any provisions, adjustments, or exceptions
made in the agreements relating to the dissemination and sharing of research
results. 4. Provide the location of all data archives relating to each
published study for which you were an author or co-author and indicate: (a)
whether this information contains all the specific data you used and
calculations your performed, including such supporting documentation as
computer source code, validation information, and other ancillary
information, necessary for full evaluation and application of the data,
particularly for another party to replicate your research results; (b) when
this information was available to researchers; (c) where and when you first
identified the location of this information; (d) what modifications, if any,
you have made to this information since publication of the respective study;
and (e) if necessary information is not fully available, provide a detailed
narrative description of the steps somebody must take to acquire the
necessary information to replicate your study results or assess the quality
of the proxy data you used. 5. According to The Wall Street
Journal, you have declined to release the exact computer code you used to
generate your results. (a) Is this correct? (b) What policy on sharing
research and methods do you follow? (c) What is the source of that policy?
(d) Provide this exact computer code used to generate your results. 6. Regarding study data and related information that is not publicly
archived, what requests have you or your co-authors received for data
relating to the climate change studies, what was your response, and why? 7. The authors McIntyre and McKitrick (Energy & Environment, Vol.
16, No. 1, 2005) report a number of errors and omissions in Mann et. al.,
1998. Provide a detailed narrative explanation of these alleged errors and
how these may affect the underlying conclusions of the work, including, but
not limited to answers to the following questions: a. Did you run calculations without the bristlecone pine series
referenced in the article and, if so, what was the result? b. Did you or your co-authors calculate temperature reconstructions
using the referenced “archived Gaspe tree ring data,” and what were the
results? c. Did you calculate the R2 statistic for the temperature
reconstruction, particularly for the 15th Century proxy record calculations
and what were the results? d. What validation statistics did you calculate for the reconstruction
prior to 1820, and what were the results? e. How did you choose particular proxies and proxy series? 8. Explain in detail your work for and on behalf of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, including, but not limited to: (a)
your role in the Third Assessment Report; (b) the process for review of
studies and other information, including the dates of key meetings, upon
which you worked during the TAR writing and review process; (c) the steps
taken by you, reviewers, and lead authors to ensure the data underlying the
studies forming the basis for key findings of the report were sound and
accurate; (d) requests you received for revisions to your written
contribution; and (e) the identity of the people who wrote and reviewed the
historical temperature-record portions of the report, particularly Section
2.3, “Is the Recent Warming Unusual?” Thank you for your assistance. If you have any questions, please
contact Peter Spencer of the Majority Committee staff at (202) 226-2424. Sincerely, Joe Barton Ed
Whitfield Subcommittee on Oversight and Investigations cc: The Honorable John Dingell, Ranking Member [Text of letter ends here] SOURCE: US House of Representatives. [22] “SURFACE TEMPERATURE RECORDS: POLICY DRIVEN
DECEPTION?”; Science and Public Policy Institute; January 7, 2010; by Joseph
D’Aleo and Anthony Watts; pp.4-7, 33. http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/ [23]
“Despite cool
temperatures, ice extent remains low”; February 3, 2010; ARCTIC SEA ICE NEWS
AND ANALYSIS; NSIDC [23a] “WIND CONTRIBUTING TO ARCTIC SEA ICE LOSS, STUDY FINDS: New research
does not question climate change is also melting ice in the Arctic, but finds
wind patterns explain steep decline”; The
Guardian (guardian.co.uk); David Adam, environment correspondent; Monday
22 March 2010 07.00 GMT [24] HEARING OF THE OVERSIGHT AND INVESTIGATIONS SUBCOMMITTEE OF THE HOUSE ENERGY
AND COMMERCE COMMITTEE SUBJECT: QUESTIONS SURROUNDING THE HOCKEY STICK
TEMPERATURE STUDIES: IMPLICATIONS FOR CLIMATE CHANGE ASSESSMENTS CHAIRED BY:
REPRESENTATIVE ED WHITFIELD (R-KY) WITNESSES: DR. MICHAEL E. MANN, ASSOCIATE
PROFESSOR AND DIRECTOR EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCE CENTER, PENNSYLVANIA STATE
UNIVERSITY; DR. RALPH J. CICERONE, PRESIDENT, NATIONAL ACADEMY OF SCIENCES;
DR. JAY GULLEDGE, SENIOR RESEARCH FELLOW, PEW CENTER ON GLOBAL CLIMATE
CHANGE; DR. JOHN R. CHRISTY, PROFESSOR AND DIRECTOR, EARTH SYSTEM SCIENCE
CENTER, NSSTC, UNIVERSITY OF ALABAMA IN HUNTSVILLE; STEPHEN MCINTYRE,
TORONTO, CANADA; DR. EDWARD J. WEGMAN, DIRECTOR, CENTER FOR COMPUTATIONAL
STATISTICS, GEORGE MASON UNIVERSITY LOCATION: 2322 RAYBURN HOUSE OFFICE
BUILDING, WASHINGTON, D.C. ____________________________________________________________ Corrections 17 March 2010. An earlier version of this paper
claimed incorrectly that it was starting
in 2004 that scientists had achieved better resolution in the Antarctic
ice core studies which allowed them to see that increases in CO2
concentrations always lag temperature increases by several centuries.
Actually, this result was established as early as 1999. The consequence of
the correction for my arguments in this paper is the following: the media
silence on the ‘CO2 lag’ is rendered all the more dramatic, since it has been
enforced over a longer stretch of time than previously claimed here. |
Himalayan
glaciers BBC NEWS Mt Everest Melting glaciers in the Himalayas
could lead to water shortages for hundreds of millions of people, the
conservation group WWF has claimed. In a report, the WWF says India,
China and Nepal could experience floods followed by droughts in coming
decades. The Himalayas contain the largest
store of water outside the polar ice caps, and feed seven great Asian rivers. The group says immediate action
against climate change could slow the rate of melting, which is increasing
annually. "The rapid melting of
Himalayan glaciers will first increase the volume of water in rivers, causing
widespread flooding," said Jennifer Morgan, director of the WWF's Global
Climate Change Programme. "But in a few decades this
situation will change and the water level in rivers will decline, meaning
massive eco and environmental problems for people in western China, Nepal and
northern India." 'Catastrophe' The glaciers, which regulate the
water supply to the Ganges, Indus, Brahmaputra, Mekong, Thanlwin, Yangtze and
Yellow rivers are believed to be retreating at a rate of about 10-15m
(33-49ft) each year. Hundreds of millions of people
throughout China and the Indian subcontinent - most of whom live far from the
Himalayas - rely on water supplied from these rivers. Many live on flood plains highly
vulnerable to raised water levels. And vast numbers of farmers rely
on regular irrigation to grow their crops successfully. The WWF said the potential for
disaster in the region should serve to focus the minds of ministers of 20
leading industrialised nations gathering in London for two meetings on
climate change. ▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬▬ World
misled over Himalayan glacier meltdown THE SUNDAY TIMES A WARNING that climate change
will melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 is likely to be retracted
after a series of scientific blunders by the United Nations body that issued
it. Two years ago the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued a benchmark report
that was claimed to incorporate the latest and most detailed research into
the impact of global warming. A central claim was the world's glaciers were
melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035. In the past few days the
scientists behind the warning have admitted that it was based on a news story
in the New Scientist, a popular science journal, published eight years before
the IPCC's 2007 report. It has also emerged that the New
Scientist report was itself based on a short telephone interview with Syed
Hasnain, a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru
University in Delhi. Hasnain has since admitted that
the claim was "speculation" and was not supported by any formal
research. If confirmed it would be one of the most serious failures yet seen
in climate research. The IPCC was set up precisely to ensure that world
leaders had the best possible scientific advice on climate change. Professor Murari Lal, who oversaw
the chapter on glaciers in the IPCC report, said he would recommend that the
claim about glaciers be dropped: "If Hasnain says officially that he
never asserted this, or that it is a wrong presumption, than I will recommend
that the assertion about Himalayan glaciers be removed from future IPCC
assessments." The IPCC's reliance on Hasnain's
1999 interview has been highlighted by Fred Pearce, the journalist who
carried out the original interview for the New Scientist. Pearce said he rang
Hasnain in India in 1999 after spotting his claims in an Indian magazine.
Pearce said: "Hasnain told me then that he was bringing a report
containing those numbers to Britain. The report had not been peer reviewed or
formally published in a scientific journal and it had no formal status so I
reported his work on that basis. "Since then I have obtained
a copy and it does not say what Hasnain said. In other words it does not
mention 2035 as a date by which any Himalayan glaciers will melt. However, he
did make clear that his comments related only to part of the Himalayan
glaciers. not the whole massif." The New Scientist report was
apparently forgotten until 2005 when WWF cited it in a report called An
Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India
and China. The report credited Hasnain's 1999 interview with the New
Scientist. But it was a campaigning report rather than an academic paper so
it was not subjected to any formal scientific review. Despite this it rapidly
became a key source for the IPCC when Lal and his colleagues came to write
the section on the Himalayas. When finally published, the IPCC
report did give its source as the WWF study but went further, suggesting the
likelihood of the glaciers melting was "very high". The IPCC
defines this as having a probability of greater than 90%. The report read: "Glaciers
in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world and,
if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the
year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the
current rate." However, glaciologists find such
figures inherently ludicrous, pointing out that most Himalayan glaciers are
hundreds of feet thick and could not melt fast enough to vanish by 2035
unless there was a huge global temperature rise. The maximum rate of decline
in thickness seen in glaciers at the moment is 2-3 feet a year and most are
far lower. Professor Julian Dowdeswell,
director of the Scott Polar Research Institute at Cambridge University, said:
"Even a small glacier such as the Dokriani glacier is up to 120 metres
[394ft] thick. A big one would be several hundred metres thick and tens of
kilometres long. The average is 300 metres thick so to melt one even at 5
metres a year would take 60 years. That is a lot faster than anything we are
seeing now so the idea of losing it all by 2035 is unrealistically high.” Some scientists have questioned
how the IPCC could have allowed such a mistake into print. Perhaps the most
likely reason was lack of expertise. Lal himself admits he knows little about
glaciers. "I am not an expert on glaciers, and I have not visited the
region so I have to rely on credible published research. The comments in the
WWF report were made by a respected Indian scientist and it was reasonable to
assume he knew what he was talking about," he said. Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC
chairman, has previously dismissed criticism of the Himalayas claim as
"voodoo science". Last week the IPCC refused to
comment so it has yet to explain how someone who admits to little expertise
on glaciers was overseeing such a report. Perhaps its one consolation is that
the blunder was spotted by climate scientists who quickly made it public. The lead role in that process was
played by Graham Cogley, a geographer from Trent University in Ontario,
Canada, who had long been unhappy with the IPCC's finding. He traced the IPCC claim back to
the New Scientist and then contacted Pearce. Pearce then re-interviewed
Hasnain, who confirmed that his 1999 comments had been
"speculative", and published the update in the New Scientist. Cogley said: "The reality,
that the glaciers are wasting away, is bad enough. But they are not wasting
away at the rate suggested by this speculative remark and the IPCC report.
The problem is that nobody who studied this material bothered chasing the
trail back to the original point when the claim first arose. It is ultimately
a trail that leads back to a magazine article and that is not the sort of
thing you want to end up in an IPCC report.” Pearce said the IPCC's reliance
on the WWF was "immensely lazy" and the organisation need to
explain itself or back up its prediction with another scientific source.
Hasnain could not be reached for comment. The revelation is the latest
crack to appear in the scientific consensus over climate change. It follows
the so-called climate-gate scandal, where British scientists apparently tried
to prevent other researchers from accessing key data. Last week another row
broke out when the Met Office criticised suggestions that sea levels were
likely to rise 1.9m by 2100, suggesting much lower increases were likely. ████████████████████████ |
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