The Disappearing Science of Global Warming
By Peter Ferrara on 2.17.10 @ 6:09AM
Establishment figures intone about the substantial "body of science" supporting the notion of man-caused global warming. But based on recent events, they need to check the body's pulse. The body is dead, and rapidly wasting away before our very eyes.
Over the past 3 months, a circus of scandals has played around the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its periodic Assessment Reports on global warming. The latest report issued in 2007 proclaimed a consensus regarding a 90% probability that mankind's activities, especially the burning of fossil fuels, were causing global warming that would lead to catastrophic results if drastic steps were not taken to reverse it.
The lasting scientific upshot of that circus of scandals is that the historical global surface temperature record on which the contention of global warming has been based has been thoroughly discredited as manipulated and mangled beyond recovery.
Lies, Damned Lies, and Statistics
Three official global surface temperature data sets exist. These include British data (Hadley-CRU) maintained by the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia, and the Hadley Center for Climate Change of the British Meteorological Office (Met Office). Another is maintained by the National Climatic Data Center at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the U.S. The third is maintained by NASA's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (NASA-GISS).
Last October, Hadley-CRU admitted in response to Freedom of Information requests that they had actually thrown away the raw temperature data from which they constructed their historical surface temperature record. The original Climategate scandal revelations included emails from CRU Director Phil Jones proclaiming to co-conspirators that he will delete the raw data files before publicly disclosing them under Freedom of Information legal requirements. But if global warming science was so sound and supported by the evidence, why would Jones not want to publicly disclose the evidence to allow full peer review under the scientific method, and prove the case?
A later revelation from the Russian Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) explains why. The IEA disclosed that Hadley-CRU had failed to record reports from weather stations in colder regions of Russia, leaving the false impression that those stations were no longer reporting. The IEA believes that the complete Russian data do not support the notion of man-caused global warming. Other revelations disclose the same sort of shenanigans throughout the Hadley-CRU data set.
In any event, without the raw data available for peer review by other scientists to check and replicate the underlying calculations, and examine them for consistency with the publicly reported results, the Hadley-CRU surface temperature record is not science. It provides no foundation for government regulations imposing trillions in additional costs, and foreclosing trillions more in future economic output, nor any basis for the demanded trillions in wealth transfers from developed to underdeveloped countries. You can file it on the library shelf between Alice in Wonderland and Grimm's Fairy Tales.
More recently have come scandalous revelations regarding the same problems with the U.S. data sets kept by NOAA and NASA-GISS. In the 1970s, when it was just honestly trying to report the science, NOAA collected the temperature data from 600 Canadian weather stations. But this number has dwindled over the years to just 35 today for the entire expanse of Canada, including just one above the Arctic Circle. Yet, the Canadian government now operates 1,400 surface weather stations across the country, with more than 100 above the Arctic Circle. The same problems have now been found in the NASA-GISS surface temperature record.
American researchers Joseph D'Aleo and E. Michael Smith published a study on the website of the Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) disclosing these results based on a review of the reports of NOAA and NASA-GISS themselves regarding the collection of data for their surface temperature records. According to a write-up in the National Post:
Mr. D'Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and [NASA-GISS] have not only reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in the database, but have "cherry-picked" the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea -- which has a warming effect on winter weather.
D'Aleo and Smith further report that over the past two decades the percentage of Canadian stations in the lower elevations included in the temperature records of the two agencies tripled, while those at higher elevations above 300 feet, where the temperatures are colder, were cut in half. The National Post story continues:
Using the agency's own figures, Smith shows that in 1991, almost a quarter of NOAA's Canadian temperature data came from stations in the high Arctic. The same region contributes only 3% of the Canadian data today. Mr. D'Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and GISS also ignore data from numerous weather stations in other parts of the world, including Russia, the U.S., and China….The result, they say, is a warmer-than-truthful global temperature record. "NOAA… systematically eliminated 75% of the world's stations with a clear bias towards removing higher latitude, high altitude and rural locations, all of which have a tendency to be cooler," the authors say. "The thermometers, in a sense, marched towards the tropics, the sea, and to airport tarmacs."
NASA GISS is run by the unbalanced James Hansen, who, as Patrick Michaels recently explained in National Review Online, "became famous for calling coal [shipments] to your local power plant 'death trains' and advocating war-crime trials for the executives who daily force you to put gasoline in your car." Hansen also testified in defense of saboteurs on trial for vandalism at power plant construction sites in Britain, saying their violence was justified by the contribution to global warming that the power plants would produce. He can certainly be relied upon as an objective data source.
The Truth About Temperature
The American Spectator : The Disappearing Science of Global Warming (22 February 2010)
spectator.org |
