Posted on 03/18/2007 1:40:02 AM PDT by plenipotentiary
'The global-warmers were bound to attack, but why are they so feeble?' Last Updated: 11:20pm GMT 17/03/2007
'The Great Global Warming Swindle', broadcast by Channel 4, put the case for scepticism about man-made climate change. The programme sparked a heated debate and charges of scientific inaccuracy. Here, its director, Martin Durkin, responds to the critics.
On March 8, Channel 4 broadcast my programme. Since then, supporters of the theory of man-made global warming have published frothing criticism. I am attacked for using an "old" graph depicting temperature over the past 1,000 years. They say I should have used a "new" graph - one used by Al Gore, known as the "hockey stick", because it looks like one.
But the hockey stick has been utterly discredited. The computer programme used to generate it was found to produce hockey-stick shapes even when fed random data (I refer readers to the work of McIntyre & McKitrick and to the Wegman Report, all available on the internet). Other than the discredited hockey stick, the graph used by us (and published by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is the standard, accepted record of temperature in this period.
A critic claims that one of the graphs cited by us, illustrating the extraordinarily close correlation between solar variation and temperature change, has since been "corrected". It most certainly has not. The graph was produced by Prof Eigil Friis-Christensen, the head of the Danish National Space Centre, who says it still stands. But if the global-warmers don't like that graph, there are plenty of others that say the same thing.
No one any longer seriously disputes the link between solar activity and temperature in earth's climate history. I urge readers to look up on the net: Veizer, Geoscience Canada, 2005; and Soon, Geophysical Research Letters, 2005.
In the film, we used three graphs depicting temperature change in the 20th century. On one there was an error in the dates on the bottom. This was corrected for the second transmission of the programme, on More4, last Monday. It made no difference. Global-warmers can pick whichever graph they like. The problem for them remains the same. The temperature rise at the beginning of the century (prior to 1940, when human emissions of CO2 were relatively insignificant) was as great, most graphs show greater, than the temperature rise at the end of the century.
So what else do they hit me with? Prof Carl Wunsch, of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who appeared in the film, later claimed he was duped into taking part. He was not.
The remarkable thing is not that I was attacked. But that the attacks have been so feeble. The ice-core data was the jewel in the global-warming crown, cited again and again as evidence that carbon dioxide 'drives' the earth's climate. In fact, as its advocates have been forced to admit, the ice-core data says the opposite. Temperature change always precedes changes in CO2 by several hundred years. Temperature drives CO2, not the other way round. The global-warmers do not deny this. They cannot.
During the post-war economic boom, while industrial emissions of CO2 went up, the temperature went down (hence the great global-cooling scare in the 1970s). Why? They say maybe the cooling was caused by SO2 (sulphur dioxide) produced by industry. But they say it mumbling under their breath, because they know it makes no sense. Thanks to China and the rest, SO2 levels are far, far higher now than they were back then. Why isn't it perishing cold?
Too many journalists and scientists have built their careers on the global-warming alarm. Certain newspapers have staked their reputation on it. The death of this theory will be painful and ugly. But it will die. Because it is wrong, wrong, wrong.
If you listen to the scientists in Durkin's film, they keep referencing the money invested in GW. It's become a billion-dollar industry, populated largely by non-scientist journalists, activists and "consultants."
It's morphed into a religion, and the pet of politicians eager to pander to an ignorant public while distributing the GW pork to their cronies.
It's a bandwagon they can hop on safely -- by the time the hysteria is proven false, the current crop of agitators will be long gone and their successors will be left to deal with the wreckage to the global economy.
>>It's morphed into a religion, and the pet of politicians eager to pander to an ignorant public while distributing the GW pork to their cronies.
I keep coming back to Mencken on this:
The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence, clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.
- H. L. Mencken, In Politics
"So we are not causing global warming and water is being sent from above."
Interesting link.
One inch of water added to the planet every 20,000 years is alot of water.
The scientific backlash to over-hyping begins.
A FRIGHTENED population is more likely to give up freedoms and rights to a government promising to “SAVE” them from even a bogus danger.
Could ALGORE’S psychosis about GLOBALONEY WARMING be yet another effort by the privileged elites to keep the great unwashed (that’d be the rest of us!) under their very well manicured – and in his case, quite fat -- thumbs?
Better think about that before you give up rights your kids may have to shed blood to recover.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3_qeWnS7Eig
Ordinary people can jump on the bandwagon too without worrying about being proved false. IF the warming reverses by natural causes, they will say SEE, WE TOLD YOU SO, KYOTO AND MORE PEOPLE DRIVING ECONOMY CARS WORLDWIDE WORKED. IF it does not reverse, they will say SEE, WE NEED TO DO MORE.
I am not so optimistic that the truth will win, at least in the short term. The Global Warming fanatics are part of the Environmentalist religion, and this religion owns many governments, political parties, the media and most of the education establishment. They will not stand by and permit contrary views. As good socialists, they believe in decrees and not debate. In some countries there will be "hate crime" laws against anyone who "denies" global warming. Scientists who do not parrot the official dogma will face losing their jobs at the least.
Those pushing this "crisis" COULD get on board the real danger bandwagon and fight the WOT so we could win it quickly and decisively. In that way, they would not be sent to the hinterland of leadership when their presently blinded followers finally wake up.
Just because the Global-Warming fanatics are wrong does not mean that they will not be able to drive public policy for years to come. The same people who in the 1970s precicted a new ice age and overpopulation now predict global warming. These people are treated like prophets, no matter how many times they contradict themselves. They consider the banning of DDT a great success precisely because the consequence of the ban was that millions poor Africans died from disease. You cannot underestimate the hatred for mankind and the genocidal evil that is behind the environmentalist religion.
Gosh, I hope so!
GW has been the biggest load of crap to come along since global cooling.
If you listen to the scientists in Durkin's film, they keep referencing the money invested in GW. It's become a billion-dollar industry, populated largely by non-scientist journalists, activists and "consultants."
I remember. I know they said its in the billions of dollars. I'm thinking that government forced policies that are whole or partially predicated on AGW is a cost far greater than money spent by journalists and consultants, For example, what does CAFE regulation cost the manufactures and consumers? What percentage of the cost is a result of the AGW hoax? Similar for over-regulation of nuclear power generation plants.
I think there's a high probability that a full accounting would show the cost approaching a half trillion dollars. Maybe it's over a trillion.
I keep coming back to Mencken on this: The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed and hence, clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary. - H. L. Mencken, In Politics
And this...
"The urge to save humanity is almost always a false front for the urge to rule." -- H. L. Mencken
Just because the Global-Warming fanatics are wrong does not mean that they will not be able to drive public policy for years to come.
True. Keep in mind, or, for your edification, technology advances exponentially. See the Law of Accelerating Returns, by Ray Kurzweil. For 2300 years government and religious leaders have adapted the technologies of their day, dogma propaganda being mainstays. So have the freedom fighters used the technologies to fend off their advances. Because technology advances based on facts and the laws of nature/physics it can advance exponentially. Dogma and propaganda cannot advance much into and not beyond the knee curve of the technology curve. That's where the state of technology is at now. Irrationality, which dogma and propaganda are products of becomes increasingly random and disconnected from the facts and laws of physics.
Irrationality itself becomes decreasingly effective and ever easier to out compete. Until it has virtually no effect on the trajectory of civilization.
Civilization then will look back upon today as an anti-civilization. Where irrationality, human death and destruction had major influence on the trajectory of human lives and societies.
Thanks for the link, Lokibob. I watched the whole 75 minutes, and it was excellent. This is going to take a meaningful toll on the lefties.
The ice-core data was the jewel in the global-warming crown, cited again and again as evidence that carbon dioxide 'drives' the earth's climate. In fact, as its advocates have been forced to admit, the ice-core data says the opposite.
A summary of just a few of the ice core studies demonstrating this fact:
"(1) correlation does not prove causation, (2) cause must precede effect, and (3) when attempting to evaluate claims of causal relationships between different parameters, it is important to have as much data as possible in order to weed out spurious correlations."
"Consider, for example, the study of Fischer et al. (1999), who examined trends of atmospheric CO2 and air temperature derived from Antarctic ice core data that extended back in time a quarter of a million years. Over this extended period, the three most dramatic warming events experienced on earth were those associated with the terminations of the last three ice ages; and for each of these climatic transitions, earth's air temperature rose well in advance of any increase in atmospheric CO2. In fact, the air's CO2 content did not begin to rise until 400 to 1,000 years after the planet began to warm. Such findings have been corroborated by Mudelsee (2001), who examined the leads/lags of atmospheric CO2 concentration and air temperature over an even longer time period, finding that variations in atmospheric CO2 concentration lagged behind variations in air temperature by 1,300 to 5,000 years over the past 420,000 years.
Other studies have also documented a fundamental violation of the cause-must-precede-effect principle in the climate alarmist hypothesis of CO2-induced global warming. From a high-resolution temperature and atmospheric CO2 record spanning the period 60 to 20 thousand years ago, Indermuhle et al. (2000) examined the CO2/temperature relationship at four distinct periods when temperatures rose by approximately 2°C and CO2 by about 20 ppm. One type of statistical test performed on the data suggested that the shifts in the air's CO2 content during these intervals lagged those in air temperature by approximately 900 years; while a second statistical test yielded a mean lag time of 1200 years."
[ see also: Yokoyama et al. (2000), Clark and Mix (2000), Petit et al. (1999), Staufer et al. (1998)]
- "Other studies periodically demonstrate a complete uncoupling of CO2 and temperature "
[see: Cheddadi et al., (1998), Raymo et al., 1998, Pagani et al. (1999), Pearson and Palmer (1999), Pearson and Palmer, (2000) ]
- "Considered in their entirety, these several results present a truly chaotic picture with respect to any possible effect that variations in atmospheric CO2 concentration may have on global temperature. Clearly, atmospheric CO2 is not the all-important driver of global climate change the climate alarmists make it out to be."
Well, Simon isn't going to be using that hockey stick for quite awhile.
Thank you very much!
It is precisely because so many jumped on the global warming band-wagon that it will be difficult to kill. They do not want to lose more credibility.
Given that so many on our side have joined the CO2 chorus, it will be even more difficult to destroy.
See post 34.
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