The Deceit Behind Global Warming

No one can deny that in recent years the need to "save the planet" from global warming has become one of the most pervasive issues of our time. As Tony Blair's chief scientific adviser, Sir David King, claimed in 2004, it poses "a far greater threat to the world than international terrorism", warning that by the end of this century the only habitable continent left will be Antarctica.

Polar bears find the Arctic sea ice shrinking, but many scientists now predict that the world is about to cool again

Inevitably, many people have been bemused by this somewhat one-sided debate, imagining that if so many experts are agreed, then there must be something in it. But if we set the story of how this fear was promoted in the context of other scares before it, the parallels which emerge might leave any honest believer in global warming feeling uncomfortable.

The story of how the panic over climate change was pushed to the top of the international agenda falls into five main stages. Stage one came in the 1970s when many scientists expressed alarm over what they saw as a disastrous change in the earth's climate. Their fear was not of warming but global cooling, of "a new Ice Age".

For three decades, after a sharp rise in the interwar years up to 1940, global temperatures had been falling. The one thing certain about climate is that it is always changing. Since we began to emerge from the last Ice Age 20,000 years ago, temperatures have been through significant swings several times. The hottest period occurred around 8,000 years ago and was followed by a long cooling. Then came what is known as the "Roman Warming", coinciding with the Roman empire. Three centuries of cooling in the Dark Ages were followed by the "Mediaeval Warming", when the evidence agrees the world was hotter than today.

Around 1300 began "the Little Ice Age", that did not end until 200 years ago, when we entered what is known as the "Modern Warming". But even this has been chequered by colder periods, such as the "Little Cooling" between 1940 and 1975. Then, in the late 1970s, the world began warming again.

A scare is often set off — as we show in our book with other examples — when two things are observed together and scientists suggest one must have been caused by the other. In this case, thanks to readings commissioned by Dr Roger Revelle, a distinguished American oceanographer, it was observed that since the late 1950s levels of carbon dioxide in the earth's atmosphere had been rising. Perhaps it was this increase that was causing the new warming in the 1980s?

Stage two of the story began in 1988 when, with remarkable speed, the global warming story was elevated into a ruling orthodoxy, partly due to hearings in Washington chaired by a youngish senator, Al Gore, who had studied under Dr Revelle in the 1960s.

But more importantly global warming hit centre stage because in 1988 the UN set up its Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC). Through a series of reports, the IPCC was to advance its cause in a rather unusual fashion. First it would commission as many as 1,500 experts to produce a huge scientific report, which might include all sorts of doubts and reservations. But this was to be prefaced by a Summary for Policymakers, drafted in con-sult-ation with governments and officials — essentially a political document — in which most of the caveats contained in the experts' report would not appear.

This contradiction was obvious in the first report in 1991, which led to the Rio conference on climate change in 1992. The second report in 1996 gave particular prominence to a study by an obscure US government scientist claiming that the evidence for a connection between global warming and rising CO2 levels was now firmly established. This study came under heavy fire from various leading climate experts for the way it manipulated the evidence. But this was not allowed to stand in the way of the claim that there was now complete scientific consensus behind the CO2 thesis, and the Summary for Policy-makers, heavily influenced from behind the scenes by Al Gore, by this time US Vice-President, paved the way in 1997 for the famous Kyoto Protocol.

Kyoto initiated stage three of the story, by formally committing governments to drastic reductions in their CO2 emissions. But the treaty still had to be ratified and this seemed a good way off, not least thanks to its rejection in 1997 by the US Senate, despite the best attempts of Mr Gore.

Not the least of his efforts was his bid to suppress an article co-authored by Dr Revelle just before his death. Gore didn't want it to be known that his guru had urged that the global warming thesis should be viewed with more caution.

One of the greatest problems Gore and his allies faced at this time was the mass of evidence showing that in the past, global temperatures had been higher than in the late 20th century. In 1998 came the answer they were looking for: a new temperature chart, devised by a young American physicist, Michael Mann. This became known as the "hockey stick" because it showed historic temperatures running in an almost flat line over the past 1,000 years, then suddenly flicking up at the end to record levels.

Mann's hockey stick was just what the IPCC wanted. When its 2001 report came out it was given pride of place at the top of page 1. The Mediaeval Warming, the Little Ice Age, the 20th century Little Cooling, when CO2 had already been rising, all had been wiped away.

But then a growing number of academics began to raise doubts about Mann and his graph. This culminated in 2003 with a devastating study by two Canadians showing how Mann had not only ignored most of the evidence before him but had used an algorithm that would produce a hockey stick graph whatever evidence was fed into the computer. When this was removed, the graph re-emerged just as it had looked before, showing the Middle Ages as hotter than today.

It is hard to recall any scientific thesis ever being so comprehensively discredited as the "hockey stick". Yet the global warming juggernaut rolled on regardless, now led by the European Union. In 2004, thanks to a highly dubious deal between the EU and Putin's Russia, stage four of the story began when the Kyoto treaty was finally ratified.

advertisement In the past three years, we have seen the EU announcing every kind of measure geared to fighting climate change, from building ever more highly-subsidised wind turbines, to a commitment that by 2050 it will have reduced carbon emissions by 60 per cent. This is a pledge that could only be met by such a massive reduction in living standards that it is impossible to see the peoples of Europe accepting it.

All this frenzy has rested on the assumption that global temperatures will continue to rise in tandem with CO2 and that, unless mankind takes drastic action, our planet is faced with the apocalypse so vividly described by Al Gore in his Oscar-winning film An Inconvenient Truth.

Yet recently, stage five of the story has seen all sorts of question marks being raised over Gore's alleged consensus. For instance, he claimed that by the end of this century world sea levels will have risen by 20 ft when even the IPCC in its latest report, only predicts a rise of between four and 17 inches.There is also of course the harsh reality that, wholly unaffected by Kyoto, the economies of China and India are now expanding at nearly 10 per cent a year, with China likely to be emitting more CO2 than the US within two years.

More serious, however, has been all the evidence accumulating to show that, despite the continuing rise in CO2 levels, global temperatures in the years since 1998 have no longer been rising and may soon even be falling.

It was a telling moment when, in August, Gore's closest scientific ally, James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was forced to revise his influential record of US surface temperatures showing that the past decade has seen the hottest years on record. His graph now concedes that the hottest year of the 20th century was not 1998 but 1934, and that four of the 10 warmest years in the past 100 were in the 1930s.

Furthermore, scientists and academics have recently been queuing up to point out that fluctuations in global temperatures correlate more consistently with patterns of radiation from the sun than with any rise in CO2 levels, and that after a century of high solar activity, the sun's effect is now weakening, presaging a likely drop in temperatures.

If global warming does turn out to have been a scare like all the others, it will certainly represent as great a collective flight from reality as history has ever recorded. The evidence of the next 10 years will be very interesting.

These blogs are a must read:

Climate Audit

and

Anthony Watts

The second one appears to be down for the moment, but keep looking. Watts is making an audit of all surface weather stations in continental USA. The pictures are just fantastic and it proves the old adage - SISU - sh-t in, sh-t out.

Interesting how a bogus science effort accomplished so much in the past twenty years.

Now if we were really smart, we’d start another trend now...with aliens visiting earth. It might take twenty years, but we could eventually convince 75 percent of the public that aliens are real...and maybe earn one of our guys a Nobel Peace Prize. Maybe we could even tie global warming in with the aliens visiting.

I’m sure that the msm and universities will give this information equal airing with the climate change propaganda we’ve been subjected to for the past decade.
Parents need to insist that children in the tax-payer-funded public schools be taught both views of “climate change.” Parents of children in private schools where anthropomorphic climate change is being promoted should challenge the offending teachers and/or look for another school.
Socialists are indoctrinating children to look to government to save them from the evil capitalists who are destroying the world. Check out what your children are being taught.

Another nail in the coffin of of these alarmist pseudo scientists has come when a couple of real scientists completed an experiment based on their theory from years earlier that suggested that cloud formation was the major contributer to global climate change. It was based on an association between cosmic rays and solar rays. They had theorized that cosmic rays ultimately provided the elements for condensation and low level cloud formation. When they mimicked the conditions in a lab experiment they in fact did produce low level clouds. Solar rays/ sun spot activity increases the magnetic shield deflecting these cosmic rays and therefore less low level clouds and more warming.Of course you will never hear about this on Capital Hill or IPCC reports other than to dismiss it with the debate is over type hysteria that solicits a political/economic solution that looks and smells an awful lot like communism.

http://www.lewrockwell.com/miller/miller21.html

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1363818.ece

I think they see the handwriting on the wall and that is why we are seeing the rise in stories about their next public hobby: atheism. It’s not Bush’s fault. It’s not global warming’s fault. Now it will be organized religion’s fault.

Attended a luncheon last week where two older gentlemen spoke of their quest to recover a P38 that had made an emergency landing on a Greenland icecap at the start of WWII. After hearing Gore tout all this global warming garbage, they just knew that plane would just be sitting on the surface and they could fly her home. In actuality, it was located 250 feet under the ice. Long story short, they finally recovered the plane, and believe Al Gore should be in a straight jacket. ;-)

FReepmail me to get on or off

Click on POGW graphic for full GW rundown

New!!: Dr. John Ray's
GREENIE WATCH

Ping me if you find one I've missed.

Forbes printed my letter to the editor wherein I called my Senator Gore Quacky Lacky in league with News Week as Chicken Litte. Responding to their article, I thought it was over with and could never have believed then that 10 or 15 years later algore would achieve world accolades for his role in the sky is falling movement.

wasn't it about 20 years ago that Carl Sagan was trying to ram "nuclear winter" down our throats?

A bit before that, Paul R. Ehrlich was pushing his book "The Population Bomb". His projection was that increases in population would result in mass starvation in the 70s and 80s. (Somehow, I missed it happening. I guess I just wasn't paying attention.)

His money quote:

"The battle to feed all of humanity is over. In the 1970s and 1980s hundreds of millions of people will starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. At this late date nothing can prevent a substantial increase in the world death rate..."

From: Wiki Reference

The next ten years are very predictable. Global warming is a theory that cannot be refuted. All evidence will point to increased global warming. If temperatures do not increase as much as hoped, studies will produce elaborate explanations about countering factors that will soon disappear. Global warming in a political sense cannot be stopped.

The process has already begun. Do you notice how some pundits are using the term "climate change" instead of "global warming"? Years ago, environmentalists predicted that there would be a new Ice Age. Then "global warming" became all the rage. If global temperatures level off or decrease, this will be heralded as proof of catastrophic "climate change" -- something that will be said to be even more extreme than mere "global warming." Why, we might have a new Ice Age and global warming at the same time! After all, in our post-modern society logic is a meaningless social construct and it is mean and petty and maybe even oppressive to point out contradictions. Enough people are hypnotized by the mass media that they will believe whatever contradictions they are told. Much as in Orwell's 1984, the authorities will change the "debate" and many people will follow the latest party line. Whatever the "problem" is, the "cure" is always socialism.

If global warming does turn out to have been a scare like all the others, it will certainly represent as great a collective flight from reality as history has ever recorded.

I think the other political collective flights from reality as represented by the totalitarianism of Hitler, Stalin, and Mao will have been even greater, but, hey, the global warming movement is totalitarian at core, too.

I was right; turns out that the article in the Daily Telegraph was a shortened version of the one initially submitted. The full version can be read here.

From the full version:

Even though a scare often begins with some genuine problem, such as BSE, the book analyses the crucial role played in each case by supposed scientific experts who eventually turn out to have misread or manipulated the evidence; then by those sections of the media who eagerly promote the scare without regard to the facts.

The "tipping point" of any scare, the authors show, comes when it is taken up by the politicians who, with their officials, come up with an absurdly disproportionate response. This leaves us all to pay a colossal price, often running into billions or even hundreds of billions of pounds.

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