American Elephants

It has been a little over a year since the so-called Climategate e-mails were leaked from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia in England. The e-mails showed the scientists behind the climate scare plotting to hide, delete and manipulate data. They denigrated scientists presenting differing views in order to force journals to publish only papers that promoted alarm about global warming. They turned “peer review” into review by friends, and made the reports of the IPCC no more than alarmist propaganda.

The Climategate e-mails and the story of the corruption of science are carefully laid out in A.W. Montford’s  The Hockeystick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science.  A worthy companion is Dr. Roy W. Spencer’s The Great Global Warming Blunder: How Mother Nature Fooled the World’s Top Climate Scientists.  Dr. Spencer has a marvelous ability to explain complicated subjects simply and clearly.  His book has the coolest book cover ever.

I said that the Climategate e-mails were leaked.  The media has liked to claim that the e-mails were “illegally hacked,” but people looking at it clearly are quite sure that a member of the CRU was horrified and distressed by the perversion of science going on.

Since that time, the work of the IPCC has been largely discredited.  They were found to be using papers from Greenpeace and ordinary mountaineers rather than the work of scientists.  Their claims about African crop yields, the Amazon rainforest, disappearing mountain ice, claims about Dutch sea levels, the melting Himalayan glaciers, and trends in disaster losses — all false exaggerations.

From Andrew Kenny, a consulting engineer with degrees in physics and mechanical engineering:

There is no evidence that mankind is changing the climate in a dangerous way. The slight warming of the past 150 years is no different from previous natural warming periods, such as the worldwide medieval warm period from about 900 to 1200 AD. Global warming and cooling are closely correlated to variations in the sun, especially in its emission of charged particles. Carbon dioxide (CO²), a harmless, natural gas upon which green plants depend, is a feeble greenhouse gas. Its only significant absorption band (15 micron) is saturated, so adding more to the atmosphere has a small and diminishing effect.

Over the past half-billion years (the span of multicelled life), CO² levels have averaged more than  2000 ppm (parts per million) but with wild fluctuations, from more than 6000 ppm to less than 500 ppm. This has had no noticeable effect on global temperatures, which have remained remarkably constant for long periods, pointing to a stable global climate system, without which higher life might not be possible. This stability probably comes from low clouds, which increase when temperatures rise and have a powerful cooling effect by reflecting away sunlight.

The “hockey stick graph” was first published in Nature magazine in 1998, and then shown 6 times in the IPCC’s 2001 report.  It showed temperatures in the northern hemisphere steady from 1000 to 1900  (compared to the long straight handle of a hockey stick) then suddenly rising to unprecedented heights in the 20th century (the blade of the hockey stick).  No medieval warm period, long considered the most beneficent climate of all, which spawned the Renaissance, and wine grapes grew in England, and was well documented in history.  The hockey stick was accepted with unquestioning faith by the IPCC and much of the scientific establishment.  (Not too big on history, those folks).

The hockey stick theory was demolished by Steven McIntyre, an expert (and stubborn) statistician.  He got hold of the data on which it was based,” and found outrageously wrong statistical methods, deliberate use of data known to be wrong, and other manipulation.”

Harold Lewis, emeritus professor of physics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, recently resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) after 67 years.  He wrote in his resignation letter:  “the global warming scam with the (literally) trillions of dollars driving it, that has corrupted so many scientists, and has carried APS before it like a rogue wave.  It is the greatest and most successful psuedoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist.  Anyone who has the faintest doubt that this is so should force himself to read the Climategate documents, which lay it bare. (Montford’s book organises the facts very well) I don’t believe that any real physicist, nay scientist, can read that stuff without revulsion.”

The temperature data on which the CRU supposedly based their work on climate is unavailable, apparently lost.  NASA has admitted that they were just using the CRU temperatures.  Anthony Watts at Watts Up With That with an army of volunteers to photograph American thermometer stations has found that far too many are located next to air conditioner exhausts, trash burners, reflective concrete walls and other temperature-corrupting elements.  Except for the satellite temperatures from University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH) which are relatively recent — we don’t have any reliable temperature records.

Weather can be defined as what’s going on outside today. Predictions come as a 5-Day Forecast, not a 50 year estimate.  Climate is an average for a large area, but you can’t predict that for 50 years either.  In fact, scientists are beginning to wonder if the idea of a global climate average is in any way meaningful.  Think that one through — how would you get a meaningful global temperature average?

CO2 is only a minor and beneficial trace gas in the atmosphere. By far the largest and most extensive “greenhouse gas” is water vapor.  We just don’t understand clouds very well.