The Anthropogenic Global Warming Church (AGWC) has been hit pretty hard as of late. In short, the old “consensus” is falling apart.
The first major hit is the so-called “Climategate”, where emails from various scientists pushing the global warming agenda were leaked to the public. Hardest hit is Prof. Phil Jones at the University of East Anglia, who had to step down as directory of the Climatic Research Unit after the leaked emails showed that scientists were manipulating data to bolster their claims. He now admits that the data supporting the famous “hockey stick” graph is missing, warming periods have happened before without human influence and even that there has been no warming since 1995. Prof. Jones also refused Freedom of Information requests and now claims to have lost the data.
Shortly after this, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has been caught up in a row, showing that many of their claims were based on false information from environment groups instead of published academic research. Claims that the Himalayan glaciers are melting by AGW came from unfounded speculation from a popular magazine. Another IPCC claim about the destruction of rain forests by AGW is now recognized by the London Times as, “an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise”, “authored by two green activists” from the World Wildlife Fund. The IPCC reports of reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and in Africa were taken from a dissertation by a Swiss student, who was quoting unsubstantiated rumors from mountain climbers. IPCC claims of coral reef destruction by AGW came solely from advocacy articles from Greenpeace, with no peer-reviewed studies to support the claims. The IPCC claim of Africa’s major agricultural loss came from a Canadian think tank, with no study to support it. The IPCC claimed that the Netherlands was endangered, due to its 55 percent of land mass below sea level – when the truth is about 20 percent is below sea level. The IPCC has also been caught up by hard data showing that their claims of increased tropical storms is false.
In the US, scientists from Space Studies in Geophysics and Oceanography now state that Alaskan glacier loss was overestimated by 40 percent for a 40 year period. This data has been used for computer climate models.
Worse yet, Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts, both well established meteorologists, have discovered that starting in 1990, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the U.S. National Climate Data Center purposely eliminated temperature measuring stations in rural, cooler locations – artificially pumping up the results. This is not just a handful of stations either, the count went from 6,000 to less than 1,500. The study also shows that jumps in global temperature from the NOAA coincide with cuts in weather stations used. You can find a whole site devoted to surface stations problems.
Furthermore, the remaining stations used were compromised by local artificial conditions, such as being placed next to air conditioner exhausts, other heat exchangers and even trash burning barrels.
Russian scientists have discovered that readings from the coldest regions of the country had been omitted from the IPCC data. Tree ring data, which indicated cooling since 1961, was truncated as well.
It’s not as if the common bloke couldn’t figure out something is wrong. Europe and North America have been hit this winter with horrible cold and snowy weather. So bad, the record cold weather is killing Florida’s coral reefs.
The American press, as usual, is so far out of step with reality that most of this news hasn’t been covered at all.
For those in the US who are trying to keep track of this all, I have found a handy, short guide.
As these scandals continue, I’m certain that the last remaining arguments from the AGWC will fall to the wayside and the environmental globalists will find a new boogyman to scare us all into the next scheme for global governance. For if you examine the goals of the environmental movement, no matter what the crisis claimed, the solution is always the same: increased government control and taxation and destruction of capitalism.
Addendum: 2010/02/18
The spiral continues with a recent FOIA release of documents from NASA, showing blatant advocacy instead of scientific analysis.
Addendum: 2010/04/15
An interesting short page on the crux of the Climategate issue.
