Bad Science:
10 April 2009
A review of more than 200 climate studies by researchers at the Harvard Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics has determined that the 20th century is neither the warmest century nor the century with the most extreme weather patterns of the past 1000 years.
The review also confirmed that the Medieval Warm Period of 800 to 1300 A.D. and the Little Ice Age of 1300 to 1900 A.D. were worldwide phenomena and not just limited to the European and North American continents.
While 20th century average temperatures are much higher than in the Little Ice Age period, many parts of the world show the medieval average temperature to be greater than that of the 20th century.
Studying climate change is challenging for a number of reasons, not the least of which is the bewildering variety of climate indicators.
Climate indicators including borehole data, cultural data, glacier advances or retreats, geomorphology, isotopic analysis from lake sediments or ice cores, tree or peat celluloses, corals, stalagmite or biological fossils, net ice accumulation rate, including dust or chemical counts, lake fossils and sediments, river sediments, melt layers in ice cores, paleontological fossils, pollen, seafloor sediments, luminescent analysis, tree ring growth and shifting tree line positions plus tree stumps in lakes, marshes and streams.
These worldwide climate records confirmed two significant climate periods in the last one thousand years, the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period.
So why is the UN and its scientists distorting the truth about these historical changes in weather patterns. I believe its because the global warming scare is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, "creating world government".
The UN and its corrupt Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change stands accused of knowingly undervaluing the historical records and understating the past century's extreme temperature changes, arbitrarily repealing fundamental laws of physics for political convenience and tripling the man made greenhouse effect to justify its prejudices.
So to the scare. The UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It has released two 450,000 year graphs, a saw tooth curve of temperature and a saw tooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN did not do that. If it had, the graphs would have shown that the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.
Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (800 to 1300 AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote "With the publication of the article, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. A leading scientist working in the area of climate change and global warming let down his guard and sent me an astonishing email that said. 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.' "
So they did. The UN's second assessment report, showed a 1,000 year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today. But the latest report contained a new graph showing no medieval warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the warmest for 1,000 years. The graph looked like an ice hockey stick. The wrongly flat 1000 to 1900 AD temperature line was the shaft, the uptick from 1900 to 2000 AD was the blade.
Here's how they did it.
(1) They gave one technique for reconstructing pre thermometer temperature 390 times more weight than any other.
(2) The technique they over weighted was one which the UN's 1996 report had said was unsafe, measurement of tree rings from bristlecone pines. Tree rings are wider in warmer years, but pine rings are also wider when there's more carbon dioxide in the air, it's plant food. This carbon dioxide fertilization distorts the calculations.
(3) The UN said they had included 24 data sets going back to 1400 AD. Without saying so, they left out the set showing the medieval warm period, tucking it into a folder marked "Censored Data".
(4) They used a computer model to draw the graph from the data, but scientists later found that the model almost always drew hockey sticks even if they fed in random, electronic "red noise".
Even after the hockey stick graph was exposed as a fraud, scientific papers confirming the UN's abolition of the medieval warm period appeared. The USA Senate asked independent statisticians to investigate. They found that the graph was meretricious, and that known associates of the scientists who had compiled it had written many of the papers supporting its conclusion.
The UN, says the graph isn't important. It is. Scores of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global temperature was 3C warmer than now. Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes, today they're there. There were Viking farms in Greenland, now they're under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole, a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 AD and found none.
The Antarctic, which holds 90 per cent of the world's ice and nearly all its 160,000 glaciers, has cooled and gained ice mass in the past 30 years, reversing a 6,000 year melting trend. Data from 6,000 boreholes worldwide show global temperatures were higher in the Middle Ages than now. And the snows of Mt Kilimanjaro are vanishing not because summit temperature is rising but because post colonial deforestation has dried the air.
The UN's predictions are founded not only on exaggerated statistics justified neither by observation nor by physical law, but also on an excessive rate of increase in airborne carbon dioxide. The true rate is 0.38 per cent year on year since records began in 1958. The models assume 1 per cent per annum, more than two and a half times too high. In 2001, the UN used these and other adjustments to predict a 21st century temperature increase of 1.5 to 6C.
Constant repetition of wrong numbers doesn't make them right. Removing the UN's solecisms, and using reasonable data and assumptions, a simple global model shows that temperature will rise by just 0.1 to 1.4C in the coming century, with a best estimate of 0.6C, well within the medieval temperature range and only a fifth of the UN's new, central projection.
So what is the true status of earth's climate. It is perhaps best understood by noting that the earth is not any warmer now and is possibly a fair amount cooler than it was at many other times in the past.
