The Great Hoax - The American Spectator | USA News and Politics
The Great Hoax
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Global warming warmongers insist that the recently exposed “Climategate” emails, exchanged among climate scientists working for the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), do not change the basic science underlying global warming, so they are no big deal. But they are quite wrong. The data and the arguments now discredited by the corruption exposed in the emails leaves the scientific case against the idea of man-caused global warming overwhelming at this point.

The Warmongers you see on television claiming a well-established scientific consensus in favor of man-caused global warming are pretending, or play-acting, for the purpose of misleading you. Quite to the contrary, the scientific argument for man-caused global warming was thoroughly demolished earlier this year with the release of the 880-page study, Climate Change Reconsidered, authored by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). The response to that study can be taken as an admission by global warming advocates that they cannot defend their position in debate.

Instead, what we hear from the Warmongers is a steady stream of name-calling (“deniers”), and, unfortunately, outright lies, as shown further below. Now exposed as well is the dishonest manipulation of basic data.

In sharp contrast, first rate, blue chip scientists are increasingly concluding that humans have little effect on global temperatures, and that natural causes and temperature patterns continue to dominate. These include Fred Singer, Professor Emeritus of Environmental Science at the University of Virginia, and the founder and first Director of the National Weather Satellite Service, Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, and U.S. Science Team Leader for the AMSR-E instrument flying on NASA’s Aqua satellite, William Happer, Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University, Syun-ichi Akasofu, Professor of Physics and former director of the International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska, Patrick Michaels, Research Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, and past President of the American Association of State Climatologists, and David Douglass, Professor of Physics at the University of Rochester, among many others. Physics icon Freeman Dyson recently expressed similar views in the New York Times. There is no collection of scientists in the world smarter and better than these.

Indeed, as will be shown below, as a result of the work of these scientists, we now have scientific proof that the notion of significant man-caused global warming is false.

The Shame of “Climategate”

As Sarah Palin accurately reported in the Washington Post on December 9 (yes, braindead, left-wing bloggers, that Sarah Palin), the Climategate “emails reveal that leading climate ‘experts’ deliberately destroyed records, manipulated data to ‘hide the decline’ in global temperatures, and tried to silence their critics by preventing them from publishing in peer-reviewed journals.” Given the magnitude of what the UN and associated environmentalist extremists are demanding on the basis of the supposed “science,” Climategate is, in fact, the greatest science scandal in world history.

One of the most revealing emails was from Phil Jones, Director of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU), a fundamental feeder source for the UN’s IPCC. He wrote, “I’ve just completed Mike’s Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (i.e. from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.” Professor Trevor Davies, Pro-Vice Chancellor of the University of East Anglia, tried to explain away the revelation by saying, “One definition of the word ‘trick’ is ‘the best way of doing something.’ What Phil did was standard practice and the facts are out there in the peer-reviewed literature.”

This is the moral equivalent of Richard Nixon trying to explain away the 18-minute gap in one of his Watergate tapes. As an eye-opening news report from the December 13 UK Daily Mail explains, “There is a widespread misconception that the decline Jones was referring to is the fall in global temperatures from their peak in 1998…. In fact, its subject was much more technical — and much more significant.”

What they were actually referring to was the widely reported, famed, “hockey stick” chart dishonestly showing stable temperatures for centuries until an explosive rise late in the 20th century. That chart was prominently featured on the first page of the Summary for Policymakers of the 2001 IPCC report.

The chart was based on proxy data for temperature in past centuries for which no temperature records are available. (Such proxy data comes from modern studies of such sources as ice cores, tree rings, and growing season dates.) The emails reveal that Jones and his colleagues, including the persistently dishonest Michael Mann of Penn State University, selectively manipulated that proxy data to hide the known high temperatures of the Medieval Warm Period, roughly 350 years starting around 1000 A.D. when temperatures were significantly higher than today. That was necessary to falsely portray global temperatures as stable until recently.

But the problem was that the data set as manipulated then showed a large and steady decline in temperatures in recent decades since 1960. So the “trick” the CRU manipulators adopted to hide that decline, as reported by the Daily Mail, was to cut off the proxy data set in the year the decline started, 1961, and substitute the CRU’s “actual” temperature readings for those later years showing a large increase in temperatures for those years. (In truth, those “actual” global surface temperature readings had been previously manipulated.) As Phillip Stott, Emeritus Professor of Biogeography at London’s School of Oriental and African Studies, told the Daily Mail, “Any scientist ought to know that you can’t just mix and match proxy and actual data. They’re apples and oranges. Yet that’s exactly what they did.”

So the “trick” referred to in the original email was not referring to “the best way of doing something,” or to “standard practice,” as Davies dishonestly said in trying to perpetuate a cover-up. It was referring to dishonest data manipulation.

Moreover, what Jones and his colleagues did with the data was not disclosed as Davies and others engaged in the cover-up have said. Quite to the contrary, the hockey stick graph published by the IPCC was further manipulated to hide the fraud, as the Daily Mail reports.

But another Jones colleague, Professor Andrew Watson, tried to continue the cover-up in a shocking BBC interview in which he called an American critic an “asshole” live on the air, and said the original email was only about “tweaking a diagram.” Are you getting the message that you can’t believe anything these global warming “science” pretenders say?

Now we can understand why other Climategate emails show Jones and his colleagues so eager to avoid disclosure of the CRU’s temperature database, which is the summary of surface temperature readings from hundreds of weather stations around the world, on which the entire analysis of the UN’s IPCC relies. In one email, Jones warns Mann not to leave such data lying around on searchable websites, “because you never know who is trawling them.” In another email, Jones proclaims that their critics have been after their CRU station data for years, and “If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.”

The Daily Mail explains that what they may have been trying to hide was revealed by an article posted on a warming skeptic website analyzing the data from the past 130 years for Darwin, Australia. As the Daily Mail reports, the CRU data “suggested that average temperatures had risen there by about two degrees Celsius. However, the raw data had been ‘adjusted’ in a series of abrupt upward steps by exactly the same amount: without the adjustment, the Darwin temperature record would have stayed level.”

Canadian climate scientist Stephen McIntyre had previously discovered a similar error in the U.S. surface temperature data collected by NASA, where the fevered global warming alarmist James Hansen reigns. He found that adjustments to the raw data hid the fact that the warmest decade on record was actually the 1930s, and exaggerated the data to allege that the 1990s were the warmest. Based on McIntyre’s work, NASA corrected the data, which then showed that 1934 was the warmest year on record rather than 1998.

Further dishonesty and cover-ups are revealed by Marc Morano at Climate Depot, and by Marc Sheppard at American Thinker.

The Real Science

What serious scientists the world over are concluding is that the temperature variations and patterns throughout the 20th century until today are consistent with natural causes, not the theory of man-caused global warming. The U.S. surface temperature record, now the most reliable in the world by far for several reasons, shows that temperatures in the 1930s were warmer than today. From 1940 to the late 1970s, U.S. temperatures declined, leaving no significant difference at that point from 1900. This decline, in fact, prompted widespread speculation that a new ice age was coming. Temperatures then increased until the El Niño spike of 1998 (unrelated to global warming), fueling the global warming hysteria. Since then, temperatures have begun to decline again.

Since CO2 emissions increased continuously throughout this time, if man-caused global warming were true, temperatures should have shown a more consistently increasing pattern. The up and down pattern instead is consistent with varying ocean current temperatures, and solar activity such as sun spots. For example, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) is a long-term pattern of ocean current temperatures that turns from cold to warm back to cold every 20 to 30 years, as cold water from deep in the ocean cycles up and is warmed.

Far more reliable and relevant is the satellite data on atmospheric temperatures, which is not distorted either by manipulation or urban heat island effects. The satellite data starts in 1979, and shows no consistent increase in global temperature trends until the El Niño spike of 1998. Since then, the satellite data shows an accelerating decline of global atmospheric temperatures well on its way to completely offsetting the 1998 El Niño increase, which will leave the satellite record with no net increase in global temperature for the past 30 years. That decline, and the continued, extended period of minimal sunspot activity we are seeing, may mean we are headed for at least a new Little Ice Age after all.

Moreover, global temperatures were again warmer than today during the Medieval Warm Period, with even higher temperatures prevailing during a period known as the Holocene Climate Optimum, which ran roughly from 6000 B.C. to 3000 B.C. In fact, temperatures were higher than today during most of the period from 9000 B.C. to the birth of Christ. Yet, there was no significant burning of fossil fuels during these times, and no evidence of any of the supposed catastrophes attributed to global warming.

In addition, CO2 is not pollution. It is a natural substance in the Earth’s atmosphere essential to life. Plants need to take in CO2 to live, emitting oxygen in turn, which is essential to animal life. Animals breathe in oxygen and emit CO2.

Atmospheric concentrations of CO2, in fact, were much higher in the past than today. For hundreds of millions of years prior to 400 million years ago, atmospheric CO2 concentrations were well over 30 times greater than today. But CO2 concentrations have actually been in sharp decline since then. From roughly 50 million years back to 350 million years ago, fluctuating CO2 concentrations were generally 3 to 15 times current levels.

These much higher CO2 concentrations did not cause any known catastrophic effects either. To the contrary, more atmospheric CO2 causes plants to grow far more rapidly. Moreover, the historical record shows that instead of temperature increases following CO2 increases, as in the global warming theory, just the opposite occurred, temperature increases preceded CO2 increases by hundreds of years.

CO2 concentrations have begun slowly rising again, due to the industrial revolution and increased burning of fossil fuels. And this is already causing more rapid growth of plant life. But humans and their activities currently account for only 3% of CO2 emissions each year. Moreover, less than half of the CO2 emitted by fossil fuel burning remains in the atmosphere, with the rest absorbed by the ocean or incorporated by the terrestrial biosphere. This is why policies to reduce human CO2 emissions such as cap and trade are predicted at best to slow temperature increases by 2050 by a ridiculous 9/100ths of one degree Fahrenheit, even after the truly catastrophic transitional and permanent cost increases of reducing fossil fuel use by the targeted 83%.

Man-Caused Global Warming Proved False

Even the UN’s own climate models project that if man’s greenhouse gas emissions were causing global warming, there would be a particular pattern of temperature distribution in the atmosphere, which scientists call “the fingerprint.” Temperatures in the troposphere portion of the atmosphere above the tropics would increase with altitude, producing a “hotspot” near the top of the troposphere, about 6 miles above the earth’s surface. Above that, in the stratosphere, there would be cooling. But higher quality temperature data from weather balloons and satellites now show just the opposite: no increasing warming with altitude in the tropical troposphere, but rather a slight cooling, with no hotspot, no fingerprint. Game over. QED.

More recently, data has been carefully collected now showing no change in the radiation reflected by the earth back out to space. If a greenhouse effect were capturing heat in the earth’s atmosphere, that reflected radiation would be declining.

The bottom line on the science of global warming is this: The basic theory that more CO2 in the atmosphere would trap some solar heat warming earth’s temperatures is sound and not in dispute. But the magnitude of that impact has been shown to be insignificant. Even the UN’s scientists couldn’t show a significant direct impact. Besides their data manipulation, the UN’s IPCC tried to spin a tale based on models assuming that the minor direct impact of CO2 produced positive feedback effects resulting in quite significant temperature increases over time. The better science is now showing that more likely are negative feedback effects maintaining global stability in natural temperature trends.

Call in the Cavalry: An American Team B

Climategate just confirms what has long been obvious to those paying attention and living in the real world. Global warming never had anything to do with science. It was all about power and money. The UN saw it as a grand opportunity to expand its powers into a world government, and, in fact, is still breathlessly pursing this undemocratic, neo-fascist nightmare in Copenhagen. That explains the IPCC’s hopelessly bad science. Other world governments saw it as a tremendous opportunity to expand their power and control, and so joined in encouraging the Grand Hoax. The worldwide Left and media fellow travelers (imagining themselves as “liberals”) who philosophically, and quite naively, favor such centralized government control as a means to do “good,” joined in perpetuating the scientific hoax as well. Environmentalist extremist groups saw it as the chance for the final victory in gaining control over all private business, and hopefully achieving the ultimate environmentalist dream in repealing the Industrial Revolution. Michael Crichton’s State of Fear is now revealed as the ultimate sourcebook for understanding these environmentalist organizations.

Climategate gives true American patriots the opportunity now to defeat this conspiracy against democracy, liberty, and prosperity. Our political leaders never should have let the self-interested, corrupt UN take the lead on this issue. Of course we must ensure protection for the public health and safety from any sort of future global warming catastrophe. What is needed now, therefore, is the appointment of a new “Team B” of climate science experts within the U.S. government to conduct its own investigation of global warming and report back to the American people on the real science. The next President, not President Obama, who is hopelessly uneducable on the subject, should ask Fred Singer and Richard Lindzen to serve as the leadership of this Team B and determine who should serve on it. Keep the fanatical James Hansen within the government as the head of a “Team A,” which would marshal the opposite case in debate with Team B. That debate would eventually reveal the whole truth to America, and the world.

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