A while ago, I wrote about the Polar Bears Fallacy (and a new book which was due to be published). The book was called Global Warming And Other Bollocks , and as it happens is wasn’t a bad read. It brought into question a lot of the things we take for granted when we are told them by the media.
Let me just clarify: I say ‘media’ because although the media would argue it is reporting what the government says, it actually reports what it wants to report. The Daily Mail, for example, is happy to twist every detail in order to attack Labour and Gordon Brown (and especially Tony Blair) – so it cannot then turn around and argue it is innocent when it has been part of a blatant lie or hypocritical story (remember the Incandescent Light Bulb saga?) No. If the media publishes something then it – and only it – is responsible for it if it hasn’t researched properly.
I noticed this story – again, in the Daily Mail – yesterday (the whole topic has been dubbed ‘Climategate’). It starts:
Claims by the world’s leading climate scientists that most of the Himalayan glaciers will vanish within 25 years were last night exposed as nonsense.
It explains where the story came from:
But the experts behind the warning have now admitted their claim was not based on hard science – but a news story that appeared in the magazine New Scientist in the late 1990s.
There is a very telling quote from Dr Benny Peiser, head of the Global Warming Policy Foundation. He says:
The IPCC review process has been shown on numerous occasions to lack transparency and due diligence.
Its work is controlled by a tightly knit group of individuals who are completely convinced that they are right. As a result, conflicting data and evidence, even if published in peer reviewed journals, are regularly ignored, while exaggerated claims, even if contentious or not peer-reviewed, are often highlighted in IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] reports.
This is something I detest: holding a belief, then twisting and manipulating facts to fit in with that belief.
In actual fact, the whole chain of involvement regarding the Melting Glaciers story is laughable. It starts with a claim made in 2005 by WWF (the uber-green charity that likes Pandas and other cuddly animals) after it read a story from The New Scientist (aka ‘She’s Dumbed Down Enough Captain – I Cannae Dumb Her Down Any More’) in 1999, which based its story on a telephone chat with Syed Hasnain (an unknown scientist at Jawaharlal Nehru University Delhi), who now claims his comments were “pure speculation” (so you can see what sort of ‘scientists’ he is, then).
I noticed in the article references to a few other recent stories that I’d missed.
There’s this one (also in the Mail) – which in itself appears to be the latest in an ongoing issue which I had also missed. Here, the IPCC has produced graphs which appear to ‘prove’ major temperature changes in recent years – but these have been artfully manipulated to hide data which might not support the view. In fact, the data it hid (or rather ‘removed’) actually showed the opposite of what it was trying to claim. How? Well, the IPCC’s graph is shown below:
But if you look more closely at the area inside the red square you can see that the green line disappears. The data which are missing actually show a marked fall in temperature – but the IPCC didn’t like that and left it out:
You can read the article yourself to pick up the peripheral matter of who leaked the data, but the deceit involved is central to my gripe. One telling quote from the article says:
For example, some suggest that the ‘medieval warm period’, the 350-year era that started around 1000, when red wine grapes flourished in southern England and the Vikings tilled now-frozen farms in Greenland, was considerably warmer than even 1998.
Of course, this is inconvenient to climate change believers because there were no cars or factories pumping out greenhouse gases in 1000AD – yet the Earth still warmed.
As the article points out, the mercury thermometer wasn’t invented until 1724, so producing a graph like the one above is very tricky and will always involve guesswork and unprovable assumptions. But when you have the following kind of person directing or helping to create such a graph then you really need to hold on to your hat:
Another British scientist – Chris Folland of the Met Office’s Hadley Centre – wrote the same day that using Briffa’s data might be awkward, because it suggested the past was too warm. This, he lamented, ‘dilutes the message rather significantly’.
What this one is saying is that it might be best to leave out some information because it goes against the point they are trying to make and so weakens their argument. It is shocking that anyone should remain in their position of employment with such shameful unethical behaviour occurring to them so readily.
What they ended up doing was taking out the data they didn’t like, and replaced them with some they did.
In another article in the same thread (to do with the Copenhagen summit late last year), the British Meteorological Office is also implicated. For those who don’t know, the Met Office is responsible for getting short, medium, and long-term weather forecasts wrong in the UK; and it seems it is now diversifying into the arena of political intrigue with a similar level of competence. It is claimed that they ‘manipulated’ climate change figures to make sure that any suggestions that global warming was not a fact were omitted or masked. This particular story was dated 17 December 2009 and is heavily tarred with the ‘hacked emails’ thread, but one from a few weeks previously highlighted the same issue.
You need to read all these stories in context, as they are all interlinked.
Global warming as a man-made phenomenon is far from proven.