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UN Global Warming Panel Preparing to Scare Again Dennis
Avery Dec. 2003 The UN's global warming panel is cooking up another scary report for 2004. Their 1996 report, the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, fraudulently claimed it saw "a discernible human influence" on the current climate. The IPCC is apparently determined to keep repeating that admitted lie. The IPCC's science experts approved the original 1996 version of the report with these statements secretly deleted before the report was printed: 1. "None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases." 2. ". . . no study to date has positively attributed all or part [of the climate change observed to date] to [man-made] causes." 3. "Any claims of positive detection and attribution of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced." 4. "While none of these studies has specifically considered the attribution issue, they often draw some attribution conclusions, for which there is little justification." 5. "When will an anthropogenic effect on climate be identified? It is not surprising that the best answer to this question is, 'we do not know.'" The following statement was secretly added to the printed version without the experts' review: "The body of statistical evidence in Chapter 8, when examined in the context of our physical understanding of the climate system, now points to a discernible human influence on the global climate." Dr. Ben Santer, the lead author for the IPCC's Chapter 8, admits making the scientifically insupportable changes which reversed the chapter's meaning. He did it at the behest of senior State Department officials. (Read: Vice President Al Gore and former Colorado Senator Tim Wirth, then Undersecretary of State.) Santer was a U.S. government employee with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The science journal Nature complained of political tampering with the report. Nevertheless, the IPCC refused to neither retract nor justify their claim of a "discernible human impact" on our climate. The IPCC's most recent published report (2001) wiped out a thousand years of the world's known climate history. It prominently published a temperature "history" welded together by Dr. Michael Mann of the University of Virginia that claimed the Medieval Warming (800 to1300 AD) and the Little Ice Age (1300 to 1850) never happened. Mann claimed that world temperatures had been virtually stable for the thousand years before 1900. (Too bad Dr. Mann's graph wasn't published soon enough to save those poor Viking colonists who starved in the frigid 14th century, after Greenland turned back into frozen tundra.) Then the IPCC's 2001 report topped its own Mann fraud by claiming that world temperatures "might" rise as much as 10.6 degrees Fahrenheit in this century unless we implement the Kyoto treaty on greenhouse gases. But the committee offered no science whatever supporting the 10.6 degree warming scenario. It was just a scary number for the front pages. Dr. Mann's temperature history (supposedly based on tree rings and ice cores) is now drawing fire from scientists whose studies of tree rings, ice cores, stalagmites, seabed sediments, etc. document that the Medieval warming and Little Ice Age were real and global. Worse, two Canadian statistical experts who have studied Mann's original data say he illegitimately snipped off at least two key data series that undercut his case for temperature stability, and invented "fill" data. Correcting Mann's data unmasks a Medieval period warmer than today. Physical evidence documents nine moderate global warmings and coolings in the past 12,000 years, all tied to variations in the sun's activity. Virtually all the global warming we've had in the past century occurred prior to 1940, before much greenhouse gas could have "forced" temperatures upward. Satellites and high-altitude balloon thermometers tell us that most of the surface "warming" since 1940 is from official thermometers in urban heat islands surrounded by more and more concrete. All this indicates that the current warming is slow, erratic-and natural. As the UN global warming committee ponders its 2004 report, we should remember what Dr. Melvyn Shapiro, a top U.S. climate research administrator, said in 1992. A space-agency press conference had just claimed a dangerous ozone hole was opening over the United States. "If there were no dollars attached to this game, you'd see it played on intellect and integrity," said Dr. Shapiro. "When you say the ozone threat is a scam, you're not only attacking people's scientific integrity, you're going after their pocketbook as well. It's money, purely money." RELATED STORY: Key Global Warming Study Found Flawed One of the most influential scientific studies supporting the case for man-made global warming has just been publicly condemned for "poor data handling, selective use of sources, reliance on obsolete versions of source data and erroneous statistical calculations." The disputed study's authors, led by Dr. Michael Mann of the University of Virginia, claimed the historically documented Medieval Climate Warming and Little Ice Age never happened. Mann's temperature history for the Northern Hemisphere (reconstructed mainly from tree rings) shows readings trending down very slightly and constantly from 1000 AD to 1900-and then zooming upward in the 20th century so sharply that the study became famous as "the hockey stick." The Mann study's conclusion, that today's temperatures are the warmest in 1000 years, was published prominently in the 2001 report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and in the Clinton Administration's National Assessment of the Potential Consequences of Climate Variability and Change. It was also cited by the Canadian government in a national voter mailing supporting Canada's signing of the Kyoto treaty to control greenhouse gas emissions. Now, two Canadians say they've found a host of errors in the research. When the errors are corrected, they say Mann's own methodology and intended data sources show Medieval temperatures warmer than today's and the modern climate looking unexceptional. The Canadians' critique has just been published the peer-reviewed journal Energy and Environment, refereed by the World Data Center for Paleoclimatology. Mann's original study, "Global-Scale Temperature Patterns and Climate Forcing Over the Past Six Centuries," was published in the journal Nature in 1998. Mann and his team used tree rings, ice cores, and a variety of other temperature proxies to reconstruct Northern Hemisphere temperatures back to the year 1400 (and later, back to the year 1000). The critique of the Mann paper is authored by a Canadian economist, Dr. Ross McKittrick of the University of Guelph (and the Fraser Institute); along with Steven McIntyre, a businessman with a background in mathematics and accounting. The two say they had no outside funding for their analysis, and that they have created an audit trail allowing third parties to verify their findings for themselves. McIntyre says the recent corporate accounting scandals taught him that "when big investments are at stake, due diligence requires relentless testing and independent verification of the data by all parties. Since governments around the world (including Canada) are making some of the most expensive policy decisions ever, based on the uncritical acceptance of the IPCC report, an independent review seemed in order." The two Canadians say that Mann and his team members had so much difficulty producing the data that they doubt anyone else had ever asked to see it. The journal Nature does its own vetting of papers, and has said nothing about its Mann reviewers. However, Mann was a principle chapter author for the IPCC report, and may not have done any "due diligence" review of his own study. As an example of selective data use, McKittrick and McIntyre point out that Mann's Central England Temperature series is cut off at the year 1730, although the data go back to 1659. The cutoff removed a major late-17th century cold period. The Central Europe temperature series was cut off at 1550, rather than going back to the available 1525, removing the warmest temperatures in the series. McKittrick and McIntyre say the Mann team also extrapolated, interpolated, or copied values into data sets that were neither required nor statistically justified, and made major calculation errors. McKittrick and McIntyre's critique of the Mann "hockey stick" paper is a global policy bombshell. The IPCC has touted a "consensus" among scientists on global warming. However, if the Mann paper was the best evidence the IPCC and the Clinton White House could marshal to support the theory of man-made planetary warming, then its deconstruction throws the global warming debate wide open again. This, again, pits real-world data showing past global warming/cooling cycles (historic manuscripts, tree rings, ice cores, iceberg debris on the floor of the Atlantic, etc.) against a computer-modeled theory that mankind's auto exhausts and smokestack are somehow more powerful than the sun. RELATED MATERIAL: from Energy
and Environment Corrections to the Mann et. al. (1998) Proxy Data Base and Northern Hemispheric Average Temperature Series Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick Message from the publisher "This paper has the power to radically change the debate over man-made global warming. Because of its potential importance we are posting it separately from the rest of the issue of Energy and Environment (volume 14 number 6) in which it appears, and giving open access to it, so that everyone who has an interest in these matters is able to read it and assess it for themselves." -W.O. Hughes, 28/10/03 Click here for pdf version of this paper.
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