Saturday, August 01, 2009

A New Bluff

The "Humans Caused Global by Burning Buried Carbons" hysterics are having one last go at ginning up the hysteria sufficiently to get some economy destroying laws passed. Dr. David Evans takes a look [pdf] at the latest bait ans switch (please keep your eye on measurements from 1960 to 2000 - pay no attention to any time period outside that range - and BTW don't look at air temperatures, it is the oceans). Here is what I consider the most important bit from the linked [pdf].

The alarmists assume that nearly all the global warming since 1750 is due to rising CO2 levels. This is a brave assumption. Oddly enough, this assumption is the foundation of climate alarmism: the climate models are calibrated so that the rise in CO2 from 1750 to the present causes nearly all the warming from 1750 to the present in their climate models. Therefore if there were in fact any other warming forces between 1750 and the present, then the climate models are too sensitive to CO2 rises and their predicted temperature rises are too high.

The alarmists insist that they know all the forces on climate from 1750 to the present, so there could not have been any unknown warming forces or natural variability. Yet when it comes to the cooling trend of the last five years, they claim that some unknown force, some natural variability, is overpowering the warming due to human emissions. They cannot have it both ways, so the alarmists are then forced to argue that natural variability can only cause short-term fluctuations (like the last five years), but not long term fluctuations (anything with a net effect on the temperature rise from 1750 to the present).

So here’s the thing. What force shifted the global climate over the centuries from the medieval warm period to the little ice age? Obviously the passing of this force may have caused much (or all) of the warming since 1750. And clearly this force wasn’t human-induced. At this point climate alarmism is so bereft of logic it disintegrates — to which the alarmist’s response was to rewrite history by erasing the medieval warm period and the little ice age, in what is known as the “hockey stick graph.” This graph appeared prominently six times in the 2001 IPCC Assessment Report and was adopted for the IPCC logo. It was uncovered as a fraud by 2004, it has since disappeared from the IPCC logo, and it did not appear in the 2007 IPCC Assessment Report.
Read the paper. It has lots of informative graphs. And the text is damning to the "let us destroy modern civilization" cause.

Let me add a biographical note on Dr. Evans. He was once in the alarmist camp and around 2003, as evidence accumulated, he joined the sceptic side of the argument.

There are now a whole raft of books out taking a look at this scam. Here are a few:

Heaven and Earth: Global Warming, the Missing Science

Air Con: The Seriously Inconvenient Truth About Global Warming

Red Hot Lies: How Global Warming Alarmists Use Threats, Fraud, and Deception to Keep You Misinformed

Green Hell: How Environmentalists Plan to Ruin Your Life and What You Can Do to Stop Them

This book takes a look at a bunch of political scams in addition to the climate scam.

Scam: The Liberal Misinformation Machine And Its War On America

Well - happy reading - but may I suggest doing your reading in an ice bath to keep your blood from boiling. And if you are an investor may I suggest buying alarmist books when they are remaindered. In 20 year they could be worth a fortune if you choose wisely or get lucky.

1 comment:

Susan's Husband said...

Actually, the current warmenist claim is that the Medieval Climatic Optimum and the Little Ice Age were local phenomenon which are not indicative of actual global temperature changes.