How the global warming industry is based on one
MASSIVE lie
By James Delingpole
Politics -- Last updated: September 29th,
2009
For the growing band of AGW “Sceptics” the
following story is dynamite. And for those who do believe in Al Gore’s
highly profitable myth about “Man-Made Global Warming”, it will no doubt feel
as comfortable as the rectally inserted suicide bomb that put paid to an Al
Qaeda operative earlier this week.
Now read on.
Those of you who saw An Inconvenient
Truth may remember, if you weren’t asleep by that stage, the key scene
where big green Al deploys his terrifying graph to show how totally screwed we
all are by man-made global warming. This graph – known as the Hockey Stick
Curve – purports to show rising global temperatures through the ages. In the
part representing the late twentieth century it shoots up almost vertically. To
emphasise his point that this is serious and that if
we don’t act NOW we’re doomed, Al Gore – wearing a wry smile which says: “Sure
folks, this is kinda funny. But don’t forget how
serious it is too” – climbs on to a mini-lift in order to be able to reach the
top of the chart. Cue consensual gasps from his parti
pris audience.
Except that the graph – devised in
1998 by a US climatologist called Dr Michael Mann - is
based
on a huge lie, as Sceptics have been saying for
quite some time. The first thing they noticed is that this “Hockey Stick”
(based on tree ring data, one of the most accurate ways of recording how
climate changes over the centuries) is that it seemed completely to omit the
Medieval Warming Period.
According to Mann’s graph, the
hottest period in modern history was NOT the generally balmy era between 900
and 1300 but the late 20th century. This led many sceptics,
among them a Canadian mathematician named Steve McIntyre to smell a rat. He
tried to replicate Mann’s tree ring work but was stymied by lack of data: ie the global community of climate-fear-promotion
scientists closed ranks and refused to provide him with any information that
might contradict their cause.
This is the point where British
climate change scientists appear – and in a most unedifying light. As Christopher
Booker has reported the Met Office, its Hadley Centre in Exeter and the
Climate Research Unit (CRU) at University of East Anglia are among the primary
drivers of global climate change alarmism. Their data has formed the basis for
the IPCC’s “we’re all doomed” reports; their scientists – among them Professor
Phil Jones and tree ring expert Professor Keith Briffa
– have been doughty supporters of Mann’s Hockey Stick theory and of the
computer models showing inexorably rising temperatures.
Hence their misleading predictions
of that “barbecue summer” we never had. As Booker says: “Part
of the reason why the Met Office has made such a mess of its forecasts for Britain
is that they are based on the same models which failed to predict the declining
trend in world temperatures since 2001.
When McIntyre approached the Met
Office and the CRU for more information they refused, claiming implausibly that
it would damage Britain’s “international relations” with all the countries that
supplied it. Later they went a step further and claimed the data had been
mislaid.
And there McIntyre’s efforts to
uncover the mystery of the Hockey Stick might have ended, had he not had a stroke
of luck, as Chris
Horner explains at Planet Gore.
“Years go by. McIntyre is still
stymied trying to get access to the original source data so that he can
replicate the Mann 1998 conclusion. In 2008 Mann publishes another paper in
bolstering his tree ring claim due to all of the controversy surrounding it. A
Mann co-author and source of tree ring data (Professor Keith Briffa of the Hadley UK Climate Research Unit) used one of
the tree ring data series (Yamal in Russia) in a
paper published in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society in 2008,
which has a strict data archiving policy. Thanks to that policy, Steve McIntyre
fought and won access to that data just last week.”
This sounds esoteric, but here’s the
important bit: what McIntyre discovered was that Professor Briffa
had cherry picked his “tree data sets” in order to reach the conclusion he
wanted to reach. When, however, McIntyre plotted in a much larger and more
representative range of samples from exactly the same area, the results he got
were startlingly different.
Have a look at the graph at Climate
Audit (which broke the story and has been so inundated with hits that its
server was almost overwhelmed) and see for yourself.
http://www.climateaudit.org/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/rcs_chronologies_rev2.gif
The scary red line shooting upwards is
the one Al Gore, Michael Mann, Keith Briffa and their
climate-fear-promotion chums would like you to believe in. The black one,
heading downwards, represents scientific reality.
We “Global Warming Deniers” are
often accused of ignoring the weight of scientific opinion. Well if the
“science” on which they base their theories is as shoddy as Mann’s Hockey
Stick, is it any wonder we think they’re talking cobblers?
Source: http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100011716/how-the-global-warming-industry-is-based-on-one-massive-lie/