Inconvenient Facts Drown Al Gore’s “Truths” [UPDATE]
By Larry Johnson on March 2, 2010 at 10:00 PM in Current Affairs
* Bumped Up *
Al Gore was out Saturday in the New York Times with an op-ed that calls into question his intellect and judgment. If the reasoning on display in big Al’s piece is indicative of his intelligence then it is easy to understand why he has been so snookered on the issue of “global warming.
Albert Gore is still a true believer. He wrote:
I, for one, genuinely wish that the climate crisis were an illusion. But unfortunately, the reality of the danger we are courting has not been changed by the discovery of at least two mistakes in the thousands of pages of careful scientific work over the last 22 years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. In fact, the crisis is still growing because we are continuing to dump 90 million tons of global-warming pollution every 24 hours into the atmosphere — as if it were an open sewer.
It is true that the climate panel published a flawed overestimate of the melting rate of debris-covered glaciers in the Himalayas, and used information about the Netherlands provided to it by the government, which was later found to be partly inaccurate. In addition, e-mail messages stolen from the University of East Anglia in Britain showed that scientists besieged by an onslaught of hostile, make-work demands from climate skeptics may not have adequately followed the requirements of the British freedom of information law.
WTF!!! Is Gore doing drugs?
Gore’s lame effort to dismiss these as minor flaws ignores a really big OBSTACLE–THE GODDAMN FACTS.
For Gore to claim that the issue exposed by “the stolen” emails from East Anglia” was a failure to follow Great Britain’s freedom of information law is like claiming that the events on December 7th, 1941 in Pearl Harbor were caused by the failure of sailors to wake up early. The East Anglia emails exposed the INCONVENIENT TRUTH that scientists had knowingly skewed data to produce pre-determined results.
Caleb Howe writing at Redstate notes that:
The damning emails show deliberate manipulation of data to produce the desired “increases in global average air and ocean temperature.” What’s worse, Phil Jones, the scientist at the epicenter of this scandal, “lost” all the original data, which might explain why he has ignored repeated Freedom of Information requests. Jones’ non-peer-reviewed findings are crucial to the famous “hockey stick” graph that alarmed Al Gore into an Oscar. Additionally, the emails show a disdain for the very notion of peer-review as well as active conspiracy to suppress dissenting points of view.
Jones lost the data? Well, that little fact was heralded in the UK Mail with this headline,
Climategate U-turn as scientist at centre of row admits: There has been no global warming since 1995
Colleagues say that the reason Professor Phil Jones has refused Freedom of Information requests is that he may have actually lost the relevant papers.
Professor Jones told the BBC yesterday there was truth in the observations of colleagues that he lacked organisational skills, that his office was swamped with piles of paper and that his record keeping is ‘not as good as it should be’.
The data is crucial to the famous ‘hockey stick graph’ used by climate change advocates to support the theory.
Professor Jones also conceded the possibility that the world was warmer in medieval times than now – suggesting global warming may not be a man-made phenomenon.And he said that for the past 15 years there has been no ‘statistically significant’ warming.
Got that? NO STATISTICALLY SIGNIFICANT WARMING IN THE PAST 15 YEARS. Of course for those of you buried up to your ass in snow in the Northeastern United States are probably not shocked by this “revelation.”
Al Gore continues to hang his hat on the conclusion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that the world is warming. But here come those pesky damn facts again. There is a problem with the underlying data:
“The temperature records cannot be relied on as indicators of global change,” said John Christy, professor of atmospheric science at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, a former lead author on the IPCC.
The doubts of Christy and a number of other researchers focus on the thousands of weather stations around the world, which have been used to collect temperature data over the past 150 years.
These stations, they believe, have been seriously compromised by factors such as urbanisation, changes in land use and, in many cases, being moved from site to site.
Christy has published research papers looking at these effects in three different regions: east Africa, and the American states of California and Alabama.
“The story is the same for each one,” he said. “The popular data sets show a lot of warming but the apparent temperature rise was actually caused by local factors affecting the weather stations, such as land development.”
The IPCC faces similar criticisms from Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph, Canada, who was invited by the panel to review its last report.
The experience turned him into a strong critic and he has since published a research paper questioning its methods.
“We concluded, with overwhelming statistical significance, that the IPCC’s climate data are contaminated with surface effects from industrialisation and data quality problems. These add up to a large warming bias,” he said.
Calabrese summarizes the rest of the bad news for Al Gore:
And still, that is not all. In an admission that rocked the British and Australian press and was mostly ignored here in the States, Professor Phil Jones himself has now conceded that the period of medieval global warming, the mere mention of which would have you swiftly decorated by a scarlett letter mere weeks ago, might, in fact, have actually been warmer than the predicted peak of the current warming. That is extremely significant. In the first place, it shows that the globe has warmed before without the aid of factories and hummers, and in the second place, because, well, there was no APOCALYPSE!!!!!!! as a result of the warming. Jones also revealed that a warming period between 1860 and 1880 occurred at a greater rate of increase than what the warmers themselves purport to be the increase of the past 30 years. These are extremely crucial points, as the extent of warming and the possible consequences are what drive any potential legislation such as what was proposed at Copenhagen in 2009.
And finally, the climategate emails make an important point indeed. For the last decade, the predicted global warming has not occurred. The lack of which, by the way, the guilty scientists referred to as a “travesty.” Of the notion that this was a concerted conspiracy among several key players, there can be little doubt.
The great glacial melt, the massive African famines, the extinction of the polar bears, and the destruction of South American rainforests are the key consequences we’re to see from AGW. Each of these points was made, and hammered upon, in the 2007 IPCC report. Each of these items has since been debunked thoroughly. The predicted devastation was a phantom. Al Gore today, and others in the past few weeks, have attempted to brush this under the carpet as immaterial, on the grounds that only a few of the points from their report have been debunked. What The Telegraph understands is what we should all understand: it’s the very most significant portions of the report that were falsified. The most sensational. The Al Goriest. And of course, that matters a great deal. It is the very direness of the moment that we’re all supposed to be terrified of–Polar bears therefore taxes and all that.
In Al Gore world, however, you can ignore these facts. They are inconvenient, after all. Instead, you peddle a new line of bullshit:
Similarly, even though climate deniers have speciously argued for several years that there has been no warming in the last decade, scientists confirmed last month that the last 10 years were the hottest decade since modern records have been kept.
The heavy snowfalls this month have been used as fodder for ridicule by those who argue that global warming is a myth, yet scientists have long pointed out that warmer global temperatures have been increasing the rate of evaporation from the oceans, putting significantly more moisture into the atmosphere — thus causing heavier downfalls of both rain and snow in particular regions, including the Northeastern United States. Just as it’s important not to miss the forest for the trees, neither should we miss the climate for the snowstorm.
Here is what scientists have found is happening to our climate: man-made global-warming pollution traps heat from the sun and increases atmospheric temperatures. These pollutants — especially carbon dioxide — have been increasing rapidly with the growth in the burning of coal, oil, natural gas and forests, and temperatures have increased over the same period. Almost all of the ice-covered regions of the Earth are melting — and seas are rising. Hurricanes are predicted to grow stronger and more destructive, though their number is expected to decrease. Droughts are getting longer and deeper in many mid-continent regions, even as the severity of flooding increases. The seasonal predictability of rainfall and temperatures is being disrupted, posing serious threats to agriculture. The rate of species extinction is accelerating to dangerous levels.
Let’s face it. Al Gore is a retard. It was just a few years ago (8 to be precise) that we were informed that LACK OF SNOW was proof of man-caused global warming.
Now, it is causing too much snow. That’s not a predictive scientific model. This is snake-handling, tongue speaking religious ecstasy. While Al Gore indulges his apocalyptic wet-dream (or maybe he’s dry humping, we just can’t tell if global warming is making us wetter or drier) those of us living in sunny Florida are experiencing one of the coldest winters on record. One data point does not a conclusion make, but Al and company may want to try some humility and work on coming up with authentic, reliably produced data before trying to panic the world into an economic course of action guaranteed to crash the global economy.
Christopher Booker, writing in The UK’s Daily Telegraph, explains concisely the unraveling of the IPCC so-called “consensus:”
The chief defence offered by the warmists to all those revelations centred on the IPCC’s last 2007 report is that they were only a few marginal mistakes scattered through a vast, 3,000-page document. OK, they say, it might have been wrong to predict that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035; that global warming was about to destroy 40 per cent of the Amazon rainforest and cut African crop yields by 50 per cent; that sea levels were rising dangerously; that hurricanes, droughts and other “extreme weather events” were getting worse. These were a handful of isolated errors in a massive report; behind them the mighty edifice of global warming orthodoxy remains unscathed. The “science is settled”, the “consensus” is intact.
But this completely misses the point. Put the errors together and it can be seen that one after another they tick off all the central, iconic issues of the entire global warming saga. Apart from those non-vanishing polar bears, no fears of climate change have been played on more insistently than these: the destruction of Himalayan glaciers and Amazonian rainforest; famine in Africa; fast-rising sea levels; the threat of hurricanes, droughts, floods and heatwaves all becoming more frequent.
All these alarms were given special prominence in the IPCC’s 2007 report and each of them has now been shown to be based, not on hard evidence, but on scare stories, derived not from proper scientists but from environmental activists. Those glaciers are not vanishing; the damage to the rainforest is not from climate change but logging and agriculture; African crop yields are more likely to increase than diminish; the modest rise in sea levels is slowing not accelerating; hurricane activity is lower than it was 60 years ago; droughts were more frequent in the past; there has been no increase in floods or heatwaves.
Furthermore, it has also emerged in almost every case that the decision to include these scare stories rather than hard scientific evidence was deliberate. As several IPCC scientists have pointed out about the scare over Himalayan glaciers, for instance, those responsible for including it were well aware that proper science said something quite different. But it was inserted nevertheless – because that was the story wanted by those in charge.
In addition, we can now read in shocking detail the truth of the outrageous efforts made to ensure that the same 2007 report was able to keep on board IPCC’s most shameless stunt of all – the notorious “hockey stick” graph purporting to show that in the late 20th century, temperatures had been hurtling up to unprecedented levels. This was deemed necessary because, after the graph was made the centrepiece of the IPCC’s 2001 report, it had been exposed as no more than a statistical illusion. (For a full account see Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion, and also my own book The Real Global Warming Disaster.)
In other words, in crucial respects the IPCC’s 2007 report was no more than reckless propaganda, designed to panic the world’s politicians into agreeing at Copenhagen in 2009 that we should all pay by far the largest single bill ever presented to the human race, amounting to tens of trillions of dollars. And as we know, faced with the prospect of this financial and economic abyss, December’s Copenhagen conference ended in shambles, with virtually nothing agreed.
What is staggering is the speed and the scale of the unravelling – assisted of course, just before Copenhagen, by “Climategate”, the emails and computer codes leaked from East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit. Their significance was the light they shone on the activities of a small group of British and US scientists at the heart of the IPCC, as they discussed ways of manipulating data to show the world warming faster than the evidence justified; fighting off legitimate requests for data from outside experts to hide their manipulations; and conspiring to silence their critics by excluding their work from scientific journals and the IPCC’s 2007 report itself. (Again, a devastating analysis of this story has just been published by Stephen Mosher and Tom Fuller in Climategate: The CRUtape Letters).
Almost as revealing as the leaked documents themselves, however, was the recent interview given to the BBC by the CRU’s suspended director, Dr Phil Jones, who has played a central role in the global warming scare for 20 years, not least as custodian of the most prestigious of the four global temperature records relied on by the IPCC. In his interview Jones seemed to be chucking overboard one key prop of warmest faith after another, as he admitted that the world might have been hotter during the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years ago than it is today, that before any rise in CO2 levels temperatures rose faster between 1860 and 1880 than they have done in the past 30 years, and that in the past decade their trend has been falling rather than rising.
Someone alert Al Gore, there is a real “inconvenient truth,” to wit that he, Mr. Gore, is completely and utterly full of shit.
UPDATE: So much for Al Gore’s “settled science:”
The cover of Gore’s newest book, Our Choice, even depicts an artist’s impression of a world beset by a series of huge super-hurricanes as a warning of what might happen if carbon emissions continue to rise.
However, the latest research, just published in Nature Geoscience, paints a very different picture.
It suggests that the rise in hurricane frequency since 1995 was just part of a natural cycle, and that several similar previous increases have been recorded, each followed by a decline.
Looking to the future, it also draws on computer modelling to predict that the most likely impact of global warming will be to decrease the frequency of tropical storms, by up to 34% by 2100.
It does, however, suggest that when tropical storms do occur they could get slightly stronger, with average windspeeds rising by 2-11% by 2100. A storm is termed a hurricane when wind speeds exceed 74mph, but most are much stronger. A category 4 or 5 hurricane such as Katrina generates speeds in excess of 150mph.
“We have come to substantially different conclusions from the IPCC,” said Chris Landsea, a lead scientist at the American government’s National Hurricane Center, who co-authored the report.
Cheer up Al. Here’s a song to lift your spirit:
by Ronald Scott
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