UK Scientist Debunks Global Warming Hoax

The Telegraph has a distinguished scientist named Christopher Monckton who effectively depants and spanks the author of the Stern Report which has the Brits agog with panic, even to the ridiculous extent of hiring ubiquitous oaf Al Gore to lecture on how the global warming trend is ruining the planet. I believe that it's about time that British pundits brush up on Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds by Charles MacKay, a good look at what they and their American leftist-loony pals are exhibiting in full-blown delirious froth-mouthed hue and cry. The herd of independent minds has rarely been more unanimous and mis-informed.

But Monckton delivers the goods in a straightforward fashion, catching the UN and its Canadian puppet in full delusionary falsification [Canada should pray that its frozen wastes warm up a bit!]:

This week, I'll show how the UN undervalued the sun's effects on historical and contemporary climate, slashed the natural greenhouse effect, overstated the past century's temperature increase, repealed a fundamental law of physics and tripled the man-made greenhouse effect.

Next week, I'll demonstrate the atrocious economic, political and environmental cost of the high-tax, zero-freedom, bureaucratic centralism implicit in Stern's report; I'll compare the global-warming scare with previous sci-fi alarums; and I'll show how the environmentalists' "precautionary principle" (get the state to interfere now, just in case) is killing people.

So to the scare. First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.

Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: "With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.' "

So they did. The UN's second assessment report, in 1996, showed a 1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today. But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no medieval warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the warmest for 1,000 years. The graph looked like an ice hockey-stick. The wrongly flat AD1000-AD1900 temperature line was the shaft: the uptick from 1900 to 2000 was the blade. Here's how they did it:

• They gave one technique for reconstructing pre-thermometer temperature 390 times more weight than any other (but didn't say so).

• The technique they overweighted was one which the UN's 1996 report had said was unsafe: measurement of tree-rings from bristlecone pines. Tree-rings are wider in warmer years, but pine-rings are also wider when there's more carbon dioxide in the air: it's plant food. This carbon dioxide fertilisation distorts the calculations.

• They said they had included 24 data sets going back to 1400. Without saying so, they left out the set showing the medieval warm period, tucking it into a folder marked "Censored Data".

• They used a computer model to draw the graph from the data, but scientists later found that the model almost always drew hockey-sticks even if they fed in random, electronic "red noise".


The large, full-colour "hockey-stick" was the key graph in the UN's 2001 report, and the only one to appear six times. The Canadian Government copied it to every household. Four years passed before a leading scientific journal would publish the truth about the graph. Did the UN or the Canadian government apologise? Of course not. The UN still uses the graph in its publications.

Even after the "hockey stick" graph was exposed, scientific papers apparently confirming its abolition of the medieval warm period appeared. The US Senate asked independent statisticians to investigate. They found that the graph was meretricious, and that known associates of the scientists who had compiled it had written many of the papers supporting its conclusion.

The UN, echoed by Stern, says the graph isn't important. It is. Scores of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global and up to 3C warmer than now. Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes: today they're there. There were Viking farms in Greenland: now they're under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none.

Making the Canadian government and the UN look like fools doesn't require a triple-digit IQ, but evidence that there is a deliberate attempt to falsify data harks back to what Richard Feynmann called "cargo cult science."
Feynmann correctly foresaw that the urge for big bucks to underwrite Big Science would bring hucksters like Gore and Stern out of the woodwork to gain political, financial, or Nobel-nitwittery gain.

Feynmann had the integrity that is lacking in much of Big Science nowadays, particularly in various embedded lobbies in the US Government such as NOAA and NASA which have advance the warming hypothesis for their own appropriations agendas. Leftist campuses also pursue Chicken Little agendas to popularize their particular deformed agitpreppie snipe hunts.

Monckton's entire article is available at the top link in pdf. It should make interesting reading for the unconverted.

Thanks to Redstate for the following link: Global Warming: The Chilling Effect on Free Speech.