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The Global Warming Frenzy
By John Coleman
In the week since my article "Global Warming is the Greatest Scam in History" was posted, I have received hundreds of emails. Most have been supportive and thanked me for my statement. A few have been very hostile. And, many of them ask for the scientific evidence that supports my statements.
For them I am posting a series of briefs debunking the science behind the global warming frenzy. This is the first one.
The claim that Earth is in the grips of runaway Global Warming took off with this chart. It was produced by Climatologist Michael Mann and colleagues in 1999. His paper portrayed the climate of Earth as stable for 1,000 years before the activities of mankind caused temperatures to skyrocket.
This chart includes the Medieval Warm period and Little Ice Age, both of which have been documented by historians and widely accepted by climatologists. Remember, it was during the Medieval Warm period that the Vikings settled Greenland and established successful farms. Strong support for this warm period worldwide can be found on the CO2 Science site. Then came the Little Ice Age during which the Vikings had to abandon Greenland. Which chart is right? This is very important because Mann’s "hockey stick" chart has been the absolute bedrock of the global warming frenzy. It was a primary exhibit and cornerstone of the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports.
A debate about Mann’s work has raged in the scientific community as other climate scientists take strong exception to his claims.
I have waded through the research papers and blog exchanges by scientists on both sides. In the end, mathematician Steven McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick have proven to my satisfaction that the Mann Hockey Stick chart is not a valid display of long-term global temperatures.
A congressional group formed a committee of scientists to settle the issue. Here are excerpts from their report:
COMMITTEE REPORT ON THE ‘HOCKEY STICK’ GLOBAL CLIMATE RECONSTRUCTION
"This committee has reviewed the work of both articles (Mann’s research paper and McIntyre and McKitrick’s counter arguments), as well as a network of journal articles that are related either by authors or subject matter, and has come to several conclusions and recommendations. Overall, our committee believes that Mann’s assessments that the decade of the 1990s was the hottest decade of the millennium and that 1998 was the hottest year of the millennium cannot be supported by his analysis.
In general, we found Mann’s articles to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and the criticisms of them to be valid and compelling. The controversy surrounding Mann’s methods lies in that the proxies are centered on the mean of the period 1902-1995, rather than on the whole time period. This mean is, thus, actually decentered low, which will cause it to exhibit a larger variance, giving it preference for being selected as the first principal component. The net effect of this decentering using the proxy data in MBH98 and MBH99 is to produce a "hockey stick" shape. The experts on this committee were Edward J. Wegman (George Mason University), David W. Scott (Rice University), and Yasmin H. Said (The Johns Hopkins University)."
My conclusion is that the cornerstone exhibit of the Global Warming proponents is bad science. It is not correct. There has not been an unprecedented rise in global temperatures in the last thirty years. So, what has been going on with temperatures worldwide? It is a difficult question since the raw data is often unreliable and there are many ways to process the data. The Winter just-ended was the coldest in many decades in many parts of the Southern Hemisphere. When the Secretary General of the UN recently visited Antarctica, the Associated Press report said the ice was melting under his feet with record high temperatures. For sure he wasn't at the South Pole station where at that moment the temperature was -47. I am sure there was no melting there.
NASA has recently reprocessed its annual data for US temperatures since 1840. Here is their revised list of the warmest years:
Year Old New
1934 1.23 1.25
1998 1.24 1.23
1921 1.12 1.15
2006 1.23 1.13
1931 1.08 1.08
1999 0.94 0.93
1953 0.91 0.90
1990 0.88 0.87
1938 0.85 0.86
1939 0.84 0.85
Three years from the 1990's make the list, but only one in this new century. It seems clear to me that we are not in the grips of massive man-made heat wave called global warming.
This brief is just the first of several. There is important research that attempts to tie global warming to carbon dioxide emissions and a long list of supporting research and observations from polar ice melting and polar bears to strength and number of exceptional storms. I will deal with all of those points in future blog postings. The_Global_Warming_Frenzy
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