Cooking the global warming numbers
The Wall Street Journal has an interesting opinion piece today entitled Our Climate Numbers Are a Big Old Mess. In it, the author talks about how the global temperature data has been manipulated to exaggerate global warming, by the IPCC and others. Scientists or politicians?
1. The warming trend is not that impressive
The earth's paltry warming trend, 0.31 degrees Fahrenheit per decade since the mid-1970s, isn't enough to scare people into poverty. And even that 0.31 degree figure is suspect.
2. The satellites and weather balloons show no such warming trend
For years, records from surface thermometers showed a global warming trend beginning in the late 1970s. But temperatures sensed by satellites and weather balloons displayed no concurrent warming.
These records have been revised a number of times, and I examined the two major revisions of these three records....The two revisions of the IPCC surface record each successively lowered temperatures in the 1950s and the 1960s. The result? Obviously more warming – from largely the same data.
3. The data has been revised six times in recent years, all in the same direction - towards warming
There have been six major revisions in the warming figures in recent years, all in the same direction. So it's like flipping a coin six times and getting tails each time. The chance of that occurring is 0.016, or less than one in 50. That doesn't mean that these revisions are all hooey, but the probability that they would all go in one direction on the merits is pretty darned small.
4. Some revisions ought to be made in the other direction, but no one wants to make them
Last year we published our results in the Journal of Geophysical Research, showing that "non-climatic" effects in land-surface temperatures – GDP per capita, among other things – exert a significant influence on the data. For example, weather stations are supposed to be a standard white color. If they darken from lack of maintenance, temperatures read higher than they actually are. After adjusting for such effects, as much as half of the warming in the U.N.'s land-based record vanishes. Because about 70% of earth's surface is water, this could mean a reduction of as much as 15% in the global warming trend.
5. Political persecution and suppression of dissent are typical in this branch of science (just as in the evolution discussion)
Why is the news on global warming always bad? Perhaps because there's little incentive to look at things the other way. If you do, you're liable to be pilloried by your colleagues.
6. Warmer periods in the past resulted in minimal, if any loss of glacial ice - so why do we think it is actually happening now? Fact or fiction?
Finally, no one seems to want to discuss that for millennia after the end of the last ice age, the Eurasian arctic was several degrees warmer in summer (when ice melts) than it is now. We know this because trees are buried in areas that are now too cold to support them. Back then, the forest extended all the way to the Arctic Ocean, which is now completely surrounded by tundra. If it was warmer for such a long period, why didn't Greenland shed its ice?
7. Questions
Why is the news on global warming always bad? If global warming isn't such a threat, who needs all that funding? Who needs the army of policy wonks crawling around the world with bold plans to stop climate change?
Indeed, it seems to me that the IPCC is not some unpolitical and representative body of scientists, but a bunch of well-meaning scientists swept up in group think and alarmism, wasting our time, energy, and resources with eco-wackoism. And if you question their foregone conclusions? You are an idiot, a flat-earther. This is what science looks like when it is controlled by a narrow orthodoxy trying to suppress dissent in the name of 'scientific purity.' (See The 7 steps to supressing opponents' ideas)
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