Man-made global warming argument continues to unravel

Phil Valentine

February 16, 2010

PhilValentine.com

 

The global warming argument continues to unravel even as some of its more rabid proponents grasp at straws.  Phil Jones, the former head of the embattled Climate Research Unit in the United Kingdom who resigned in disgrace amidst the Climategate scandal, has now made a startling admission.  Jones conceded to the BBC that there has been no statistically significant warming since 1995.  Furthermore, he admitted that it is quite possible that the world was warmer during medieval times than it is now, a position long held by global warming skeptics and long denied by the global warming fear-mongers. 

Jones’ concession on both issues points to a sea change in the entire global warming debate.  If our world was warmer during the Medieval Warm Period then it’s highly unlikely that any warming over the last century has anything to do with us.  And keep in mind that this “warming” they point to is 0.7 degrees.  What the global warming folks don’t tell you is we were coming off the Little Ice Age which followed the Medieval Warm Period.  The Little Ice Age ran from about 1300 to 1850.  It stands to reason that we would be warming a bit after coming off a 550-year cold snap.  Many experts tell us we’d have to warm significantly more to match European temperatures during medieval times when vineyards were abundant in the London area.

Professor Jones’ backtracking is coupled with all sorts of holes that, of late, have been blown in the much-ballyhooed 2007 UN IPCC report.  That report is riddled with outlandish claims that have now been corrected and dubious sources for important parts of the research.  One claim of temperature and ice change came from casual observations taken from a hiking magazine.  Their claim that the Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035 had to be revised when it was discovered someone had transposed the numbers.  It was supposed to be 2350.  Okay, so they only missed it by 300 years.  But who can realistically claim that they have any idea what the climate will be doing in 300 years?

Other mistakes in the report include a claim that up to 40 percent of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in rainfall.  Instead of coming from a peer-reviewed paper, that claim came from the radical World Wildlife Fund.

We now know that temperature data the IPCC has relied on since its inception is suspect given the manner in which this data has been collected.  A staple of previous IPCC reports, the Michael Mann hockey stick graph, which showed little temperature change over a thousand years then a sudden spike, like the blade of a hockey stick, in the last 50 years, has been widely discredited.  The IPCC quietly dropped the hockey stick data in its last report.

Also, the claim of a consensus by Al Gore and others is laughable.  The IPCC used 150 scientists to compile the report, not the thousands Gore has claimed.  Other scientists involved simply reviewed the material and a good number of them disagreed with the findings.  Hardly unanimous, as Gore has claimed.

The most laughable is the claim that the recent snowstorms in the Northeast corridor were caused by global warming.  They actually said that.  It would seem if that’s the case then the planet has already solved the global warming problem. 

The IPCC, along with Al Gore, won a Nobel Peace Prize for their work.  Of course, global warming has nothing to do with peace but that’s okay.  Apparently, the IPCC and Al Gore have nothing to do with real science.