It's been a while since I addressed global warming. Lately what's bothered me has been the absolute rage and poison the global warming alarmists have shown towards those who question their claims. It's an unattractive blend of arrogance and venom.
Speaking at the American leg of Live Earth: The Concerts for a Climate in Crisis, Robert F. Kennedy Jr., referring to skeptics of man-made global warming, said "This is treason. And we need to start treating them as traitors."
From Al Gore: "There has been an organized campaign....to create the impression that there is disagreement in the scientific community. In actuality, there is very little disagreement. This is one of the strongest of scientific consensus views in the history of science." And incredibly, "We live in a world where what used to be called propaganda now has a major role to play in shaping public opinion."
Okay, that "consensus" bit again. In his money-making propaganda piece "An Inconvenient Truth," Gore cites a study of 928 scientific papers, none of which (Gore claims) disagree with the "consensus" opinion.
Shortly thereafter, Dr. Benny Peiser, a senior lecturer in the science faculty at Liverpool John Moores University, conducted his own study of the exact same papers, and found that "only one-third backed the consensus view, while only 1 percent did so explicitly."
Meanwhile another study conducted in 2003 indicates that climate scientists are actually about evenly split over the question of whether climate change is primarily due to mankind's activities. In fact, slightly more strongly disagreed with that position than strongly agreed.
Another set of claims are: 1) The hottest 10 years in the last century have all occurred since 1980. 2) 1998 was the hottest year on record, and 2001 was the second-hottest. 3) January-March, 2002, was the hottest such period on record.
In fact, NASA recently corrected faulty data regarding its temperatures. The warmest year on record is now 1934. 1998 (long trumpeted by the media as record-breaking) moves to second place. 1921 takes third. In fact, 5 of the 10 warmest years on record now all occur before World War II.
Four of the top 10 are now from the 1930s: 1934, 1931, 1938 and 1939, while only 3 of the top 10 are from the last 10 years (1998, 2006, 1999). Several years (2000, 2002, 2003, 2004) fell well down the leaderboard, behind even 1900.
SUMMARY: The claims of an "overwhelming consensus" and "the '90s were the hottest decade in history, and '98 the hottest year" have been debunked.
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Global Warming:
from PolitiFact.com non-partisan fact checker.
Most scientists say humans cause warming
False
At a debate in South Carolina, Tancredo said he could match, stack for stack, the scientific reports that support global warming with those that do not.
In fact, the stacks would be pretty lopsided.
Tancredo is wrong to suggest that climate scientists are evenly split. The overwhelming consensus among them is that humans are the main cause of global warming.
A recent study by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a group of scientists from more than 130 nations, concluded that there is overwhelming evidence that warming is caused by human activity.
Their February 2007 report said warming was "unequivocal" and that most of it has been caused by greenhouse gas concentrations caused by humans. The report said that humans have caused a significant increase in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide since 1750.
Yes, there have been dissenting studies over the years about global warming. But the IPCC is an effort to forge an international consensus. It has included more than 2,500 expert reviewers, more than 800 authors and more than 450 lead authors working for the past six years.
Since several of the claims made by global warming alarminsts have been disproved (the point of the post,) it's reasonable to expect that some of their other claims will also prove to be incorrect.
The IPCC report is written by bureaucrats and politicians, not scientists. For example, one scientist who contributed to the IPCC in 2001 states that they completely misrepresented the chapter he worked on. The "reviews" it's supposedly subject to are not the stringent challenges in peer-reviewed science journals, where authors have to answer questions about the article. The UN authors can simply ignore the questions and publish what they plese.
All of the claims the alarmists have made may indeed turn out to be true; but they're using false data and shady arguments to make their case.
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