Global warming just a Y2K bug
The science is settl… oops! This couldn’t have come at a worse time for the original Global Cooling alarmist, Newsweek. It just published a screed against climate change skeptics, containing this quote:
This sounded what would become a recurring theme for naysayers: that global temperature data are flat-out wrong. For one thing, they argued, the data reflect urbanization (many temperature stations are in or near cities), not true global warming.
CNN Money carries a rebuttal of the Newsweek piece. So does Marc Morano at the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, as well as NewsBusters Noel Sheppard and Amy Ridenour.
But it gets better. Much, much better.
While doing some research on the problem of temperature station siting and data quality, statistician Steve McIntyre discovered a strange discontinuity in the numbers published by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. This is the primary source warming alarmists use for US temperature data, and the origin of the claim that 1998 had been the warmest year on record until 2006 came along. McIntyre himself became a minor celebrity in 2004 when he and Ross McKitrick broke Michael Mann’s hockey stick by spotting dubious data manipulation. Just as Mann refused to make his work available for review, the researchers were not permitted access to the secret algorithms NASA GISS used to extract temperature trends from the data. Access to the database of temperature measurement locations was also withdrawn, as soon as the researchers began questioning, for example, whether aircon exhausts over hot tarmac made for an ideal site. They had to reverse engineer the statistical adjustments, and build their own database of temperature measurement sites. This they did.
Turns out that the data were wrong. So badly wrong, in fact, that NASA has begun republishing it, shattering the “hockey stick” myth once and for all. Stealing 1998’s thunder, 1934 is now officially the warmest year on record in the US, and five of the ten warmest years this century happened before World War II. 2001 fell off the top ten list completely.
Warren Meyer wrote a letter to Newsweek, and also has a detailed explanation of how the error came about. For more info and supporting information on this excellent news, see these three posts by Michael Asher at DailyTech, and this post by Anthony Watts. As of this writing, the site of the main protagonist, Steve McIntyre, remains down, apparently because of a DDOS attack. (Coincidence?)
Turns out global warming isn’t a crisis, but Y2K was — for those naïfs who couldn’t be bothered with practical, technical solutions to the problem.
The climate change profiteers had better find a new crisis to keep themselves supplied with grants and book deals.
Update: I must add that this news — and it’s early days yet — is quite staggering. I’m actually surprised. I have always been skeptical of the computer model predictions, but argued even if true, it’s not a crisis that merits urgent and growth-sapping regulation by government bureaucracies. That the underlying data is badly flawed in the first place, as it now appears to be, comes as a bit of a shock. Not an entirely unpleasant one, but a shock nevertheless.
Update: Chirped a friend of mine: “Will the last alarmist to concede please switch on all the lights?”
Update: I wonder why, in a piece containing the leading term “deniers” in the headline, Newsweek takes pains to point out that Richard Lindzen’s “parents had fled Hitler’s Germany”. Notice how his background is the only historical detail included in the article? Oh wait. It’s not the only one. The other is about S. Fred Singer, like Lindzen a “denier”, who “fled Nazi-occupied Austria as a boy”. Guess it’s not a coincidence, then. Unless I’m missing a really good reason why having escaped the Holocaust is relevant to one’s opinions about climate change.
Update: Is that a furious scrabbling sound over at Newsweek’s offices? A column in Newsweek calls the previous issue’s cover story by Sharon Begley in, ahem, Newsweek, “a vast oversimplification of a messy story”, and “a morality tale”. It disputes key facts of the story and bemoans the righteous indignation that prompted it. Weren’t there editors on hand to give Ms Begley a few pointers? (Hat tip: the reference frame)
Update: To be fair, though I liked the Y2K chirp (which I first saw on James Taranto’s page) there’s no evidence that the data error was in fact a simple Y2K problem. Around 2000, however, it appears to data sets were merged or concatenated. A cooler set was replaced by a warmer set. Go figure.
Update: If I don’t quit updating this post, I’m going to run out of electrons. So nevermind. It’s nothing, really.
What ever the facts about climate change, there’s no denying that human activity is fucking up the world, and that we will soon run out of fossil fuels.
Yeah: secret model algorithms, not releasing statistical gathering information, refusing to release vital information for peer review etc. etc.
Sounds just like what science should be!
Oh, and I’m glad the previous commentator is so astute. Thanks for the contribution!
@ Walton: Whatever the facts, you’re right.
“human activity is fucking up the world”… hmm, fucking up the world or changing the world to suit our needs? Isn’t that what we are, environmental adapters rather than adapters to the environment?
And yes, we will “soon” run out of fossil fuels. Actually, they’ll probably become so expensive they’ll be uneconomical before they completely run out. But, in any case, what is your point?
I think it would be rather difficult for us to do any real damage to the world. Even Chernobyl is a thriving ecosystem these days, and from what we know about the earth’s past history, in a billion years or so all trace of current mankind will have disappeared, submerged under the earth’s crust in the ancient process of subduction and renewal. If the earth could survive the kind of catastrophic meteor that killed the dinosaurs, sent global temperatures soaring and blanketed the earth in dust for years; then it can survive us making the place a few degrees warmer.
The question we really need to be asking ourselves is what’s good for us. Which approach ensures the best combination of risk, wealth and security? To narrow it down a bit, how are increased global temperatures going to affect us, and is it more effective to slow down our rate of growth and progress to limit CO2 emissions or should we be spending the resources instead on trying to mitigate the effects? Personally, I’m more in favour of the latter, since I believe that current attempts to halt CO2 emissions will not only leave everybody poorer (and thus less able to cope with changes) but are also doomed to fail by the rise of countries like China, India and Brazil who cannot afford to stop growing. Even if the entire Western world were to somehow reduce their CO2 emissions to zero (an impossible target), the overall global level of CO2 emissions would likely eventually remain the same or even increase. China is already the world’s biggest CO2 emitter, and it still has a lot of growth capacity.
So I’m advocating for a cautious approach to global warming, focused on reducing the risk of those worst affected and on minimising the impact on us. Importantly, unlike the “stop what you’re doing” principle, this approach means that if things are proven to be less bad than currently assumed (as this fascinating article implies), it’s easier to adjust to it.
As for fossil fuels, who cares if we use them up? It’s not like they have any other uses, and we’d almost certainly have moved on to alternatives long before any of them are really close to exhaustion. The stone age did not end because we ran out of stone, nor will the oil age end because we ran out of oil. Instead, increasing demand will drive the price up to the point where alternatives begin to make economic sense and we will gradually change over. Peak oil is a myth, based on the fact that it relies on calculations of reserves that are in turn based on the price of extraction. What this means is that if oil is $40 a barrel, the calculations only take into account the oil reserves that can be economically extracted for less than that. If it’s $60 or $80 a barrel, it suddenly becomes possible to extract oil from previously uneconomical fields and so they’re added to the calculations. There’s actually billions upon billions of tons of oil out there which will become economical to extract at higher prices and with newer technology. We’re not going to be in danger of running out of oil for a century at least. Stop panicking.
“Most of the literate world today regards “global warming” as both real and dangerous. Indeed, the diplomatic activity concerning warming might lead one to believe that it is the major crisis confronting mankind… I must state at the outset, that, as a scientist, I can find no substantive basis for the warming scenarios being popularly described. Moreover, according to many studies I have read by economists, agronomists, and hydrologists, there would be little difficulty adapting to such warming if it were to occur.”
~ Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meterology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
https://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/reg15n2j.html
See my update about how Newsweek described Lindzen. If you didn’t know its journalists are paragons of virtue and objectivity, you’d almost think it was a deliberate and egregious racist insult.
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