Global warming is a hoax

• This was first published as a column in print in Maverick magazine in South Africa on 6 September 2007. If the denial machine reads this, I am still waiting to be well-funded, so at least consider subscribing, please.
  

You can relax. The hottest year in recorded US history was not 1998, and 2001 isn’t even in the top ten anymore. Hey, facts change, you know.

The news couldn’t have come at a worse time for Newsweek. It had just published a cover emblazoned with the headline “Global Warming is a Hoax*” The footnote reads: “Or so claim well-funded naysayers who still reject the overwhelming evidence of climate change. Inside the denial machine. By Sharon Begley.”

Contributing editor Robert J Samuelson repudiated the story in the very next issue, however. He calls it a “moral crusade”, “righteous indignation” that “undermines good journalism”, “a vast oversimplification of a messy story” and “a wonderful read, marred only by its being fundamentally misleading.” Wow. With friends like these…

Then there’s Steve McIntyre, already infamous in climate change circles for revealing the fatal flaws in the Michael Mann “hockey stick” chart adopted by the UN’s International Panel for Climate Change. His original aim had been to verify the adequacy of the US network of temperature sensors, many of which were being influenced by encroaching urbanisation. Some of them sit in the middle of hot tar parking lots, or near the hot exhaust fans of air conditioning units, for example.

The NASA official in charge of the most cited database of US temperatures, James Hansen, not only refused to disclose the adjustments that were being made to correct for bad siting of sensors, but also removed public access to the locations of meteorological stations. McIntyre had to reconstruct both. He did.

In The American Spectator, Michael Fumento wrote: “In retrospect, you knew there would be trouble when you put the people responsible for the Space Shuttle program in charge of tracking US temperatures.”

And so it was. McIntyre questioned a discontinuity around January 2000, and discovered it coincided with a switch from one set of source data to another. Turns out the two sources didn’t match: the second set was on average 0.15 degrees warmer than the first. Individual station variations could be as much as 1.5 degrees either way.

The result was that the top ten “hottest years on record”, the subject of much media sensationalism, got reshuffled. Now, half the hottest years occur before World War II, well before CO2 emissions reached anywhere near modern levels. The hottest ever is now 1934, instead of 1998. The difference is within the margin of error, but you didn’t hear that when 1998 was held up as proof of global warming, did you?

Going against all scientific ethics, NASA, which this year alone had released five press releases warning about warming, didn’t even bother announcing the correction. Hansen himself pooh-poohed it. And even after McIntyre’s correction, the question of unreliable source data remains. Is it enough just to “correct” bad source data? How is this done? Can other scientists check it? And if the best source data network in the world is so problematic, what about the far less sophisticated networks of sensors elsewhere around the globe?

These questions remain unanswered. Events such as these, combined with the secrecy of the analytical methods NASA employs, do not disprove that global temperatures have been rising for three decades. It is, however, another nail in the coffin of the global warming movement. It shows that the science is far from settled, as they would have you believe.

So here are a few things that need to change before I’ll even consider the theory that man-made global warming is a crisis, or worse, that strong government action is the only way to “save the planet”.

First, the data needs to be reliable. Scientists should be open about the quality of the source data and publicly correct errors as soon as they’re discovered. While they’re at it, they might explain to those of us who were taught that bad data must be discarded and cannot be used to support scientific theory, why unreliable climate data can simply be “corrected” using some secret algorithm.

Almost no “deniers” deny that the last decades has seen rising temperatures, or even that it is highly likely that human activity contributes to this rise. However, when the data is uncertain, doesn’t correlate with the claimed cause, and shows a plateau in the last ten years similar to a previous peak in the 1930s, it’s disingenuous to say the science is settled.

There have been many previous climate scares. A report published by the Business and Media Institute, entitled Fire and Ice, documents global cooling as the media scare of the day in 1895. In the 1930s, the temperature record looked similar to that of today, and global warming was the crisis du jour. By 1975, the self-same Newsweek led with more global cooling alarm, documenting the expected “drastic decline in food production” and using language that sounds identical to today’s warnings of global warming.

Second, appeals to “scientific consensus” undermine the credibility of those who make them. Such an appeal is a refusal to deal with the substance of criticism, which in itself is more than a little suspicious. Worse, there is no such consensus. The UN’s IPCC reports may derive from science, but the outcome is negotiated by politicians and non-governmental organisations. Several scientists have repudiated them, or even sued to get their names removed from the author list. Why would they do that if the science is settled?

A growing number of scientists are speaking out, despite the risk to their own project funding, to denounce the “consensus”. Indeed, most scientific progress, from Galileo to Einstein, comes from people who break with consensus. The scientific method requires not only repeatability in experiments, but also falsifiability. A single scientist is enough to disprove a theory, “consensus” be damned. Science isn’t a democracy.

Third, the predictions of inevitable crisis are based on computer models that suffer from the same scientific method problems. Not only are they still inadequate today, failing to take into account a host of important information, but they are complex systems that are highly sensitive to input variability. James McWilliams, an applied mathematician and earth scientist at UCLA, argues that computer models differ markedly, and may never be able to predict climate accurately, because they are hyper-sensitive both to initial conditions and to minor changes in the calculations themselves.

Roy Spencer, an award-winning climate scientist with experience both at NASA and in academia, even doubts some of the basic premises on which the models are built, such as the idea of positive feedback. He says that the way data are averaged and analysed means that cause and effect cannot be distinguished, and any apparent cause of temperature variability will look like feedback, whether this is true or not. Thus, feedback assumptions get programmed into models where they may not even exist. And then, to counter their hyper-sensitivity, they’re “tuned” to produce “expected” results. So it’s doubly true that the models merely prove the preconceived notions upon which they’re built.

“Climate scientists are beginning to question long held assumptions,” says Spencer, “which is almost always the first step toward a major scientific discovery.”

It is telling not only that models fail to predict past climate when run in reverse, but how do you falsify a prediction about climate in the year 2100? If scientific theories must be falsifiable, catastrophic global warming is not a scientific theory at all.

Finally, global warming firebrands could cut out the ad hominem attacks and guilt-by-association logic they employ. Begley’s term “deniers” itself is an insult, because it compares skeptics to Holocaust deniers. If you think I’m reading too much into the word, note that Begley added childhood biographical information for only two people in her story – both of them skeptics. The parents of Richard Lindzen “had fled Hitler’s Germany”. And Fred Singer “fled Nazi-occupied Austria as a boy”. Are those details really relevant to their work as climate scientists?

The notion that “deniers” are somehow a well-funded machine, and therefore are discredited even before they open their mouths, is also full of holes. Proponents of human-induced climate change are better funded by several orders of magnitude, including by companies with vested interests in climate alarmism. As for the credibility of their accusations, people like Begley, Al Gore and Nancy Pelosi mindlessly repeat long-discredited calumnies, such as that the relatively small Competitive Enterprise Institute once offered scientists $10 000 to “write articles undercutting the new [IPCC] report.” In fact, the invitation was for scientists on both sides of the issue merely to analyse and comment on the report.

With all the secrecy and lies and unscientific reasoning and fallacious logic and character assassination, it is indeed a wonder that predicting climate apocalypse remains fashionable even in intelligent society. It would appear even smart people are vulnerable to sensationalism, neurotic fear and irrational faith. As Newsweek knows, apocalypse sells.