Don't Believe the Hype

So to the scare. First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.

Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: "With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.' "

So they did. The UN's second assessment report, in 1996, showed a 1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today. But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no medieval warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the warmest for 1,000 years. The graph looked like an ice hockey-stick. The wrongly flat AD1000-AD1900 temperature line was the shaft: the uptick from 1900 to 2000 was the blade. Here's how they did it:

• They gave one technique for reconstructing pre-thermometer temperature 390 times more weight than any other (but didn't say so).

• The technique they overweighted was one which the UN's 1996 report had said was unsafe: measurement of tree-rings from bristlecone pines. Tree-rings are wider in warmer years, but pine-rings are also wider when there's more carbon dioxide in the air: it's plant food. This carbon dioxide fertilisation distorts the calculations.

• They said they had included 24 data sets going back to 1400. Without saying so, they left out the set showing the medieval warm period, tucking it into a folder marked "Censored Data".

• They used a computer model to draw the graph from the data, but scientists later found that the model almost always drew hockey-sticks even if they fed in random, electronic "red noise".

The large, full-colour "hockey-stick" was the key graph in the UN's 2001 report, and the only one to appear six times. The Canadian Government copied it to every household. Four years passed before a leading scientific journal would publish the truth about the graph. Did the UN or the Canadian government apologise? Of course not. The UN still uses the graph in its publications.

Even after the "hockey stick" graph was exposed, scientific papers apparently confirming its abolition of the medieval warm period appeared. The US Senate asked independent statisticians to investigate. They found that the graph was meretricious, and that known associates of the scientists who had compiled it had written many of the papers supporting its conclusion.

So, in order to hype the fate of global warming, one has to suppose that the prior warming periods in the Earth's history was nonexistent. Or that such periods were not catastrophic although scientists believe that the current one will be.

Just how scientific is that? Let's apply just a wee bit of scientific analysis. We know from the historical records that there were periods when the Earth was warmer than now. Then the Earth cooled. There are climatic cycles that extend for eons, but somehow this latest cycle is the end of life as we know it. Does this pass the smell test for you? It doesn't for me.

And it smells even worse once you look at how scientists are massaging the data in order to arrive at the conclusions that the current period is going to result in climate changes unlike that we've seen before.

To what end is this hysteria over global warming? A global government? If the UN can get its grubby hands all over how energy is produced and energy credits are traded (a major contributor to the gases these scientists believe are behind the warming), this would affect how everyone gets their power.

The US, despite refusing to sign onto the Kyoto Protocols, is doing a better job controlling its emissions than those sanctimonious countries who have chastizes the US for not doing so. And wonder of wonders, the very countries that called on the US to sign onto the Protocols have not been able to meet their targets, despite little to no economic growth. The US has done better, even with a growing economy.

But none of this stops people from making claims such as this: Greenhouse gases reach record high in 2005. Just how far back are these records going? 100 years? 150 years? That's the implication when talking about 19th century emissions, yet there are signs that the planet was much warmer thousands of years ago and there was some mechanism that altered the temperature - lowering it significantly.

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