PREAMBLE
This paper aims to help the lay reader confused and irritated by the complex, polarised and often vituperative debate between experts in Anthropogenic Global Warming. By quoting the major players verbatim, it exposes the bias infecting every stage of the process from data selection through analysis and reporting to media presentation, thereby calling into question the alarmist arguments. A sound case needs no such manipulation.
CONTENTS
1. INTRODUCTION – THE $300 TRILLION QUESTION
2. OUR LEADERS
2.1. Want to do something constructive? Blow up a dam – James Hansen
2.2. If science fails, ideology should do it – Mike Hulme
3. WE REALLY MUST FIND SUITABLE DATA
3.1. Baseline à la carte – Tom Wigley
4. TAKE AWAY THE NUMBER YOU FIRST THOUGHT OF
4.1. So exactly what is your process, Professor?
4.1.1. I’ll delete the file – Phil Jones
4.1.2. Avoid litigation, you may lose – Ben Santer
4.2. Death of a hockey-stick – D’Arrigo et al
4.3. A load of garbage – ‘Harry’ Harris
4.4. The truth can be so confusing – IPCC
4.5. Hide the incline – Michael Mann
4.6. Important to choose the right assumption – Phil Jones
5. REPORT PREPARATION
5.1. Perjured conclusion – IPCC 2
6. POLITICAL SHENANIGANS
6.1. We’ll keep the red flag flying here – Czarina Browner
6.2. Given that AGW exists… – the IPCC’s neutral brief
6.3. Our policy is clear, we just don’t adhere to it – EPA
6.3.1. Underwhelming transparency – Ms Lisa Jackson
6.3.2. So how does one get to be a scientist? – EPA
7. MEDIA SCHMEDIA
7.1. The Biased Broadcasting Corporation
7.1.1. Socialists triumph, Hurrah! – Jane Garvey
7.1.2. Alarming revelation: science not settled – Peter Sissons
7.1.3. Balance inappropriate, at last it’s official – BBC Trust
7.1.4. Hide the stasis – D’Aleo and Watts
7.1.5. Synthesis? Leave it to the NGOs – Roger Harrabin
7.2. More honoured in the breach – Journalists’ Code of Ethics
7.3. Rice production increase ‘overlooked’ – ‘Guardian’
7.4. Denialists needn’t apply – ‘Nature’
7.5. Keep your friends close – IPCC’s expert reviewers
8. EVIDENCE UNNECESSARY, HYSTERIA ESSENTIAL
9. CONCLUSION
1. INTRODUCTION – THE $300 TRILLION QUESTION
Is man warming the planet? This, the most important question in the history of science needs careful, impartial scientific study. Instead the science is subordinated to a UN-managed political campaign offering us an invidious choice (figures from IPCC):
World GDP 2100
1990 US$ trillions
Capitalism (Economic Golden Age) 525-550
Socialism (Saving the Planet) 235-328
———————————————————————————–
Net Cost of Saving the Planet 198-315
This campaign for economic collapse relies on factitious manipulation of biased data enhanced by excited reporting from such reputable bodies as the BBC, Time and the New York Times.
[Bold emphasis is mine throughout unless otherwise stated]
2. OUR LEADERS
Before we get to details, the views of two leading thinkers will give an idea of what we’re up against.
2.1. Want to do something constructive? Blow up a dam – James Hansen
Hansen (Head of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies), perhaps the most luminous member of the AGW lobby, is noted for his er… outspoken views.
A recent book by one Keith Farnish includes:
Civilization has created the perfect conditions for a terrible tragedy on the kind of scale never seen before in the history of humanity.
Farnish proposes preventing this tragedy by:
… removing grazing domesticated animals, razing cities to the ground, blowing up dams …
And if governments won’t co-operate:
… if …removing a sea wall or a dam will have a net beneficial effect on the natural environment then, however you go about it – explosives, technical sabotage or manual destruction – the removal would be a constructive action.
Unasked, Hansen offered his view:
Keith Farnish has it right: time has practically run out, and the ‘system’ is the problem.
2.2. If science fails, ideology should do it – Mike Hulme
Hulme, (Professor of Climate Change, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia) is arguably the UK’s most influential AGW scientist. He has an interesting view of political realities:
Within a capitalist world order, climate change is actually a convenient phenomenon to come along
He dismisses ‘normal’ science because it produces the wrong answer:
Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking …
Self-evidently? I must be missing something.
In 1997 he helped organise a statement, signed by ‘European Climate Scientists’, recommending:
… substantial control in the growth of emissions
But somehow omitted to:
… explain the personal values and ethical judgments we each made in reaching this conclusion.
As he later admitted, this omission being concealed:
…the impression could easily be gained that our belief was a non-negotiable conclusion of our scientific work.
Is he claiming such an impression would be mistaken?
Twelve years on, he describes his part in this charade as ‘naïve’ and explains that he reaches his conclusions on the basis of:
…scientific evidence, my political philosophy, my ideology of nature and my personal values.
We should consider ourselves fortunate that scientific evidence is included.
3. WE REALLY MUST FIND SUITABLE DATA
3.1. Baseline à la carte – Tom Wigley
To show that industrialization has increased the global concentration of CO2 we must determine the pre-industrial (say mid 19th century) level – the baseline.
In 1983, Tom Wigley (University Corporation for Atmospheric Research), by re-analysing measurements (Callender) dating back to 1812, concluded that the relevant figure was 280 parts per million.
In evidence to the US Congress in 2004, Professor Jaworowski (Chairman, Scientific Council of the Central Laboratory for Radiological Protection, Warsaw) commented:
The notion of low pre-industrial CO2 atmospheric level, based on such poor knowledge, became a widely accepted Holy Grail of climate warming models. The modelers ignored the evidence … that in 19th century its average concentration was 335 ppm.
Here is the original data:
The 280ppm includes the circled points only; Jaworowski’s 335ppm includes all points.
Callendar also concluded:
… it may be said that the combustion of fossil fuel … is likely to prove beneficial to mankind in several ways, besides the provision of heat and power. For instance the above-mentioned small increases of mean temperature would be important at the northern margin of cultivation, and the growth of favourably situated plants is directly proportional to the CO2 pressure.
A benefit of AGW? How could Wigley have missed this?
4. TAKE AWAY THE NUMBER YOU FIRST THOUGHT OF
4.1. So exactly what is your process, Professor?
‘Show your working’. This stern instruction is… well, was… often included in examination questions so that the examiner could see how you got from data to the result. When asked the same question, AGW proponents usually refuse, producing such gems of logic as ‘you only want to find fault with it’. Still, their reaction in itself is revealing:
4.1.1. I’ll delete the file – Phil Jones
The journal Climatic Change has requested that Jones (Head of the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia) make available data and computer programs used by Mike Mann (Director, Earth System Science Center, Penn State University). Jones and Mann are two of the most senior scientists involved in the work supporting the IPCC’s AGW thesis.
From: Phil Jones
To: mann
Subject: CLIMATIC CHANGE needs your advice – YOUR EYES ONLY !!!!!
Date: Fri Jan 16 13:25:59 2004Mike,
This is for YOURS EYES ONLY. Delete after reading - please ! I’m trying to redress the balance. One reply from Pfister said you should make all available !! Pot calling the kettle black – Christian doesn’t make his methods available. I replied to the wrong Christian message so you don’t get to see what he said. Probably best. Told Steve separately and to get more advice from a few others as well as Kluwer and legal.PLEASE DELETE - just for you, not even Ray [Bradley] and Malcolm [Hughes]
Multiple exclamation marks, upper-case phrases, explicitly excluding from circulation even a couple of (presumably minor) co-conspirators, twice asking that the message be deleted – why the desperation?
A year later, Jones obviously feels he’s ‘in blood stepped in so far that returning were as tedious as go o’er’:
At 09:41 AM 2/2/2005, Phil Jones wrote:
…
The two MMs [Steve McIntyre (climateaudit.org) and Dr. Ross R. McKitrick (Prof. of Economics, Univ. Guelph, Ontario)]have been after the CRU [Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia] station data for years. If they ever hear there is a The Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.
Heroic stand – he could get six months for that (FOIA Section 77, Personal Liability – the ‘shredding offence’).
On the same day, Wigley, seeing a potential problem, suggests an elegant manoeuvre:
My concern was if Sarah[Raper, CRU programmer] is/was still employed by UEA. I guess she could claim that she had only written one tenth of the code and release every tenth line.
Still more heroic – conspiracy to pervert the cause of justice risks a substantially longer sentence.
4.1.2. Avoid litigation, you may lose – Ben Santer
Steve McIntyre’s November 2008 FOIA request for ‘monthly time series of output from any of the [NOAA’s] 47 climate models’ prompted the following e-mails:
From: Ben Santer
To: “Thomas.R.Karl”
Subject: Re: [Fwd: FOI Request]
Date: Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:57:22 -0800
(Santer is Climate Statistician, Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory)
…
… all of the raw (gridded) model and observational data used in the [reference] paper are freely available to Mr. McIntyre.
If Mr. McIntyre wishes to audit us … he has all the information necessary to conduct such an audit. Providing Mr. McIntyre with the quantities that I derived from the raw model data [technical description] would defeat the very purpose of an audit.
‘Defeat the very purpose of an audit’ is meretricious, implying that McIntyre can create his own process. Well, indeed he can, but if his results agree, then the NOAA are proved correct, if they disagree then his process must be in error and the NOAA are still correct. Heads I win, tails I don’t lose.
After further exchanges, the request is acceded to:
January 6, 2009
Ben Santer to many
…
As many of you may know, I have decided to publicly release the synthetic MSU temperatures that were the subject of Mr. McIntyre’s FOIA request … I agreed to this publication process primarily because … I have no desire … to be involved in years of litigation.
There was no option. ‘I have decided’ is a spurious claim to magnanimity, ‘I agreed’ suggests the decision wasn’t his and ‘years of litigation’ concedes it wasn’t voluntary.
4.2. Death of a hockey-stick – D’Arrigo et al
The Climategate e-mails reveal many examples of pro-warming bias among scientists (and not one of bias against).
For example:
In 2004 a paper by Jones and Mann (J and M) concluded:
… late 20th century warmth is unprecedented at hemispheric and, likely, global scales.
That ‘likely’ is interesting. It means we don’t have the evidence yet but we’re pretty sure
– see ‘Hide the incline’ below.
And even more significantly:
Only anthropogenic forcing of climate, however, can explain the recent anomalous warming …
In 2006 a paper by D’Arrigo et al, in reference to J and M’s work, commented:
This conclusion, however, must be taken cautiously. … these records show trends which are not necessarily coherent over the latter[mid 1980s to the present] interval, resulting in a ‘‘flattening’’ of MWP [Medieval Warm Period] conditions compared to recent warming in our reconstruction.
In plain terms, J and M suppressed the MWP.
D’Arrigo makes – stresses – the crucial point:
… we stress that presently available paleoclimatic reconstructions are inadequate for making specific inferences, at hemispheric scales, about MWP warmth relative to the present anthropogenic period…
In short, the J and M conclusion was not supported by the evidence.
Richard Alley (Evan Pugh Professor of Geosciences, Penn State Institutes of Energy and the Environment) commented:
March 8, 2006
Richard Alley to Jonathan Overpeck:(Overpeck is Co-Director, Institute of the Environment, Univ. of Arizona)
Rosanne D’Arrigo talked to the National Research Council yesterday. … they have redrilled a bunch of the high-latitude tree rings that underlie almost all of the high-resolution reconstructions, and the tree rings are simply missing the post-1970s warming, with reasonably high confidence.
Which means Ms D’Arrigo has:
… pretty well killed the hockey stick in public forum
What really upset Alley is that Ms D’Arrigo wouldn’t settle for murdering the hockey-stick in private, she told the world about it.
Alley continues:
[explanation of the method used in the D’Arrigo paper] …so the trees miss the extreme warming of the recent times, and can’t reliably be counted as catching the extreme warmth of the MWP if there was extreme warmth then. Because as far as I can tell the hockey stick really was a tree-ring record, regardless of how it was labelled as multiproxy, this looks to me to be a really big deal.
Given that J and M’s suppression of the MWP – the lynch-pin of AGW – is the biggest possible deal, how come Alley didn’t advise the public of it?
4.3. A load of garbage – ‘Harry’ Harris
Among the dozens of laboratories working on AGW, the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) is pre-eminent:
In global warming circles, the CRU wields outsize influence: It claims the world’s largest temperature data set, and its work and mathematical models were incorporated into the IPCC’s 2007 report. The report … is what the [EPA] acknowledged it ‘relies on most heavily’ when concluding carbon dioxide emissions endanger public health and should be regulated.
(Declan McCullagh, CBS News)
In 2006, CRU programmer Ian ‘Harry’ Harris was tasked to reconstruct the process by which CRU support for AGW was derived. He describes
www.climate-gate.org/cru/documents/HARRY_READ_ME.txt
the generally ‘hopeless state of [CRU’s] databases’, but one paragraph stands out:
…the rest of the databases seem to be in nearly as poor a state as Australia was. There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy stations, one with no WMO and one with, usually overlapping and with the same station name and very similar coordinates … So, we can have a proper result, but only by including a load of garbage!
To paraphrase programming’s oldest rule: ‘load of garbage in, load of garbage out’
Would the load of garbage have been allowed to stand had it proved global cooling?
4.4. The truth can be so confusing – IPCC
Occasionally the record is blatant:
January 5 2005
Parker, David [UK Meteorological Office] wrote:Neil [Plummer, Australian Bureau of Metrology]
There is a preference in the atmospheric observations chapter of IPCC AR4 to stay with the 1961-1990 normals. This is partly because a change of normals confuses users, e.g. anomalies will seem less positive than before if we change to newer normals, so the impression of global warming will be muted.
Of course, the IPCC would have taken similar care to avoid confusing users had it involved selecting ‘normals’ reducing the level of AGW. And I’m Chairman of Exxon.
4.5. Hide the incline – Michael Mann
The AGW thesis requires that recent (alleged) warming is unprecedented…
This graph (1965 by Hubert Lamb, Founder and first Director of the CRU) shows that it isn’t. Mann’s response to this difficulty is in his e-mail of June 2003:
…it would be nice to try to “contain” the putative “Medieval Warm Period”, even if we don’t yet have data available that far back.
‘Don’t yet have data’ is pure ‘Alice in Wonderland’: Sentence first, verdict afterwards. Mann’s conclusion precedes the data but don’t worry, chaps, we can fix that.
4.6. Important to choose the right assumption – Phil Jones
An interview (Feb. 2010) of Phil Jones by the BBC’s Environmental Correspondent Roger Harrabin included the following:
Q. – There is a debate over whether the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) was global or not. If it were to be conclusively shown that it was a global phenomenon, would you accept that this would undermine the premise that mean surface atmospheric temperatures during the latter part of the 20th Century were unprecedented?
Jones answered:
… The MWP is most clearly expressed in parts of North America, the North Atlantic and Europe and parts of Asia. For it to be global in extent the MWP would need to be seen clearly in more records from the tropical regions and the Southern Hemisphere. There are very few palaeoclimatic records for these latter two regions.
Of course, if the MWP was shown to be global in extent … then obviously the late-20th century warmth would not be unprecedented.
…
… the two hemispheres do not always follow one another. We cannot, therefore, make the assumption that temperatures in the global average will be similar to those in the northern hemisphere.
But he does make another assumption, that the global average temperatures were cooler than those in the NH. Why not just admit ignorance, suspend judgement and keep doing the science? Perhaps Jones agrees with Hulme:
Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process…
5.1. Perjured conclusion – IPCC 2nd Assessment Report
The draft of the Working Group I (‘The Science of Climate Change’) report was reviewed and approved by the IPCC in December, 1995. It included:
Finally we come to the most difficult question of all: ‘When will the detection and unambiguous attribution of human-induced climate change occur? … the best answer to this question is ‘We do not know’.
Leave aside this begs the question – will unambiguous attribution occur at all – this remarkably candid admission was not politically acceptable. The published version read:
The body of statistical evidence … now points toward a discernible human influence on global climate.
When these changes were criticised in an article in ‘Energy Daily’, Santer (Convening Lead Author) explained that they were prompted by:
Written comments made by governments and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) during October and November 1995;
Comments made by governments and NGOs during the plenary sessions of the Madrid meeting
So that’s the IPCC process…
Scientists: ‘We don’t know.’
Politicians and eco-warriers: ‘Yes you do.’
Scientists: ‘Oh, alright then.’
Well, at least we know.
6.1. We’ll keep the red flag flying here – Czarina Browner
On December 15, 2008, President-elect Barack Obama appointed Carol M. Browner as his Assistant for Energy and Climate Change. Ms Browner is a Socialist, at that time listed as a member of the Commission for a Sustainable World Society (CSWS), a body established under the auspices of the Socialist International (SI) whose aims in respect of climate change are summed up thus:
An alternative would be an international court … to act as the top legal authority with regard to compliance with an anticipated Copenhagen agreement. … Such a court might also be given jurisdiction over all international laws covering the environment, but its principal task would be to ensure compliance with an agreement on cutting greenhouse gas emissions. The court might be given the authority to fine or tax states and companies.
So Ms Browner supports the handover of US sovereignty to an international body. I’m not a lawyer but wouldn’t that be treason?
6.2. Given that AGW exists… – the IPCC’s neutral brief
Impartial terms of reference for the IPCC would read something like:
That the activities of the IPCC should be aimed at assessing the evidence relating to the possibility of changes in global climate in order to:
(i) determine whether a significant trend exists
(ii) if so, identify the factors driving it and
(iii) recommend what action, if any, should be taken
The actual brief is curiously self-contradictory:
That the activities of the [IPCC] should be aimed at:
(iv) assessing the scientific information that is related to the various components of the climate change issue such as emissions of major greenhouse gases and modifications of the Earth’s radiation balance resulting therefrom …
(v) formulating realistic response strategies for the management of the climate change issue …
Having in (i) allowed the possibility that an assessment of the scientific information concludes that there is no (material) warming, (ii) then instructs the Panel to find strategies to deal with it anyway. A more suspicious man than I would suspect they already knew the answer.
6.3. Our policy is clear, we just don’t adhere to it – EPA
6.3.1. Underwhelming transparency – Ms Lisa Jackson
Ms Jackson, Obama’s appointee as Head of the EPA, in a memo to all staff, set out her policy:
I will ensure EPA’s efforts to address the environmental crises of today are rooted in three fundamental values: science-based policies and programs, adherence to the rule of law, and overwhelming transparency.
An admirable position. However…
6.3.2. So how does one get to be a scientist? – EPA
A written statement (March 2009) from the EPA said:
… he [EPA employee Alan Carlin, B.S. Physics, CalTech] is not a scientist …
And why would the EPA traduce an employee in this way?
Carlin and colleague John Davidson had earlier produced a draft report: ‘Comments on Draft Technical Support Document (TSD) for Endangerment Analysis for Greenhouse Gas Emissions under the Clean Air Act’.
The first and as things turned out the only draft included the following:
The issue is rather whether the GHG/CO2/AGW hypothesis meets the ultimate scientific test—conformance with real world data. What these comments show is that it is this ultimate test that the hypothesis fails; this is why EPA needs to carefully reexamine the science behind global warming before proposing an endangerment finding.
When the draft was circulated within the Agency, executive Al McGartland, responded with a gagging order:
March 12th e-mail to Carlin
In the light of the tight schedule and the turn of events, please do not have any direct communication with anyone outside of (our group) on endangerment. There should be no meetings, e-mails, written statements, phone calls, etc.
Five days later he advised:
March 17th e-mail to Carlin
Alan , I have decided not to forward your comments. The administrator and the administration has decided to move forward . . . and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.
Read ‘Get your scientific tanks off the Agency’s policy lawn’.
Followed, eight minutes later by:
e-mail from McGartland to Carlin
I don’t want you to spend any additional EPA time on climate change.
When this crude censorship became public, the Agency reacted with commendable speed: first with the ‘he isn’t a scientist’ lie, then the flat denial:
The notion that there was any suppression is ridiculous. There was no pre-determined position on endangerment and Mr. Carlin’s work was not suppressed. Mr. Carlin has been welcome to share his ideas publicly in various forums, including EPA sponsored events and countless media interviews, and continues to do so.
(EPA spokeswoman)
It seems she was badly briefed.
7.1. The Biased Broadcasting Corporation
7.1.1. Socialists triumph, Hurrah! – Jane Garvey
Describing in 2007 (with co-presenter Peter Allen) the night of Labour’s May 2nd 1997 election victory:
… the corridors [of Broadcasting House] … were strewn with empty champagne bottles …
Realising her indiscretion, Garvey tries a joking non-denial denial:
… not that the BBC were celebrating in any way shape or form (Allen, laughing – ‘no, no, no, not at all’)
And continues reassuringly:
… I think it’s fair to say that in the intervening years the BBC, if it was ever in love with Labour has probably fallen out of love with Labour, or learned to fall back in, or basically just learned to be in the middle somewhere which is how it should be –
Finally she explains that the ‘falling out’ was due not to a requirement for impartiality but to ‘problems’:
… there was always this suggestion that the BBC was full of pinkoes who couldn’t wait for Labour to get back into power – that may have been the case, who knows? But as I say I think there’ve been a few problems along the way – wish I hadn’t started this now
Problems meaning the UK’s participating in the Iraq war and similar anti-Socialist acts.
Does Ms Garvey expect us to believe that the staff’s overwhelming preference for a Labour victory did not influence programming? Or that even if it once did, it’s all OK because they’re now ‘in the middle somewhere’? As the Duke of Wellington observed (on being greeted with: ‘Mr. Simpkins, I believe’): ‘If you can believe that, my dear Sir, you can believe anything’.
7.1.2. Alarming revelation: science not settled – Peter Sissons
Some three years ago former BBC veteran newsreader Peter Sissons revealed it was now ‘effectively BBC policy’ to stifle critics of the consensus view on global warming, adding:
I believe I am one of a tiny number of BBC interviewers who have so much as raised the possibility that there is another side to the debate on climate change. The Corporation’s most famous interrogators invariably begin by accepting that ‘the science is settled’, when there are countless reputable scientists and climatologists producing work that says it isn’t.
7.1.3. Balance inappropriate, at last it’s official – BBC Trust
In June 2007 the BBC Trust published a report on AGW impartiality which included the following:
The BBC has held a high-level seminar with some of the best scientific experts, and has come to the view that the weight of evidence no longer justifies equal space being given to the opponents of the consensus.
A 2009 FOIA request to identify these experts was denied when the Information Commissioner ruled:
… the seminar was held for the purposes of ‘journalism, art and literature’ and therefore the BBC is not obliged to disclose this information…
In more human terms: never mind that you lot paid for the whole exercise, we’re not telling you the names of our best scientific experts ‘cos you’ll only go putting it about that we packed the jury.
7.1.4. Hide the stasis – D’Aleo and Watts
In January 2010 Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts published a paper which included the following conclusion:
Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and unidirectionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century.
A search a few days later of the BBC web site for ‘Joseph D’Aleo’ yielded only one entry:
The group [Dion and the Belmonts] formed when … and Angelo D’Aleo, first tenor,(born February 3, 1940) in late 1957.
Apparently the BBC didn’t consider this ‘no global warming’ story worth reporting, A 50’s music group, on the other hand…
7.1.5. Synthesis? Leave it to the NGOs – Roger Harrabin
A paper in 2000, ‘Global Review of Forest Fires’ by Andy Rowell (environmental journalist and author) and Dr. Peter F Moore (nature conservationist) – a campaigning document not subject to peer-review – included:
Up to 40% of the Brazilian forest is extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall. In the 1998 dry season, some 270,000 sq. km of forest became vulnerable to fire, due to completely depleted plant-available water stored in the upper five metres of soil
IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, 2007, Working Group II included:
Forty percent of the Amazonian forests could react drastically even to a slight reduction of precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America, could change very rapidly to another steady state not necessarily producing gradual changes between the actual and the future situation (Rowell and Moore, 2000). It is more probable that forests will be replaced by … tropical savannas.
So R and M’s ‘forest became vulnerable to fire’ translates into the IPCC’s ‘forests will be replaced by … tropical savannas’.
Regarding the IPCC’s flagrant breach of its own rules in using a non peer-reviewed campaigning document as a source, Harrabin explains:
My guess is that NGO reports often offer an easy synthesis of already-published evidence.
So that’s alright then. No need for all that tedious work, leave it to those nice people at Greenpeace.
But set aside that minor issue. The important question is what use the IPCC would have made of R and M if it had argued against warming-induced damage of any sort. A Big Mac (with fries) for the first correct answer.
7.2. More honoured in the breach – Journalists’ Code of Ethics
Journalists have a Code of Ethics – who knew? It recommends that they:
Support the open exchange of views, even views they find repugnant.
Give voice to the voiceless; official and unofficial sources of information can be equally valid.
Distinguish between advocacy and news reporting. Analysis and commentary should be labeled and not misrepresent fact or context
Re-entering the real world, media bias takes two forms: political and sensationalist. In either case the facts are incidental to the content of the report…
7.3. Rice production increase ‘overlooked’ – ‘Guardian
In November last, under the headline:
Yangtze delta warned to prepare for effects of climate change
the Guardian summarised the findings of a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report on the implications of climate change for the Yangtze River Basin (YRB), quoting in particular:
If current trends continue, [the report] predicted rice production in the Yantgtze basin would decrease by between 9% and 41% by the end of the 21st century, while harvest of corn and winter wheat would decline even more precipitously.
Presumably the sub-editor threw out the report’s next paragraph:
However, the reduction in grain output will be lessened by the increase of CO2 in the atmosphere (CO2 fertilization effect), with an estimated overall reduction of 3.6% for early harvesting rice, 2.8% for the double harvesting rice, and a slight production increase for single harvesting rice.
And these two:
Adaptation measures … have been effective in reducing the impact of climate change.
Without taking any adaptation measures, rice production per unit area in the YRB should have decreased in the past decades with climate change. In reality, rice production per unit area has increased significantly during the same period.
How odd to edit out the actual good news while making a headline of the potential bad.
7.4. Denialists needn’t apply – ‘Nature’
From Nature’s editorial guidelines:
… a condition of publication in a Nature journal is that authors are required to make materials, data and associated protocols promptly available to readers without preconditions. [Nature’s emphasis]
A ‘Nature’ editorial regarding attempts by ‘denialists’ to gain access to IPCC’s process information included:
If there are benefits to the e-mail theft, one is to highlight yet again the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate-change researchers, often in the form of endless, time-consuming [FOIA] demands for information…
It seems ‘denialists’, as well as being email thieves, are personae non gratae in Nature’s editorial office.
7.5. Keep your friends close – IPCC’s expert reviewers
IPCC Working Group III’s list of ‘Expert Reviewers’ includes:
From environmental campaigning organisations: 10
Greenpeace (3)
Friends of the Earth (2)
Climate Action Network (2)
WWF (1)
Environmental Defense (1)
David Suzuki Foundation (1)
From bodies arguing the ‘denialist’ viewpoint: Nil
It gets worse. Not only are dissenting opinions in a small minority in the IPCC, but that minority is declining as dissenters quit the unequal contest.
For example, Dr. Chris Landsea ended his participation in IPCC deliberations thus:
I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound.
Last and most damning. Among the IPCC’s farrago of lies, half-truths, mistakes and deceptions, not one – read my lips: not one – has been biased towards reducing the likelihood or impact of AGW.
8. EVIDENCE UNNECESSARY, HYSTERIA ESSENTIAL
A century’s worth of screaming headlines from the world’s leading news media illustrates their preference for excitement over accuracy:
ICE 1895, New York Times
Geologists Think the World May be Frozen Up Again.FIRE 1922, Associated Press
…the Arctic Ocean is warming up, icebergs are growing scarcer and in some places the seals are finding the waters too hot.ICE 1923, Chicago Tribune
Scientist Says Arctic Ice Will Wipe Out Canada.FIRE 1930, New York Times
Alpine glaciers are in full retreat.ICE 1974, New York Times
And unless government officials reacted to the coming [cooling] catastrophe, “mass deaths by starvation and probably in anarchy and violence” would result.FIRE 2009, Time Magazine (Entire issue on AGW)
Be Worried, Be Very Worried.
Global warming, even most skeptics have concluded, is the real deal, and human activity has been causing it.
It scarcely needs be said that…
IPCC forecasts small temperature rise by 2100
… would scarcely make an inside page.
9. CONCLUSION
Predictions of human-induced rising CO2 levels driving catastrophic and always malign climatic changes, based on biased data manipulated by biased processes and magnified by biased reporting, have caused the waste of billions of dollars and, unchecked, will result in the waste of trillions more.
‘The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed — and hence clamorous to be led to safety — by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.’
Henry Louis Mencken (1880 – 1956) ‘The Sage of Baltimore’.