U.N.'s Global Warming Report Lied Again

Off Topic Politics & World Issues
1

http://www.foxnews.com/scitech/2010/01/28/save-rainforest-climate-change-scandal-chopped-facts/

A United Nations report on climate change that has been lambasted for its faulty research is under new attack for yet another instance of what its critics say is sloppy science – adding to a growing scandal that has undermined the credibility of scientists and policymakers who back the U.N.'s findings about global warming.

In the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), issued in 2007 by the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), scientists wrote that 40 percent of the Amazon rainforest in South America was endangered by global warming.

But that assertion was discredited this week when it emerged that the findings were based on numbers from a study by the World Wildlife Federation that had nothing to do with the issue of global warming – and that was written by a freelance journalist and green activist.

The IPCC report states that “up to 40 percent of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation” – highlighting the threat climate change poses to the Earth. The report goes on to say that “it is more probable that forests will be replaced by ecosystems … such as tropical savannas.”

But it has now been revealed that the claim was based on a WWF study titled “Global Review of Forest Fires,” a paper barely related to the Amazon rainforest that was written “to secure essential policy reform at national and international level to provide a legislative and economic base for controlling harmful anthropogenic forest fires.”

EUReferendum, a blog skeptical of global warming, uncovered the WWF association. It noted that the original “40 percent” figure came from a letter published in the journal Nature that discussed harmful logging activities – and again had nothing to do with global warming.

The reference to the Brazilian rainforest can be found in Chapter 13 of the IPCC Working Group II report, the same section of AR4 in which claims are made that the Himalayan glaciers are rapidly melting because of global warming. Last week, the data leading to this claim were disproved as well, a scandal being labeled “glacier-gate” or “Himalaya-gate.”

The Himalaya controversy followed another tempest – the disclosure of e-mails that suggested that leading global warming scientists in the U.K. and the U.S. had conspired to hide a decline in global temperatures.

“If it is true that IPCC has indeed faked numbers regarding the Amazon, or used unsubstantiated facts, then it is the third nail in the IPCC coffin in less than three months,” Andrew Wheeler, former staff director for the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, told FoxNews.com. “For years, we have been told that the IPCC peer review process is the gold standard in scientific review. It now appears it is more of a fool’s gold process.”

Wheeler, who is now a senior vice president with B&D Consulting’s Energy, Climate and Environment Practice in Washington, said the latest scandal calls into question the “entire underpinnings” of the IPCC’s assessment and peer review process.

The U.N. did not return calls seeking comment on the scandal.

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice chairman of the IPCC, was quoted in the European press as saying, “I would like to submit that this could increase the credibility of the IPCC, not decrease it. Aren’t mistakes human? Even the IPCC is a human institution.”

But not everyone agrees. Ross McKitrick, a professor of economics at the University of Guleph in Ontario, said the U.N. needs to start from scratch on global warming research and make a “full accounting” of how much of its research findings have been “likewise compromised.”

McKitrick said this is needed because the U.N. acknowledged the inaccuracy of the data only now that its shortcomings have been exposed. “They are admitting what they did only because they were caught,” he told FoxNews.com. “The fact that so many IPCC authors kept silent all this time shows how monumental has been the breach of trust.”

Lubos Motl, a Czech physicist and former Harvard University faculty member, said the deforestation of the Amazon has occurred, but not because of global warming. He said it was due to social and economic reasons, including the clearing of cattle pastures, subsistence agriculture, the building of infrastructure and logging.

“Such economically driven changes are surely unattractive for those of us who prefer mysterious and natural forests,” says Motl. “But they do help the people who live in Latin America.”

The rapidly accumulating scandals surrounding climate change research appear to be driving the public away from its support for government measures to intervene. On Wednesday, Yale University and George Mason University released a survey showing that just 57 percent of respondents believe global warming “is happening.” That was down 14 percentage points, from 71 percent, in October 2008. Fifty percent of people said they were “very” or “somewhat” worried about global warming, down 13 points from two years ago.

Another poll released Monday by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press asked respondents to rank 21 issues in terms of their priority. Global warming came in last.

2

There’s also a recent report on systematic fraud with regard to handling of surface temperature values.

We had known before that they were comparing different sets of stations for later years versus earlier years, and with a more urban bias for later years, but it turns out the situation is worse than that.

The handling of data for the surface temperature values is so bad that all surface-based claims for overall global temperature (not that their method could possibly have generated the only possible non-biased representation of that, which would be to weigh each point of the Earth equally) now I think have to be dismissed totally.

The only things to do are:

  1. Have other parties completely start again from the raw data, and as should be done, compare results of each station only with itself over the time the station has been operating. Also as personal opinion, it seems to me that urban stations should not be used at all. Alleged “global” changes of a fraction of a degree – and amounts that small are all the temperature change that the AGW advocates have to buttress their arguments – shouldn’t depend on urban changes of a fraction of a degree. Urban temperatures could have such changes for reasons having nothing to do with global effects.

Furthermore, it seems to me that total urban area must be a very tiny percentage of the total surface area of the Earth. So why should should urban values contribute even 1% to an alleged “global average temperature,” let alone the far greater percentage that they have made them to contribute? And,

  1. Use the satellite data.

I’ll see if I can find the article in question again.

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Brief excerpts:

In the 1970s, nearly 600 Canadian weather stations fed surface temperature readings into a global database assembled by the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA). Today, NOAA only collects data from 35 stations across Canada.

… The Canadian government, meanwhile, operates 1,400 surface weather stations across the country, and more than 100 above the Arctic Circle, according to Environment Canada.

Yet as American researchers Joseph Dâ??Aleo, a meteorologist, and E. Michael Smith, a computer programmer, point out in a study published on the website of the Science and Public Policy Institute, NOAA uses just one thermometer [for measuring] everything north of latitude 65 degrees.

… Mr. D’Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and another U.S. agency, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have not only reduced the total number of Canadian weather stations in the database, but have ‘cherry picked’ the ones that remain by choosing sites in relatively warmer places, including more southerly locations, or sites closer to airports, cities or the sea – which has a warming effect on winter weather.

… Using the agency’s own figures, Smith shows that in 1991, almost a quarter of NOAA’s Canadian temperature data came from stations in the high Arctic. The same region contributes only 3% of the Canadian data today.

Mr. D’Aleo and Mr. Smith say NOAA and GISS also ignore data from numerous weather stations in other parts of the world, including Russia, the U.S. and China.

… “NOAA systematically eliminated 75% of the world’s stations with a clear bias towards removing higher latitude, high altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler,” the authors say. “The thermometers in a sense, marched towards the tropics, the sea, and to airport tarmacs.”

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To make clear:

Handling data this way is not a matter of a single person making a blunder, or these entire large groups of scientists collectively making a blunder.

Back when I was a teaching assistant at UF, I absolutely guarantee you that any pharmacy student doing undergraduate research would have had no problem understanding that you CANNOT handle data this way and have a valid result.

There is no way these scientists did not know that as well.

This is fraud.

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[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:

This is fraud.[/quote]

I fully agree with you. The problem is, most of the media will NEVER cover this honestly, so swaying public opinion towards the truth is going to be extremely difficult. The concept of AGW is now ingrained into Western culture, despite the fact that it is devoid of any good scientific principles.

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[quote]HG Thrower wrote:

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:

This is fraud.[/quote]

I fully agree with you. The problem is, most of the media will NEVER cover this honestly, so swaying public opinion towards the truth is going to be extremely difficult. The concept of AGW is now ingrained into Western culture, despite the fact that it is devoid of any good scientific principles.[/quote]

Don’t be so sure that all hope is lost.

It’s probably even better now.

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You don’t even need to look at studies, reports, or any of that shit. Look at it this way. The Earth is about 4.6 billion years old, and we have recorded roughly 115 of those years. How can anyone try to base a model on information like that?

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Well, I expect that to these people, the current time is SPECIAL. Because, you see, it is their time.

I forget the name of it, but it is a standard logic error to attribute special properties and importance to one’s own time. But many people are quite prone to it.

It seems entirely likely to them that the cusp of world history, in one or more major respects, must be in their time.

As psychological guesswork, I suppose that those scoring high in narcissism would be likely to go yet further and tend to imagine that they personally, or as an important part of a collective, can change the outcome of their predicted cusp-of-history event.

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[quote]DoubleDuce wrote:

[quote]HG Thrower wrote:

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:

This is fraud.[/quote]

I fully agree with you. The problem is, most of the media will NEVER cover this honestly, so swaying public opinion towards the truth is going to be extremely difficult. The concept of AGW is now ingrained into Western culture, despite the fact that it is devoid of any good scientific principles.[/quote]

Don’t be so sure that all hope is lost.

It’s probably even better now.[/quote]
I’ll admit, I’m a bit jaded. A large part of my work right now is strategic consulting with clients on how best to survive the CA cap-and-trade scheme that starts in 2012. Its going to kill a BUNCH of business, add a bare minimum of $.06/kwh to power bills (probably much more), and likely double the cost of gas and diesel. And for what? To reduce less than 1% of manmade emissions of a gas that is less than 1% responsible for something that may or may not be happening and may or may not have manmade causes. I get a headache just thinking about it.

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Btw, as to why Arnold would have done such a thing as California’s carbon cap, the above psychological explanation would seem to apply quite closely.

A perfect fit to his psychology, really.

You can see where Arnold’s mind is not going to prefer the direction where a carbon cap being considered for California would “reduce less than 1% of manmade emissions of a gas that is less than 1% responsible for something that may or may not be happening and may or may not have manmade causes,” when instead his mind can have it where he personally is playing a key role in not merely changing the entire world, but actually saving it; and not merely for generations to come, but forever.

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Or maybe he’s just a dumbass, which is my theory.

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I suppose the combined theory would be that he is a dumbass who finds it completely believable, indeed a matter of fate, that he is the Savior of the World.

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[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
I suppose the combined theory would be that he is a dumbass who finds it completely believable, indeed a matter of fate, that he is the Savior of the World.[/quote]

True, I have found that many in the weight community think Arnold is some kind of God. He was a bodybuilder and an actor, not necessarily very intellectual pursuits.

Yes, he did make money. Lots of money. Yes he did win the Olympia, but it’s not like a Nobel prize in math. Personally, I think most of his movies were grade B. Conan sucked. Terminator was good, but playing a wooden robot was right up his alley, not really a stretch.

So he makes a fortune and gets elected Governor in the fruit loop capatal of the world. Imagine that.

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Actually, myself I don’t think he is a dumbass. Rather I was saying that if desired the theories could be combined.

But do I think that he applied the slightest trace of valid scientific thinking to the problem? No. Rather I see how it likely had tremendous psychological appeal for me. Plus, he loves the adulation, and it was predictable that in California this would get more of it for him from the sort of crowd he seems to particularly aim to please.

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The motivation of this personality type is not stupidity but in fact to assert one’s value - so it is indeed correct to say they are driven by a need to be SPECIAL.

They are ego-driven to be THE BEST, and whether their immaculate image is that of Savior of the World or Body builder, high priest or an athlete.

In order to achieve the self-image of The Best or Numero Uno, this high achiever, ambitious personality type becomes The Outstanding Paragon. Their whole agenda is to win the acceptance of a faceless crowd ( the more the better, “the best”, their value ) and therefore validate their worth. What that accomplishes on a psychological level is; it fills their hearts with valued - self-worth becomes the antidote to their feelings of worthlessness.

They are highly invested in performance over authenticity ( by removing their faces they win more numbers in the crowd ), doing a good job, asserting their superiority and therefore rising themselves above others. Compare themselves with others searching status and success. Become driven careerists and social climbers, invested in achievement at any cost, exclusivity and being a “winner”.
Image conscious ( Savior of the World, best POTUS, etc ), highly concerned with how they are perceived. Pragmatic and efficient, but also studied, losing touch with their feelings beneath a smooth facade. Constantly promoting themselves making themselves sound better than they really are.

Narcissistic, with grandiose, inflated notions about themselves and their talents. Exhibitionists and seductive, as if saying “Look at me!”

16

For a nice contrast, one could pick two Vice Presidents of the United States, Al Gore and George HW Bush.

Back when he was a Vice President, the latter with good humor summed up his job as “You die, I fly.”

(A reference to his duties in attending state funerals around the world.)

True, he did later become President, but I don’t at all expect his self-image depended on it and he never seemed to make too much of himself. For example, he never criticized the man who beat him (Clinton), nor ever seemed bitter in the slightest, nor did he ever seem to make excuses such as “If only Perot hadn’t been in the race,” or whatever.

In contrast, one can hardly see Gore describing his role in the world as “You die, I fly.” No, he is much more important than that!!

On not winning the Presidency, really the only thing for him was to be the One to Save the World.

It’s true that he also figured how he could pocket $100,000,000+ out of the deal.

But I really expect that the psychological drive exceeded the financial one.

Recall, he was somewhat of a wreck for the first year at least after losing the 2000 election.

17

[quote]John S. wrote:
“If it is true that IPCC has indeed faked numbers regarding the Amazon, or used unsubstantiated facts, then it is the third nail in the IPCC coffin in less than three months,” Andrew Wheeler, former staff director for the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee, told FoxNews.com. “For years, we have been told that the IPCC peer review process is the gold standard in scientific review. It now appears it is more of a fool’s gold process.”

Wheeler, who is now a senior vice president with B&D Consulting’s Energy, Climate and Environment Practice in Washington, said the latest scandal calls into question the “entire underpinnings” of the IPCC’s assessment and peer review process.

The U.N. did not return calls seeking comment on the scandal.

Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice chairman of the IPCC, was quoted in the European press as saying, “I would like to submit that this could increase the credibility of the IPCC, not decrease it. Aren’t mistakes human? Even the IPCC is a human institution.”[/quote]
I would say instead that the very fact that the IPCC would choose as Vice Chairman a man who would think this – that by being “human” this utter lack of care for verification and truth actually could add to the IPCC’s credibility – shows that the organization is a complete joke.

18

[quote]Bill Roberts wrote:
For a nice contrast, one could pick two Vice Presidents of the United States, Al Gore and George HW Bush.

Back when he was a Vice President, the latter with good humor summed up his job as “You die, I fly.”

(A reference to his duties in attending state funerals around the world.)

True, he did later become President, but I don’t at all expect his self-image depended on it and he never seemed to make too much of himself. For example, he never criticized the man who beat him (Clinton), nor ever seemed bitter in the slightest, nor did he ever seem to make excuses such as “If only Perot hadn’t been in the race,” or whatever.

In contrast, one can hardly see Gore describing his role in the world as “You die, I fly.” No, he is much more important than that!!

On not winning the Presidency, really the only thing for him was to be the One to Save the World.

It’s true that he also figured how he could pocket $100,000,000+ out of the deal.

But I really expect that the psychological drive exceeded the financial one.

Recall, he was somewhat of a wreck for the first year at least after losing the 2000 election.[/quote]

Gore strikes me more as a “reformer” - completely different motivated personality then “The Best”, maybe his drive is more directed towards being seen as “Noble” and “Humane”. You can have the same goals and come from different psychological motivations.

Bush strikes me more as completely psychologically unhealthy. Coward, weak and specially dangerous.

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Are you sure that you have George HW and George W Bush straight?

While I don’t think your characterization is correct for the latter either, for the first it makes utterly zero sense, no offense intended, which is why I wonder if you have the two confused, which would be easy enough to do.

With Gore, he strikes me as a complete narcissist, not as a “reformer.” He also has no track record as a reformer of any sort in his many years in the Senate. Just really not a basis for that except if assuming that his global warming crusade shows it, but there are other explanations for that crusade.

Anyway, my point in bringing GHW Bush into it was to use contrast to illustrate: a differing person who also lost an election for the Presidency but had no psychological need for crusading afterwards as Gore did (nor did he go into seclusion, grow a beard, and become obese or near-obese for a year after the loss) and also dealt 100 times better with the triviality of the VP job than Gore did (Gore was known to be resentful and angry about it) with this second point being further illustration of Gore’s nature.

One has to be a pretty extreme psychological case to actually feel put down and dissatisfied when Vice President of the United States. Anyone who is not an extreme narcissist would consider it an honor to have the position.

20

This is good news - I’m glad that more people are realizing the fallacies of global warming, and how much of a political tool it really is. I admit I used to believe in global warming back a couple years ago… only for the fact that I would hear it on TV often so you just kind of accept it without thinking about it. Then I got into politics and lo and behold…