Climategate, and now Glaciergate have started a mini feeding frenzy around the AGW documents and presentations. A lot of problems that we have known about for a long time are suddenly getting dusted off and re-presented, because the media are at last starting to pay some attention.
Here’s one I just noticed on NASA’s information pages:
Certain gases in the atmosphere behave like the glass on a greenhouse, allowing sunlight to enter, but blocking heat from escaping.
I noticed this in passing while having a look at Watt’s Up With That’s observations on the Purge, in which claims about glaciers melting are being silently removed from web pages.
Now, I am sure that I don’t have to explain again that the above “trapped heat” load of old claptrap was conclusively disproved for real greenhouses back in 1909 by Professor RW Wood, when he compared an IR-transparent salt greenhouse to an ordinary glass one, and found they gave the same temperature rise. It’s not even the current wrong explanation, it’s the wrong wrong explanation that even AGWers giving the other more recent wrong explanation tell you is well known to be wrong. They’re a hundred years behind the news. Repeating this rubbish under the NASA logo is simply moronic.
But they missed a few others, too.
They claim that global sea level rise doubled during the last decade. Well, you can have a look at the data here. Look in particular at the 1930s and 1940s. It goes up about 7 cm in 20 years, or 3.5 mm/yr. This is clearly within the ‘noise’ of internal variability. (It’s actually likely due to the PDO swings.) Deliberately misleading.
They say “Levels of Carbon Dioxide are higher today than at anytime in past 650,000 years.” But the Earth is 3.5 billion years old. And it spent most of that time with CO2 levels far higher than today. Deliberately misleading.
They say “Global surface air temperatures rose three-quarters of a degree Celsius […] in the last century, but at twice that amount in the past 50 years.” Not very well checked for typos, is it?
They say “Eleven of the last 12 years (1995-2006) are the warmest since accurate recordkeeping began in 1850.” Besides the fact that it isn’t really a very long time, it’s a somewhat inaccurate statement to call it “accurate”. We’re talking about the global temperature here. How many thermometers did they have in Antarctica in 1850? In the middle of Africa, or across the Pacific? I’ve looked at the data and I can tell you the answer is: not very many. About 15% of the grid cells are filled in (see lighter coloured squares in piccy below), and because of the size of the grid cells even that’s a massive overestimate of completeness. Temperature monitoring only really went global around the 1920s-1940s.
They show the disappearing ice cap of Mount Kilimanjaro from space. Except that we already know that it started disappearing in the 1800s, most of the snow cap vanished prior to 1950, and it’s been blamed on deforestation causing a reduction in precipitation.
And we have “Many species of plants and animals are already responding to global warming, moving to higher elevations or closer to the poles.” This is a ridiculous statement. The global warming signal can only be detected (barely) by averaging thermometer readings for decades over continental scales. At any local scale, it is totally buried by the noise.
The chart below shows the monthly average anomaly (‘anomaly’ = difference from the long-term average) for each grid cell (a region 5 degrees in both latitude and longitude) used in the HadCRUT3 data set. (Yes, I know; that link’s to CRU, and it’s already been adjusted to “correct” it by the warmists.) Except instead of plotting the global average for each year, as the cheating buggers usually do, I’ve plotted all the data. If you squint, you can see that it does indeed drift upwards slightly.
Strange. It’s meteoric rise doesn’t look quite as impressive, somehow.
Half a dozen basic errors or deceptions on just one page. And several of them so well-known that even AGWers usually disavow them. Morons. But up until now, they have been able to get away with it.
I’ve been meaning to do a couple of other topics I’ve noticed along the way, but something else interesting always comes up before I finish it off. But fortunately there are now so many different lines of attack going on that it hardly matters. Climategate quotes turn up in every thread. Every time we’re told about the IPCC being peer-reviewed we can bring up the glaciologist’s interview in ‘No Scientist’. The Klingon railroad engineer will surely be ‘railroaded’ from his job for peculation soon. CRU is no longer trusted. The IPCC and now it seems NASA will soon follow. And then the politicians will have nothing to hide behind.
It will take decades to repair the damage they’ve done, and it isn’t over yet. But there are finally reasons to be cheerful.
Looking at the spikes in the sea-level (concern about which is not exclusive to climate hysterics) in your link it is very difficult to escape the conclusion that like so many of these “charts” it only represents the relative accuracy of the means employed to make the measurements at the time - determined by historical factors such as the diversity of available first hand data sources and the analytical models employed at whatever times the points were plotted. All very Copenhagen.
Indeed. Although the process is quite noisy anyway. The sea rises and falls not only with the tides but with air pressure (1 cm per millibar), which varies with the passing weather, and with the effect of winds and currents like the Gulf Stream, which themselves have unpredictably chaotic eddies. Trying to extract millimetres per year of motion from something going up and down on an irregular 19 year Metonic cycle with random variations thrown in is quite a challenge. Usually thrown off by the fact that the land you’re measuring it against is bobbing up and down at about that rate too.
As usual, it’s a whole lot messier and less certain than those simple explanations and nice clean graphs suggest.
““Global surface air temperatures rose three-quarters of a degree Celsius […] in the last century, but at twice that amount in the past 50 years.”
That’s not exactly a typo, it’s a typical example of the inability of journalists to understand the most basic maths. (I bet this wasn’t written - or at least, wasn’t edited for final copy - by anyone with a scientific qualification).
What they are trying to say is that the RATE OF RISE was .75 C/century over the last hundred years, but 1.5 C/century over the last fifty years. You can believe that or not, as you wish (I don’t), but the reason it looks odd is that they just don’t understand the difference between a value, a rise in a value, the rate of rise of the value, or the rate of rise of the rate of rise of the value (hence “inflation has dropped” causes people to expect prices to fall; no, folks - wrong order of the derivative).
It’s the kind of utter ignorance that led the Telegraph (yes them again) a few months ago to headline an article with “Food prices double in seven months in Scotland” which if true would be more than remarkable, it would be a civil-war-causing event. However what they really meant was that in seven months the RATE OF INCREASE of food prices had gone up from 3% to 6%. A very different thing.
And we trust these people to make decisions which will cripple our economies for the whole foreseeable future?
Andrew, I’m not sure how much of this sort of thing is ignorance and how much is deliberate scare tactic.
It’s like a “Tories to cut Health Spending by 50%” headline. The media know, and the politically aware know, that what they really mean is that the Tories are promising to cut the rise in health costs spent on administration by 50%.
The AGW scare is full of crap like that.