Nullius in Verba

Update: Guess who was right, Danny and the media or the economist and me? And notice how the media ignores the whole issue when Harper looks like he’s right again. 

Now back to our regular programming:

Watching the recent frenzy over the Climate Conference in Bali I am very happy that we finally have a Prime Minister who is able to blow the cold air of reality into the environmental maelstrom of something that looks like a big-hot-back-slapping doldrum. Canada’s position, Japan’s, (and Australia’s, no thanks to the brainwashing organization, CBC, everyone thinks that the position in Oz has changed because of the new Labour government, but really it hasn’t) and the position of the United States is that there is no point in setting restrictions on greenhouse gas emissions (GHG) when the world’s largest emittor won’t join in, and I refer to China. India’s emissions are projected to overtake the United States as well. The emissions from the US are going down each year under GW Bush, and not due to a recession either as the United States economy is better than ever, while Chinese emissions are increasing rapidly. If you’re one of those people who believes that anthropogenic GHG emissions (AGHG) is causing a disaster then by AlGlorey, why aren’t you concerned? It’s not going to matter one iota how much Canada does or even the United States for that matter, when the fat kids on the teeter-totter are all sitting on one end. Why isn’t this a bigger concern?

It’s comparable to a disarmament treaty during the Cold War that restricts the United States from building missiles but mandates the Soviet Union to build even more.

But does the media care? They’d rather follow the likes of Matt Damon and Leonardo DiCaprio. After all, it should concern us greatly when the dogs of Hollywood fly in on Lear Jets led by Al-Goreacle, and start yapping that perhaps things are getting blown way out of proportion.

Recently a new journal article* published in 2007 by a Canadian climate researcher and external IPCC reviewer, Dr. Ross McKitrik, in the Journal of Geophysical Research has demonstrated that the increase in surface temperature is in large part due to non-GHG anthropogenic reasons, ie: urbanization - in layman’s terms our cities are warm and temperature stations near cities are recording that. Moreover the methodology used by current science to screen out this background effect isn’t doing an effective job. His work reveals that the increase in temperature is half of that which the current United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is estimating, thereby reducing their estimates even lower than their own reduction in estimates from the latest report. 

A group of Dutch scientists have independently confirmed McKitrik’s work. Dr. Jos DeLaat and Dr. A.N. Maurellis at the Royal Netherlands Meterological Institute and National Institute for Space Research Netherlands respectively showed something very interesting indeed in two recent papers. Their latest in the International Journal of Climatology, 2006, states:

Our analysis of climate model simulations of GHG warming confirms our earlier results, namely, that they do not show any kind of CO2 emission–temperature trend correlation. In fact, the modeled temperature trends are quite insensitive to the magnitude of the industrial CO2 emissions. It is possible that the response of the climate system to enhanced GHG radiative forcing is much more localized than expected in that it occurs only in specific regions and mainly in the lower troposphere, although this runs contrary to the current understanding of GHG-related processes (cf Hansen et al., 1997; IPCC, 2001; Hansen et al., 2005; Santer et al., 2005).

This confirms an earlier work of theirs in 2004 that points out that surface stations situated in regions of low economic output show relatively little change in mean surface temperatures compared to surface stations in areas of high economic output as seen in this graph:

(star = high CO2 area, cross = low CO2 area)

In other words, AGHG is not causing global climate change, only a local effect is seen.

Although the exact mechanisms have yet to be determined our findings show that a significant part of the observed surface warming is related to processes other than enhanced greenhouse warming.

Its interesting to see other scientists dispute the current mainstream thinking just for the sake of a challenge. Stephen McIntyre just cannot leave the Dr. Michael Mann et. al. famous hockey stick graph alone, and for good reason. With its projection heavily weighted by the Graybill tree ring data, McIntyre spends some time in the same Sheep Mountain woods doing core sampling to update the data and demonstrates that according to the forest, the planet has been getting colder lately.

And this brings me to my main point. I’m really concerned when science gets manipulated by politicians. Take for instance hurricane researcher and IPCC member Dr. Chris Landsea who points that fact out as he resigns from the IPCC. There is also no doubt that certain countries eye Kyoto as the holy grail of economic subsidies, a diversion of money to their coffers. It is now currently the world’s largest welfare scam. Kyoto has not much to do with saving the planet from AGHG because it’s reductions are meaningless. Kyoto is all about transplanting more factories to China and India.

(In 1614 Galileo challenged mainstream thinking about the sun revolving around the earth leading to an Inquisition where he was soundly chastized)

It disturbs me as a scientist to see things get so manipulated by certain people with certain agendas. Like for instance what happened with Dr. Paul Reiter, a leading expert on malaria and other diseases carried by the mosquito vector. His testamony in front of the British House of Parliament reveals how the lead writers of the IPCC report on the Impact on Human Health are chosen. It is worth reading the whole thing. After not being chosen as a lead author in IPCC 4, largely due to his suspicion that he is not alarmist enough because he states the research doesn’t support an increase in malaria due to Global Warming, he retorts that the people chosen are basically laymen with agendas chosen by politicians:

34.   I replied with a question about the two Lead Authors that had been selected: “It is often stated that the IPCC represents the worlds top scientists. I copy to you the bibliographies of (the two lead authors), as downloaded from MEDLINE. You will observe that (the first) has never written a single article, and (the second) has only authored five articles. Can these two really be considered “Lead authors” with experience, representative of the world’s top scientists and specialists in human health?”

  35.   I also pointed out that one Lead Author is a “hygienist”, the other is a specialist in fossil faeces, and both have been co-authors on publications by environmental activists.

Imagine that, the lead authors of part of a document that is due to set world policy and massive interference by governments at all levels was written by a group of people with no scientific publications at all. 

The list of climate scientists disillusioned with the political manipulation of the IPCC grows longer, however when they try and make their voices heard they are soundly run out of town. That’s partly the fierce nature of the whole argument which involves scientific blows from both sides, however this fight is now one sided because the media, the politicians, and the hollywood hound-dogs have chosen the side they like - the socialist side that says global warming is cause by us bad humans but we should feel sorry for China and let them emit GHG because they’re poor. So in essence lets do nothing but feel good about it. Modern Liberal policy in progress, something Jean Chretien who did nothing about Canada’s GHG emissions over the last 10 years would have been proud of.

* Note: McKitrik’s work is sponsored by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, not industry.