BACK in the 1980s anthropogenic global warming was resurrected. Its emphasis was that man-made CO2 would dangerously heat up the world and had to be controlled.
And there was lots of money available if this could be proved. So a multi-billion dollar industry was born.
The first thing was to speed up the rate of warming. This was done by ignoring a large number of temperature measuring stations from cold areas like Siberia, places with altitude such as Bolivia and only one above the Arctic Circle. So far so good.
Two distractions were the Medieval Warm Period, and the Little Ice Age. Michael Mann removed those with his hockey stick graph. It has since been shown that feeding random numbers into his program always resulted in a hockey stick. It rapidly went from the 1995 IPCC report’s cover and Al Gore’s presentations into obscurity.
There was also a problem with the record high temperatures from the 1930s–1940s. To lower them, the major measuring agencies started to adjust the original temperatures. This can be legitimate if weather stations have been moved or their surroundings compromised. A photographic record of every station in the US shows that 80% are no longer correctly positioned mostly due to urbanisation (green fields are now asphalt parking lots). Logically the old readings should have been regarded as valid and current readings would need to be lowered. They’ve done the opposite.
They started reducing the temperatures pre-1960 (give or take) and increasing them since then. NOAA for example was adjusting temperatures this way by 0.01 Fahrenheit per month, but then went to doing it twice a month. But hey, when you’re on a good thing, do it more often! The Australian, NZ and GB BOMs, and the US’s NOAA and NASA have all been doing this. They have also stopped providing historical data to other weather forecasters.
Parts of NOAA were so concerned with their official figures they established 100 green field stations across the US. After 10 years they show a steady drop, whereas the “official” adjusted figures just keep rising. Satellite measurements, which are difficult to fudge, are also showing a stable or dropping temperature pattern.
So what does this all mean? Our temperature records have been modified to meaningless; the computer models are useless (87 of 89 major models can’t get within two standard deviations of actuals); the actuals haven’t risen for 17 years; our governments do not class CO2 as a pollutant (look it up); environmentalists should embrace the benefits of more CO2; windmills and commercial solar should be junked.
Let’s get back to using coal and gas, which are more reliable, cheaper and are less dangerous (actually beneficial) to our environment.
We have experimented with square wheels and they have been a failure; we need to get back to ones that make the world go round.
John Ibbotson, Gulmarrad NSW
First published in The Daily Examiner 5 Sep 2014
In 2007 John wrote and published one of the first Australian books sceptical of AGW: Planning Ahead For Future Generations, by Highlighting Climate Change Myths.
www.lighthouses.com.au
John is still actively involved in slaying global warming myths and fighting for a better deal for Murray Darling irrigators.
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