The Decline and Fall of Global Warming

I am greatly pleased to see the whole global warming "consensus" falling in a heap over the past few months. With new revelations late last week and over the weekend, it appears that at least one of the primary scientists behind the scam has finally admitted that there is no science behind the scam.

The big news from a couple of weeks ago was a series of articles showing that some of the most important claims listed in the latest IPCC report were based on non-peer-reviewed papers written by political advocacy organizations such as the World Wildlife Fund. Claims of future drought, future floods, future food shortages in Africa, shrinking glaciers in the Himalayas, and various other disasters blamed on global warming were simply made up in order to drive governments around the world to take action.

We had already seen that NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), and its leader James Hansen, "correct" the data in ways that greatly enhance the appearance of global warming, delete hundreds of measurement sites primarily in rural areas, and preferentially use temperatures from areas that have had large population increases resulting in buildings and parking lots being built around them.  Many of the stations have air-conditioner and jet engine exhaust blowing on them.  James Hansen is considered to be the "founder of global warming" and routinely attends protests to argue that people should rise up and destroy power plants and "coal trains of death".

James Hansen Being Arrested

Rajendra Pachauri

Then there is the head of the IPCC himself, Rajendra Pachauri, who uses the incorrect statements in the IPCC report to get grants for his own business.

But the most astonishing item...

But the most astonishing item is an interview with the BBC granted by Phil Jones, the head of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at East Anglia University in the United Kingdom.

His organization was the focus of the "Climate Gate" leaked emails describing manipulation of temperature data sets and proxies, as well as control of the peer review process to disallow skeptical papers from being published.  (These emails have resulted in several resignations, including the editor of the journal Nature.)

Professor Jones is one of the guiding lights behind the science of global warming, but here is what came out on Saturday in a remarkable series of questions and answers:

• There has been no statistically significant global warming in the last 15 years
• The world may have been warmer in medieval times than it is now
• He has lost the raw data that was used to generate the "hockey stick" that shows flat temperatures for centuries followed by extreme modern warming, so the result cannot be duplicated
• His record keeping is "not what it should be"
• The IPCC models may have overestimated the climate sensitivity for greenhouse gases, underestimated natural variability, or both.
• This also suggests that there is a systematic upward bias in the impacts estimates based on these models just from this factor alone.
• The logic behind attribution of current warming to well-mixed man-made greenhouse gases is faulty.
• There is a tendency in the IPCC reports to leave out inconvenient findings, especially in the part(s) most likely to be read by policy makers.
• The science is not settled, however unsettling that might be.

I note however that Al Gore on his blog is still saying "things are much worse than we thought" in the Arctic despite increases in sea ice over the last 3 years.  We have a ways to go before people like him are universally laughed at.

The original BBC article
An excellent analysis at wattsupwiththat
An article from the UK Daily Mail