Dead Last

Those of us who have questioned the accuracy and veracity of climate change science over the past five years weren’t at all surprised when the ClimateGate scandal broke. It demonstrated that vested interests in the AGW (human-caused [anthropogenic] global warming) community were more than willing to corrupt the data, bastardize the “models,” and silence critics. Over the past week, we sighed as reports of falsified data on glaciers surfaced. The U.K. Mail Online reports:

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

So, the UN IPCC used purely political data and allows it to be quoted by climate change alarmists as scientific fact. No surprise, really.

And a few days ago, the Vancouver Sun reports:

Two American researchers allege that U.S. government scientists have skewed global temperature trends by ignoring readings from thousands of local weather stations around the world, particularly those in colder altitudes and more northerly latitudes, such as Canada.

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.

Worse, only one station -- at Eureka on Ellesmere Island -- is now used by NOAA as a temperature gauge for all Canadian territory above the Arctic Circle.
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 D’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.”

It appears that NOAA has become politicized to the extent that they’re eliminating high latitude (northern) and high altitude (mountainous) temperature readings but (and this is an important but) comparing data collected without those readings to past data collected with them. It’s apples and oranges, designed to make the case for AGW.

AGW true believers will, of course act like the three monkeys—hearing, seeing and speaking nothing that might threaten their religious zeal.

But those of us who demanded scientific proof before becoming believers wonder how long it will take for our government leaders to recognize that AGW is merely an unproven hypothesis that may be completely unimportant in the broader span of the world’s climate. At the risk of contradicted the great Nobel prize winning scientist, Al Gore, the science is NOT settled—not even close to settled. In fact, the AGW hypothesis, along with its emphasis on CO2 as a driver gas, may be completely wrong.

I’ll be interested to see whether President Obama continues to emphasize cap and trade legislation in his upcoming State of the Union address. Since climate change now ranks dead last (Pew Research poll) among issues that concern Americans, it might be wise for our rebooted “man of the people” to focus his attention elsewhere.