The claims made by climate scientists and the United Nations IPCC report have come under increasing scrutiny ever since the Climategate scandal revealed in November of last year the unprofessional conduct of climate scientists who manipulated data to fit their ideological biases.
One casualty of this more critical look at the IPCC report is the claim that the glaciers of the Himalayas would disappear by 2035. It turns out that this was based on one unsubstantiated claim made in a 1999 interview by Syed Hasnain of Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.
… the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — after Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the IPCC, called the 2035 story “voodoo science” — eventually had to withdraw that section of the report.
Bad enough.What had been revealed was that the IPCC had put this inflammatory (and physically impossible) date into the IPCC report, even though it hadn’t been peer-reviewed and couldn’t actually be sourced to anything more than an offhand remark in a casual phone interview.
Naturally, everyone involved was shocked, utterly shocked, that such a thing could happen.
The problem is that this is not an isolated incident. The Times reports today on the unraveling of another global warming claim that has become conventional wisdom in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina: that global warming is causing an increase in the number and severity of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods.
Politicians have used this supposed link to advocate compensating developing countries for the destruction from natural disasters. The Times quotes Gordon Brown, the British prime minister telling the British parliament “that the financial agreement at Copenhagen ‘must address the great injustice that . . . those hit first and hardest by climate change are those that have done least harm.’”
The new controversy also goes back to the IPCC’s 2007 report in which a separate section warned that the world had “suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s”.
It suggested a part of this increase was due to global warming and cited the unpublished report, saying: “One study has found that while the dominant signal remains that of the significant increases in the values of exposure at risk, once losses are normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend.”
The Sunday Times has since found that the scientific paper on which the IPCC based its claim had not been peer reviewed, nor published, at the time the climate body issued its report.
When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.”
Despite this change the IPCC did not issue a clarification ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit last month. It has also emerged that at least two scientific reviewers who checked drafts of the IPCC report urged greater caution in proposing a link between climate change and disaster impacts — but were ignored.
These are just two revelations that have become public over the past week.
Watts Up With That? cites a report from The American Thinker that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) have been “manipulating worldwide temperature data in order to fraudulently advance the global warming political agenda.”
NOAA has deleted 4,500 of the 6,000 thermometers in service around the globe and extrapolated temperatures for the areas where they no longer measure temperature. One example of this distortion is Bolivia, a mountainous country, where climate models show an increase in temperature after the Bolivian measurements where dropped and Bolivian temperatures where “extrapolated” from neighboring stations “on a beach in Peru or somewhere in the Amazon jungle.”
Other adjustments of the raw data for single locations have resulted in drastically different temperature trends. Here is an example from one weather station in Australia:
The raw data shows a drop in temperatures over a century, but the adjusted data shows a significant increase.
Recent record cold temperatures have coincided with new predictions of a 30 year mini ice age.
Meanwhile Michael Mann, the creator of the famous “hockey stick” graph that eliminated the Medieval Warm Period and shows record temperature increases in the 1990s, is under investigation by Penn State. State government officials are ready to investigate further when Penn State completes its investigation at the end of January:
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