The deception of disaster-driven headlines
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Sea ice was understated by an area the size of California. |
The Apostle Paul's admonition to "test all things; hold fast what is good" (1 Thessalonians 5:21) applies to many "breaking news" claims of just-discovered ecological disaster. Again and again, further analysis finds poor data, poor interpretations of data, and sometimes outright fraud. Among the most famous examples is the now discredited "Hockey Stick" graph of temperatures over the last 2000 years, which falsely eliminate the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age and gave the appearance of sudden, abnormal warming in the last century. (You may recall seeing a version of it in An Inconvenient Truth--remember Al Gore on a lift, rising impossibly high above the stage?)
Two other examples just occurred. First, data behind the claims that Arctic sea ice extent was abnormally low in the last few months were mistaken because of satellite drift, causing a computer program to understate ice extent by an area the size of California. In the chart above, the red line shows the accurate reading, the blue the reading based on the faulty data.
Cooler Heads Thousands of experts question key aspects of catastrophic, human-induced global warming. Here's just one:
Once president of the American Association of State Climatologists and program chair for the Committee on Applied Climatology of the American Meteorological Society, Patrick Michaels is now a research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia, visiting scientist with the Marshall Institute in D.C., and Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies for the Cato Institute. Michaels has produced hundreds of publications, including many articles, some recent notables being "Our Climate Numbers Are a Big Old Mess ," "Hansen Unhinged," "The Grand Exaggerator," "Record Low for Climate Science ," "Will the U.N. Chill Out on Climate Change?" and "Inclusive Science." Michaels recently added Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don't Want You to Know to his three other books, Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians, and the Media, The Satanic Gases: Clearing the Air about Global Warming, and Sound and Fury: The Science and Politics of Global Warming. | ||||
Second, Gore is being forced to pull a slide from his presentation, one that purports to show a correlation between global warming and current disasters like the Australian wildfires. Earlier this month, Mr. Gore found himself contradicted by the researchers on whose data he had relied. According to the authors of the report, "justifying the upward trend in hydro-meteorological disaster occurrence and impacts essentially through climate change would be misleading."
So, the next time you see a dooms-day global warming headline, keep in mind that climate science is still young. Christian prudence suggests that we ought to "be cautious of claims that our planet is in peril from speculative dangers."
Revised "Skeptic's Handbook" summarizes the case against manmade global warming
Australian climate scientist Joanne Nova has posted a sixth revision of The Skeptic's Handbook, which briefly and clearly summarizes the major problems with manmade global warming alarmism.
On page 3, she lists "The only 4 points that matter":
- The greenhouse signature is missing. Weather balloons have scanned the skies for years but can find no sign of the telltale "hot-spot" warming pattern that greenhouse gases would leave. There's not even a hint. Something else caused the warming.
- The strongest evidence was the ice cores, but newer, more detailed, data turned the theory inside out. Instead of carbon pushing up temperatures, for the last half-a-million years temperatures have gone up before carbon dioxide levels. On average 800 years before.... Something else caused the warming.
- Temperatures are not rising. Satellites circling the planet twice a day show that the world has not warmed since 2001.... While temperatures have been flat, CO2 has been rising, BUT something else has changed the trend....
- Carbon dioxide is already doing almost all the warming it can do.... The first CO2 molecules matter a lot, but extra ones have less and less effect. In fact, carbon levels were ten times as high in the past but the world still slipped into an ice age....
The Skeptic's Handbook is an excellent resource to give to open-minded believers in manmade warming.
Google Earth over-simplifies CO2 science
Purdue scientists have contributed a new feature to Google Earth: depiction of carbon emissions around the United States.
"This will bring emissions information into everyone's living room as a recognizable, accessible online experience," Kevin Gurney, assistant professor of earth and atmospheric sciences at Purdue, said.
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| Precise, yes; but is it accurate? |
Actually, this will contribute little to the climate change debate except confusion. It will create a false sense of understanding in those who look at data for a given locale and think they can infer the locale's contribution to global warming.
According NASA's David Crisp, who led the project to launch a CO2-measuring satellite called "OCO," "we don't understand the processes that are absorbing over 60% of the CO2 that we're putting out today.... We can't accurately predict how much CO2 will be in our atmosphere 50 years from now." OCO failed to launch, but had it succeeded it would only have been able to measure large areas--on the order of the State of Colorado--and could not have accurately isolated even regional sources of of CO2. (Click here to listen to NPR's coverage.) Google Earth's city- and county-specific emissions levels seem speculative.
There's a lot more we don't known. Despite contrary claims, we don't know long-past atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The physics of CO2's role in global temperature is debated (in part because CO2 follows rather than leads temperature), but it is certainly minuscule compared with water vapor, which accounts for over 95 percent of the greenhouse effect.
Of total CO2 in the atmosphere, only about 3.2 percent is manmade. Furthermore, CO2's heat absorption diminishes with every added unit, and clouds, which act as a thermostat, cool a warming planet and warm a cooling planet.
Almost makes you think God planned it that way, doesn't it?
Now, please forward this message to your pastor, other Christian leaders, and friends and urge them to sign the WeGetIt.org Declaration, too!
The more people sign, the stronger the message our leaders will hear that Biblical principles and factual evidence, not media hype about speculative fears like global warming, should guide our care for the environment and the poor.
Gratefully,
-- The WeGetIt.org campaign team
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