Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post

At Wikipedia, one man engineers the debate on global warming, and shapes it to his views. Next to Al Gore, William Connolley may be the world’s most influential person in the global warming debate. He has a PhD in mathematics and worked as a climate modeller, but those accomplishments don’t explain his influence—PhDs are not uncommon and, in any case, he comes from the mid-level ranks in the British Antarctic Survey, the agency for which he worked until recently.

Connolley is not only a big shot on Wikipedia, he’s a big shot at Wikipedia—an administrator with unusual editorial clout. Using that clout, this 40-something scientist of minor relevance gets to tear down scientists of great accomplishment. Because Wikipedia has become the single biggest reference source in the world, and global warming is one of the most sought-after subjects, the ability to control information on Wikipedia by taking down authoritative scientists is no trifling matter.

Connolley and his cohorts don’t just edit pages of scientists actively involved in the global warming debate. Scientists who work in unrelated fields, but who have findings that indirectly bolster a critique of climate change orthodoxy, will also get smeared. So will non-scientists and organizations that he disagrees with. Any reference, anywhere among Wikipedia’s 2.5-million English-language pages, that casts doubt on the consequences of climate change will be bent to Connolley’s bidding. Read more here.

By Dr. Vincent Gray, 4 time IPCC Reviewer and Nobelist

The Global Warming Scam has been perpetrated in order to support the Environmentalist belief that the earth is being harmed by the emission of greenhouse gases from the combustion of fossil fuels. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, (IPCC) was set up to provide evidence for this belief. They have published four major Reports which are widely considered to have proved it to be true. This paper examines the evidence in detail and shows that none of the evidence presented confirms a relationship between emissions of greenhouse gases and any harmful effect on the climate. It is the result of 18 years of scrutiny and comment on IPCC Reports and of a study of the scientific literature associated with it.

In order to establish a relationship between human emissions of greenhouse gases and any influence on the climate, it is necessary to solve three problems: (1) To determine the average temperature of the earth and show that it is increasing, (2) To measure the concentrations of greenhouse gases everywhere in the atmosphere, (3) To reliably predict changes in future climate. None of these problems has been solved.

It is impossible to measure the average surface temperature of the earth, yet the IPCC scientists try to claim that it is possible to measure “anomalies” of this unknown quantity. An assessment of all the temperature data available, largely ignored by the IPCC, shows no evidence for overall warming, but the existence of cyclic behaviour. Recent warming was last recorded around 1950. An absence of warming for 10 years and a current downturn. suggest that the cool part of the cycle is imminent.

The chief greenhouse gas, water vapour, is irregularly distributed, with most of it over the tropics and very little over the poles. Yet the IPCC tries to pretend it is uniformly distributed, so that its “anomalies” can be treated as “feedback” to a global temperature models. Carbon dioxide is only measured in extremely restricted circumstances in order to pretend that it is “well-mixed”.  No general measurements are reported and 90,000 early measurements which show great variability have been suppressed.

Although weather cannot be predicted more than a week or so ahead the claim is made that “climate” can be predicted 100 years ahead. The claim is based on the development of computer models based on the “flat earth” theory of the climate which assumes it is possible to model the climate from “balanced” average energy quantities This assumption is absurd since all the quantities have skewed distributions with no acceptable average. No resulting model has ever been tested for its ability to predict the future. This is even admitted as the model outputs are mere “projections”. Since the projections are far into the future, nobody living is able to check their validity. Read more here.

By Steven Goddard, The UK Register

A paper published in scientific journal Nature this week has reignited the debate about Global Warming, by predicting that the earth won’t be getting any warmer until 2015. Researchers at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences have factored in cyclical oceanic into their climate model, and produced a different forecast to the “consensus” models which don’t. But how will we know whether the earth is warming or cooling? Today, it all depends on the data source.

Two authorities provide us with analysis of long-term surface temperature trends. Both agree on the global temperature trend until 1998, at which time a sharp divergence occurred. The UK Meteorological Office’s Hadley Center for Climate Studies Had-Crut data shows worldwide temperatures declining since 1998. By contrast, NASA data shows worldwide temperatures increasing at a record pace. The other two widely used global temperature data sources are from earth-orbiting satellites UAH (University of Alabama at Huntsville) and RSS (Remote Sensing Systems.) Both show decreasing temperatures over the last decade, with present temperatures barely above the 30 year average. Satellite temperature data (UAH and RSS) is more reliable because it covers the entire earth - with the exception of small regions near the north and south poles. They use the same methodology from year to year, and the two sources tend to agree fairly closely. The downside of satellite data is that it only goes back to 1978.

Confusing? How can scientists who report measurements of the earth’s temperature within one one-hundredth of a degree be unable to concur if the temperature is going up or down over a ten year period? Something appears to be inconsistent with the NASA data - but what is it?

One clue we can see is that NASA has been reworking recent temperatures upwards and older temperatures downwards - which creates a greater slope and the appearance of warming. Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre has been tracking the changes closely on his Climate Audit site, and reports that NASA is Rewriting History, Time and Time Again. The recent changes can be seen by comparing the NASA 1999 and 2007 US temperature graphs.

Particularly troubling are the years from 1986-1998. In the 2007 version of the graph, the 1986 data was adjusted upwards by 0.4 degrees relative to the 1999 graph. In fact, every year except one from 1986-1998 was adjusted upwards, by an average of 0.2 degrees. If someone wanted to present a case for a lot of recent warming, adjusting data upwards would be an excellent way to do it.

Looking at the NASA website, we can see that the person in charge of the temperature data is the eminent Dr. James Hansen - Al Gore’s science advisor and the world’s leading long-term advocate of global warming. Read story here.

James Hansen busy rewriting history