By Melanie Phillips, UK Spectator
Yet another example of the bogus ‘research’ masquerading as science that is used to reinforce the man-made global warming fraud. One of the difficulties the green zealots have had is that Antarctica has been not warming but cooling, with the extent of its ice reaching record levels. A few weeks ago, a study led by Professor Eric Steig caused some excitement by claiming that actually West Antarctica was warming so much that it more than made up for the cooling in East Antarctica. Warning bells should have sounded when Steig said “What we did is interpolate carefully instead of just using the back of an envelope.”
To those of us who have been following this scam for the past two decades, ‘interpolate carefully’ sounds like a bit of, er, creative calculation. And so it has proved. Various scientists immediately spotted the flaw in Steig’s methodology of combining satellite evidence since 1979 with temperature readings from surface weather stations. The flaw they identified was that, since Antarctica has so few weather stations, the computer Steig used was programmed to guess what data they would have produced had such stations existed. In other words, the findings that caused such excitement were based on data that had been made up.
Even one of the IPCC’s lead authors sniffed a problem: “This looks like a pretty good analysis, but I have to say I remain somewhat skeptical,” Kevin Trenberth, climate analysis chief at the National Center for Atmospheric Research said in an e-mail. “It is hard to make data where none exist.”
Well, yes. But then the invention of data that does not exist and the obliteration of data that does exist has been precisely how the man-made global warming fraud has been perpetrated right from the get-go. The most egregious example of this was the piece of ‘research’ that underpinned the entire IPCC/Kyoto shebang from 2001 when it was published—the so-called ‘hockey stick’ curve, which purported to show a vertiginous and unprecedented rise in global temperature in the 20th century.
The problem with pegging such a rise to the evils of industrialisation had always been the Medieval Warm Period, during which global temperatures were warmer than in modern times. So the ‘hockey stick’ study dealt with that by simply managing to airbrush out the Medieval Warm Period and its subsequent corrective Little Ice Age altogether. Some seven centuries of global history were simply excised from the data—because an algorithm had been built into the computer programme which would have been created a ‘hockey stick’ curve whatever data were fed into it.
This shoddy research was subsequently torn apart so comprehensively that it has been called the most discredited study in the history of science (and has been quietly dropped by the IPCC, leaving man-made global warming theory with no more substance than the grin on the face of the Cheshire Cat. Read more of Melanie’s story here.
See a complete compilation of the sudden flurry of counterattacks by the folks at Real Climate, proving to be home for some of the most fanciful and discredited pseudo-science on the planet here.
See why even as we win the science, derailing the carbon control train accelerating down the tracks won’t be easy here.