Tuesday, February 16, 2010

Speechless in Selmer: Climatic Research Unit Head Denies Global Warming

Listen, I'm not a conspiracist. I maintain a web site on evolution based on mainline science. But, excuse me, when a leading global warming advocate admits to skewing data and that the globe hasn't warmed--at least in a statistically significant way--since 1995, how come that isn't front page news?

Phil Jones, who has temporarily stood aside as the unit's director, admitted to the journal Nature that his much-criticised failure to keep records about the location of Chinese weather stations used in a major paper was "not acceptable". (newscientist.com)

Worse, listen to what it was that the Climate Research Unit (the "climategate" organization) doesn't like to say:

The BBC asked Phil Jones, "Do you agree that from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming?"

His answer? "Yes, but only just."

He then goes on to explain that 1995 to 2009 works out to an increase of about one-eighth of a degree celsius per decade.

Then, he goes on to say that from 2002 to 2009, there has been a global cooling of the exact same amount, .12 degrees celsius per decade.

I don't know about you, but the only people who have told me that the globe's been cooling the last 7 years have been the right-wing global-warming-deniers.

This is Phil Jones, friends. This is the head of the Climate Research Unit in England. This is a person who "unacceptably" left out information in a Nature article, then griped that those who caught him doing it didn't correct it by submitting to Nature themselves. This is a pro-global-warming guy!

In the BBC interview, he adds:

I'm 100% confident that the climate has warmed. … there's evidence that most of the warming since the 1950s is due to human activity.

The global cooling is not statistically significant, but exactly the same as the global warming is 1995. I have seen data presented by scientists insisting that the earth is rapidly warming right now, and that it's been increasingly rising since 2000.

This sure throws things in disarray, in my opinion.

Is Global Warming Real?


There's no statistically significant rise since 1995. Obviously, we don't know if the globe is warming. There's really nothing to discuss here.

Factcheck,org disagrees with me. They write:

Many of the e-mails that are being held up as "smoking guns" have been misrepresented by global-warming skeptics eager to find evidence of a conspiracy. And even if they showed what the critics claim, there remains ample evidence that the earth is getting warmer.

Ample evidence? There's no statistically significant rise in global temperature since 1995. There's been a decrease since 2002, and even though it's not statistically significant, it is a downward trend for the last 7 years!!!

This is not the first dishonesty I've found.

More Dishonesty


Just a few weeks ago I watched a report on TV about Antarctica melting. Not once in the whole entire "scientific" program did they distinguish between West Antarctica and East Antarctica.

Almost all the land-locked ice, the only ice that can increase sea level, is in East and West Antarctica and Greenland. Greenland has 10% of the world's land ice, West Antarctica has 15%, and East Antarctica has 70%.

East Antarctica isn't melting!

Okay, that may not matter. West Antarctica and Greenland are. West Antarctica has had very significant increases in temperature over the last 50 years. It's been completely without ice, as has all of Antarctica, in the world's past, so it's possible West Antarctica could completely melt, which would drive sea levels up significantly.

But if you're doing a TV show on Antarctica melting, you have to tell people what I just told you, or you're deceiving them!

That's not conspiracy thinking; that's just fact.

This is awful. Why aren't Phil Jones' admissions front page news? Why do documentaries almost never distinguish between East Antarctica's perfectly safe and much larger ice mass and West Antarctica's melting one?

I want us to stop pumping carbon in the air. I want clean water and clean forests. I want to make as little impact on the earth as possible. I believe carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas.

I don't believe, however, that hiding the facts and deceiving are ever okay.

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