Major Update Below!

Paul Krugman’s ego runneth over. He thinks he can wade into the scientific debate surrounding global warming and be credible. Where he gets these delusions of grandeur is unknown to me. As someone who works in the complex and competitive world of space systems and aerospace, I know that the young and unproven ‘science’ of global climate and global warming is complex and still being tested through the scientific method.

Right now, while the layman view of the subject is assumed to be settled, the scientific testing of the global warming theories, along with the past decade’s measurements, have thrown enormous doubt into the doom and gloom scenarios that Paul Krugman has apparently prematurely accepted as defacto fact.

As Krugman ably demonstrates, lay people should not jump into this debate without some experience and expertise in science, math and engineering. The real professionals, on the other hand, have discovered that the source of all the recent global warming is not CO2, but bad data used in climate models which forces the models to show recent warming – where OTHER DATA shows there is no recent warming.

Let me repeat this. The statistical models used by the High Priests of Global Warming are using a newly identified and specific data set which wrongly produces decades of warming where none exists in the raw temperature data 0r other data sets.

The work was produced by Steve McIntyre at Climate Audit in his report Yamal: A “Divergence” Problem. H/T to WUWT for the heads up. Steve is a gifted scientist, therefore he speaks in the babble of PhDs deep in the bowels of scientific debate. You can go to both links and see the raw conclusions, but I will try to synthesize the PhDese into normal language. My job as an engineer is to translate between the PhDs and the Program Managers to make a successful system for both. I am fluent in both cultures. I am also much more blunt and less diplomatic in my conclusions. So here it goes.

I will let the authors be more reserved, but I find the results damning. To summarize, the infamous Hockey Stick (HS) warming trend that supposedly shows man made CO2 forcing the Earth’s temperature higher is in fact an artifact of one set of bad data.

One of the many independent representations (proxies) of the Earth’s historic temperature profile before 1970’s (and the advent of global temperature measurements from space) are things like tree rings. Data sets from all over the world were used to construct the history of Earth’s climate, and previous research shows none of them show a significant hike in global temperature except one from Russia (see here and here for examples of previous reporting on this find).

Let me explain this using an example everyone can relate to. We measure the tides and the gravitational forces of the Sun and Moon using sensors spread across the globe. Even if there is a set of data that is lost, all the other data sets show the same tidal nature of gravity on the Earth’s oceans.

Now suppose someone had a set of data from Alaska which showed something completely different form the other data (e.g., tides are caused by Mercury, not the Moon or Sun).  It would take some serious weighting and jiggering of the statistics to have this one data set override all the other data sets. But it can be done.

Now suppose there were many measurements from Alaska, but the scientists claiming Mercury (smallest planet in the solar system) was the driving force behind tides instead of the Sun (largest) or the Moon (closest) had used only those data sets that proved their theory, ignoring the other Alaska data. Would anyone see this as deliberate data manipulation to force and preferred outcome?

So with that example in mind look at the graph produced when Steve McIntyre included the other Russian tree ring data (black line) and compared that with the IPCC selected data (red line):

No recent warming in the non-IPCC data set. In fact, it shows recent cooling! This cannot be an accidental result, for that one data set to override all the other data in the region. It just doesn’t add up.

This is more evidence of a broader trend in the IPCC claims of global warming. More and more we find, when we look into the data, that it is skewed. Even the National Climate Data Center admits openly that for some measurements the raw measurements do not show any warming, that is added in later. Here is their own graph on one such data set (click to enlarge):

Warming only appears after the data is run through ‘processing’ that magically produces a recent warming trend. Up until 1960 the raw and processed data are consistent, after that there is a processed warming trend added to the raw data – growing over the years to modern day. They openly admit they have added warming to raw data that shows no warming. More here on cooking the books of global warming.

Above is the final chart produced at Climate Audit. What this shows is that when you take out the suspected tree ring data, there is no global warming (black line) but actually global cooling. If you add in ALL the data sets from that region of Russia, there is no global warming (green line) at all. Only if you carefully select some special data from the world of data sets (red line) do you see something that could be advertised as global warming.

Since all other data around the world is apparently showing little to no warming during the last few decades of increased CO2 production, then this revelation scientifically proves CO2 is NOT warming the planet.

One has to wonder at the forensic evidence discovered to date showing the UN IPCC and its doom and gloom fanatics were able to magically produce phantom warming from data that shows no such phenomena. One has to also wonder at the motives of such people who are obsessed with collecting trillions of dollars from everyone on the planet in order to ‘save the planet’ from this phantom danger.

It looks like a grand extortion scheme. Either pay us to stop global warming or the end of the world will come. Of course, to make this scam work, one needs to show data that indicates pending doom. Pathetic.

Major Update: The chronology of this fiasco is as damning as the results. Check out the WUWT story and read the notes:

1. In a 1995 Nature paper by Briffa, Schweingruber et al., they reported that 1032 was the coldest year of the millennium – right in the middle of the Medieval Warm Period. But the reconstruction depended on 3 short tree ring cores from the Polar Urals whose dating was very problematic.http://www.climateaudit.org/?p=877.

2. In the 1990s, Schweingruber obtained new Polar Urals data with more securely-dated cores for the MWP. Neither Briffa nor Schweingruber published a new Polar Urals chronology using this data. An updated chronology with this data would have yielded a very different picture, namely a warm medieval era and no anomalous 20th century.

Emphasis mine. That’s the first 1.5 notes out of 10. Read the rest. This forensic data illustrates a potentially criminal scam in my humble opinion. And the scientific method of challenge and reproducing results is the mechanism by which this came to light.

Tags: Global Warming, Tree Rings