Climate Change and Scientific Fraud?

It is especially scary to read the papers right now. All are full of articles relating to the just released IPCC which is shorthand for the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change. Actually, they just released a 12 page summary of a 1,600 page report which won't be released until May. Why so long you maight ask. Well, the official reason is that the summary is a political document negotiated by the governments of 150 countries. Before the official document can be released, it has to be made politically correct. So while we wait for what will be scientific bulls@@t, we can look at what the summary says. For one thing, they have given up on the Hockeystick graph which was released in 2001 and has be shown to be a hopelessly flawed depiction of the "fact" that the 20th Century was "unusually warm". The IPCC's estimates for how much the sea-level will rise are about 1/2 the previous estimate and the catastrophic rise being advanced by Al Gore is now about 20-times that of the IPCC. It makes little difference since none of this is based on any real science, but instead it is all based on computer models which make numerous assumptions for input and none of the computer models can be used to duplicate what actually happened in the last century. For example, there are some 20 greenhouse computer models which all predict warming from 11.5 to 1.4 C and for a doubling in carbon dioxide. Yet, nobody can tell us which of these models is correct and nobody can use one of these models to account for the fact that there was climate cooling between 1945 and 1975 when greenhouse gases were increasing rapidly. If you think logically as a scientist must, this does not give you much confidence in computer models of climates extending into this century when they can't even tell you what the weather will be next week.

Al Gore and his ignorant sycophants in the liberal media will use two arguments to support their case and both are faulty, but our populace is too poorly educated to discern how illogical they really are. The first thing they will try to use is the fact that there is a scientific consensus that all is lost if we don't cut carbon dioxide emissions. This is not how science works. Almost every scientific advance has come from a minority of scientists and often a minority of one---think Galileo or Einstein. Next, they will recite the fact that the climate is warming and carbon dioxide emissions are increasing. Correlation is never proof of causation. For example, as Fred Singer, an environmental scientist at the University of Virginia points out, the birth rate in England is decreasing and so is the number of storks. Does this prove storks bring babies?

Professor Singer has a good essay on all this here.