Real vs Faux Science in the Global Warming Debate

Now that the furor over Nobel Scientist Al Gore has died down, lets look at some of the real science of global warming. How about science from people who have actually investigated the issues? For example, is CO2 related to global warming? Yes, but not nearly in the way that the IPCC shills might have you think.

The US National Science Foundation has further confirmed the scientific observation that increases in carbon dioxide happen years after natural global warming cycles, and that CO2 does not contribute to global warming on near the scale that was once thought.

Its the strongest evidence for the Greenhouse Gas theory of global warming -- that warm periods in the earth's past were typically accompanied by rises in atmospheric carbon dioxide. But that evidence is under serious attack, from new research funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

The research team, led by Paleoclimatologist Lowell Stott, demonstrated CO2 levels after the last Ice Age started to rise some 1,300 years after the warming began. According to Stott, earlier researchers had cause and effect reversed -- CO2 increases were the result of warming, and not the original cause. Stott's paper is not the first to show CO2 rises followed warming trends, but it is one of the most detailed and thorough rebuttals of the linkage.

The work comes hot on the heels of other research downgrading CO2's importance in climate change. Earlier this year, the Belgian Royal Meteorological Institute issued a study saying CO2 effects had been "grossly overstated." Dr. Steven Schwartz of Brookhaven National Labs concluded that CO2-based warming had been overstated by some 400%, and a pair of Chinese researchers used mathematical modeling to demonstrate the majority of current warming was natural in origin.

Stott's findings are important for two reasons. First, they directly challenge the correlation between CO2 and warming. As Stott himself points out, CO2 is still likely a contributor to climate change, but its role needs to be reevaluated.

Science can be painful...I mean to those who don't actually perform the observations, but instead sit in their offices and trust their garbage-in-garbage-out computer models.

Take for example the non-scientist Al Gore. There were actually a lot more untruths in his movie than the British High Court pointed out. And Gore new about them, but he worried that if he pointed out the tenuousness of many of the claims, that the authentic scientific community and its fellow travelers (like me) would begin piling on with marked derision. Well, the piling on has begun!

Based on the judge’s ruling, the footage that ought to be excised adds up to about 25 minutes or so out of the 98-minute film. What’s left is largely Gore personal drama and cinematic fluff that has nothing to do with the science of climate change.

It should also be pointed out that Gore makes other notable factual misstatements in the film that don’t help his or his film’s credibility.

He says in the film that polio has been "cured," implying that we can cure "global warming." While a preventative polio vaccine does exist, there is no "cure" for polio.

Gore attempts to smear his critics by likening them to the tobacco industry. In spotlighting a magazine advertisement proclaiming that "more doctors smoke Camel than any other brand," he states that the ad was published after the Surgeon General’s 1964 report on smoking and lung cancer. But the ad is actually from 1947 — 17 years before the report.

Gore also says in the film that 2005 is the hottest year on record. But NASA data actually show that 1934 was the hottest year on record in the U.S. — 2005 is not even in the top 10.

Perhaps worse than the film’s errors is their origin. The BBC reported that Gore knew the film presented incorrect information but took no corrective steps because he didn’t want to spotlight any uncertainties in the scientific data that may fuel opponents of global warming alarmism.

Yesterday the United Nations overstepped itself by stating that because we have failed to tackle the obvious problem of man-made global warming that we have now entered "the sixth mass extinction of life" in the history of earth. Hmmm... Maybe they'll need a few wars to help the UN's thesis along. How about a few wildfires?

It's a good thing that the UN has laid its cards on the table. Maybe now everyone will start noticing that the UN and its Frankenstein Monster--theIPCC--are emperors that have no clothes.