President Obama has apparently halted global warming by a secret executive order, which, amongst other things, commands the seas to stop rising, the world to begin to heal and the Chevy Volt assembly line to show a profit in 2013 despite a MSRP of $39,999, less $7,500 in government rebates.
This is the only conclusion that I can come to as I ponder the Global Warming Alarmists Brigade’s latest effort in pseudo-science, or what I like to call “Science for Journalists.”
Recently Shaun Marcott, Ph.D., published a paper that “proves” that the world is warmer now than at anytime during the last 4,000 years.
And the hucksters in the media, if they don’t exactly believe it, at least they publicize it.
“In the new research… Shaun Marcott, an earth scientist at Oregon State University, and his colleagues” reported the New York Times “compiled the most meticulous reconstruction yet of global temperatures over the past 11,300 years, virtually the entire Holocene. They used indicators like the distribution of microscopic, temperature-sensitive ocean creatures to determine past climate.”
That all sounds very impressive and meticulous, but is the reconstruction accurate?
Ummm, no.
David W. Kreutzer, Ph.D., Senior Fellow in Energy Economics and Climate Change from the Heritage Foundation told me that the data was rigged in the same way that the famous “Hockey Stick” graph was rigged.
The original global warming Hockey Stick was rigged by Michael Mann- the Ph.D. is implied- in order to bring overall historical global temperatures down, so that our present day temperatures can look warmer by contrast.
“As a young, relatively unknown recent Ph.D. graduate,” says James Taylor, Forbes columnist and a fellow researcher at Heritage, “Mann attained wealth, fame and adulation among global warming alarmists after assembling a proxy temperature reconstruction that he claimed showed global temperatures underwent a steady, roughly 1,000-year decline followed by a sharp rise during the 20th century. The media reported on the Mann hockey stick reconstruction as if it settled the global warming debate, but objective scientists pointed out several crucial flaws that invalidated Mann’s claims.”
Mann achieved these results, in part, by cherry picking data by using proxies for temperature data- proxies like the “distribution of microscopic, temperature-sensitive ocean creatures”- rather than data that would conflict with his goal of showing dramatic, current-day temperature increases.
While Manna’s data showed that temperatures were hotter now than any time in 1,000 years, Marcott goes him four times better by showing that the earth has never been hotter in 4,000 years.
Taylor, however, says “many temperature studies, including studies presented by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, indicate current global temperatures are cooler than the vast majority of the past 4,000 years.”
So do historical records.
In fact, records indicate that temperatures today aren’t even the hottest in the last 1,000 years.
Matt Ridley, a global warming supporter, writing in the Wall Street Journal, concludes that there is ample reason to believe that temperatures are cooler now than during the Medieval Warm Period, saying “the evidence increasingly vindicates the scientists who first discovered the Medieval Warm Period.”
Ridley cites four recent scientific studies that tend to support the notion that temperatures were hotter then.
Mann’s hockey stick- and Marcott’s too- eliminated an historical epoch called the Medieval Warm Period, a period during which archeological, written and historical records suggest temperatures may have been warmer than today’s.
The Medieval Warm Period was a period that saw the Vikings colonize Greenland, between the 10th and 15th Centuries, for example, disappearing just as the climate began to cool. It would have been impossible to conceive of the Vikings being able to colonize Greenland without significantly warmer temperatures. It also would have been impossible to have grown varieties of flora that were found on Greenland during that period were the temperatures as cold as today’s.
Data actually suggests that the earth stopped warming 15 years ago. This pause in warming wasn’t anticipated in any climate change models created by global warming advocates.
And that’s really the rub when it comes to climate science.
When the data doesn’t go their way- which is almost always- they either re-write the science, the history or rely on an Obama executive order.