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November 5, 2006
Global Warming Cultists Rewrite Climate History and the Laws of Physics
Posted by Dave Blount at November 5, 2006 7:48 PM
As Christopher Monckton observes, global warming hysteria "is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, 'creating world government.'" In part one of a thoroughly documented piece in the Sunday Telegraph, Monckton debunks the sloppy science and outright trickery used to generate the alleged "consensus" that the world is doomed if progressive bureaucrats don't cripple Western economies.
One of the Left's best tricks is abolishing the Medieval Warm Period. As the United Nations and Al Gore would prefer you didn't know, temperatures were as much as 3°C higher during the Middle Ages than they are today. "Greenland" got its name from being lush and green when the Vikings discovered it; today it's a frozen wasteland. In 1421, the Chinese sailed around the Arctic without encountering ice.
Monckton quotes David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, who had published an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data:
With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period."
They got rid of it by fudging data, allowing them to produce the infamous hockey stick graph that strikes fear into the hearts of the gullible.
Not content to rewrite natural history, the climate hysteria cult has gone after physics. A "forcing" is an influence on temperature, measured in watts. To get from the forcing to the temperature increase it would create, you have to use a constant called lambda. Its actual value is 0.22–0.3°C per watt, but global warming propagandist extraordinaire James Hansen has suggested making it 0.67, 0.75, or 1°C. Most UN computer models use 1°C. A scary new report by Nicholas Stern implies 1.9°C.
If that doesn't terrify people into submission, they'll have to raise lambda even higher. Soon we'll have to pay an extra tax on beans because their models will predict that breaking wind could cause the planet to burst into flames.
Let's hope the seas haven't boiled away before Monckton continues his exposé next Sunday.
On a tip from Bergbikr.
