Gore's Assault on Reason

Al Gore is not impressed by science apparently. Or maybe he just doesn't keep up. Gore has made a charge that the Myanmar cyclone was caused by the warming of the oceans. Gore has famously promoted anthropogenic global warming (AGW) warnings to the point of obtaining a Nobel prize. He claims that AGW science is settled. Is his evidence for this claim then, scientific?

Just recently I posted about NASA's data showing that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) has been verified to have flipped states circa 2000, from hot to cold. This explains why the global temperature has shown no warming, for the last 8 years. To the east, the Atlantic oscillation has been attempted - unsuccessfully - to be mated to damage costs on the eastern coasts of the U.S. This failed primarily due to the false inflation of damage costs incurred by affluents who tend to live near the shore, and to faulty insurance and non-insured cost data. And according to Chris Landsea (more on him below), the granularity of wind speed measurement accuracy is too low to measure the differences in hurricane energies with enough accuracy to develop causality: The signal to noise ratio is too low.

In fact, AGW is not universally supported as Gore would have us think. As reported in INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY , February 07, 2008, "Kenneth Tapping, a solar researcher and project director for Canada's National Research Council, is among those looking at the sun for evidence of an increase in sunspot activity."

"Solar activity fluctuates in an 11-year cycle. But so far in this cycle, the sun has been disturbingly quiet. The lack of increased activity could signal the beginning of what is known as a Maunder Minimum, an event which occurs every couple of centuries and can last as long as a century."

"Such an event occurred in the 17th century. The observation of sunspots showed extraordinarily low levels of magnetism on the sun, with little or no 11-year cycle."

"This solar hibernation corresponded with a period of bitter cold that began around 1650 and lasted, with intermittent spikes of warming, until 1715. Frigid winters and cold summers during that period led to massive crop failures, famine and death in Northern Europe."

"Tapping reports no change in the sun's magnetic field so far this cycle and warns that if the sun remains quiet for another year or two, it may indicate a repeat of that period of drastic cooling of the Earth, bringing massive snowfall and severe weather to the Northern Hemisphere."

Also, "...researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research in Germany report the sun has been burning more brightly over the last 60 years, accounting for the 1 degree Celsius increase in Earth's temperature over the last 100 years.

If the sun is the driving factor, what of CO2 as a factor? "R. Timothy Patterson, professor of geology and director of the Ottawa-Carleton Geoscience Center of Canada's Carleton University, says that "CO2 variations show little correlation with our planet's climate on long, medium and even short time scales."

Rather, he says, "I and the first-class scientists I work with are consistently finding excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the sun and earthly climate. This is not surprising. The sun and the stars are the ultimate source of energy on this planet."

Patterson, sharing Tapping's concern, says: "Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth."

And according to IBD, "A Hoover Institution Study a few years back examined historical data and came to a similar conclusion. The effects of solar activity and volcanoes are impossible to miss. Temperatures fluctuated exactly as expected, and the pattern was so clear that, statistically, the odds of the correlation existing by chance were one in 100," according to Hoover fellow Bruce Berkowitz. The study says that "try as we might, we simply could not find any relationship between industrial activity, energy consumption and changes in global temperatures."
The study concludes that if you shut down all the world's power plants and factories, "there would not be much effect on temperatures."

But the U.N.'s IPCC is undeterred in its assessment of both AGW and its effect on hurricanes. Kevin E. Trenberth of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder and a "lead author" at IPCC made a claim for the connection between AGW and hurricanes. According to Juliet Eilperin, Washington Post Staff Writer, Sunday, January 23, 2005, "A federal hurricane research scientist resigned in January of 2005 from a U.N.-sponsored climate assessment team, saying the group's leader had politicized the process.

Chris Landsea, who works at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's hurricane research division in Miami, said Monday that he would not contribute to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's chapter on atmospheric and surface climate conditions because the lead author had told reporters global warming contributed to intense Atlantic hurricanes last year.

Landsea said, "It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming," he wrote. "My view is that when people identify themselves as being associated with the IPCC and then make pronouncements far outside current scientific understandings that this will harm the credibility of climate change science and will in the longer term diminish our role in public policy."

Hans von Storch, a climatologist at the Institute for Coastal Research in Geesthacht, Germany, says "It's a demonstration of how highly politicized the IPCC process has become."

Storch and Lars Bärring of Lund University in Sweden published a paper on their study of storminess in Scandinavia since Napoleonic times. "That article is an outgrowth of work that began in the early 1990s, at time when, according to von Storch, European newspapers were full of stories about increasing storm activity, which was described as an early signal of global warming. A more careful analysis by von Storch's group, however, found that the level of storminess in Europe in 1995 was, in fact, similar to the level existing in 1900."

While these types of contradictory data are ignored by the IPCC, also ignored are their own data, according to some who accuse the summarizing authors of actually contradicting the conclusions of their own data. It is said that it is these summaries that are generally read and used for policy decisions, not the detailed data and analysis sections in the back of the IPCC reports. So exactly what is the science? It is not difficult to discover blogs of scientific disputation on the subject.

Most damaging is the Report of the U.S. Senate Committeee on Environment and Public Works December 20, 2007. This report reveals that the IPCC consensus involved only 52 scientists, who were politically constrained: "The 52 scientists who participated in the 2007 IPCC Summary for Policymakers had to adhere to the wishes of the UN political leaders and delegates in a process described as more closely resembling a political party’s convention platform battle, not a scientific process."

The Senate report also lists over 400 scientists from around the world who are opposed to AGW, and gives their reasons for opposition. It also gives instances of oppression of dissension. There are 800% more scientists listed as opposed, than the original consensus contained. The "universal" consensus does not exist and never did.

It should be demanded of Gore that he show the irrefutable (settled) science that proves his assertion. Because without the science behind his cause-and-effect declaration, Gore is violating the AGW activist's main claim: that it is based on science. One suspects that Gore will have a hard time producing a data-driven defense of his accusation. This places Gore in the position of being guilty of his own "assault on reason".