What an amazing week we have had, with the distortions and misinformation agenda of the climate sceptics. First we have the umpire sending Alan Jones back to study journalism 101 (fact checking), once again Jones passes off his own opinion as fact…… Jones “Human beings produce 0.0001 per cent of the carbon dioxide in the air”. The actual amount of C02 in the atmosphere that was produced by humans is 28 per cent.
Next up we had an ex-science presenter, Joanne Evans-Codling-Nova, partner of self proclaimed rocket scientist and conspiracy theorist Dr David Evans, she produces a graph of temperatures up to the year 1900 obtained from 6000 borehole proxies and misrepresents the graph as being up to the year 2000, thus removing the last 100 years of warming. Well the original authors did try to explain her mistake to her.
Not to be outdone in the misinformation stakes, The Climate Skeptics Party, only a bit over twelve months after the UK Met office declared that the warming since 1995 was statistically significant, now claim that there has been no warming since the beginning of 1997. Their actual graph is from the UK Daily Mail, another distortion rag and starts from August 1997, a full eight months later. The Mail’s August starting temperature has been adjusted a little bit up and the end temperature a little bit down to make their claim. Starting at the beginning of 1997 shows a completely different picture from that being claimed.
It is very easy to pick one’s own start and stop dates to show that there has been no warming, that there has been cooling or that the warming is twice as fast. There are about five global temperature data sets that are all in basic agreement as to the multi-decadal warming trend from human activities. How long before the skeptics start claiming “No warming since last Tuesday”?
Finally we round up the week with The Weekend Australian’s comparison of apples with oranges. A recent study of past temperatures based on tree proxies from Northern Scandinavia revealed that the Northern Hemisphere temperature was possibly 0.6 DegC above the 1951-1980 global mean during the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). Currently the Northern Hemisphere temperature is 0.8DegC above that mean. Much higher now and also higher than the current full global temperature which also includes the Southern Hemisphere. The Weekend Australian graphs then compare past NH temperature with current global temperature to claim that the MWP was warmer than today. Who will notice that?
John Byatt
Cooloola Cove
