Less Fire, More Ice

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Monday, February 23, 2009 4:20 PM PT

Environment: The claim that man's activities are heating the planet was weakened when it was learned that a glitch caused satellites to undermeasure the volume of Arctic ice. Doom has been overdone.

The global warming speculation has more holes in it than Al Gore's oversized carbon footprint has square miles. Deeply infected with statistical and common sense problems, the climate change argument is beginning to crumble. Suddenly what many considered irrefutable evidence has more in common with fables than scientific work:

• The famed hockey stick chart that supposedly shows Earth's temperature rising sharply in response to the industrial age is not an accurate measure of what has actually occurred. This stick, used by the United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to scare the public into believing that human activity is causing the Earth to warm, has been revealed to be in error.

The unmasking happened five years ago when Canadian researchers Stephen McIntyre and Ross McKitrick crunched the numbers and uncovered a fundamental mathematical flaw in the computer program that University of Massachusetts geoscientist Michael Mann used to create the chart.

Mann and his co-researchers also conveniently left the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age out of the temperature chart, a deception, whether intended or not, that renders their entire work unreliable.

• Global temperatures peaked in 1998, a fact that contradicts the assertion that man's continued pumping of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is making the planet hotter. This was not predicted by the climate models that say we're headed for a warm period.

Nor can anthropogenic global warming be explained when introduced into the argument is the fact that 1934, when far fewer carbon-spewing machines existed than we have today, is the hottest year on record.

Global warming alarmists invested heavily in convincing everyone that 1998 was the hottest year and 2006 the third warmest. After correcting for faulty data, NASA had to backtrack.

At the same time NASA made the correction, it also reported that six of the top 10 hottest years are from a period before 90% of the 20th century growth in carbon emissions occurred.

• In 2007, it was learned that the placement of temperature stations across the U.S. had skewed readings. Equipment at a site in Oregon was found to be just 10 feet from an air conditioning exhaust vent. The sensor at another Oregon station is located on a rooftop near an air conditioning unit. A Tahoe, Calif., station is located next to a drum where trash is burned.

A volunteer group has found that 69% of the 807 stations it has rated (of the 1,221 U.S. Historical Climatological Network stations) are located less than 12 yards from an artificial heating source; 11% are located "next to/above an artificial heating source, such a building, roof top, parking lot or concrete surface."

Most interesting is a comparison between two California stations located within 40 miles of each other. The station in Orland is isolated from man-made influences and has recorded falling temperatures since the late 19th century. Meanwhile, the Marysville station, once in a remote area but now surrounded by artificial heat sources, has shown increases in temperatures over a similar period.

• Last week, researchers at the U.S. National Snow and Ice Data Center admitted that from early January to the middle of this month, "sensor drift" in the satellite monitors used to measure sea ice caused them to underestimate the extent of Arctic sea ice by 193,000 square miles. That's a significant area roughly the size of California.

Will the alarmists and media apologize for spreading fear about shrinking sea ice that was not really shrinking? Not likely. They'll move on to something else to hype. But it won't change the facts on the ground — or in the sea.

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