Maine Voices: Column's critique of global warming claims was on the money
A criticism of M.D. Harmon's reporting was not an accurate depiction of the science involved.
ROBERT ALMEDER
KENNEBUNKPORT — In his critique (Maine Voices, March 3) of a Feb. 19 column by M.D. Harmon on climate change, Marc Anderson accuses Harmon of fallacious reasoning for thinking that the non-controversial refutation of the "hockey stick" graph refutes the notorious global warming argument.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Robert Almeder of Kennebunkport is professor emeritus at Georgia State University. He has lectured on the philosophy of science, logic and epistemology at the Sorbonne, The University of Pittsburgh and Tel Aviv University while serving as editor of the American Philosophical Quarterly.
Anderson apparently believes that because we cannot explain the unprecedented recent warming depicted in the hockey stick graph by appeal to natural forces, we can only account for it in terms of human behavior associated with ever-increasing CO2 emissions.
However, the argument Anderson refuted is not the argument offered by Harmon, who was asserting that real global warming in the Medieval Warm Period was distorted and suppressed by the introduction of questionable proxy evidence.
This made it look as if the warmth we have recently experienced is unprecedented, when demonstrably it is not. There is nothing fallacious about Harmon's argument.
But there is more to say here. It is well known that the hockey stick graph offered by Michael Mann, Philip Jones and others found acceptance in the scientific community associated with the U.S. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
They cited it as a correct depiction of a sharp and unprecedented increase in global temperature in the last century. Thus it served as solid evidence for future predictions of extreme global warmth.
It was also featured in Al Gore's sci-fi documentary "An Inconvenient Truth." and was listed as one of 10 serious errors noted by the High Court in London when the court ruled the film was propaganda.
The First IPCC Assessment, issued in 1990, presented the traditional history of climate in the past 1,100 years.
There was a Medieval Warming Period (roughly 800-1400) that was somewhat warmer than the present (2010); and there was a Little Ice Age (1500-1850) that was cooler than the present.
The presence of a period warmer than the present – but without the presence of man-made greenhouse gases – embarrassed those enthusiastic alarmists who hold that global warming can only be attributed to the activities of man coordinated with corresponding increases in CO2 emissions.
So, efforts were made to conceal the Medieval Warm Period, and the most successful was offered by Mann and Jones, of "Climategate" fame.
This used a small number of tree ring records to reconstruct Northern Hemisphere temperatures going back a thousand years that no longer showed the Medieval Warm Period. The new graph ended in a sharp warming period beginning in the 19th century.
This uptilt came to be known as "the hockey stick" and was quite clearly featured in the next IPCC report, where it was then rhapsodically affirmed as indicating that the present warming was unprecedented in the last thousand years, was clearly caused by increasing CO2 emissions, and is likely to get worse without drastic reduction in CO2 emissions caused by human activity.
As has been frequently noted elsewhere, apart from the manipulation of the database to fit a preconceived hypothesis of unprecedented recent warmth attributed to human activity, the most acute criticism was written by two Canadian statisticians and two other independent assessments of the hockey stick graph.
All found the statistics not adequate to justify the claims. Because the existence of the Medieval Warm Period is amply documented in historical accounts for the North Atlantic Region, Mann and his allies countered that the warming had to be regional, but was not characteristic of the whole Northern Hemisphere and especially not the planet.
On this, climatologist Richard Lindzen said: "Given that an underlying assumption of their analysis was that the geographic pattern of warming had to have remained constant, this (regional variation) would have invalidated the analysis . Indeed the 4th IPCC Assessment (2007) no longer featured the hockey stick, but the claim that current warming is unprecedented remains, and Mann's reconstruction is still shown in chapter 6 of the 4th Assessment buried among other reconstructions."
Finally, several scientifically respectable studies have recently established that normal global warming and normal global sea-level rise pretty much stopped in late 1993-94 with the exception of 1998, and that every year after 1998 until now has been cooler than 1998.
None of this, however, was predicted by the models used by IPCC, and thus IPCC has failed to satisfy the conditions of a good scientific hypothesis.
Were you interviewed for this story? If so, please fill out our accuracy form
Most...
Copyright ©2010 MaineToday Media, Inc.
8 COMMENTS
sapereaude1 said...
Considering the catastrophic climatic side effects of global warming, one of which being that two billion people will likely be facing famine forced by drought, and those two billion people have nuclear weapons, we could hypothesize that global warming will be followed shortly by nuclear winter. So why worry?
March 20, 2010 at 8:29 AM Report abuse
youknowit said...
Very logical, so where are the Harmon haters? Not up yet, still all fuzzy headed, like their science? One more interesting point is that Al the big footprint Gore has conflict of interest in his presentation of warming. So here we have a real inconvenient truth. What is the ideal temperature for planet Earth? If you can't answer that question, then stop trying to pretend you know what should be done to cure a condition that hasn't been proven to even exist.
March 20, 2010 at 8:30 AM Report abuse
AXeL said...
When George Bush invaded an oil-producing nation many people gave a side-long look at his ownership of oil interests while many others took it as a given that he invaded simply to line his own pockets. The VERY SAME PEOPLE not only refuse to even acknowledge that Al Gore is heavily invested in Alternative Energy and Carbon Trading, they deny that his fortune is linked with the escalation of Global Warming Alarmism, Cap and Trade legislation and the Green Jobs Initiatives. The facts are that Global Warming Alarmism is about money and bringing about the social changes that could not be done in the normal, legal fashion. Al Gore said it himself about George Bush, "HE PLAYED ON OUR FEAR".
March 20, 2010 at 9:09 AM Report abuse
AFVET said...
axEL -- so you agree: Bush is a scoundrel.
March 20, 2010 at 1:41 PM Report abuse
null said...
Back to the beginning, Harmon’s tale of Jones’s interview with the BBC was so far off basis that it is near complete fabrication. He just followed the anti climate change jargon of the prior week. This was after it had been widely noted that Jones and the climate specific scientific community still believe that climate change is related to human activity. Anyone who actually followed the interview to near completion would recognize this. Either Harmon did little or no direct investigation into the Jones interview or deliberately twisted its content.
March 20, 2010 at 8:50 PM Report abuse
CivilDebate said...
youknowit, would you please explain that argument about the ideal temperature? I've heard it before but don't get it. It seems agriculture and for that matter all civilization has developed in relation to climate. To take a trivial example, in Maine the conditions are perfect for maple syrup so it plays a role in our economy. Change the temperature too much and no more sap. Without getting into the science for a moment, is there any reason to think it's a good idea to change radically the conditions our agriculture, economy, and well-being depend on? Thanks.
March 20, 2010 at 10:56 PM Report abuse
windjammer said...
People can argue the issue of global warming fact or fiction until the cows come home-I always thought the phrase was rediculous anyway. I do know this-the human population explosion has caused ecological anamolies never seen before. And it is going to get worse if we don't do something about it. It is patently absurd to ignore the negative impact humnan activity has and continues to have on this life raft in space we call earth. The evidence is irrefutable-we simply cannot afford delusion or denial here. Collective myopia in that regard is simply foolish and dangerous. SO-we need to quit playing the name game and meet our environmental problems head on-to do otherwise is profoundly ignorant if not incredibly short sighted and stupid.
March 21, 2010 at 7:21 AM Report abuse
RnJhbmtXaGl0ZQ%3D%3D said...
Many people have been led to believe that warming will bring catastophic side effects. However, the Medieval Warm Period, the best documented of all natural climate cycles, was a period of prosperity. The ensuing cold period, from which we have recovered since 1850, was a period of hardship. The Roman Warm Period and the cold period misnamed the "Dark Ages" are futher examples of the natural climate cycle. William Burroughs in his book Climate Change in Prehistory (Cambridge University Presss, 2005) is a good antidote to fear-mongering by those with a vested interest. Burroughs shows that we do not have to worry about warming in the tropics where most of mankind live: since the peak of ice cover during the last glacial period the temperature in the tropics has risen only 3 degrees Celcius (5 degrees Fahrenheit). Warming occurs mostly in the higher latitudes.
March 22, 2010 at 4:17 AM Report abuse