generalspeaking

Undue Trust? Gilding the Disaster?

How about that? An apology from the UN's climate change body, the very collectively-responsible environmental group gold-medalled by the United Nations and co-recipients of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, admitting that perhaps there may be some truth to the critics' contentions that some of their findings were overstated, the result of misinformation, and just plain w r o n g.

As though the world isn't in deep enough trouble with the unmistakable signs of Climate Change.

Climate change due to normative, natural cyclical changes in weather patterns having their detrimental effects on the atmosphere and the very geography of the Earth, not necessarily Global Warming, as a result of human-derived activities deleterious to the globe.

There is ample room in all of the environmentalists' and climatologists' speculations and hypothesis to allow for both to be implicated, with an emphasis on natural cycles.

But fudge the "proofs" laid out by the IPCC? Unequivocally state with certain conviction that human activity is solely and despairingly the cause of the catastrophic scenarios that our changing environment is leading us toward, and giving as proof unassailable truths? Well, !oops!

That part of the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change relating to the high likelihood of Himalayan glaciers "disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high", appears to have been ill-advised for positive/negative inclusion. The alarmed public was informed that India and China, Nepal and Bhutan, Pakistan and Afghanistan, whose dependence on meltwater from the Himalaya would face disaster.

Oh dear, it would appear that an Indian glaciologist had mused, simply mused, on the potential for such a scenario in a 1999 interview, that it had no scientific verification in data, observation or fact. Yet, though the IPCC agrees it used imperfect (wrong) data, they are not quite all that contrite, as it happens.

"This conclusion is robust, appropriate, and entirely consistent with the underlying science and the broader IPCC assessment", they responded, insisting they stand by their overall conclusion about glacier loss. Yet a glaciologist who contributed to the 2007 report gave his opinion that the glacier error was immense, and he had forewarned his colleagues about its inclusion.

Wait, we're not finished yet. That was just yesterday's unfortunate revelation. There's another, and it's just as impressively inconvenient a truth of lack of vital data-gathering and egregious conclusion-reaching in its own way; perhaps even more so. Two U.S. researchers now conclude that American government scientists have been rather remiss in their professional conduct.

Having skewed global temperature readings simply by choosing to bypass thousands of weather station readings right around the globe, and most especially those located in colder altitudes, and more northerly latitudes. Say, for example, from Canada, where the Canadian government operates 1,400 surface weather stations; over 200 above the Arctic Circle.

Yet in their professional environmental-tally wisdom the scientists chose to use "just one thermometer (for measuring) everything north of latitude 65 degrees". Where in the 1970s some 600 Canadian weather stations were involved in a global data-base courtesy of the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, today data is collected from a mere 35 Canadian stations.

Of those 35, only one is now used by NOAA as a gauge for all Canadian territory above the Arctic Circle. Joseph D'Aleo, a meteorologist, and E. Michael Smith, a computer programmer, also state that the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies has "cherry picked" Canadian weather stations to be included in their database; selecting those stations sited in southerly locations; the high Arctic now only contributes 3% of the Canadian data.

NOAA, according to the two critics, overlooks temperature data from Bolivia, a high-altitude, landlocked country, assigning temperature values instead based on data from stations located at lower elevations in Peru, or the Amazon basin. Unsurprisingly, the result is a warmer-than-reality global temperature record.

"NOAA ... systematically eliminated 75% of the world's stations with a clear bias towards removing higher latitude, high altitude and rural locations, all of which had a tendency to be cooler", the two authors write in their study published on the website of the Science and Public Policy Institute.

"The thermometers in a sense, marched towards the tropics, the sea, and to airport tarmacs." Ergo, Global Warming.

Labels: Environment, United Nations, United States

posted by Pieface @ Thursday, January 21, 2010