Global Warming Summary Term Paper

FIRST-PERSON: 'Energygate,' the latest global warming scandal

WASHINGTON (BP)--"A good name is to be chosen rather than great riches," Proverbs 22:1 says. Few things are more incompatible with a good name, however, than a reputation for partiality, bias and conflict of interest. As Proverbs 24:23 puts it, "Partiality in judging is not good."

But a reputation is what "Energygate" -- the latest scandal destroying the credibility of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) -- is all about.

November 2009 brought Climategate -- the release of thousands of emails, computer programs and other documents showing that climate scientists in control of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had fabricated, exaggerated, suppressed and corrupted data to support belief in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming and had intimidated dissenting scientists and journal editors who would publish their work, corrupted the peer review process and flouted canons of scientific transparency as well as American and British freedom of information laws.

The first few months of 2010 brought Himalayagate, Amazongate and a variety of other revelations that IPCC's vaunted AR4 (Fourth Assessment Report) had incorporated non-peer reviewed articles -- sometimes outright propaganda pieces produced by environmental advocacy organizations -- as sources of some of its most alarming predictions.

Later in 2010 came recommendations from the InterAcademy Council (IAC) Committee to Review the IPCC for steps that must be taken to improve IPCC's function and credibility. Among the most important was adoption and implementation of a clear conflict of interest policy that would, among other things, prevent much of what was revealed in Climategate, Himalayagate, etc.

Now, Energygate.

On May 9, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claimed in a press release that a forthcoming report "showed" that "80 percent of the world's energy supply could be met by renewable [sources] by mid-century" even if all nuclear energy production ceased.

On June 14, IPCC at last released the Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation (SRRES), with the reality falling more than a little short of the claim.

First, the SRRES shows no such thing. It claims it, but provides no evidence for it.

Global Warming Hysteria: More Credibility Problems for “the ...

The University of Colorado’s Sea Level Research Group decided in May to add 0.3 millimeters — or about the thickness of a fingernail — every year to its actual measurements of sea levels, sparking criticism from experts who called it an attempt to exaggerate the effects of global warming. “Gatekeepers of our sea level data are manufacturing a fictitious sea level rise that is not occurring,” said James M. Taylor, a lawyer who focuses on environmental issues for the Heartland Institute. Steve Nerem, the director of the widely relied-upon research center, told FoxNews.com that his group added the 0.3 millimeters per year to the actual sea level measurements because land masses, still rebounding from the ice age, are rising and increasing the amount of water that oceans can hold. “We have to account for the fact that the ocean basins are actually getting slightly bigger… water volume is expanding,” he said, a phenomenon they call glacial isostatic adjustment (GIA). …Climate scientist John Christy, a professor at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said that the amount of water in the ocean and sea level were two different things. “To me… sea level rise is what’s measured against the actual coast,” he told FoxNews.com. “That’s what tells us the impact of rising oceans.”

Somehow, such “adjustments usually seem to go in one direction.  Besides, even if this is a dispute about definitions, given the hyper controversial nature of the issue, the scientists should have prominently disclosed what they did, and why, when the data was released–in order to prevent the very credibility problem that not doing so has now created. (Read the article further for an interesting back and forth between the sea level measurer and the skeptics about the relative importance of the added inch,  the sea level expert claiming it is negligible compared to the IPCC’s  “expected” amount of sea level rise this century–2-4 feet–and the skeptic noting it is about 20% of the actual small amount of rise in the last century–7 inches–with no acceleration in recent years.)

Second, the IPCC has apparently returned to its old bad ways of issuing reports with data from political sources as if they were objective scientific findings. From a National Post

[W]ho could have imagined that the IPCC would have emerged from these setbacks so cocksure that it would return to its old ways of conflating environmentalist propaganda with scientific investigation? But it has.