Lies, Damned Lies and Global Warming Graphs

The origin of the phrase Lies, Damned Lies and Statistics is usually attributed to Disraeli although it appears in none of his works and was first reported several years after his death. But it could be made for those who have convinced our leaders to spend gazillions tackling the threat of global warming. When I was a boy, the scientific consensus was that we were heading for a new ice age. Heretics who objected to spending vast sums tackling that “slam dunk cert” were pilloried. You cannot really win. But back to the graph below.

If you look at this it appears alarming. Frankly I can only conclude that we will all fry up by some time in April 2013. Okay, I exaggerate but there appears a clear trend. But of course this is a special from the global warming brigade so all is not as it seems. At this stage I bring in the assistance of Christopher Booker (Uncle Chris) who understands how these things are manipulated.

For starters, Booker points out that is “not particularly helpful” to look at graphs of modern temperatures in isolation, without seeing how they fit into a much longer historical perspective. This is his polite way of saying that looking at a short term trend is utterly misleading since there is no long term context. Booker continues:
“The Modern Warming has been carrying us out of the Little Ice Age for 200 years and temperature rises of the past 30 years are part of a much longer pattern of temperature rise which long predates the modern rise in CO2. As part of that general rise it is useful to look at the rises between 1860-1880 and 1910-1940, which were not dissimilar to the rise between 1980 and 2010, When the global warming scare first got going in the 1980s, it did so on the basis of a ten—year rise no greater or faster than that recorded in the decades after 1910 less than 0.2 degrees.”

You see his point? We have always had short periods when temperatures rise sharply. That is the way of the world. We have not always had CO2 emissions on anything like the scale of today. Thus how can one claim that the most recent temperature rises MUST be caused by CO2 emissions?

Booker continues… “also tending to fog people’s understanding is the tendency to present these temperature fluctuations by exaggerating the vertical axis, so that comparatively minor fluctuations in global temps of a few tenths of a degree look like wild upward swings, If you put the base line much lower, to show the average global temperature rather than just anomalies from an artificial mean, the actual temperature graph looks much more like a straightish line, with a few very modest little wiggles up and down.

By exaggerating the vertical axis the warmists have been able to convey the impression that temperatures have been virtually doubling in recent decades, whereas they have only risen (and indeed fallen) by tiny fractions, Twice in the past 14 years, since the freak El Nino effect of 1998, we have seen temperatures fall by around 0.7 degrees, equivalent to the entire net rise of the whole of the 10th century, They may then have risen again, though never so high as they rose in 1998, but the one thing that is incontrovertible is that the rise in average temperatures has not been anything like so great as that projected by the computer models on which the IPCC and the warmists rely (0.2 degrees-plus per decade), because the models are programmed to assume that a rise in CO2 will produce a commensurate rise in temperatures, This is simply not happening, which reflects the fact that the models are wrongly programmed to rely much too heavily on that assumed correlation between CO2 and temperatures, and also on the assumption that the effect of water vapour, by the far the most significant of the greenhouse gases, is to reinforce the CO2 effect (‘positive feedback’) whereas experts such as Richard Lindzen argue that water vapour produces a negative feedback effect.”

Well there you have it. A friend of mine in Bristol occasionally picks me up for not citing enough primary sources. Well here is a secondary and a primary source. Good enough to convince you Dr D?

The truth is that temperatures have always gone up and down over short and medium term cycles. The 11th century when vines grew in Greenland was a rather hot one as were those that followed. A few hundred years earlier we had the “dark ages” in Northern Europe which was a rather cold period. And temperatures have moved in this way before and after CO2 emissions started shooting up. There is no proven causal effect at all.

Booker: “Nobody actually knows how any of these things work or what really shapes the climate, let alone what the world’s weather is going to be like in 100 years time (or even next week). But the one thing we do know beyond any doubt is that those officially approved computer models are wrong. “

Back to me. Look at the projections made for the past five years back at the turn of the Century. They are already wrong. Yet we are meant to spend gazillions of quid and pass laws on emissions which will send Britain back to the stone ages on the basis of projections made by the same computer models for 50 or 100 years time? For how many more years do the models have to keep getting it wrong before our leaders and betters admit that they got it wrong?

As an aside, there is a graph that I really wish to see which plos on one axis the fervency of a belief that we must spend gazillions tackling global warming and on another the fervency of the public cliams made by the same individual between 2000 and 2005 on how vital it is that join the Euro to prevent our economy collapsing.

You could put in a third axis just for Chris Huhne plotting the speed at which your wife drives.