Alarmed | Doubt  | Awakening | Evidence | IPCC vs Science | Corruption?  | Science of greenhouse gases | Cosmic Rays | CO2 follows temp
CO2 is Innocent | Junk details | Medieval Warm Period | Infamous Hockey Stick | Urban Heat Islands  | Solving the Problem | More info | Glossary

This is a personal story as well as a skeptics' primer. I taught myself the science because it was vital, in order to understand such an important issue about which there have been serious charges of misleading people in the science itself. Nobody is sponsoring me. Were it not for what I now know is bad science that they support, I would be working with Transition Towns. Checking contradictory sources, and continuing to question evidence, became essential to discovering the truth.

Science, Method, Climatology, and Forgetting the Basics is a straight introduction by Ric Werme, an engineer long familiar with Climate Science. It's scientific but simple and very readable. Another good introduction is by James Peden, a first-rate scientist with a track record as atmospheric physicist. Here are several other excellent introductions. More exist. Take your pick. Here is an excellent, brief Skeptics' Handbook. Nobody could say, after looking at any of these, that scientists skeptical of manmade global warming are either kooks or crooks, or that there is a consensus - as Al Gore claimed.

If you have evidence to query or improve anything here - please contact me, or join our science workshop and Forum. I've done my best but I'm still learning and would like to build a real "consensus" of good science. Curiously, after the science seemed officially "agreed", more and more evidence has been arising that contradicts "manmade global warming".

I became alarmed by seeing An Inconvenient Truth

In September 2007 I became very concerned about global warming after seeing Al Gore's film An Inconvenient Truth. He showed a graph which is a "hockey stick" shape, showing a millennium of steady global temperatures, followed by a dramatic temperature rise as the twentieth century progressed. A second graph shows CO2 levels rising inexorably from 1958 when Keeling started CO2 measurements. Al Gore showed the temperature "hockey stick" together with Keeling's compelling zigzag graph, to demonstrate how the two had risen together. He then showed disasters worldwide, including Hurricane Katrina, which are all apparently getting worse as temperatures rise. He said

• "Our CO2 emissions were the cause of the rising CO2 levels, since nothing else could have caused this.
• And the rising CO2 must have caused these temperature rises, since, again, there was nothing else."

A study by Naomi Oreskes appeared to prove that a complete consensus of scientists were portraying a very serious picture - threatening our whole future - unless we drastically lower our carbon dioxide emissions, and unless we act quickly. It seemed there was no serious scientific dissent from Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) - and it seemed the issue was urgent.

The message was reinforced for me by top NASA scientist James Hansen describing catastrophic levels of polar ice melt. I've always checked evidence - but all my checks seemed to confirm it. As I live on the Somerset levels, a huge area as flat and low as Holland, the picture hit home. Holland would disappear completely in this new Noah's Flood. How are we to cut back CO2 soon enough? Cope with disaster? What are we bequeathing our children? How can I begin to wake people up?

That month, I changed from back-street thinker to 200% committed activist. I discovered Transition Towns, which are developing positive, creative ways to live with an energy-depleted future in the face of Peak Oil and Global Warming. I read many science websites, which all told me that those who still denied Anthropogenic Global Warming were ignorant, in denial, or in the pay of big oil. I found clear answers to all the skeptics' issues. I got to learn the chief skeptics' names.

What's up doc? temperatures falling despite CO2 rising..?

I noticed doubts in the AGW forums that I'd passed over before. I noticed unexplained anomalies in the most basic data. IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change) use the following graph showing global temperature rise from 1860 to now. Their original bright red/blue vertical bars are actually highly distracting, so I've toned them all down to pale gray. This way you notice the temperature rises steeply from 1910 to 1940 when CO2 output was far lower; moreover, temperature decreases inexplicably from 1940 to 1970. The vertical bars  change from "BLUE" to "RED" as they cross a "zero" line.

...for the splice of this 150 years' thermometer record onto a millennium of "proxy" temperature measurements, that produced the "hockey stick". This icon was used prominently by IPCC 2001. I started Googling for evidence of other views on AGW - still trying to avoid the "baddies" in the pay of "big oil"... I found this Gallup poll - it is out of date - but does it still suggest there wasn't the consensus among scientists that Al Gore claimed when he made his film? Here's a 2006 poll...

Help! but the nineties were the warmest years of last century? What, 1930's were warmer? ah, that was just the US! No, it was also true in Bodo, Norway... and oh my goodness, it was even warmer, according to the oxygen isotope records, in the Medieval Warm Period... even warmer in the Roman Warm Period... even warmer in the Minoan Warm Period. Is there other evidence for this, like Roman remains under recent glaciers? Greenland buildings still buried in permafrost? well, yes, there is...

Oh no! Al Gore has portrayed a totally misleading picture!

Suddenly there opened up a cascade of doubts over Al Gore's claims of scientific consensus over global warming, and the "hockey stick" graph that he used in An Inconvenient Truth (AIT). Al Gore maintained that CO2 is driving temperature change now, and he neatly implied that the geological records showed that CO2 has always driven temperature changes. In fact, the records show that CO2 lags behind big temperature changes by around 800 years - but on a geological time scale, this lag is so small that you don't see it unless you look close. See also short video.

Gore made claims of "extreme conditions" - serious sea level rise, serious droughts here, serious floods there, more tornadoes, more serious hurricanes like Katrina, glaciers melting fast, ice-sheets cracking up, the Gulf Stream shutting down, heatwaves killing people ...and other "plagues"... (tropical diseases spreading, lakes drying out, polar bears dying out) already happening and likely to getting worse, ...as a result of global warming. He calls carbon dioxide a pollutant. I discovered that...

... every single claim of An Inconvenient Truth can be refuted as cherrypicking, false, or otherwise critically misleading, as has been shown particularly well by "35 Errors in AIT" by Lord Monckton, "Falsehoods in Gore's AIT" by William Johnson, "Unmasking AIT" by William Kininmonth, and "Convenient Fibs" by Prof. Rossiter. Here was weighty, informed evidence on all counts against Al Gore, that I could not refute - however much I might try. Suddenly - there was a mass of evidence that contradicts every single claim for Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW).

The Emperor's New Clothes

Everywhere I now looked, I was seeing the evidence differently. How could I have been so mistaken before? Was I really that mistaken? How could Al Gore be so mistaken? How could he have slipped through the checks and balances of Science, if he really was that misleading or misled? How could so many worthy scientists be so mistaken? Perhaps, if I looked harder, I'd find that science did have answers after all? For a while I bounced uncomfortably from one side to the other as challenge after challenge appeared. AGW? Yes!! No!! Yes!! No!! Every time I dug deeper, I found bad science, and more and more proof of no AGW. But what does this say about those who have promoted an empty, misleading, expensive science where the prime evidence disappears in every direction? Could scientists say they had been deceived or pressured? Did any experience a "Damascus" awakening? How was I going to avoid being trashed and ignored as just another skeptic shill of "big oil", another gullible newcomer, another dangerous heretic who cannot deal with the real science? But I'm not alone - I found articles like "how can so many be so wrong?" and "discrimination & job loss" and "confessions of an ex-IPCC reviewer" and "alarmist tactics & funding" and "Wikipedia disinformation" and "I devoted six years to carbon accounting" and "The Green Inquisition" and saddest of all "The Lynching of CO2 - the Innocent Source of Life".

Many scientists started out believing there was a serious greenhouse warming effect from rising CO2 levels, and that the increase in CO2 levels was due to our emissions. There seemed to be nothing else that could have caused such dramatic recent temperature rises; nothing but us that could have caused CO2 levels to rise. But many scientists are doing U-turns like I did, when they see evidence that doesn't fit CO2 as driver of temperature. CORRELATION DOES NOT PROVE CAUSATION OR EVEN CONNECTION.

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Let's look at the science and evidence for ourselves...

Peek at the skeptics' issues that Skeptical Science has rebutted: a blog with reasonably courteous debate, unlike many AGW blogs where ad hominem abounds and anti-AGW's get excluded. But... peek at Climate Skeptic which has rebutted all of New Scientist's rebuttals of skeptics' issues...

Temperature (surface, troposphere, stratosphere, Arctic, and Antarctica)

Below left is a map of surface temperature anomalies. Land temperatures fluctuate more than sea temperatures. Anomaly signifies a temperature different from "normal"; thus the red areas on Antarctica only indicate some lessening of the cold; they do not indicate warmth; moreover, most of Antarctica has cooled. H'mmmm...

Below centre, for approximately the same period, are temperature anomalies for the troposphere (region of clouds) and lower stratosphere (above the clouds). Unlike the surface temperature anomalies picture, the troposphere shows a balance between warming and cooling, while the lower stratosphere has been cooling a lot. Note the strongly cooler areas over Antarctica. Here is a good example of the difficulties of interpreting data. People confuse temperatures taken at the surface with data from higher altitudes. Place, height, and time span, can be critical.

Polar temperature anomalies Polar data over the last 27 years has been collected by NOAA satellites [47]. Both polar regions have many important anomalies we need to understand, beyond the media hype - I've now done a page on polar issues. Antarctica: overall, this huge continent has cooled, unlike the rest of the world, and its icecap has grown. The warming spots may be due to volcanic activity. The highest anomaly in Antarctica is around the Antarctic Peninsula and Ross Ice Shelf, which is where the well-publicised melting occurred. There may be a very good reason why Antarctica cooled as the rest of the planet warmed - Antarctica's behaviour is strong evidence for Svensmark. The Arctic is different again. Its sea ice has always been subject to huge fluctuations, and the media claims of "unprecedented!" situations are all untrue. The only "unprecedented" factor is the satellite temperature records we have kept since 1979. Anecdotes and history and earlier science from Greenland, Alaska, and northern Canada should not be dismissed. Used rightly, polar evidence can help us.

IPCC dogma trumps the evidence of Science

Sir John Houghton, first co-chair of the IPCC, said, “Unless we announce disasters no one will listen” and “The impacts of global warming are like a weapon of mass destruction”. He claimed that it kills more people than terrorism. The IPCC role was supposedly to “assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.” But the scientific reports were edited, and IPCC made the Summary for Policymakers, published before the science, the most important part of their reports.

Ben Santer rewrote the principal conclusions of the IPCC's 1995 report:-

• Where it had once said there was no discernible human influence on climate, it was rewritten to say there was now a discernible influence. This was done without reference back to the scientists who had originally submitted their final draft reaching precisely the opposite conclusion.

IPCC 2007 says:-

• Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global average sea level.
• ... Carbon dioxide (CO2) is the most important anthropogenic GHG. Its annual emissions grew by about 80% between 1970 and 2004.
• ... Most of the observed increase in globally-averaged temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic GHG concentrations. It is likely there has been significant anthropogenic warming over the past 50 years averaged over each continent (except Antarctica).

and now we hear in the media that "nearly all climate scientists would agree with three propositions":-

• First, the climate is in a warming trend.
• Second, that most of this warming trend is down to human emissions of greenhouse gases.
• And third, that if emissions continue to rise then the result will be continued warming which will become damaging to human society.

But

• "nearly all scientists" seems misleading - (a) what about 31,000 scientist who signed the Oregon Petition (b) there are stories here, and elsewhere, of suppression of evidence contradicting "manmade global warming" by threatening funding withdrawal, etc, where scientists remain silent.
• "First", (a) the warming trend was only 1970-2000;
• (b) we need to exclude urban heat island effect and there is evidence that UHI has doubled apparent warming.
• "Second", (a) temperature has levelled off and may have started to fall, but CO2 has continued to rise steadily;
• (b) CO2 rise fits sea surface temperature rise far better than it fits the rising curve of our emissions.
• (c) we appear to have long ago reached the saturation level of the CO2 greenhouse effect.
• (d) The Sun's output has been higher than it has been for centuries. The CUMULATIVE solar influence, both radiant and magnetic, could explain why temperature rise continued even after solar power lessened, and why, after a little longer, land temperatures are now falling. Sea change should be even slower.
• "Third" - if CO2 is innocent, this fear is meaningless.
• Monckton and Spencer and others show there is no evidence for "runaway tipping points".

And in fact

• If CO2 were driving temperature with a "runaway tipping point", surely the seas, containing 50 times the atmospheric CO2, would have exploded millions of years ago, since they would be one big source of fizzy water, releasing more CO2... causing more temperature rise... releasing more CO2...

Let's get the basic CO2 figures: let's list our CO2 emissions alongside the natural planetary CO2 flux. Seas have 50 times as much CO2 as is in the air. We can unpack the details later (under CO2 follows temp and Lynching of innocent CO2):

All the President's Men

I was now thoroughly disconcerted. I'd found evidence that upset everything - apparently. But all the evidence I'd found had supposedly been "dealt with" by New Scientist, Gristmill, Royal Society etc in their "answers to skeptics". With so much insistence that "manmade CO2 emissions are responsible for global warming", I could not be sure that I had found enough key evidence until I'd doubly checked both sides of each issue - prosecution AND defence, plus prosecution's answers to defence AND defence's answers to prosecution. This fourfold level of investigation was the real eye-opener.

• Prof. Noble tells of a "Corporate climate coup".
• Prof. Tim Ball tells "How UN structures were designed to prove human CO2 was causing global warming".
• Climate data analyst John McLean wrote Peer-review? What peer review? about the IPCC.
• Dr John Everett led work for the IPCC for which he shared the Nobel Peace Prize - but read his "Climate Change Facts".

What doubled my sense of horror was to realize the extent to which even scientists are following bad science without the ability, or realization of the need, to check the basics for themselves. They only have the science-lookalike pieces that seem to explain away all the skeptics' issues, thereby suggesting that skeptics must simply be in denial and in Exxon's pay pocket. We need a primer that non-scientists can enjoy yet scientists can check; that does not "divide and rule" - separate non-scientists from scientists trapped in a dozen specialist niches, unable even to check each other.

The worst realization was discovering "brownshirt" activists who have gotten into positions of power and try to suppress all dissenting views, often vilifying, in ways that are untrue, misleading, unjustified, the small number of skeptics who speak up. I never thought I would be thankful that the Great Global Warming Swindle could still challenge orthodoxy. It's not my cup of tea. But its director now has my admiration, for standing up to Bob Ward, ex-manager in "policy communication" for the Royal Society, who fought fanatically to try to suppress the Swindle DVD. Many examples contribute to an angry divisiveness, where there are faults on both sides. Dr Vincent Gray's insider's descriptions of the IPCC gave me much-needed evidence of an IPCC serially intent on devaluing natural causes of climate change. But he can write badly, with spurious polemics, science nearly as badly validated as the IPCC science, and religious issues, which make him an easy target for AGW repudiation, on grounds (often hidden and not-so-hidden ad homs) that his science is muddled, etc - while ignoring his vital valid points.

• Prof. Lindzen has published an important paper Climate Science: is it currently designed to answer questions? which talks about many incidents like this in a historical context.
• Prof. Akasofu, retired director of the International Arctic Research Center of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, has written the best well-informed, highly readable pieces, esp. Misleading Information on Global Warming.

How a false "science-lookalike" may have built up is an important study. I don't think anyone fully understands it as yet. See also Spencer Weart and Prof Segalstad, as well as Courtney. The concern started innocently. Then in the '70's Thatcher cut research funding except for pro-AGW research. I suspect this started the rot. Then in the '80's and '90's Big Business funded the attempt to "scientifically" deny AGW. But with growing levels of apocalyptic fears, the scales tipped again, and now all businesses give lip-service to AGW and will no longer fund skeptics; there are claims that AGW science gets effectively 2000 times the amount of funding that skeptics get, despite continuing AGW cries that skeptics get "oil funding!" But scientists are speaking up. And if we clear the tsunami of bad science, we may find that a tiny core of good science has been growing too.

The heart of the science controversy - IPCC and greenhouse gas effects
Skeptics say that the CO2 greenhouse effect is grossly overestimated, has already reached its maximum level like opaque water, and does not have any serious "amplifying" effects threatening to tip the planet into runaway heating. The main greenhouse gas is water vapour, but this is much harder to quantify or predict.

Schmidt still has no reply to Monckton's rebuttal of his "Cuckoo Science". This is of key importance. Had Schmidt been able to reply, he would not have passed up this opportunity to prove a key issue of the AGW thesis, and to silence opposition. Schmidt, in his July 2008 Real Climate "rebuttal" of Monckton's July 2008 APS paper, refers to Monckton's "previous attempt" as if his "Cuckoo Science" rebuttal had disproved and silenced Monckton, which we can see was not the case. Monckton thus stands vindicated.

Here is the heart of the IPCC greenhouse gas science - and how AGW science has handled it. It's easy to wave equations or computer models in someone's face to say they prove something. But it's not so easy to fool someone who is a scientist or statistician, or has an eye for fraud, or has actually studied Climate Science. If the greenhouse effects of CO2 have been calculated incorrectly and much higher than the IPCC /UN figures dictate, the whole "greenhouse" basis of Anthropogenic Global Warming comes unstuck - and the credibility of the IPCC - and the expensive possibility of "fixing" nonexistent problem by reducing CO2 emissions.

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Fresh air at last with Svensmark et al

It was hard work to extract myself from a mire of contradictory "science" claims, from colleagues I now believed were seriously mistaken if not knowingly fraudulent, and from a lot of self-doubt. But the polar bears are fine after all [9]. Eventually I was ready to investigate the work of Svensmark et al. Reading "The Chilling Stars" was like climbing a mountain and suddenly finding oneself emerging from rain, wind, and poor visibility, into clear, sunlit pastures above. This new science really fits the whole of earth history, and can explain all the many twentieth-century anomalies with a single factor. Simple and beautiful. Svensmark and others are showing, inch by inch, an unremitting correlation between the level of cosmic rays and the quantity of low cloud. By increasing Earth’s albedo, or whiteness, more solar energy lost by reflection. Black warms; white cools. Now over the last 100 years, the Sun’s magnetic flux increased by 230%, in addition to its sustaining a TSI “high” longer than it has done for 8000 years. The high TSI heated the huge ocean reservoir gradually, and the high solar magnetic flux lowered the level of cosmic rays. Less rays, less clouds, more warmth. Data fits theory pretty well, and all this suggests that after all, the Sun is a prime driver of temperature changes. New experiments are starting to give an idea of how the cloud-forming mechanism could work. Svensmark's material has been rubbished [15]. But in one instance that looks suspiciously typical, he was simply not allowed the normal space to defend his science when it was attacked by Laut in 2003, and Damon and Laut in 2004 [16]. Actually he has written very fair rebuttals of both Laut's papers. Svensmark responded to point out mistakes in Laut's science and fallacies in his rebuttals of Svensmark's science, and to point out his discourteous language. As I've seen many times now, discourteous and dishonest responses, and onesided reporting, can keep people away from good science. You have to read all sides' answers to each other. When I checked Svensmark's own website I found a serious bias in Wikipedia in that it mentions Laut, but omits to mention Svensmark's reply to Laut. Also, see [57] re Lockwood & Frohlich's dissent.

Here (above left) is a graph from Earthshine Projects, of recently-available measurements for the change in albedo. Again, the pattern correlates well with recent temperatures (rising with falling albedo worldwide, falling with rising albedo) and this correlation bears out the Antarctica anomaly.

Climate Science now makes sense! CO2 follows temperature, now as always!

Having got the bad science out of the way, the real science starts to look simple and beautiful. But - this is a young science!! A lot of "climate skeptics" have strong hunches about how the true science works, but the basics are not 100% proven (or they may be proven to a small number who can grasp the science involved, but are unclear to most of us), and much warm discussion is happening (join our Forum to help develop good ways to handle key points that are unresolved, if you like!). Ah, perhaps this is one reason why it has been possible for authoritarian "green" alarmists to come in with rogue "certainties" about "disasters ahead!" Jackboot-easy answers for people who dislike "not being sure"...

To me, this would seem to be the way climate works:

Taken from Josh Hall's post here (scroll down to 11.38am) [48], these graphs show a high "fit" for temperature-leading-CO2 but only a very low "fit" for CO2-leading-temp. These graphs are explained further here. Click on pics to see originals. Macrae describes the same proof. Below, centre, we see the extremely high correlation between sea surface temperature and CO2 level - independent of time - strongly suggesting that CO2 levels fluctuate globally with sea temperatures.

Temperatures correlate to the sun and oceans far better than to CO2 (Joe D'Aleo, below right). Dr Glassman shows the strong correlation between the solubility of CO2 and the CO2/temperature link, as shown in the Vostok ice core data - as we would expect - and this too is irrespective of time.

Shaviv and Svensmark: High correlation between cosmic rays and cloud. See the varying correlations in the other graphs. The solar input is clearly significant, but modulated over time by the oceans. Lance Endersbee: such a high correlation between CO2 and SST suggests that SST must drive CO2 levels. But the stats are over a very short time frame. Original article here. (4) Put them all together for the best fit. (3) Correlation with the ocean currents is even better. (2) TSI (Total Solar Irradiance) fits much better and explains the mid-century dip. (1) CO2 has a low "fit" with a century of temp records.

Paleo records show that CO2 lags about 800 years behind temperature rise and fall in recent Ice Age change times; this seems to fit the 800-odd years cited as the long thermohaline ocean cycle. Revisit the video. At times CO2 levels have been far, far higher than today; some of those times have been ice ages.

Segalstad, Jaworowski, Glassman and Anthoni - the lynching of innocent CO2

There appears to be no observed "feedback loop" of greenhouse effects amplified by CO2 increase. On the contrary, as CO2 rose, water vapour fell (below left). Yet water vapour is a far more powerful greenhouse gas, and this change more than balances any possible GHG effect due to CO2. And, although at near-maximum greenhouse effect already (below right), CO2's effects as a greenhouse gas have been grossly overestimated by IPCC - see Monckton demonstrating IPCC's serial fudging of GHG science and Segalstadt demonstrating serial falsification of CO2 science.

IPCC arranged their presentations to fit an alarm picture. But here are the facts, and an attempt to elucidate the science:

We are emitting 3-4ppm (6-8Gt) carbon dioxide each year, perhaps 2% of the total annual CO2 flux. CO2 levels have been rising at around 1.5ppm, or 3Gt p.a. since Keeling's records started in 1952 CO2 levels are around 380ppm (=750Gt) now. The total annual CO2 flux is huge but just how big? - maybe 220 Gt p.a. (Holmen 2000), maybe 150 Gt p.a. (IPCC SAR) (or more if one includes leaf water and rain water?) - between one third and one fifth of the total atmospheric CO2 - or more. Henry's Law says that CO2 is in balance between the atmosphere and the oceans in approx. ratio 1: 50 This applies to our emissions although the average ocean mixing rate may be of uncertain speed - only one fiftieth could remain longterm in the air. One of many places where the real science may be known to just a few; or may not be known as yet for certain - but such science brings little funds and may be difficult to grasp... Since the measured CO2 rise of 1.5ppm p.a. is so much higher than the 0.035ppm p.a. that would ultimately remain airborne from human emissions, this surely alerts us to look for a second cause of CO2 rise. In my humble opinion, it is mostly coincidence that the rising CO2 (from 1952) is of a similar pattern to our emissions rise, smaller, and with a high "smoothed" correlation - the atmospheric rise averages out at 46% the emissions rise. Correlation does not prove causation; but to explore the significance of this correlation, read our science workshop page & join the forum. AGW said "We KNOW we have caused the CO2 rise." They butchered good science to fit this, inventing a "buffer effect" to overrule Henry's Law. If this were real, we could never have fizzy drinks! This is what happens when one starts down the slippery path of unchecked fantasies: to "prove" their bad science, IPCC had to invent more bad science: they now need CO2 to remain in the air for 50-200 years, which we can see, from the size of the annual flux, is ridiculous. Segalstad lists 35 studies based on 6 different factors, which give lifetimes of between 2 and 12 years. AGW also ignored the science showing that CO2 greenhouse effects are logarithmic and levelling off. AGW - and "townies" behind computers - tend to forget the massive area and volume of the oceans that outgasses vast quantities of CO2 with the slightest temperature change - equivalent to 150ppm for 1ºC temp rise at average sea surface temp. The Greenpeace CO2 cycle ignores the oceans! AGW do not include the "blotting-paper" effect of the biosphere: increased CO2 levels enable vegetation to grow more, usefully and naturally sequestering extra CO2, as the biosphere has always done in response to millions of years of erupting volcanoes. AGW also fails to consider the subtle oceanic balance, where more ocean CO2 enables more CaCO3 to be precipitated into corals and mollusc shells. IPCC has constructed a false dogma, extending the work of Callendar (1949) Bolin & Eriksson (1959) and Siegenthaler & Oeschger (1987) who were already building up a false thesis of global warming effects through our CO2 emissions, while ignoring the size of the oceans, Henry's Law, GHG saturation, and the biosphere of both land plants and sea animals.

See also my CO2 flux page - where we are gradually resolving basic CO2 science issues. For current CO2 skeptics' info, see CO2 Sceptics. Taking the oceans as the driver of CO2 levels, Dr Glassman relates the solubility of CO2 to temperature, as shown in Vostok ice core records, and to atmospheric pressure. Dr Floor Anthoni explains the "atmospheric pipe effect" whereby the level of CO2 works in practice like pressure on vegetation to grow more. Prof Segalstad describes the incremental development of bad science. Prof Jaworowski shows another part of the fraud: the ice records used for recent CO2 levels are known not to be reliable proxies. Then to add insult to injury, the unnaturally depressed ice records were spliced onto Keeling's CO2 records - by losing 83 years.

More scare stories and bad evidence we can almost certainly reject:

• Dangerous ocean acidification is - a scare story - see here and here.
• Dangerous sea rise levels is another scare story. Sea levels have been rising, but only by the tiny amount that corresponds to thermal expansion, and even this may have stopped.
• The big global ice sheets, whose melting would raise sea levels, are not melting - quite the opposite. But local effects in Greenland and the Antarctic peninsula are often taken to represent global patterns, and the effects of ocean currents and volcanic activity in these areas have been ignored or forgotten.
• CO2 does not have an amplifying effect on temperature rise: this is just bluster for which there is no evidence.
• Aerosols cause local effects eg smog; the true global effects are far less certain.
• Greenhouse gases: the above graph shows HOH more than balancing CO2. Despite our knowledge of the absorption spectra that cause greenhouse effects in closed experimental situations, our understanding of the total effect in the atmosphere is still not good enough to claim any clear knowledge. Methane is doing its own thing; there is serious evidence casting doubt on the CFC link to the ozone hole; etc
• Serial distortion of data has happened, or is seriously suspected, concerning the greenhouse-gas maths, the "hockey stick" of 1000 years' global temperatures, the CO2 ice core records (see below)...and...
• ... the Urban Heat Island effect. This causes local heating and serious distortion of temperature records. Skeptics claim - with considerable evidence - that it has not been anything like adequately compensated for.

Let's look at the most well-known flaw trail...

The strange story of the missing Medieval Warm Period

IPCC 1996 had this picture [below, upper left] showing the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). The MWP is well-known to historians as well as to scientists.

Anthropologists and archaeologists are aware of the MWP from Viking settlements in Greenland. They know from things like places inhabited, plants cultivated. The Schnidejoch pass in Switzerland [Svensmark & Calder, The Chilling Stars] was used regularly in Roman and in Medieval times; the pass has only just reopened. But AGW devalues "anecdotal" and historical evidence in favour of "proxy" temp. measurements. In 1998 a study by Huang et al was published of over 6,000 borehole records of the last 20,000 years, from which temperature proxies were read. Here is the last millennium [lower left], strikingly similar to the IPCC 1996 graph. The world experienced a medieval warm period that appears to dwarf recent changes.

CO2 Science has studied many people's work on the MWP. Craig Loehle wrote a paper showing all the available studies that show the MWP, and another paper that summarizes over 20 papers that challenge the use of tree-ring measurements for proxy temperature measurement. Tree-ring proxies were used to produce the original hockey stick - but these tend not to show the MWP - perhaps because they measure moisture not temperature. For all other proxies (that do not have other interference factors) tend to show the MWP. Monckton lists 19 recent studies that clearly show the MWP. The Sargasso Sea [below left] demonstrates a MWP and a Roman warm period that were both warmer than now; this, and the centre map of locations of MWP studies, show the MWP as global and not just local to Europe.

There is evidence that IPCC wanted to erase the Medieval Warm Period from visibility... ..to show a sudden, never-before-seen temperature rise which might have horror effects... floods... droughts... tornadoes... IPCC 2001 (Third Assessment Report) replaced the IPCC 1996 graph (showing the MWP) with the "hockey stick" which tidily removes the MWP, and visually emphasises "we must have caused recent global warming" - "the likes of which never happened before". Iain Stewart (BBC) says that skeptics want the MWP restored, because they do not want to face the truth about current manmade dangers. H'mmm....

See the visual prominence the Hockey Stick was given. It was reproduced six times altogether through the IPCC report. Yet the independent reports that show the MWP far outnumber and outweigh the work by Mann and a small coterie who replicate a limited and suspect range of data. Monckton writes "The UN says the [hockey stick] graph is not important. It is. Scores of scientific papers show that the mediaeval warm period was real, global and up to 3ºC warmer than now." The Hockey Stick, widely circulated by the UN, amplified in people’s minds by Al Gore’s visually hypnotic film, has overlaid traditional and well-proven knowledge with propaganda, that there never was a significant Medieval Warm Period. Funny thing is, Al Gore himself mentions the Medieval Warm Period in his 1992 book Earth in the Balance... How unfortunate that he forgot to mention the other MWP experts in his film, or any of the plentiful evidence of temperatures higher in the past than today... By my understanding of the term, this is fraudulent misrepresentation.

McIntyre and McKitrick broke the "hockey stick" - the fraudulent temperature graph

Canadian Steve McIntyre became suspicious of the IPCC 2001 graph where the Medieval Warm Period had disappeared. He is a statistician who was involved with the IPCC process. McIntyre requested the data from Mann so that he could check the results for himself.

He was blocked, again and again, and in the end used the Freedom of Information Act to obtain material. It became apparent that one proxy record, that of bristlecone pine, had been given prominence 390 times the weighting of the rest - because it had the key data that could be shaped into a hockey-stick [above right]. Some of the other data had simply been buried in a file marked "censored". Read Ross McKitrick's paper of the extraordinary story. Longer histories of the malfeasance used to enable the hockey stick to get published and accepted, are told by Bishop Hill and Monckton of Brenchley.

Even before Al Gore filmed An Inconvenient Truth after Katrina in 2006, McIntyre & McKitrick had published refutations of the hockey stick, in 2003 and 2005. Their work was subsequently supported by the Wegman report (2006) for the US House of Representatives, and by a report of the National Academy of Sciences in the US. Dr. Wegman is one of the world's most eminent statisticians; his report found that the graph had “a validation skill not significantly different from zero”. But unfortunately, bad MSM reporting of the NAS report has given the impression that NAS approved the hockey stick.

One of the longterm thermometer records that exists [above right], Central England temperatures from 1611 to now, shows no "hockey stick" rise for the whole twentieth century - there is only a little, very recent temperature rise.

Recent work by Jeff Id [above left] is a superb demolition of the validity of the statistical process invoked in using proxies by selection ... the past is automatically diminished in comparison with the present... making a hockey stick... Notice the family resemblance to both the original Hockey Stick and the Luminous Spaghetti graph - subdued MWP, slowly dipping, then kick up to a current high - a resemblance not shared with a single one of Monckton's 19 studies and clearly not with Loehle's 18 studies (see cumulative graph above).

Steve McIntyre now runs Climate Audit which deservedly won the 2007 award for Best Science Blog. It provides crucial audits of more and more bad IPCC statistics and associated bad practice, and shows real science at work. But Steve cannot get stuff peer-reviewed or published in the old, formal sense; he has become an embarrassment to the establishment.

IPCC 2007 abandoned the original hockey stick in favour of - another hockey stick. Pressure had been put on HS authors Mann et al, by McIntyre and McKitrick. The IPCC 2007 "spaghetti" graph [below left] looks quite different - but actually it's virtually the same hockey-stick dressed up with only minor concessions... Look: (a) the data is from a limited set, procured by only a limited circle including the original Hockey Stick authors; (b) the MWP is still devalued way below what so much other evidence suggests, (c) the graph still uses the same unholy splice of data – thermometer for the twentieth century and questionable proxies for earlier, without proper checks on the reliability of the proxies.

Now IPCC (via Mann et al) has constructed another Hockey Stick [some prelim. auditing work - below right]. Despite no tree-ring temp. proxies, the latest model bears every sign of the original flaws: cherrypicking proxies that are already suspect... the bad maths that automatically produces a hockey stick... And to add insult to injury, BBC has been parading the original hockey stick as if it had never been discredited by top statistician Wegman (Iain Stewart, Climate Wars).