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FRAUDS, SERIOUS FRAUDS, AND<br />
IPCC ASSESSMENT REPORTS<br />
by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley<br />
SPPI ORIGINAL PAPER ♦ September 18, 2013
FRAUDS, SERIOUS FRAUDS, AND IPCC ASSESSMENT REPORTS<br />
by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley | September 18, 2013<br />
In the 19 th century, British Prime Ministers used to say there were “lies, damned lies, and<br />
statistics”. In the 21 st century, we may say there are <strong>frauds</strong>, serious <strong>frauds</strong>, and IPCC<br />
Assessment Reports.<br />
Recall, for instance, the notorious graph in the Fourth Assessment Report that falsely indicated<br />
that the rate of global warming is accelerating and we are to blame. Using the same statistical<br />
dodge, one can show that a sine-wave has a rising trend.<br />
In the 21 st century, we may say there are <strong>frauds</strong>, serious <strong>frauds</strong>,<br />
and IPCC Assessment Reports.<br />
In the Fifth Assessment Report, the IPCC still cannot bring itself to behave. My expert review of<br />
an earlier draft of that report opened with these words:<br />
“To restore some link between IPCC reports and observed reality, the report must address –<br />
but does not at present address – the now-pressing question why the key prediction of<br />
warming in earlier IPCC reports have proven to be significant exaggerations. The IPCC’s<br />
credibility has already been damaged by its premature adoption and subsequent hasty<br />
abandonment of the now-discredited “hockey-stick” graph as its logo; by its rewriting its<br />
Second Assessment Report after submission of the scientists’ final draft, to state the<br />
opposite of their finding that no discernible human influence on climate is detectable; by its<br />
declaration that all Himalayan ice would be gone in 25 years; and by its use of a dishonest<br />
statistical technique in 2007 falsely to suggest that the rate of global warming is<br />
accelerating. But the central damage to its credibility arises from the absence of anything<br />
like the warming it had predicted.”<br />
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The IPCC have indeed addressed The Pause. But they have addressed it by using statistical<br />
prestidigitation to air-brush it out. The very first graphs the reader of the Summary for<br />
Policymakers will see are in Figure SPM.1, which consists of three panels. Each of these panels<br />
exploits bogus statistical techniques to vanish the pause.<br />
Here is what They did and how They did it.<br />
The first of the three panels shows the global instrumental surface temperature record since<br />
1850:<br />
And what is wrong with that? It looks innocuous enough, but a mathematician would take one<br />
look at it and sniff. He would see two things obviously wrong with drawing any conclusion<br />
about dangerously-rising 20 th -century temperatures from this graph.<br />
First, there is the aspect-ratio dodge. For the x axis is in years and the y axis is in Celsius degrees<br />
of temperature change. One can choose any aspect ratio one wants. To make 20 th -century<br />
global warming look worse, just stretch the graph northwards.<br />
Not all climate extremists know that. In a debate with me on Roy Green’s radio show in Canada<br />
a few years ago, one of the pointy-heads at TheSmugBlog asked the audience, with that earnest<br />
desperation in his voice that is mandatory, “But don’t you see how serious it is that global<br />
temperatures are rising at an angle of 45 degrees?”<br />
I had to explain as gently as I could, that degrees of arc and degrees of temperature change are<br />
clean different things.<br />
All around the world the record-keepers have been rewriting the temperatures<br />
in the early 20 th century to push them downward, so as to make the rate of<br />
warming over the century seem a great deal steeper than it was.<br />
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But it is Dick Lindzen, whose vast experience and profound knowledge allows him to put the<br />
climate scare into perspective as no other can, who has best illustrated the insignificance of<br />
20 th -century global warming.<br />
His local paper, the Boston Globe, prints the previous month’s temperature movements in the<br />
city. He has superimposed on that record an orange band that shows the entire warming of<br />
0.75 C° over the 20 th century.<br />
Even allowing for the fact that a global annual average will change less than a regional monthly<br />
one, it is difficult to look at Dick Lindzen’s orange band and draw the conclusion that 20 th<br />
century global warming was alarmingly beyond the bounds of natural variability.<br />
The second statistical dodge in the IPCC’s first panel is the error-bars dodge. If you look<br />
carefully at the error-bars in the IPCC’s graph, you will see that they are absent. Let us remedy<br />
that absence:<br />
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Even today, the combined measurement, coverage, and bias uncertainties in the global<br />
terrestrial data are ±0.15 C°. The uncertainties were far larger in the 19 th century. Notice also<br />
how much less drastic and exciting the graph looks once the 2 σ uncertainty bounds are<br />
plotted.<br />
There is a third dodge that is not directly evident from looking at the graph itself. All around the<br />
world the record-keepers have been rewriting the temperatures in the early 20 th century to<br />
push them downward, so as to make the rate of warming over the century seem a great deal<br />
steeper than it was. Here, for instance, is New Zealand:<br />
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And Darwin Airport, Australia:<br />
And the U.S. Historical Climate Network, before and after adjustment (this example and the<br />
next two are thanks to the vigilant Steven Goddard):<br />
And the GISS record at Reykjavik, Iceland, before (left) and after adjustment (right):<br />
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And Santa Rosa, CA, this time with the trend-line added:<br />
The effect of all these tamperings is to make it look as though there was more global warming<br />
in the 20 th century than there was. Fortunately, there is not so much scope for the compilers of<br />
the terrestrial temperature records to tamper with what has happened since 1979, because the<br />
watching satellites now provide an independent record of global temperature change.<br />
So to the second of the three mendacious panels in Figure SPM.1:<br />
This graph is an illustration of a meme that has become a favorite with the apologists for<br />
Apocalypse: the most recent decade was warmer than earlier decades, so global warming is still<br />
getting worse (for the theology of the New Religion, standing common sense on its head, is that<br />
warmer weather is worse than cooler).<br />
The effect of all these tamperings is to make it look as though there was<br />
more global warming in the 20 th century than there was … So this<br />
statistical dodge neatly erases the past 12 years 8 months of the Pause.<br />
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The priceless advantage of taking decadal averages, if one wants to magic the Pause away, is<br />
that it wipes out the entire trend of the most recent decade. One can dock off a further two<br />
years if, as here, one uses the decades 1991-2000, 2001-2010 etc., rather than 1993-2002,<br />
2003-2012 etc. Finally, using decades docks off all the months of the current year. So this<br />
statistical dodge neatly erases the past 12 years 8 months of the Pause.<br />
And, by what is perhaps more than a coincidence, the length of the Pause, taken as the longest<br />
period exhibiting a zero least-squares linear-regression trend on the mean of the monthly<br />
global mean surface temperature anomalies on the three terrestrial datasets, is – er – precisely<br />
12 years 8 months.<br />
There is another and more subtle dodge here. As we saw in the earlier graph of the<br />
uncertainties in the HadCRUt4 global temperature dataset, the error bars narrow toward the<br />
present. The way the IPCC has presented the decadal blocks on the graph exploits this to make<br />
it seem that the blocks in the 1970s, 80s, 90s, and noughties are much further apart than those<br />
in the 1910s, 20s, 30s, and 40s, implying without quite saying so that the rate of warming over<br />
the four most recent decades on the graph was significantly greater than the warming earlier in<br />
the 20 th century.<br />
Dick Lindzen, however, uses a graph that shows how little difference there is between the<br />
earlier and later periods of warming, even though it was only in the later period that we could<br />
have exercised much influence.<br />
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One panel shows the global temperature anomalies from 1895-1946. The other shows the<br />
anomalies from 1957-2008. Both cover 52 years. Both are plotted to an identical scale. Dick<br />
Lindzen asks his audiences whether they can tell which panel covers which period. It is not at all<br />
easy to tell.<br />
Which brings us to the third panel. Here, the dodge is one of the newest in the arsenal of<br />
statistical shiftinesses on which the IPCC draws with such disfiguring frequency and relish. It is<br />
the use of colors, and bright ones at that, to try to suggest that the mild and beneficial global<br />
warming of the 20 th century was grievous and alarmingly damaging.<br />
And here the IPCC will find that it has made a mistake. Previously it has chiefly used bright<br />
colors in the red scale to indicate predictions of future planetary overheating. However, most<br />
people, on looking about them, will see remarkably little change as a result of 100 years’<br />
warming. The trees are greener; the deserts have shrunk by quite a bit (the Sahara by 300,000<br />
sq. km in 30 years); sea level is 8 inches higher; and that’s it.<br />
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Recoloring the graph in neutral tones would have been more scientifically adult:<br />
Does the Earth really look that much different as a result of 0.7 C° global warming over 100<br />
years? Not really. Let us end with a God’s-eye view of the planet He has given us. Really, our<br />
stewardship has not left it in too much of a mess.<br />
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Yet.<br />
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