frauds

FRAUDS, SERIOUS FRAUDS, AND
IPCC ASSESSMENT REPORTS
by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
SPPI ORIGINAL PAPER ♦ September 18, 2013

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