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Tortured Kyoto Data

A new study inadvertently exposes global-warming hysteria.

By Patrick J. Michaels, senior fellow in environmental studies at the Cato Institute, & author of The Satanic Gases

April 23, 2001 8:55 a.m. ecent reports were all a-twitter with the news: The ocean is warming; the warming is consistent with a bunch of climate models; and this proves what a lout George Bush is on global warming. The first claim is true; the second is mainly a result of data manipulation. And the scientific paper that presented this news actually shows that Bush did the right thing on global warming by ditching the Kyoto Protocol.

The paper was written by Sydney Levitus and published in Science on April 13th. I read Levitus's paper and I would hope that everyone else who wrote a news story about it did, too. But it is painfully apparent that either they didn't, or, if they did, they didn't read very carefully.

Levitus has been studying historical records of temperatures in the top 10,000 feet of the ocean. He finds a net rise in the temperature of this layer of approximately 0.11ºC for his study period, 1955-96.

But where the water meets the atmosphere — in the top 1,000 feet — he finds nothing like the temperature changes that should have occurred, at least according to his computer models of human influence on the atmosphere. Instead, this portion of the ocean data, as well as other records of the global climate, reveals an abrupt warming in temperature in 1976-77 that climatologists call "the great Pacific climate shift."

Notably, there is no warming between 1955 (the beginning of Levitus's history) and 1976, or from 1977 through 1996 (the end of Levitus's history). The same pattern can be found in concurrent weather-balloon histories, this time in the layer from 5,000 to 30,000 feet above sea level. They may also be found in chemical analyses of the makeup of Pacific corals.

In his paper, Levitus suggests a strong correlation between the temperature history in the deep-ocean (below 10,000 feet) data and predicted warming from myriad climate models. That is, climate models containing not only the warming from human greenhouse emissions, but also a highly uncertain cooling from concurrent dusty emissions, the inconstancy of the sun, and cooling from volcanoes. The correlation is so striking, Federal climatologist Tim Barnett told the Washington Post that, "We don't have to do any fancy statistics to beat it out of the data."

Really? Read the third paragraph of Levitus's paper: "The ocean heat content curve is based on analyses of 5-year running composites of the historical ocean data." In other words, succeeding five-year averages of the raw data were used, rather than the original stuff, which is dominated by the inexplicable 1976-77 shift. The dramatic shift is left out of the analysis. Barnett's right, sort of. You don't have to "beat" the right signal out of the data if you massage it in instead.

For fun, we decided to treat the shallow-ocean (1,000 foot) data, which weren't manipulated to begin with, to the same averaging. Sure enough, the 1976-77 shift disappears and the resultant figures look just like the deep-ocean (10,000 foot) data, which resembles the climate models. Proof again that if you torture the data, it will confess to whatever you want.

Every reader should and must ask why it was necessary for us to treat the data, and why the peer-reviewers at Science either didn't notice this or thought it was okay, or — worst of all — told the editor, who ignored their negative review. The truth is likely some combination of these three things.

So the real signal in the real data is still the 1976-77 shift.

As noted above, there is no statistically significant warming trend on either side of this blip. How can a climate model explain this? The sun didn't suddenly get brighter in 1976. And the three big volcanic eruptions that dominate this study period occurred in 1963 (Mt. Agung), 1982 (El Chichon), and 1991 (Mt. Pinatubo); they could not have orchestrated a step-change in temperature in one year. Here's a better explanation: The match between the ocean history and the climate models results from human influence on the data rather than human influence on the atmosphere.

So what's the statistical crime here? About 0.11º C of ocean warming in 40 years! That's 0.027ºC per decade, which is several times lower than the initial estimates for ocean warming that catapulted this issue onto the front burner in the first place. The bottom line is that warming over the next 100 years is going to be negligible. That fact can be gleaned from another model noted in the very same Science paper, which does not have volcanoes and assumes the sun is constant. It gives an ocean-warming rate that corresponds to about 0.6ºC in the next 100 years, which translates to a total global warming only of around 1.4ºC. This is far from the 5.8ºC making the newspapers these days.

All of this proves that Bush was right to bomb the Kyoto Protocol. Everyone knew Kyoto wouldn't do anything about warming, and that it would cost a fortune. Now, as demonstrated, if inadvertently, in this new Science paper, it wasn't much of a problem anyway. Global warming is something we will adapt to as our technology evolves in concert with our need for larger amounts of energy produced in an economical fashion.

-- Anonymous, April 23, 2001

Answers

Bush may not be wrong to reject Kyoto

In making the claim that the 20th century has been the warmest in the past 1,000 years, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's summary combines data sets that are like apples and oranges. Data derived from tree rings that indicate a stable climate from 1000 to 1900 are added to surface-based thermometer data collected for the 20th century. Such data masquerading as conclusive evidence of dramatic warming over the current century would be rejected in a high- school statistics class.

Using tree rings to garner information about past temperature variations ignores other conditions that might affect growing seasons. Rainfall and atmospheric carbon-dioxide concentrations affect tree growth as much as temperature does. And the sample is biased since most of the data come from Northern Hemisphere countries and from urban "heat islands" or airports.

These continued controversies have kept the IPCC from ratifying and releasing a final report. As it is, most of the documents released to date conatin many caveats to the cataclysmic global-warming scenario that have escaped those who seem to rely upon executive summaries or selective reading.

http://www.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/geted.pl5?eo20010423a2.htm

-- Anonymous, April 23, 2001


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