Inconvenient Truth One

There was acute embarrassment at NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) following the exposure of a serious flaw in its record of US surface temperatures since 1880. The error was so glaring that on 7th August 2007 GISS had to post revised figures which show instead of temperatures reaching their highest level in the past decade that the hottest year of the 20th century was not 1998 but 1934. Of the ten warmest years since 1880 it turns out that four were in the 1930s and only three in the past decade.

According to Christopher Booker writing in the Sunday Telegraph on Sunday 19th August 2007, the significance of this is that the head of GISS is James Hansen the inventor of global warming and for the past 20 years, Al 'Inconvenient Truth' Gore's closest scientific ally in his promotion of the global warming scare. The revised figures relate only to temperatures in North America but the fact that the pre-eminent scientific champion of the orthodoxy has been promoting erroneous data has considerable implications.

The expert responsible for spotting GISS's error was Stephen McIntyre, a Canadian computer analyst who four years ago scored the greatest coup in the history of this debate by demolishing the notorious hockey stick - the graph which purported to show temperatures flat-lining for centuries until they suddenly began an exponential rise in the late 20th century was produced by concealing data for the Medieval Warm Period recognised by all historians of the period. The hockey stick was adopted as the supreme icon of the global warming lobby led by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which reproduced it no fewer than five times in its 2001 sexed-up report.

Since McIntyre exposed the mass of basic computer errors on which it was based, the IPCC in its most recent dodgy dossier quietly dropped it. The new GISS graph, conceding that the last decade may not have seen the hottest years of the past century, follows the latest satellite figures from the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) showing that in recent years global temperatures have not continued to rise (as orthodox CO2 warming theory would suggest) but have flattened out at a level significantly lower than in 1998.

Inconvenient Truth Two

Officials in the UK Department for Business, Enterprise & Regulatory Reform briefed ministers on how to explain to the EU's energy commissioner Andris Piebalgs that the UK will not be able to comply with a European Council decision in March 2007 that the EU must derive 20 percent of its energy from renewable sources by 2020.

The officials calculated that this could cost UK electricity users alone an additional 22 billion pounds a year equivalent to two thousand pounds per household. This is two percent of GDP and double Sir Nicholas Stern's estimate for the entire cost of halting global warming.

Whitehall officials advised the Government that the target was not remotely achievable anyway and, taking a leaf out of the Yes Minister Handbook, recommended ministers to start being economical with the actualite. So expect nuclear power to become sustainable (as well as carbon-lite) again. Germany meanwhile would like to move the target up seven percentage points to 27 percent.

Inconvenient Truth Three

Cuts in greenhouse gas emissions on the scale proposed by Al Gore might possibly save $12 trillion but their cost would be $34 trillion.
Professor William Nordhaus of Yale - the world's leading expert on the financial costs of tackling global warming.

Then there are the inconvenient supplementaries as to who pick up the costs and the benefits. Who? Whom?

more from Shepherd on Climate