Earlier today I was forwarded an email about a climate study.  This was supposedly an excerpt:

Anyone who has read, say, one or more scientific papers know that this is not the usual language of academic papers.  The first line sounds more like a letter to Penthouse than a scientific paper (you know, the classic "I never thought something like this would happen to me, but last Saturday night…)  What caused me to delete the email (fortunately it was still in the trash so I could go back and find these quotes) was the line "findings in this paper could nt be more damaging to manmade global warming theory or the the thousands of climate scientists…"  No academic in his right mind would state his/her conclusions in this manner, and even if they did, not editor or advisor would let it slip by. 

The premise of the paper was apparently that something other than man (ie bacteria) was creating the CO2 that was causing global warming.  But that in fact does not really refute the core of man-made global warming theory.  The shakiest part of man-made global warming theory is that CO2 will really cause the dire temeprature rises that are often published (rather than much smaller increases on the order of 1C rather than 5C or more).  But the authors were accepting this part, and merely positing that something other than man was causing the CO2 rise.  But this makes no sense.   The 100 ppm rise of CO2 over the last 150 years may not be all due to man, but its pretty clear a lot of it is.  After all, if CO2 has risen from 280 to 380 ppm in the last 150 years, that is a trend that could only go back so far, unless there were such a thing as negative concentrations.

The rest gets even sillier:

We believe that academic intimidation of this kind contradicts the spirit of open enquiry in which scientific investigations should be conducted. We deplore the aggressive responses we encountered before our findings were published, and fear the reaction this paper might provoke. But dangerous as these findings are, we feel we have no choice but to publish.

That’s the kind of thing you post in your blog, not in the paper itself.   Climate does unfortunately see a lot of ad hominem attacks back and forth, but seldom in the academic papers themselves.

So I assumed that it was some ill-concieved hoax by a skeptic, though I could not really understand what point they were trying to make.  Positing such a thing, only to have it quickly shot down, could only hurt the skeptic position.  If a skeptic made the hoax, it was a stupid strategy.  The point is trying to bring clarity and real science back to a politicized scientific debate, and this just does the opposite.

I have therefore come to the conclusion that this hoax is likely the work of global warming catastrophists.  My guess is that they wanted to make a point that skeptics were no such thing — that skeptics would bite like a hungry bass at such a lure as long as it supported their position.  And certain folks in political circles did so, at least for a few hours.   My presumption is that if we had all trumpeted this fake study, then our judgement on other issues would get called into question.  My sense is that catastrophists have convinced themselves with their own propaganda that skeptics are all motivated by political and financial agendas.  But most skeptics are really interested in the science, and are motivated by the real fear that we are at the cusp of embarking on some really poor, near tragic, policy decisions.

Now, if you really want to have fun, create a similar hoax the other way, supporting catastrophic man-made global warming.  You will probably make the NBC Nightly News.  It would be fun to try something really nutty and see if people buy it, like saying the oceans will rise 20 feet in the next century… oops, its already been done.  Al Gore made that claim, among other truly absurd statements, in his movie An Inconvinient Trust, for which he not only made the NBC Nightly News but he also won an Oscar and a Nobel Prize. 

There is nothing unique about the following, but I include it as an example of the unbelieveable exaggerations that are being bandied about concerning climate.  I was doing some research on the Salton Sea for a post at Coyote Blog and ran accross this letter from the California Audobon Society.  It says, in part:

Although there is uncertainty about what the precise impacts will be, there is no longer legitimate scientific disagreement about the fact that the climate is changing and that those changes will accelerate over the next century.

One of the classic rhetorical tricks is to say "it cannot be denied that" followed by two statements.  The first statement will in fact be undeniable, setting up the reader to blindly accept the second, which is much more contentious.  In this case, there is indeed no doubt that Climate is changing.  Climate is always changing, else we would still have glaciers in Minnesota.  However, it is far, far from given that the changes will "accelerate" in the next century.  In fact, the relationship between CO2 and warming is in fact a diminishing return, making "acceleration" difficult in all but a looney universe dominated by positive feedbacks.

But the real whopper comes in the next paragraph:

According to recent analyses, California is projected to experience temperature increases of at least 4-8 degrees Fahrenheit (if global emissions are significantly curtailed) and more likely temperature increases of 9-18 degrees Fahrenheit (current emissions path) over the next centur

Really?  First absolutely impossible to reconcile 9-18 degree F with the approximately 1F (0.6C) warming we have seen in the last century.  CO2 rose 100ppm in the last century and produced 1F, but adding another 200ppm in the next century will produce 9-18F??  This implies an upward sloping curve that is exactly opposite of the relationship everyone agrees CO2 and warming have.  18F implies almost two degrees a decade, a huge number considering the warming over the last decade has been close to zero and no decade has had warming of more than about 0.3F.  Further, I am sure the Sierra Club found someone who actually produced such a study, but the IPCC "consensus", which I think is exaggerated, calls for only about 4-6F increases in the next century.  Five degrees F is probably bad enough, do they really have to outright exaggerate?

From Greenpeace:

Gosh, its an amazing coincidence that the steps proposed to curb CO2 (reduce oil use, demonize oil companies, limit growth, increase government interventions in free economies, limit global trade) exactly match the political goals held by many leading climate catastrophists long before greenhouse gas theory was even born.  But I am sure its all about the science.  When I hear a climate catastrophist promoting nuclear energy to replace coal in electricity generation (the one no-brainer technology substitution we have available to us to reduce CO2 production), that is a person I can respect for their intellectual integrity.  Of course, I almost never hear it.

By the way, Greenpeace should have a picture of John D. Rockefeller,the founder of Standard Oil of New Jersey (and predecesor of Exxon) on the wall of every one of its offices.  Mr. Rockefeller and Standard Oil, by making Kerosene cheap and universally available as a luminant, did more than Greenpeace will ever do to save the whales.

Update:  The chart itself is kind of funny when you think about it.  It implies that increased prices for gas and oil, which increase profits, would also increase global warming.  But in fact, exactly the opposite is true.  As prices have risen, Exxon has made higher profits but demand has been reduced.  In fact, Exxon really "promoted" global warming the most in the 1980’s and 1990’s when they were making miserable profits and oil prices were low.

This morning I was all fired up to write something petty, like "Al Gore now has made the same contributions to peace as have previous winners Yassir Arafat and Henry Kissinger."  Later, I considered a long and drawn out post on the inaccuracies of "An Inconvinient Truth", but I really have already done that in long form here and in short form here.  In truth, the Peace prize process has for years been about a group of leftish statists making a statement, and often it has been about tweaking the US, rather than a dispassionate analysis of true contributions to peace made with the benefit of some historic distance (as is done with the scientific prizes).  Further, most folks I argue with don’t really care about the specific inacuracies in Gore’s movie, their response typically being something in the "fake but accurate" line of reasoning.

So instead I will say what I told a reader by email a few hours ago.  I tend to be optimistic about the world, and believe that we are approaching a high water mark (so to speak) for the climate catastrophists, where we will look back and see their influence peak and start unwinding under the presure of science and the reality of the enormous cost to abate CO2.  Gore’s Peace prize, in the same year as his Oscar and that global warming music festival no one can even remember the name of 3 months later, feels to me like it may be that high water mark.   The Peace Prize certainly was the high water mark for Jimmy Carter’s credibility, not to mention that of Henry Kissinger and a myriad of others.  Think of it this way — if the guys who made the peace prize decisions were investors, and you knew what they were investing in, you would sell short.  Seriously, just look at the group.  Well, they just invested in Al Gore.

Update:  One thing many commenters have not pointed out is that Al Gore is really manuevering the US and China and India (and the rest of the developping world) into a position that, if he has his way, conflict is going to occur over who gets to grow and develop, and who does not.  CO2 catastrophism has the ablility to be the single most destabalizing issue of the 21st century. This is peace?