Rodney Hide on ‘Global Cooling’
Less than a week ago, Act leader Rodney Hide sent an “open letter” to John Key outlining his stance on the Emissions Trading Scheme. In it he says:
So I’m not as worried about the future of the planet as I used to be. Even the UN now admits the globe stopped warming in 1998. [emphasis mine]
Take a look at the graph above and see what he’s done here. Technically 1998 was a very warm year and we’ve not had temperatures to match it since. Up until now people who have had an axe to grind have been misleading the public by phrasing this in ways to make it appear as if global warming has miraculously stopped somehow but Hide goes a step further and turns misdirection into an outright lie.
The UN have never, to my knowledge, said that global warming has stopped. The figures, even when taken selectively, don’t lend support to this concept.
Now, I like Hide as a person but we can’t afford to have people in his postition of influence spreading outright lies like this to the general public and for policy to be made based on these lies.
(sources: Open Parachute, Hot Topic, UK Met Office, Scoop)
Tags: global waming, Rodney Hide
Technically, that’s only true for this particular data set (HadCrut – Hadley Centre in the UK, part of the Met Office). The other major surface record compilation, the NASA GISS series, rates 2005 as warmer than 1998. The main difference between the two is that the GISS series includes more of the polar regions, and so includes more of the regions that are warming fastest.
In other words, to make the “cooling” claim, you not only have to intentionally misinterpret the data, but you have to carefully choose the data you use.
Cheers
Interesting. I quite like Ken’s summary on the selective use of evidence:
Nice summary. I’d add and “never be tempted to fill the evidence gaps with assumptions” Just reading an interesting article in this months Canterbury Uni alumni mag. It writes of research by a student (Daniel Tovar) in the Franz Josef area investigating a series of moraines, in particular one known as the Waiho Loop. To quote “Scientists have long believed the Waiho Loop was created during a cold snap about 13000 years ago that also affected Europe and North America, and this inspired the movie ‘The Day After Tomorrow’. While the Loop moraine had widely been used as evidence for direct inter-hemispheric linkage in climate change, it’s sediments had never been studied.”
Tovar’s research concluded that the moraine was actually the outcome of a landslide (due to the Alpine fault)rather than a climatic event. His Professor Jamie Shulmeister was so surprised he went into the field to check the results. But he too came to the same conclusion – based on a whole bunch of factors that I wont go into here (stuff like matching rock types and the fact that its angular edges meant it hadnt been carried in water etc). So despite the fact that the Waiho Loop was a famous moraine and has been studied for over 30 years and has been referred to in top international journals as the NZ equivalent of the big cool at this time…it turns out it has now all come ‘crashing down’.