(Dec. 21, 2009) A new report reveals a British scientist and Wikipedia administrator rewrote climate history, editing more than 5,000 unique articles in the online encyclopedia to cover traces of a medieval warming period Continue reading
University of Waterloo
December 21, 2009
WATERLOO, Ont. (Monday, Dec. 21, 2009) – Cosmic rays and chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs), both already implicated in depleting the Earth’s ozone layer, are also responsible for changes in the global climate, a University of Waterloo scientist reports in a new peer-reviewed paper.
In his paper, Qing-Bin Lu, a professor of physics and astronomy, shows how CFCs – compounds once widely used as refrigerants – and cosmic rays – energy particles originating in outer space – are mostly to blame for climate change, rather than carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. His paper, derived from observations of satellite, ground-based and balloon measurements as well as an innovative use of an established mechanism, was published online in the prestigious journal Physics Reports.
“My findings do not agree with the climate models that conventionally thought that greenhouse gases, mainly CO2, are the major culprits for the global warming seen in the late 20th century,” Lu said. “Instead, the observed data show that CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays most likely caused both the Antarctic ozone hole and global warming. These findings are totally unexpected and striking, as I was focused on studying the mechanism for the formation of the ozone hole, rather than global warming.”
His conclusions are based on observations that from 1950 up to now, the climate in the Arctic and Antarctic atmospheres has been completely controlled by CFCs and cosmic rays, with no CO2 impact.
“Most remarkably, the total amount of CFCs, ozone-depleting molecules that are well-known greenhouse gases, has decreased around 2000,” Lu said. “Correspondingly, the global surface temperature has also dropped. In striking contrast, the CO2 level has kept rising since 1850 and now is at its largest growth rate.”
In his research, Lu discovers that while there was global warming from 1950 to 2000, there has been global cooling since 2002. The cooling trend will continue for the next 50 years, according to his new research observations.
As well, there is no solid evidence that the global warming from 1950 to 2000 was due to CO2. Instead, Lu notes, it was probably due to CFCs conspiring with cosmic rays. And from 1850 to 1950, the recorded CO2 level increased significantly because of the industrial revolution, while the global temperature kept nearly constant or only rose by about 0.1 C.
In previously published work, Lu demonstrated that an observed cyclic hole in the ozone layer provided proof of a new ozone depletion theory involving cosmic rays, which was developed by Lu and his former co-workers at Rutgers University and the Université de Sherbrooke. In the past, it was generally accepted for more than two decades that the Earth’s ozone layer is depleted due to the sun’s ultraviolet light-induced destruction of CFCs in the atmosphere.
The depletion theory says cosmic rays, rather than the sun’s UV light, play the dominant role in breaking down ozone-depleting molecules and then ozone. In his study, published in Physical Review Letters, Lu analyzed reliable cosmic ray and ozone data in the period of 1980-2007, which cover two full 11-year solar cycles.
In his latest paper, Lu further proves the cosmic-ray-driven ozone depletion theory by showing a large number of data from laboratory and satellite observations. One reviewer wrote: “These are very strong facts and it appears that they have largely been ignored in the past when modelling the Antarctic ozone loss.”
New observations of the effects of CFCs and cosmic rays on ozone loss and global warming/cooling could be important to the Earth and humans in the 21st century. “It certainly deserves close attention,” Lu wrote in his paper, entitled Cosmic-Ray-Driven Electron-Induced Reactions of Halogenated Molecules Adsorbed on Ice Surfaces: Implications for Atmospheric Ozone Depletion and Global Climate Change.
In his interview on "The House", John Drexhage erred, importantly, in his description of current national GHG discharges arising from energy use. This is quite understandable, as I am sure John is very tired after two weeks in Copenhagen.
John said that developed nations are currently responsible for 80% of global Greenhouse Gas (GHG) discharges to the atmosphere. In fact, in 2007—the last year for which we have complete information—developed nations accounted for only 40% of global GHG discharges. Developing nations accounted for 51% and "economies in transition" (nations that were part of the USSR before 1990) accounted for 11%.
It may also be important to note that by the end of 2007, developing nations accounted for 95% of the reported increase in global GHGs between 1990 and 2007. Developed nations accounted for 21% of the global increase. GHGs dropped in "economies in transition" by 16%.
If you want to consider relative national contributions to the current concentrations in the upper atmosphere—reflecting GHG discharges over the last 100 to 150 years—we only have nation-specific discharges estimates going back to 1980. However, most analysts agree that the relative national GHG contributions for 1980 through 2007 are likely fairly representative of national shares for the longer time frame. On that basis:
The largest historical contributors of GHGs to the earth’s atmosphere are, in the following order:
United States, 23%
China, 13%
Russia, 11%
Japan, 5%
Germany, 4%
India, 3%
United Kingdom, 3%
Canada, 2%
Italy, 2%
France, 2%
Poland, 2%
South Africa, 2%
Mexico, 1%
South Korea, 1%
Australia, 1%
Brazil, 1%
Spain, 1%
Iran, 1%
Saudi Arabia, 1%
Netherlands, 1%
Ukraine, 1%
Indonesia, 1%
Taiwan, 1%
Turkey, 1%
The first 5 listed countries account for 55% of the total. We are far more certain of the emission estimates for developed than developing nations and economies in transition. It is most likely, therefore, that our estimates for developing and transitioning economies would increase, relative to the developed nation estimates, if we had access to better data.
You can look up the official estimates of national CO2 emissions from energy use here.
I have also made this spreadsheet using data located at this URL, for your information.
Chelsea Schilling
WorldNetDaily
December 21, 2009
A new report reveals a British scientist and Wikipedia administrator rewrote climate history, editing more than 5,000 unique articles in the online encyclopedia to cover traces of a medieval warming period – something Climategate scientists saw as a major roadblock in the effort to spread the global warming message.
Recently hacked e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit expose a plot to eliminate the Medieval Warm Period, a 400-year era that began around A.D. 1000, the Financial Post’s Lawrence Solomon reports.
The warming period is said to have improved agriculture and increased life spans, but scientists at the center of the Climategate e-mail scandal believed the era undermined their goal of spreading concern about global warming as it pertains to today’s climate.
Solomon noted the warming period presented a dilemma long before the Climategate e-mail scandal.
A 1995 e-mail predating the recent Climate Research Unit scandal was sent to geophysicist David Deming. A major climate-change researcher told Deming, “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.”
Some scientists later expressed concern about erasing the period.
One chief practitioner identified as Keith Briffa, said in a Sept. 22, 1999, e-mail, “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. … I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.”
Briffa and other scientists, with the help of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, published a well-known symbol of their movement: the hockey stick chart, an illustration reproduced in textbooks, media reports and the pages of the 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, report.
However, the graph showed stable temperatures over the last 1,000 years and omitted any indication of the warming period.
“But the U.N.’s official verdict that the Medieval Warm Period had not existed did not erase the countless schoolbooks, encyclopedias, and other scholarly sources that claimed it had,” Solomon wrote. “Rewriting those would take decades, time that the band members didn’t have if they were to save the globe from warming.”
Instead, the group created a website called RealClimate.org. One e-mail addressed criticism of the hockey stick graph and any suggestions that today’s temperatures were not the hottest on record.
“The idea is that we working climate scientists should have a place where we can mount a rapid response to supposedly ‘bombshell’ papers that are doing the rounds” in aid of “combating dis-information,” a Dec. 10, 2004, e-mail to the Climate Research Unit from Gavin Schmidt explained.
The RealClimate.org team consisted of Schmidt, Mike Mann, Eric Steig, William Connolley, Stefan Rahmstorf, Ray Bradley, Amy Clement, Rasmus Benestad and Caspar Ammann.
Solomon revealed that Connolley, one man in the nine-member team who is a U.K. scientist, a software engineer and Green Party activist, took control of Wikipedia’s entries to see that any trace of the true climate history would be erased.
Beginning in February 2003, Connolley rewrote Wikipedia entries on global warming, the greenhouse effect, the instrumental temperature record, the urban heat island, on climate models and on global cooling, according to the report. In February, he began editing the Little Ice Age. By August, he began to rewrite history without the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned to the hockey-stick chart.
“He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band,” Solomon explains. “Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.”
Through his role as a Wikipedia administrator, Connolley is said to have created or rewritten 5,428 unique Wikipedia entries.
“When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it – more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand,” Solomon wrote. “When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred – over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions.”
Meanwhile, followers who adhered to Connolley’s climate views “were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings,” Solomon contends.
Through his control of the Wikipedia pages, Connolley is said to have “turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.”
Facts about the Medieval Warm Period and criticism of global warming doctrine were purportedly scrubbed from Wikipedia’s pages.
“With the release of the Climategate e-mails, the disappearing trick has been exposed,” Solomon declared. “The glorious Medieval Warm Period will remain in the history books, perhaps with an asterisk to describe how a band of zealots once tried to make it disappear.”
A Wikipedia arbitration committee has stated in the past: “William M. Connolley has, on a number of occasions, misused his administrator tools by acting while involved.”
A July 31, 2006, article in the New Yorker described Connolley as a “victim of an edit war over the entry on global warming, to which he had contributed.”
“After a particularly nasty confrontation with a skeptic, who had repeatedly watered down language pertaining to the greenhouse effect, the case went into arbitration,” the report states.
“User William M. Connolley strongly pushes his POV [point of view] with systematic removal of any POV which does not match his own,” his accuser charged in a written deposition. “His views on climate science are singular and narrow.”
Connolley said Wikipedia “gives no privilege to those who know what they’re talking about.”
Just today, Connolley has made edits in numerous Wikipedia entries, including articles titled, “Public opinion on climate change,” “Climate,” “Scientific opinion on climate change,” “RealClimate,” ” Global cooling,” “Climate change” and the biography of scientist William M. Gray, writing that Gray’s “views on global warming are controversial.”
(Dec. 20, 2009) In the religion of AGW, Human Caused Global Warming, if facts don’t fit the theology, the facts must change, not the theology. Continue reading
Ethel C. Fenig
American Thinker
December 20, 2009
In the religion of AGW, Human Caused Global Warming, if facts don’t fit the theology, the facts must change, not the theology.
Amazingly, it is easy to change the facts to fit the desired thesis; easier than deliberately altering an experiment. Writing in the Financial Post, Lawrence Solomon reports how a Green Party activist, a fervent believer in global warming, was troubled by the existence of evidence that previous global warming had occurred 1000 years ago during the Middle Ages, a time of human blossoming, increased food supply and better living after the cold, aptly named Dark Ages.
What to do? Change his high priestly role in the religion of Global Warming? Nope. All he had to do was rewrite the facts as they existed in Wikipedia, the online user written encyclopedia.
Facts didn’t validate the theology of global warming? No problem–eliminate them. Unbelievers were punished with the Wiki equivalent of being burnt at the stake–their articles were removed or changed without permission or the ultimate punishment…banishment from Wiki! Voila! New phony facts–the perfect oxymoron–that magically proved the new theology!
U.K. scientist and Green Party activist William Connolley would take on particularly crucial duties.
Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known – Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.
All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it – more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred – over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions.
This certainly isn’t the scientific method I was taught in elementary school.
(Dec. 19, 2009) Climate alarmists have put enormous pressure on the western media to supress knowledge of facts inconvenient to their scientific arguments using a variety of methods to supress dissenting opinion. Continue reading
(Dec. 19, 2009) The Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm. Continue reading
Matthew Sheffield
NewsBusters
December 19, 2009
Climate alarmists have put enormous pressure on the western media to supress knowledge of facts inconvenient to their scientific arguments using a variety of methods to supress dissenting opinion.
Besides threatening journalists, promoting the use of Nazi-esque insults like the word “deniers,” and bullying scientists who publish research papers critical of their near-religious beliefs, alarmists have taken to the web with aplomb, most famously exposed in the ongoing “ClimateGate” scandal.
Engaging in politicized science via email isn’t the only cyber activity that left-enviro activists engage in however. Wikipedia is also a favorite target, particularly for a British global warming activist named William Connolley who seems to have made it his life’s mission to censor climate realists in the online encyclopedia.
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Connolley claims he is employed currently as a software developer and has not disclosed that he is paid to engage in wiki enviro-activism. Considering that most of his wiki contributions seem to happen outside of business hours GMT, it seems likely that Connolley is interacting with Wikipedia on his personal time.
Climate alarmism seems to have become a personal obsession for him, however. Just this past Thursday, the UK Green Party politician made 31 comments or revisions to articles according to his user contributions page.
In the month of August 2009 (one which I picked randomly), Connolley had a total of 451 edits or comments, averaging out to 15 every day of the month. That, mind you, is with a two-week hiatus of August 15th through 24th where Connolley made no edits factored in.
During June of 2009, Connolley literally could not take a break from Wikipedia, making a whopping total of 815 contributions to the site spread over every day of the month, an average of 27 each day.
What sorts of edits has Connolley made to Wikipedia, however? For that, let’s turn to Canadian journalist Lawrence Solomon who has this excellent summary of just some of Connolley’s numerous wiki actions:
Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.
All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it – more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred – over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.
Quite disturbing indeed.
Incidentally, Connolley is currently up for election as a Wikipedia administrator. If you are a registered user, you can cast your ballot against his left-wing propaganda campaign here.
Such a horrendously biased an obsessed individual should not be allowed to decide what is neutral or fair, the ostensible guiding principle of Wikipedia.
Matthew Sheffield is the creator of NewsBusters and its Executive Editor.
Lawrence Solomon
Financial Post
December 19, 2009
The Climategate Emails describe how a small band of climatologists cooked the books to make the last century seem dangerously warm.
The emails also describe how the band plotted to rewrite history as well as science, particularly by eliminating the Medieval Warm Period, a 400 year period that began around 1000 AD.
The Climategate Emails reveal something else, too: the enlistment of the most widely read source of information in the world — Wikipedia — in the wholesale rewriting of this history.
The Medieval Warm Period, which followed the meanness and cold of the Dark Ages, was a great time in human history — it allowed humans around the world to bask in a glorious warmth that vastly improved agriculture, increased life spans and otherwise bettered the human condition.
But the Medieval Warm Period was not so great for some humans in our own time — the same small band that believes the planet has now entered an unprecedented and dangerous warm period. As we now know from the Climategate Emails, this band saw the Medieval Warm Period as an enormous obstacle in their mission of spreading the word about global warming. If temperatures were warmer 1,000 years ago than today, the Climategate Emails explain in detail, their message that we now live in the warmest of all possible times would be undermined. As put by one band member, a Briton named Folland at the Hadley Centre, a Medieval Warm Period “dilutes the message rather significantly.”
Even before the Climategate Emails came to light, the problem posed by the Medieval Warm Period to this band was known. “We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period” read a pre-Climategate email, circa 1995, as attested to at hearings of the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works. But the Climategate transcripts were more extensive and more illuminating — they provided an unvarnished look at the struggles that the climate practitioners underwent before settling on their scientific dogma.
The Climategate Emails showed, for example, that some members of the band were uncomfortable with aspects of their work, some even questioning the need to erase the existence of the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years earlier.
Said Briffa, one of their chief practitioners: “I know there is pressure to present a nice tidy story as regards ‘apparent unprecedented warming in a thousand years or more in the proxy data’ but in reality the situation is not quite so simple. … I believe that the recent warmth was probably matched about 1,000 years ago.”
In the end, Briffa and other members of the band overcame their doubts and settled on their dogma. With the help of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the highest climate change authority of all, they published what became the icon of their movement — the hockey stick graph. This icon showed temperatures in the last 1,000 years to have been stable — no Medieval Warm Period, not even the Little Ice Age of a few centuries ago.
But the UN’s official verdict that the Medieval Warm Period had not existed did not erase the countless schoolbooks, encyclopedias, and other scholarly sources that claimed it had. Rewriting those would take decades, time that the band members didn’t have if they were to save the globe from warming.
Instead, the band members turned to their friends in the media and to the blogosphere, creating a website called RealClimate.org. “The idea is that we working climate scientists should have a place where we can mount a rapid response to supposedly ‘bombshell’ papers that are doing the rounds” in aid of “combating dis-information,” one email explained, referring to criticisms of the hockey stick and anything else suggesting that temperatures today were not the hottest in recorded time. One person in the nine-member Realclimate.org team — U.K. scientist and Green Party activist William Connolley — would take on particularly crucial duties.
Connolley took control of all things climate in the most used information source the world has ever known – Wikipedia. Starting in February 2003, just when opposition to the claims of the band members were beginning to gel, Connolley set to work on the Wikipedia site. He rewrote Wikipedia’s articles on global warming, on the greenhouse effect, on the instrumental temperature record, on the urban heat island, on climate models, on global cooling. On Feb. 14, he began to erase the Little Ice Age; on Aug.11, the Medieval Warm Period. In October, he turned his attention to the hockey stick graph. He rewrote articles on the politics of global warming and on the scientists who were skeptical of the band. Richard Lindzen and Fred Singer, two of the world’s most distinguished climate scientists, were among his early targets, followed by others that the band especially hated, such as Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, authorities on the Medieval Warm Period.
All told, Connolley created or rewrote 5,428 unique Wikipedia articles. His control over Wikipedia was greater still, however, through the role he obtained at Wikipedia as a website administrator, which allowed him to act with virtual impunity. When Connolley didn’t like the subject of a certain article, he removed it — more than 500 articles of various descriptions disappeared at his hand. When he disapproved of the arguments that others were making, he often had them barred — over 2,000 Wikipedia contributors who ran afoul of him found themselves blocked from making further contributions. Acolytes whose writing conformed to Connolley’s global warming views, in contrast, were rewarded with Wikipedia’s blessings. In these ways, Connolley turned Wikipedia into the missionary wing of the global warming movement.
The Medieval Warm Period disappeared, as did criticism of the global warming orthodoxy. With the release of the Climategate Emails, the disappearing trick has been exposed. The glorious Medieval Warm Period will remain in the history books, perhaps with an asterisk to describe how a band of zealots once tried to make it disappear.
Sources for this column:
Warmer Days and Longer Lives
U.S. Senate Committee on Environment & Public Works Hearing Statements: 12/06/2006
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