Cool It

The discovery by a private citizen of a Y2K Bug in NASA's numbers forced a revision in the data most cited by global warming zealots. (Watch out, the limousine liberals may run you down. Best hug your hummer for safety.) As you may have noted, the warmest years now occur not most recently, but all the way back in the Depression years, when economic activity was, well, depressed. Bret Stephens, in yesterday's WSJ poses a few questions and comes to a few conclusions of his own:

I confess: I am prepared to acknowledge that Mr. McIntyre's discovery amounts to what a New York Times reporter calls a "statistically meaningless" rearrangement of data.

But just how "meaningless" would this have seemed had it yielded the opposite result? Had Mr. McIntyre found that a collation error understated recent temperatures by 0.15 degrees Celsius (instead of overstating it by that amount, as he discovered), would the news coverage have differed in tone and approach? When it was reported in January that 2006 was one of the hottest years on record, NASA's James Hansen used the occasion to warn grimly that "2007 is likely to be warmer than 2006." Yet now he says, in connection to the data revision, that "in general I think we want to avoid going into more and more detail about ranking of individual years."

I confess: I am prepared to acknowledge that the world has been and will be getting warmer thanks in some part to an increase in man-made atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases. I acknowledge this in the same way I'm confident that the equatorial radius of Saturn is about 60,000 kilometers: not because I've measured it myself, but out of a deep reserve of faith in the methods of the scientific community, above all its reputation for transparency and open-mindedness.

But that faith is tested when leading climate scientists won't share the data they use to estimate temperatures past and present and thus construct all-important trend lines.

Stephens questions Newsweek's sensationalist cover story and provides persuasive counterpoint. Even a few wiser heads at the leftie Beeb are embarassed at their own flagrant eco-preachiness, which can no longer even be disguised as news. Michael Fumento points out world global warming temperature data is suspect. And here's a book you might want to read, Bjorn Lomborg's "Cool It". Lomborg is a Danish academic and environmental activist.

Now the enviro-elite turn against trees. (those terrifying trees!) Former Greenpeace-nik turned sensible person Patrick Moore blasts Gore's pet actor Leonardo diCaprio's silly movie, The 11th hour:

In many countries with temperate forests, there has been an increase in carbon stored in trees in recent years. This includes the United States, Canada, New Zealand and Sweden.

The most important factors influencing the carbon cycle are deforestation on the negative side, and the use of wood, from sustainably managed forests, as a substitute for non-renewable materials and fuels, on the positive side.

To address climate change, we must use more wood, not less. Using wood sends a signal to the marketplace to grow more trees and to produce more wood. That means we can then use less concrete, steel and plastic -- heavy carbon emitters through their production. Trees are the only abundant, biodegradable and renewable global resource.

UPDATE: From NRO's Planet Gore, a question about whether trains are all that green.

UPDATE: First his wife makes the great greenie sacrifice of giving up tangerines. Now megabucks lawyer (is his mansion bigger than Gore's?) and presidential candidate John Edwards asks us to give up our SUVs. As noted above, our SUVs/Hummers may be more fuel efficient than silly little Civics or trains.

Related posts: Never Mind Nature, Tilting at Windmills, Green Scheme in Wilmette