Global Warming, Is It A Hoax, or Just Bad Science?

I've just done some rather quick study on a theory advanced more than 60 years ago by a Serbian civil engineer and mathematician named Milutin Milanković. Milanković Cycle theory proposes that the variations in

...eccentricity, axial tilt, and precession of the Earth's orbit determined climatic patterns on Earth, resulting in 100,000-year ice age cycles of the Quaternary glaciation over the last few million years. The Earth's axis completes one full cycle of precession approximately every 26,000 years. At the same time, the elliptical orbit rotates, more slowly, leading to a 23,000-year cycle between the seasons and the orbit. In addition, the angle between Earth's rotational axis and the normal to the plane of its orbit moves from 22.1 degrees to 24.5 degrees and back again on a 41,000-year cycle. Currently, this angle is 23.44 degrees and is decreasing.

His theory proposes that there is roughly a 25-40,000 year period of warm climates between much longer periods of glaciation, commonly referred to as an ice age. His theory was very popular in the 1970's and 1980's, but eventually fell out of favour.

However, a small number of climatologists and paleontologists have continued to work in this area. Some of those who have been labeled as deniers by proponents of anthropomorphic global warming are these scientists. But soon it was observed that global temperature was increasing and at about this time Global Climate Modeling (GCM) received more attention and the Milankovitch analogue was forgotten. There has been little further discussion about the possibility of a coming ice age.

Eventually, other scientists began to study temperatures from around the globe and noticed from the late 19th century until the early-mid 1980's of a consistent rise in temperature. Through many iterations, several climatologist decided that the steep rise in the production of CO2 was the culprit of this warming period. Jennifer Marohasy writes, that

the idea that our consumption of carbon and production of CO2 was contributing to climate warming was the work of Loutre and Berger and a paper by Loutre in 2000 claimed that the Holocene (the current warm period) would extend for at least another 30,000 (KY) years because of the effect of CO2 concentration as a greenhouse gas.

It was acknowledged in this paper that the orbital geometry 400KY which featured muted amplitude, was the “best and closest analogue to our near future climate”, but inexplicably the Global Climate Model LLN2-D NH was “tuned” to replicate the past 200KY climate transitions when isolation amplitude was at it’s highest level over the 400KY cycle and quite unlike present conditions. Using different values for CO2 it was found that “best agreement with SPECMAP is obtained near 210 ppmv CO2 ”.

Then using a modeled Holocene they projected climate using a range of CO2 forcing, and they reported that there was no transition to ice for at least 30KY into the future.

The algorithm for this process is not disclosed but the authors rightly list the limitations of the model in which CO2 is considered as an external forcing i.e. the carbon cycle is not simulated by the model. Clouds and the hydrological cycle are simplified and so is the heat transport to middle and deep ocean. In addition regional changes such as the North Atlantic and over Europe are not simulated “and might depart from the global trend”.

It is unfortunate that these limitations appear to have been ignored and the AGW hypothesis was born and has occupied science and the media ever since. {Emphasis mine}

Now, with "Climategate" it appears that those scientists who are employed by the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, who have the most to lose in terms of prestige, grant money and public recognition, may very well have "massaged" their data to reach a predetermined political, agenda driven, conclusion. Furthermore, it's not been sufficiently proven that CO2 is the gas that has driven the warming period in the first place.

There is further detailed material in a paper by Dr Willie Soon which shows that there is no evidence to support global warming by CO2.

The concentration of CO2 varies according to the temperature of the ocean and CO2 follows temperature. If the present decline in temperature continues we can expect to see a decline in the rate of CO2 as more is dissolved in a cooler sea.

If this is in fact the case, then AGW is dead. It may in fact take many years to defeat this political agenda completely, but public sentiment has been turning against it now for the past year or so. Hence the inability of the UN to renegotiate the Kyoto Accords. No nation wants to negotiate it's economic destruction, and that's what it would take, the dismantling of the Western economic system in order to achieve the goals of the original system.

Watch this video:


UPDATE: From tomorro's London Times an account of the hack of CRU at the University of East Anglia that includes this surprising synopsis:

Astonishingly, what appears, at least at first blush, to have emerged is that (a) the scientists have been manipulating the raw temperature figures to show a relentlessly rising global warming trend; (b) they have consistently refused outsiders access to the raw data; (c) the scientists have been trying to avoid freedom of information requests; and (d) they have been discussing ways to prevent papers by dissenting scientists being published in learned journals.

There may be a perfectly innocent explanation. But what is clear is that the integrity of the scientific evidence on which not merely the British Government, but other countries, too, through the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, claim to base far-reaching and hugely expensive policy decisions, has been called into question. And the reputation of British science has been seriously tarnished. A high-level independent inquiry must be set up without delay.