CHURCHVILLE, VA—My neighbor, physicist Edward Long, is afraid our temperature records have been falsified to support the man-made global warming scare. e;He’s afraid HDr. Long recently chose two sets of U.S. meteorological stations from the master list offered by the National Climate Data Center. One data set was rural, one urban. Each had a site in each of the lower 48 states. From the 1890s to 2006, the urban set of measurements showed an increase of 0.72 degrees—but the rural set showed only 0.11 degrees of warming.

 

The vast majority of America is rural, and our cities obviously create their own “heat islands” with masses of cement, brick, and blacktop. Thus, the U.S. temperature record should logically show a true temperature gain that is close to the low rural increase of 0.11 degrees C. In fact, NCDC record shows an overall U.S. temperature increase of 0.69 degrees C.

 

Ed Long says on the American Thinker blog, “The NCDC’s massaging—they call it ‘adjusting’—has resulted in an increase in the rural values, from a raw value of 0.11C/century to an adjusted value of 0.58C/century, and no change in the urban values. . . . This is the exact opposite of any rational consideration, given the increase in the size and activities within urban locations—unless deception is the goal.”  

 

The warming alarmists embedded in our government-sponsored research units have already wasted billions of dollars to endlessly run misleading computerized “climate models.” They have come close to bankrupting our society through the forced substitution of costly, erratic solar and wind power for coal, oil, and natural gas while we refuse to authorize new nuclear facilities. Next would come the job losses, as U.S. industries shut down due to high energy costs or flee to Third World countries with no energy taxes.

 

Now we find that the man-made global warming record, which has supposedly triggered all of this, is “supported” by government-manipulated temperature records:

 

• The Russians say Britain’s East Anglia University officially deleted most of the thermometer sites scattered across Russia’s vast hinterlands—because the readings didn’t show global warming.

 

• New Zealand’s official record shows a major warming in the 20^th century, but none of its weather sites shows that warming trend.

 

• Veteran meteorologist Joe D’Aleo of Icecap recently charged, on John Coleman’s KUSI-TV special, that the U.S. temperature record has been similarly corrupted over the years, weeding out non-warming weather sites. .

 

• James Goodridge, then California State Climatologist,  published a peer-reviewed report in 1992 that found California’s urban counties had experienced a strong warming, the suburban counties a moderate warming, and the rural counties no warming at all.

 

We’ve been enthralled by the Green Wave of guilt and redemption. I recently reminded in a column that the 1995 IPCC report claimed a “human fingerprint on our warming” with no credible scientific to support it—and no such scientific support has since been proffered. An NIH physician who believes in man-made warming looked at this column and said, “What do I care about a 14-year-old report?” 

 

Heavily-taxed energy will double and triple the real costs for everything we buy. Look for food costs to soar five-fold as nitrogen fertilizer—made with natural gas—is forced out of the farm economy. Steel will have too big a “carbon footprint” so the steelmakers and manufacturing will be in China and India. Yet there is only a 22 percent correlation between our global warming record and the rise of human-emitted CO₂ in the 20^th century. The correlation with sunspots is 79 percent.

 

The government-sponsored climate research community—for whatever reasons—has apparently betrayed us.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He is an environmental economist and was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

Where are the American journalists who should be covering the collapse of the man-made warming scare — the biggest hoax in human history? The public, shoveling snow amid blizzard winds, wants to know. The stock market, laboring under the threat of trillion-dollar energy taxes, urgently needs to know. Even the Columbia Journalism Review, complicit in fostering the global warming scare for 20 years, is prodding America’s mainstream media to finally do their duty.

The press in England, Australia, and even India is already breaking the story:

– “The Professor’s Amazing Climate Change Retreat,” London Daily Mail, Feb. 13. “Professor Phil Jones of East Anglia University confesses on the BBC that the world hasn’t warmed since 1995, and the Medieval Warming was perhaps warmer than today.”

– “World May Not Be Warming, Say Scientists,” Sunday Times of London, Feb. 14.

– “The Hottest Hoax in the World,” Ninad Sheth, India’s Open Magazine, Jan. 30.

– “The Great Global Warming Collapse,” Margaret Wente, Canada’s Global & Mail, Feb. 20.

Also eagerly awaiting the media confessions is that little band of hardy souls who have been telling us for years inconvenient truths about gaps in the greenhouse theory while insisting that “the science isn’t settled” by a long shot. They’ve been accused of treason, likened to Holocaust deniers, and threatened with jail and with death for telling us that the evidence didn’t stack up. They could get no hearing — not on university campuses, not in the press, not even in their own communities. While falsely accused of “shilling for corporations,” they lost jobs, tenure, and reputations.

Professor Jones, himself a leader of the plot, has confessed that the Medieval Warming might have been global and warmer than today. Now we can look at that remarkable seabed sediment core dug up from the Atlantic floor by Boston College’s Maureen Raymo. The plankton microfossils in the mud layers go back a million years, and tell of more than 600 long, moderate, natural global warmings: Medieval, Roman, Holocene, and on back through the ages. The wildlife has all been through sudden climate change many times.

Willi Dansgaard and Hans Oeschger, pioneers of the Greenland ice cores who discovered the 1,500-year cycles named after them, can once again be science heroes, as they deserve.

What will Al Gore finally say if he ever grants an interview? Will he admit he misled us about the Antarctic ice records, which show temperatures have historically changed 800 years before the CO2 levels? That makes CO2 no more than a lagging indicator of solar changes.

As a mere economist and history buff, I will take some credit. I helped Fred Singer write a New York Times bestseller: Unstoppable Global Warming — Every 1,500 Years. We presented the historic and physical evidence of the world’s past global warmings. We credited Henrik Svensmark’s demonstration that the sun’s variability is linked to earth’s temperatures by cosmic rays, which create more or fewer of the low, wet clouds that cyclically warm and cool our planet. And we poked holes in the scare stories being fed to the public.

Most of the world’s citizens will never realize how close they came to revisiting the Stone Age, with precious little help from solar panels, wind turbines, or biofuels.

Right now the journalists’ dereliction of duty is mainly hurting themselves. The public already fears it can’t trust its newspapers and TV networks. Any carbon taxes imposed now will be quickly rescinded. American journalists are simply building a bigger head of steam for the angry backlash when the public finally learns (probably through the internet) that they’ve been had.

Note: This article appeared in Pajamas Media on February 22, 2010

Dennis T. Avery served on the staff of the U.S. Commodity Future Trading Commission from its inception in 1974 until 1980. He is currently a senior fellow of the Hudson Institute in Washington, D.C. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years.