Christopher Monckton of Brenchley:
Pseudo-science by press release has become the norm among the Forces of Darkness. With as much fanfare as McGill University could muster, the recent paper by Professor Lovejoy was promoted via a typically head-banging instance of the genre.
The gushingly flatulent halation of the university PR-wallahs is typical of the verbal diarrhea habitual among practitioners of the Dark Arts. The ipsissima verba of Lovejoy himself in the press release are of particular interest.
Here is what he is quoted as saying:
“We’ve had a fluctuation in average temperature that’s just huge since 1880 – on the order of about 0.9 degrees Celsius. This study shows that the odds of that being caused by natural fluctuations are less than one in a hundred and are likely to be less than one in a thousand.
“While the statistical rejection of a hypothesis can’t generally be used to conclude the truth of any specific alternative, in many cases – including this one – the rejection of one greatly enhances the credibility of the other.”
Is the post-1880 variability in global temperatures “huge”? The most direct method to test this proposition is to examine the available temperature record since 1500, the starting date of Lovejoy’s analysis.
However, there is no direct global thermometer record going back that far. Accordingly, Lovejoy uses a ragbag of politically-correct reconstructions over various periods since then, inevitably including the long-discredited “hockey-stick” graph. Not only that, but an unpublished version of Richard Muller’s Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature record is dragged in as well.
There is one curious and significant omission on Lovejoy’s list of references. There is no mention of the Central England Temperature Record. Now, CET is the longest continuous regional temperature record we have. Despite its name, it covers most of England roughly from Lancashire in the north to Devon in the south. And it has been maintained since 1659.
No one doing a genuinely study of temperature change since 1500 would make ignore CET altogether. It has been maintained in a nation on which Fortune has smiled, so that there have been no interruptions owing to riot or revolution. It is on the right latitude to be – at least potentially – a respectable proxy for global temperature change over the period of study.
The most straightforward way to determine whether any proxy measurement – here, the part for the whole – provides a reasonable indication of how the Earth may have warmed and cooled over the period of record is to make a comparison between the proxy and the global record during the period of overlap.
First, let us apply this test to the “hockey stick” graph that Professor Lovejoy used. To establish that such a test is valuable, we go to no less authoritative a source than the World Meteorological Organization, one of the profiteering cheer-leaders of the panic pandemic.
Here, taken directly from the front cover of the WMO’s “Status of the Global Climate” for 1999, is a graph showing that three distinct series of tree-ring data faithfully replicate the sharp increase in global temperature over the 20th century.
Here is the “smoking gun” that proves how exceptional the growth in 20th-century was. There had been nothing like it in a millennium.
Just one problem with that. The original tree-ring data for the period 1960-1999 did not show temperature soaring. But the global temperature record for 1960-1999 did. So the tree-ring graphs, all three of them, were tampered with to truncate all three records in 1960 and to bolt on the real-world temperatures.
With long known records of cooler and warmer centuries, a 0.9 C° variation is meaningless, and cannot be reasonably declared as proof of such minor fluctuations as being due to the presence of humans.