NAS briefing notes
Below is CEI’s take on the NAS report briefing today, plus that of Senator Inhofe (R-OK).
Having “high confidence the planet is warmest in 400 years” is a little like saying everyone who eats carrots eventually will die. We all know that. What would one expect after emerging from the little ice age?
Our impression is that the report can be spun in about any direction you want to go. For example, ABC radio is reporting that the NAS panel found the 1990s to be the warmest decade in 2,000 years! Exactly the opposite of what the panel found and reported today.
Aside from Dr. North reading a prepared statement, the whole briefing was mostly a Kurt Cuffey show. He fielded most of the questions. We were perplexed by his assertion of a new paradigm that roughly says we know a lot about proxy reconstructions of world average temperature in the last 400 years, but the further back we go in “deeper time” the more “murky” it gets. Spending in excess of 2 billion a year on climate research, does it make sense to postulate that we are not getting a clearer picture from proxies further back than 400 years ago? And what is so magical about 400 years, if not as a starting point for the little ice age? It seems a little too cute. When we challenged him, Cuffey said that, yes we are learning more about further back in time, but the more we learn the less we know – more information makes things murkier. But from 400 years ago up to current time, the more we learn the more we do know. Say what?
In a side conversation with committee chair, Gerald North, North made a point of asking us to relay to McIntyre that he has made a significant contribution to the “hockey stick” issue and Science should be grateful. We are not sure Mann would agree.
It can all be downloaded at: http://nationalacademies.org/morenews/20060622.html
Note from Craig Idso: Bob,
BRAVO on your comments during the NAS press briefing today! You hit the
nail on the head. It is clear to me that the "all the evidence" they looked
at was mere cherry picking. They did not look at or ignored the many
studies that clearly indicate the MWP was as warm as or warmer than the CWP.
Craig
Bob Ferguson
Center for Science and Public Policy
CEI NAS STATEMENT
STATEMENT ON THE NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL’S REPORT
ON THE CHANGE IN SURFACE TEMPERATURES SINCE AD 1600
HYPERLINK "http://www.cei.org/dyn/view_Expert.cfm?Expert=125" \o "http://www.cei.org/dyn/view_Expert.cfm?Expert=125" Myron Ebell
Director of Energy & Global Warming Policy
Competitive Enterprise Institute
Washington, D.C., June 22, 2006—The National Research Council’s report on the “hockey stick” temperature graph, which was released today, confirms what was not controversial—namely, that the twentieth century was the warmest in the past 400 years. As the Earth’s climate has been emerging from the Little Ice Age since the mid-nineteenth century, this is not being debated.
On the issues that the committee was charged with investigating, the report finds that the proxy evidence does not support the conclusions that the twentieth century was the warmest or that the 1990s was the warmest decade or that 1998 was the warmest year in the past 1000 years, claims which were originally made in papers by Professor Michael Mann, et al. and were given widespread publicity in the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report. All those claims could, of course, be true, but they are not confirmed by the available evidence according to the committee report.
Furthermore, the chairman of the committee, Professor Gerald North, in his oral remarks criticized the IPCC for using the hockey stick graph as the featured item in the Summary for Policymakers of the Third Assessment Report (2001). He said that this was not the way science should work, because science should be a process of proposing new claims and then challenging them, rather than taking the claims of one new scientific paper as definitive before it had been vetted by the scientific community. Clearly, the hockey stick has not stood up to further scientific scrutiny, and today’s report by the NRC expert committee confirms that conclusion.
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FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE CONTACTS: MARC MORANO 202-224-5762
June 22, 2006 MATT DEMPSEY 202-224-9797
INHOFE SAYS NAS REPORT REAFFIRMS ‘HOCKEY STICK’ IS BROKEN
Washington, D.C.-Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), Chairman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works commented on today’s congressionally commissioned review by the National Academy of Sciences that shows that Dr. Michael Mann’s “hockey stick” study was flawed, specifically refuting some of its most often-cited conclusions.
The National Academy of Sciences’ “Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2000 Years” noted in their summary that there were “relatively warm conditions centered around A.D. 1000 (identified by some as the ‘Medieval Warm Period’) and a relatively cold period (or ‘Little Ice Age’) centered around 1700.” The hockey stick constructed by Mann and his colleagues purported to show temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere remained relatively stable over 900 years, then spiked upward in the 20th century.
“Today’s NAS report reaffirms what I have been saying all along, that Mann's ‘hockey stick’ is broken,” Senator Inhofe said. “Today’s report refutes Mann's prior assertions that there was no Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age.”
The NAS report also stated that “substantial uncertainties” surround Mann’s claims that the last few decades of the 20th century were the warmest in last 1000 years. In fact, while the report conceded that temperature data uncertainties increase going backward in time, it acknowledged that “not all individual proxy records indicate that the recent warmth is unprecedented…’ In addition, the NAS report further chastises Mann, declaring “Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that ‘the 1990’s are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium ...’”
“This report shows that the planet warmed for about 200 years prior to the industrial age, when we were coming out of the depths of the Little Ice Age where harsh winters froze the Thames and caused untold deaths. “Trying to prove man-made global warming by comparing the well-known fact that
today's temperatures are warmer than during the Little Ice Age is akin to comparing summer to winter to show a catastrophic temperature trend.”