Renewable Farming

First-ever audit of raw climate data discredits long-claimed “man-made global warming”

Australian researcher John McLean conducted an exhaustive audit on the key long-term climate data which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change uses for its “consensus” on man-made global warming. He found the data has been severely corrupted and manipulated. His conclusion: Today’s “consensus” of man-made world warming is built on an unreliable foundation. It’s a shaky base from which to urge taxing the world’s people for trillions of dollars to combat climate change.

October 7, 2018 — Weekend commentary by Jerry Carlson: McLean’s findings are one more independent caution which reveals the gaps, bias and “adjustments” which climate-change advocates persistently ignore.

Here are some of the inconsistencies McLean documents:

  • Large time gaps occur in observed data. Instead, averages were calculated from next to no information. For two years, temperatures over land in the Southern Hemisphere were estimated from just one site in Indonesia.
  • Adjustments – “I wouldn’t be surprised to find that more than 50% of adjustments were incorrect,” says McLean. Many of the adjustments are skewed to artificially cool earlier temperatures and warm later ones,  giving an exaggerated impression of the rate of global warming.

Here’s a link to McLean’s summary on Brietbart.

Even more colorful is his original report posted on the Australian website JoNova.

McLean’s report was published simultaneously with the latest alarm from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.  This United Nations group’s report was headlined in the Wall Street Journal with this lead: “Rapid, far-reaching changes to almost every facet of society are needed to avoid catastrophic climate change — reforms far beyond anything governments are currently either doing or planning to do.”

On Oct. 10, the Wall Street Journal carried a commentary further debunking the hysteria generated by the IPCC. 

And if you want some bemusement on all this, visit Marc Morano’s Climate Depot website for a thoroughly contrary view. 

More than 40 years ago in the  mid-1970s, I interviewed one of the world’s foremost climatologists, Dr. Reid A. Bryson, at the University of Wisconsin.  Back then, “climate cooling” was the fear d’jour.

Bryson was one of the world’s most ethical and astute climatologists. His book Climates of Hunger co-authored with Thomas J. Murray, documented long-term climate changes which have occurred over many thousands of years. The book, published in 1977, is still available on Amazon

His historic climate-change data warned that the most dangerous points of a climate cycle is a downslope into cooling. Dry, cold eras force massive migrations, shortages of food and water, and wars for scarce resources. Eras of warmer climate spawn good harvests and human technological progress. Bryson’s reasoning rests on solid archeological data.

Bryson and his colleagues knew from archeological data found in western Iowa around the current town of Cherokee and nearby Mill Creek that a corn-growing culture of indigenous Plains Indians had thrived in this region for several hundred years — until about 1200 AD. Then in the following several decades, all of their tribes disappeared, apparently migrating southward into a more hospitable climate. Digging in centuries-old Indian trash dumps, the climatologist team found that numbers of their discarded bones of buffalo, deer and elk diminished steadily after peaking around 1200 AD. The research team reasoned that crops also begin failing as cooler, drier seasons persisted. By around 1300 AD, most of the Mill Creek tribes had left for warmer, wetter climates farther south.

The message from the Mill Creek exodus, and failures of several other historic civilizations: Fear long-term cycles of cool, dry weather. 

I asked Dr. Bryson how much reliance climatologists can place on modern weather data. He showed me several long-term data sets for the United States, and explained how government and university climatologists often “smooth” actual observed weather station records to make data fit presumed statistical theories.

Those broad observations of data “corrections” are confirmed by several other climatologists, such as Iben Browning, whom I often interviewed on climate questions. Browning co-authored a landmark book, Climate and the Affairs of Men.  

Over the years I’ve found that the most credible data analysis comes from researchers who are not part of a “climatologist consensus” and don’t need a ride on the gravy train of public funds granted to combat climate change. Australian researcher John McLean estimates that forcible income-transfer programs worldwide, justified by climate-change concerns. total about $2 trillion per year.

Our bottom-line advice to Midwest farmers remains the same: Develop resilient management programs which can cope with cooler climates and more extreme variations in rainfall. Build in more diversity in rotations, including cover crops. Replace significant fractions of your high-cost purchased NPK with enhanced soil biology.