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Drive-by shootings in Kyotoville
The global warming debate heats up
By Allan M.R. MacRae
Published in the Sunday, September 10, 2005 Calgary Sun in edited form.

Drive-by shootings have moved from the slums of our cities to the realms of academia. Any scientist who dares challenge the Kyoto Protocol faces a vicious assault, a turf war launched by the pro-Kyoto gang. These pro-Kyoto attacks are not merely unprofessional - of no scientific merit, they are intended to intimidate real academic debate on the Kyoto Protocol, a global treaty to limit production of greenhouse gases like CO₂ that allegedly cause catastrophic global warming.

Witness the attack on Bjorn Lomborg, author of "The Skeptical Environmentalist". While Lomborg did not challenge the flawed science of Kyoto, he said that Kyoto was a huge misallocation of funds that should be used for more pressing needs - such as cleaning up dirty drinking water that kills millions of children every year. In January 2003, the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty (DCSD) declared that Lomborg's book fell within the concept of "objective scientific dishonesty". The DCSD announced its ruling at a press conference and published it on the Internet, without giving Lomborg any opportunity to respond prior to publication. Almost one year later, in December 2003 the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation completely repudiated the DCSD's findings.

But such bullying is not unique, as other researchers who challenged the scientific basis of Kyoto have learned. Of particular sensitivity to the pro-Kyoto gang is the "hockey stick" temperature curve of 1000 to 2000 AD, proposed by Michael Mann of University of Virginia. Mann's hockey stick indicates that temperatures fell only slightly from 1000 to 1900 AD, after which temperatures increased sharply as a result of humanmade increases in CO₂. Mann concluded: "Our results suggest that the latter 20th century is anomalous in the context of at least the past millennium. The 1990s was the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, at moderately high levels of confidence." Mann's conclusion was the cornerstone supporting Kyoto. However, Mann has been proven entirely incorrect. Mann eliminated from the climate record both the Medieval Warm Period, a period from about 900 to 1300 AD when global temperatures were warmer than today, and also the Little Ice Age from about 1300 to 1800 AD, when temperatures were colder. Mann's conclusion contradicted hundreds of previous studies, but was adopted without question by Kyoto supporters and was the centerpiece of the 2001 Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Canada’s climate change policy is still based on that erroneous Summary for Policymakers (SPM).

In 2003, Willie Soon and Sallie Baliunas of Harvard University wrote a review of over 250 research papers that concluded that the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age were true climatic anomalies with worldwide imprints - contradicting Mann's hockey stick and undermining the basis of Kyoto. Soon and Baliunas were then attacked in the journal EOS.

Also in 2003, University of Ottawa geology professor Jan Veizer and Israeli astrophysicist Nir Shaviv concluded that even though prehistoric CO₂ concentrations in the atmosphere were often many times today's levels, CO₂ had an insignificant effect on Earth’s temperatures. Veizer and Shaviv also received "special attention" from EOS.

In both cases, the attacks were highly unprofessional - these critiques should have been launched in the journals that published the original papers, not in EOS. Also, the victims of these attacks were not given advanced notice, nor were they were given the opportunity to respond in the same issue. In both cases the victims had to wait months for their rebuttals to be published, while the specious attacks were circulated by the pro-Kyoto gang.

Scientists opposed to Kyoto have now been completely vindicated.

Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph and Steven McIntyre conducted a detailed audit of Mann’s hockey stick, and found fatal errors including severe data selection biases and methodological mistakes. McIntyre and McKitrick even showed that hockey stick graphs could be produced over 90% of the time by loading any set of random numbers into Mann’s computer code. Just call it “Mann-made global warming”. Few scientists now accept Mann’s hockey stick. Climate researcher Hans von Storch further criticized it in Science Express in 2004, calling it “rubbish".

Meanwhile, our Ottawa brain trust has just announced that CO₂ will be declared a toxic substance under the Canadian Environmental Protection Act. Is their next move a tax on cow and sheep flatulence, as was tried in New Zealand?

Or will it be a new National Energy Program, another pillaging of Alberta?

The United States House Energy & Commerce Committee has launched a full investigation into the IPCC’s bias and incompetence, and the entire Mann hockey stick fiasco: <http://energycommerce.house.gov/108/Letters/06232005_1570.htm>

The truth is there never has been any solid scientific evidence in favor of Kyoto. From the beginning, Kyoto has been politically driven, replete with flawed science and scary scenarios for which there is no evidence.

The pro-Kyoto gang should finally admit that their pet project actually hurts the environment - Kyoto is a massive waste of scarce global resources that should be used to alleviate real problems, not squandered on fictitious ones.

Allan M. R. MacRae is a professional engineer and investment banker based in Calgary.