Al Gore's global warming "consensus" spontaneously combusts

 
The U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works has published some fascinating articles on climate change, though to read the daily newspaper you'd never know it.

A July 2007 review of 539 abstracts in peer-reviewed scientific journals over the last three years reveals a "shift toward the views of global warming skeptics."

For the journal Energy and Environment, author Michael Asher submitted additional detail that blows the lid off Al Gore's "consensus view" on anthropogenic (human causation of) global warming.

...In 2004, history professor Naomi Oreskes performed a survey of research papers on climate change. Examining peer-reviewed papers published on the ISI Web of Science database from 1993 to 2003, she found a majority supported the "consensus view," defined as humans were having at least some effect on global climate change. Oreskes' work has been repeatedly cited, but as some of its data is now nearly 15 years old, its conclusions are becoming somewhat dated...

Researcher Dr. Klaus-Martin Schulte used the same database and search terms and examined papers from 2004 through February 2007. The results are stunning:

* Of 528 papers on climate change, only 38 (7%) gave an explicit endorsement of anthropogenic global warming (AGW)
* 32 papers (6%) reject AGW outright
* 48% refuse to accept or reject AGW, i.e., take no position for or against
* Only one paper speculates that AGW could lead to catastrophic results

The figures are even more surprising when we consider how AGW is defined for the purpose of this reporting. In this context, supporting AGW requires that:

* Humans need not be the primary cause of warming (i.e., they can have "any" impact whatsoever)
* No belief or support for "catastrophic" warming is necessary

Why then would Schulte's survey contradict the UN's IPCC 2007 Report, which gave a "90% likely" figure for AGW?

Simple. Despite the media's breathless exhortations that "thousands of scientists" are involved in the IPCC report, the reality is that the text is actually written by a small number of "lead authors." Furthermore, the executive summary -- the portion most frequently quoted in the mainstream media -- is written by politicians and approved by political operatives from member nations.

By IPCC policy, the individual report chapters -- the only text actually written by scientists -- are edited to "ensure compliance" with the summary, which is typically published months before the actual report itself... By contrast, the ISI Web of Science database covers 8,700 journals and publications, including every leading scientific journal in the world.

In short, scientists are offering a very different consensus than that which is marketed by Al Gore and the United Nations.

Is that because Al Gore and the UN stand to make billions from 'carbon trading markets', which have spun up from the IPCC to take financial advantage of various hysterical AGW pronouncements?

The World Rainforest Movement -- a very left-leaning organization -- investigated these bizarre financial ties and came to a shocking conclusion.

[they] concluded that the IPCC report "must now be shelved due to their clear conflict of interest and a new report instigated which will be free of the taint of intellectual corruption." And solar energy portal Ecotopia reports that members of the IPCC "...had vested interests in reaching unrealistically and unjustifiably optimistic conclusions about the possibility of compensating for emissions with trees... [and] should have been automatically disqualified from serving on an intergovernmental panel charged with investigating impartially the feasibility and benefits of such... projects."

In short, the IPCC had an inherent conflict of interest.

As for Al Gore's vaunted "consensus view"? It seems to have spontaneously combusted, perhaps due to all of the desert-hot wind emanating from greedy politicians.