“Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period”

They did, however miscarry the science for what they felt was a higher, more noble, and entirely wrong cause. Why? To feel good about doing something in the fashion that they were trained to believe, easily summarized as the broad but rarely explained concept called “Solidarity”. What it amounts to is no different in application as it was when it was flogged hither and fro by the Communists: it is the making of all people the same in sentiment, not finding a way for people of differing views to amicably arrive at the best course of action.

To accomplish this solidarity, basically you have to lie to people at first, and once you have them, you have to cut off their freedom to disagree with you. As far as the greenies are concerned, we are still somewhere at the last stage of the first phase. Christopher Monckton writing in The Telegraph sums it up:

So to the scare. First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.

Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: "With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.' "

So they did. The UN's second assessment report, in 1996, showed a 1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today. But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no medieval warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the warmest for 1,000 years.

So they did indeed. The non-science went into overdrive for what was presumed to be for a cause immutable to criticism because it is impirically drawn – possibly the first time leftist could believe that they were involved in a cutting-edge matter of hard science. Their method: flog it as a cause – have a concert, start another exploitable political faction, do anything... anything at all except look at the data. And when you need some supporting data, then invent it to do what science has sought through time to avoid: create maximum emotional reaction in order to banish any question, any depth or detail as just what it is we should do, and forbid any genuine doubt.

Here's how they did it:

• They gave one technique for reconstructing pre-thermometer temperature 390 times more weight than any other (but didn't say so).
• The technique they overweighted was one which the UN's 1996 report had said was unsafe: measurement of tree-rings from bristlecone pines. Tree-rings are wider in warmer years, but pine-rings are also wider when there's more carbon dioxide in the air: it's plant food. This carbon dioxide fertilisation distorts the calculations.
• They said they had included 24 data sets going back to 1400. Without saying so, they left out the set showing the medieval warm period, tucking it into a folder marked "Censored Data".
• They used a computer model to draw the graph from the data, but scientists later found that the model almost always drew hockey-sticks even if they fed in random, electronic "red noise".

It all has the air of Pol Pot insisting that irrigation canals flow uphill. That we should all be coerced into a grand endeavor and course of action based on this sort of manipulation of real data stains all science with the reputation of the witchcraft they find so immediately critical to their attempt to tell us that these narrow-minded green are here to “save us from ourselves”.

Bull. They’re using humiliation (how DARE you eat that!) to construct a form of widespread guilt which will place them on a mural above the alter in the church of the unquestioning intellect.

Sami Solanki, a solar physicist, says that in the past half-century the sun has been warmer, for longer, than at any time in at least the past 11,400 years, contributing a base forcing equivalent to a quarter of the past century's warming. That's before adding climate feedbacks.

The UN expresses its heat-energy forcings in watts per square metre per second. It estimates that the sun caused just 0.3 watts of forcing since 1750. Begin in 1900 to match the temperature start-date, and the base solar forcing more than doubles to 0.7 watts. Multiply by 2.7, which the Royal Society suggests is the UN's current factor for climate feedbacks, and you get 1.9 watts – more than six times the UN's figure.

The entire 20th-century warming from all sources was below 2 watts. The sun could have caused just about all of it.

Next, the UN slashed the natural greenhouse effect by 40 per cent from 33C in the climate-physics textbooks to 20C, making the man-made additions appear bigger.

But don’t mention the war...

- H/T to Kevin. Thanks, Ace.