Global warming activists get lots of attention when they make scary predictions of environmental catastrophe if the world doesn’t embrace costly wind and solar power and stop using so much oil and coal. Less attention is paid to facts and figures that dispute the alarmist forecasts.
But some red-faced scientists are quietly apologizing over what they acknowledge to be remarkably shoddy work in the supposedly unimpeachable U.N. climate report of 2007.
“The world’s most authoritative report on global warming” contained “five glaring errors” in one paragraph alone, prompting the apologies and promises “to be more careful,” The Associated Press reported.
Predictably, that was followed by a rush to assure everyone that the errors in no way detract from the validity of the report, which was put together by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Decide for yourself:
* The report declared that massive glaciers in the Himalayas may be lost to melting by the year 2035. That sounds alarming! But it should have said the year of the alleged melt-off was some time in the mid-24th century — an error of 300 years!
* That claim was attributed to an advocacy group, the World Wildlife Fund, though the IPCC boasts that it relied on unbiased sources of scientific data in writing its report.
* Even basic math was bungled. One table claims a certain glacier shrank more than 135 meters per year from 1845 to 1965. But when somebody divided the total shrinkage by the number of years, the real figure was less than one-fifth of that.
* Though the Himalayas have only 33,000 square kilometers of glaciers, the report said the glaciers would shrink 400,000 square kilometers in the next 25 years!
These revelations come on top of news that IPCC scientists manipulated climate data to get the results they wanted and tried to suppress the views of highly respected dissenting scientists.
It is sensible for the American people to question environmentalists’ claims that climate science is now “settled.”