The Global Warming Hoax

I have written quite a bit about the global warming scam in this blog over the past 8 years. As I see it there are four main points that need to be established before we prepare to accept draconian curtailments of our energy usage:

1) Has the Earth warmed in the recent past?
2) Is the warming cyclical or secular?
3) If secular, is it caused primarily or significantly by humans?
4) Is warming bad?

While most of my arguments have been against #2 & #3 (and some with #4) I have usually accepted #1 as an established fact, although with provisos that it is difficult to measure world average temperatures, disagreements between satellite and earth based measures, etc...

It has been suggested and strongly argued by others however that there are major problems with the earth based measurements due to urban heat sink effects, i.e. as urban areas have been built up they trap more heat and temperature stations near them will show a temperature rise that is purely due to those effects rather than any average rise in global temperatures. Anthony Watts at www.surfacestations.org has done yeoman's work in documenting the temperature biases due to poorly placed monitoring stations (near air conditioning ducts, heating vents, etc...)

To add to this is this very simple and clever piece of analysis done by a kid and his dad using GISS data. One wonders if anyone at CRU or their various cronies have ever done a similar analysis (h/t Coyote).



I'm not sure I'm any longer willing to concede point #1 anymore. I am more and more convinced that rather than being a large mistake caused by some tunnel vision and political pressure that AGW is, instead, a huge conscious or semi-conscious hoax provoked by the bad intersection of politics, grant money and groupthink.