Arctic Sea Ice Scam

Ever been had? The Observer of July 26 under the engaging title Revealed: the secret evidence of global warming Bush tried to hide makes the following claims:

Photos from US spy satellites declassified by the Obama White House provide the first graphic images of how the polar ice sheets are retreating in the summer. The effects on the world’s weather, environments and wildlife could be devastating.

Graphic images that reveal the devastating impact of global warming in the Arctic have been released by the US military…The pictures, kept secret by Washington during the presidency of George W Bush, were declassified by the White House last week. President Barack Obama is currently trying to galvanise Congress and the American public to take action to halt catastrophic climate change caused by rising levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

One particularly striking set of images – selected from the 1,000 photographs released – includes views of the Alaskan port of Barrow. One, taken in July 2006, shows sea ice still nestling close to the shore. A second image shows that by the following July the coastal waters were entirely ice-free.

Here are the images

We will show in this post that this is a hideous piece of lies and propaganda. It is very revealing since not only does it show the biased propagandizing of the Guardian/The Observer stable, but also demonstrates the crude and shameless progagandizing of the Obama Administration (which also confirms the case made in the post All who hate Me love Death that Obama was dissembling when he claimed that he wouldn’t interfere with science). We will show in this post, with additional evidence from the air and the ground, that the satellite pictures have been deliberately selectively cropped and chosen for maximum propaganda effect to mislead the public (and politicians, no doubt). It is akin to taking beach photographs of low tide one year and of high tide the following year, and putting them side by side in an argument about sea level rise. Put on the finishing touches about a Bush conspiracy and Obama’s openness and you are home and dry with something the Nazis would have been proud of.

Even the University of Alaska, Fairbanks felt compelled to comment:

Annual break-up of landfast sea ice off the coast of Barrow, Alaska received international media attention in July 2009 after the USGS made available high resolution-satellite imagery that show inter-annual variability in coastal ice conditions…However, unlike suggested by some, comparing summer ice conditions in July 2006 and July 2007 is not sufficient evidence to verify a trend.

In other words, all they show is that one year differs from another and no trend can be inferred. In the nicest possible way, this says that someone is up to no good here by distorting the science. Shame on the US Geological Survey for being prepared to become the mouthpiece of propaganda.

Growth of Crops, Weeds, CO2 and Lies

The USA has its own Climate Change propaganda. The latest is Obama’s first big scientific report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States, signed off by Obama’s appointed President’s Science Advisor, John Holdren, the neo-Malthusian who has espoused forcible sterilization and abortion for reducing the US population. As expected, it’s a classic but crude piece of propaganda peppered with images that are designed to scare, but which are unrelated to the matter under consideration – for example pictures of floods from Hurricane Katrina, which has nothing whatsoever to do with climate change, but which was merely the result of a hurricane making landfall directly on New Orleans. The Space and Science Research Center in Florida put out a press release on July 13 with a call for Holdren and NOAA Administrator Jane Lubchenko to be removed from office because

These two individuals and other agency heads orchestrated and then signed off on the recently released government report, Global Climate Change Impacts in the United States. This report was a piece of blatant, politically motivated bad science and pure propaganda…

And in a letter to Senator Boxer, the SSRC opine that it is

an international embarrassment of American scientific expertise and is so full of misleading data, false assumptions, and invalid conclusions that it simply cannot be relied upon as a policy making reference.

The report cites 569 references, but how many readers are going to go to the trouble of looking any of them up to discover that they don’t support the position of the text, or have been so selectively quoted that they are relied on to say the opposite to what was meant?

We can’t deal with the whole report, so we will mention one example from the chapter on agriculture (PDF here) as we have been considering the effects of elevated CO2 on plants. This example will demonstrate the lying propaganda, and the disregard and crafty twisting of the evidence; and this example is typical of the whole report, which is a compendium of lies.

The poster boy of the agricultural section of the report is the following image, which also appears on the associated website. The report text states

The most widely used herbicide in the United States, glyphosate (RoundUp®), loses its efficacy on weeds grown at carbon dioxide levels that are projected to occur in the coming decades (see photos below).
Higher concentrations of the chemical and more frequent spraying thus will be needed, increasing economic and environmental costs associated with chemical use.

What this is supposed to show is that as CO2 increases, the effectiveness of a common herbicide decreases. Notice anything strange? The experiment is completely unrepresentative of an agricultural situation since it is evident from the picture that there are no crops present. Well, who sows and grows fields of weeds, and who wastes time and money spraying weeds with herbicide where there are no crops growing? Who cares about weeds where crops aren’t grown? No-one.

Don’t be deceived. What the picture actually shows is that weeds, like all plants, thrive under elevated CO2, can better utilize available resources, and can overcome stresses better (in this case, the application of herbicide, which is an extreme stress). This is expected, and we pointed this out in previous posts (World Food Supplies and Carbon Emissions, and Photosynthesis and CO2 Enrichment). The picture says nothing whatsoever about what would happen to the weeds under herbicide stress when they have to compete for the same resources (water, nutrients, light, CO2 etc) as herbicide-resistant crops growing in the same patch. What we find in the real world (as we will demonstrate below) is that in a competitive environment (which is the only real-world agricultural scenario worth considering) the fertilizing effects of enhanced CO2 on crops far outweigh any slight mitigation of herbicide stress on weeds. The result is that in elevated CO2 environments, crop yield is far higher for a given application of herbicide, or alternatively for a given crop yield the herbicide requirement is considerably reduced. Thus the report is lying, the scientists who compiled it are lying, and they know very well that they are lying. The trouble is, we’re not supposed to be informed well enough to know it. We will now prove it.

Convenient Lies

In true Orwellian fashion, Al Gore’s award-winning documentary An Inconvenient Truth is about as close to truth as was Pravda (Russian=truth) under the communist USSR. The documentary is in fact a concatenation of very convenient lies. It is a propaganda piece of historic proportions. In October 2007, the British government was sued in the High Court for encouraging its dissemination and showing in schools. The judge directed that had the government not given an undertaking to the court to put out a guidance note pointing out the manifest errors in the film, the judge would have ruled the government’s action to be a contravention of the law prohibiting the political indoctrination of children.

The BBC, though, is not bound by such a ruling and continues to pump out the untruths that have been so thoroughly discredited. Now climate change propaganda has found its way into history articles. Not content with governments and the media disseminating propaganda to manipulate and control the future, we have to suffer the distortion of the past as well. In this month’s BBC History magazine there is an article about ‘the scientists who predicted climate change’. This is a very topical issue, and could have been a very interesting article had it not come off the rails and become a train wreck in the first few lines.