We’ve been lectured time and again about the importance of having climate science work come from peer reviewed papers, saying that the work of dedicated amateurs has no place in climate science unless the work rises to publication/peer review level.
Yet that doesn’t seem to apply for United Nations science publications. Of course just one look at the front cover at left tells you its more about selling than science.
The cover image pulls at heartstrings, making the world appear as if it is running out of time before turning entirely into an inhospitable desert. That is an extreme view in my opinion.
Steve McIntyre’s blog discovery of UNEP’s folly bears repeating, because it shows the sort of sloppy science that is going into “official” publications.
This is much like the NCDC CCSP report just over a year ago where they used a photoshopped image of a “flooded” house.
In this case, the United Nations simply grabbed an image from Wikipedia that supported the view they wanted to sell. The problem with the graph in the upper right of page 5 of the UNEP report is that it itself has not been peer reviewed nor has it originated from a peer reviewed publication, having its inception at Wikipedia.
And then there’s the problem of “Hanno” who is an anonymous contributor. This is simply his/her artwork and interpretation. We don’t have any idea who “Hanno” is, nor apparently does UNEP.
Yet UNEP cites the graph as if it was a published and peer reviewed work as “Hanno 2009”. Yet UNEP doesn’t even get the year right as the graph was created in 2005:
But as Steve McIntyre shows us, this graph from “Hanno” is just another variation of Mann’s discredited Hockey Stick based on questionable mathematics, outright errors such as data inversions, and dubious or excluded proxies that may not reflect temperature change at all.
From Climate Audit:
The UNEP CLIMATE CHANGE SCIENCE COMPENDIUM 2009 on page 5 uses the following graph from Wikipedia (not the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report):
CO2 concentration and mean global temperature during the past millennium. CO2 levels (blue line, lefthand axis) are given in parts per million, temperatures (red line, right-hand axis) in degrees Celsius. Source: Hanno 2009 Page 5
Hanno is the pseudonym for a Wikipedia contributor. The graphic itself compares CO2 levels from Mauna Loa and Law Dome ice core to a splice of the HAdCRU temperature index and the Jones and Mann 2004 reconstruction (dominated by Graybill bristlecone chronology).
The latter splice is, of course, the splice that Mann has informed us is never done by responsible climate scientists, further informing us that the allegation that such splices are done is disinformation by fossil fuel companies.
No researchers in this field have ever, to our knowledge, “grafted the thermometer record onto” any reconstrution. It is somewhat disappointing to find this specious claim (which we usually find originating from industry-funded climate disinformation websites) appearing in this forum.
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I’ve done some additional review and here is what I’ve found about “Hanno”
First here is the Wikipedia source for the image:
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:CO2-Temp.png
The following 4 pages on Wikimedia Commons link to this file. UNEP likely got it from the first page during a Google search.
UPDATE: From a Climate Audit commenter “Feedback”: Hanno is also the author of a non-hockey stick graph that can be found in the Norwegian Wikipedia article about the Migration Period (Norwegian: Folkevandringstiden) that shows a more Lamb-like relationship between the MWP and the current warm period:
Source is said to be:
Source: graph drawn by Hanno using data published by A. Moberg, D.M. Sonechkin, K. Holmgren, N.M. Datsenko, W. Karlén, and S.-E. Lauritzen (2005, Highly variable Northern Hemisphere temperatures reconstructed from low- and high-resolution proxy data. Nature (London), 433, 613–617). Temperatures for the last three decades of the 20th Century were taken from P.D. Jones, D.E. Parker, T.J. Osborn & K.R. Briffa (2005, Global and hemispheric temperature anomalies – land and marine instrumental records. In Trends: A Compendium of Data on Global Change. Carbon Dioxide Information Analysis Center, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, U.S.
http://no.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fil:NH_temperature_2ka.png
So apparently “Hanno” contradicts himself with his own set of artwork.
UPDATE2: The Wiki “Hanno” user page is interesting. Thanks to commenter “Dr. Spock”.
Ah Hanno has a face now. Well, at least that is sorted out but the UN certainly did not know his name or anything beyond the Wikipedia username.
We should know by now anything associated with the UN and IPCC is not to be believed so no surprises here.
At.what point do the people responsible for [snip] such as this get called to account? I can imagine that after the whole AGW scam has died this will simply be forgotten and the authors move on to some other ’cause’. But in perpetrating these fictions in an attempt to persuade governments to spend billions of our money they are behaving in a fraudulent manner. Is a defence of this such as ‘I believe in this cause’ enough? It smacks of religion but is dressed up as science and is therefore rather more deceitful.
http://www.bio.ntnu.no/users/hannos/engelsk.htm
wasn’t to hard to find him. here is a picture.
oops already posted sorry.
‘The content and views expressed in this publication do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of . . . the United Nations Environment Programme.’
Similar deceit on residence time of Atmospheric CO2 by the IPCC.
Complete denial of all the scientific studies that have been performed.
http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2009/09/ipcc-outlier-as-usual.html
Well it would figure from the graph that this guy “Hanno” is an activist pushing his view of the climate agenda
A look at his “Membership” page says that he’s a member of:
Have a look at “Friends of the Earth” page and you’ll see the fire of some irrational activism at work:
http://www.foei.org/
The Norwegian section:
http://naturvern.no/
Here’s the Google translated version:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=no&u=http://naturvern.no/&ei=c22-SoLaKZG-sgOLqbQ6&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=1&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dhttp://naturvern.no/%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26hs%3DCCy
And the German Section:
http://www.bund.net/
Translated:
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=de&u=http://www.bund.net/&ei=322-SpiXBo6csgPVg4hD&sa=X&oi=translate&resnum=1&ct=result&prev=/search%3Fq%3Dhttp://www.bund.net/%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff%26client%3Dfirefox-a%26rls%3Dorg.mozilla:en-US:official%26hs%3DKtI
The IPCC says its so, congress says its so, Obama says its so, Lisa Jackson says its so, NOAA says its so, GISS (James the statistician) says its so, Al Gore says its so, Kerry, Pelosi , Waxman …… common thread they want something from you, facts must be ignored.
This abstract of one of Hannos papers speaks for itself
http://www.springerlink.com/content/l7201j54p1w10805/
Another link, “Framtiden i våre hender” (The Future in our hands) is an environmental organization. A google translation of http://www.framtiden.no :
http://translate.google.com/translate?prev=hp&hl=sv&js=y&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.framtiden.no%2F&sl=no&tl=en&history_state0=
A headline “People’s Board, a climate threat?” suggest that democracy is a threat. (There was an election in Norway last week, and it become a close race between the left and the rigth; the right was supposed to win but didn’t.)
Another banner says “We’re seeing the connections – between economic growth and global differences [/injustice] and the environmental crisis.”
A kind of funny — or probably scary — article they link is “The unproductive gonna save us”, which says that those whi’s not study and doesn’t contribute to growth shall are the heroes that shall save our society (I havn’t read it all yet, but…) :
http://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?hl=sv&sl=no&tl=en&u=http://www.folkevett.no/artikler/steinar-lem-i-utvalg/de-uproduktive-skal-redde-oss/&prev=hp&rurl=translate.google.com&usg=ALkJrhjZTvnH_15oGFVwhnt0YU1xNTzZgg
Also “Fair trade”, agriculture without fertilizers etc. the environmentalism of today. Do we have …a moonbat tsunami, or?
Carsten Arnholm, Norway (12:57:40) :
fascinating. Some branches of sociology try to emulate the “hard” sciences. Here we have a “hard”scientist trying to emulate the softer branches of sociology. If anyone can send me the full copy of Hanno’s article I’d be delighted to have a go at it. The guy’s out of his league.
Hanno’s graph is a complete hoax. Here the graphs from Möeberg’s database (red line) and Yang’s database (blue line):
http://www.biocab.org/Medieval_Global_Warming_Yang-Moeberg.jpg
Anthony, you probably did the wrong search for where the image is used. The “What links here” search only looks in the current site. Up at the top of the commons page is a tab which searches all Wikipedia sites. That search shows the graph is used on the “Global Warming” page of Wikipedia in several languages (but not the English version).
http://toolserver.org/~daniel/WikiSense/CheckUsage.php?i=CO2-Temp.png&w=_100000#end
REPLY: Good find, Wikipedia editors reading WUWT should probably work then to get this graph corrected. – A
Did anybody notice the UNEP document also had a full two-page spread where they confused weather and climate? It was titled “Significant climate anomalies from 2008 / 2009”
Hanno certainly is a most peculiar person. He has also written in Wikipedia about “motoring”, which he calls “a mental disorder which constitutes a special case of autism.”
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fno.wikipedia.org%2Fwiki%2FBruker%3AHanno
He really does live in his own little world.
Nasif Nahle (13:30:46) :
Why such a difference between the two graphs?
Stuart Huggett (12:26:47): “At what point do the people responsible for [snip] such as this get called to account? I can imagine that after the whole AGW scam has died this will simply be forgotten and the authors move on to some other ’cause’.”
At what point will you get called to account when it becomes painfully obvious that you’re wrong, that it’s not a scam, that AGW is very real?
There are other issues with the UNEP report.
It the world map at the beginning of the report, “Significant Climate Anomalies from 2008/2009”, a small paragraph says that
“Artic Sea Ice (Sep 09)
Second lowest extent on record behind Sept. 07”.
Maybe they finished the report before they could know, and based this on a guess.
Or maybe it’s just a “scenario”.
Ack (11:03:32) : The scary part is, that this “data” will be accepted by the masses.
Don’t be so sure Ack. It seems the general population would believe the harsher winters are saying global warming isn’t happening before a scientist who says global warming is happening.
ChrisM (11:30:31) : My son has been told he must not use wikipedia for school work as it is unreliable.
It’s a good reassurance that it’s generally understand that Wikipedia isn’t a reliable source!
But some have spent many, many hours of their lives over the past few years entering biased information at Wiki thinking that it will somehow change the public’s view of global warming. Sucks to be them.
Icarus (13:45:12) :
If you’re so sure of your position, why are you hiding behind a pseudonym?
Icarus.
I am not proposing to spend tens of billions of dollars of other people’s money on the basis of highly debatable climate ‘predictions’. Niether am I fabricating data to ‘prove’ those predictions. I am therefore very willing to be called to account for having asked questions – even if I am wrong.
This was noticed by one of my readers, not me.
Stuart Huggett (12:26:47) : At.what point do the people responsible for [snip] such as this get called to account? I can imagine that after the whole AGW scam has died this will simply be forgotten and the authors move on to some other ’cause’
History didn’t keep track of the names of people who said man was responsible for eclipses of the sun. So I agree with you, they will be forgotten.
Heck, people don’t even know who Michael Mann, Steven Schneider, William Connolley, and James Hansen (et al) are now, let alone in the future.
And you’re right about moving on to another cause—people don’t remember that Steven Schneider was part of the coming ice age scare.
I think the only name that will be remembered for global warming will be Al Gore.