It seems there’s a purge on at the UN to remove failed climate claims. Last week it was the 50 million climate refugees that never materialized and was covered up, this week it’s the poor of Africa they’ve “disappeared”. This one I stumbled upon quite by accident, doing some research for my previous story: World opinion on global warming: not so hot
In it I noted this – Lawrence Solomon makes an observation: 
In Sub-Saharan Africa, where 54% are not aware that their climate is alleged to be warming, a mere 22% have heard of the global warming issue and predominantly blame humans for the warming. In undeveloped Asia, 48% are unaware that the climate is warming and 27% predominantly blame humans.
I wondered about the 54% in Africa saying:
But one has to wonder, if the people that live closest to the earth (such as natives in sub-Saharan Africa) can’t detect changes around them, are we manufacturing a crisis that we wouldn’t notice otherwise?
So I decided to ask the question: How hard is Africa being hit by climate change? I recalled a catchphrase “Africa hit hard by global warming” that I had read before, so I decided to start with that. My first Google search produced the answer in the form of a UNEP report from 2001, except…. the report isn’t there. But, according to Google cache, it was there just a few days ago. See the process of discovery below.
OK so I visited that web page: http://hqweb.unep.org/documents.Multilingual/default.asp
It is a document aggregation page, full of reports and speeches going back to 2000. But I couldn’t locate any press release from February 2001 as stated in the Google search above.
So I decided to search on that title specifically:
And it gives me the same page, where that doesn’t exist that I can find. Odd.
Then I recalled that UNEP provided a site specific Google search on that page under the header, so I tried that, simply searching for “africa hit hardest”
Bingo. It gave me a URL with a document ID:
http://www.unep.org/Documents.multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=192&ArticleID=2776&l=en
And when I clicked on that…amazingly, it returned me to the default document page:
http://hqweb.unep.org/Documents.multilingual/Default.asp
Try it yourself. Hmmm. That sort of redirect to a default page usually occurs when the internal web page engine can’t find the document requested. On some websites, they trap 404 errors, then redirect so the end user isn’t dumped along the side of the information superhighway. I thought, well, it is a 10 year old document, maybe it was simply deleted on the 10 year mark automatically? Well no, they have this from the year 2000 on that page:
So it could not be some sort of date related automatic deletion of a 2001 document.
Then I recalled that my first search attempt showed a “cached” version, so I decided to check that. Sure enough, it was in Google cache, and it was a capture from April 17th, 2011, just a few days ago. Here it is:
Even if you click on the link at the top of the page cited by Google cache, it takes you to the UNEP default page. So clearly, the article has disappeared from the website.
Curiously, just 5 days after the last snapshot taken by Google cache was saved, April 22nd, the Gallup poll comes out:
And in that Gallup poll website, there’s this inconvenient table:
Which begs the question: If Africans are the “hardest hit by global warming” according to the UN, how can only 54% of the people in Sub-Saharan Africa be unaware of it (and only 49% of Middle East and North Africans)?
Of course, the UN helpfully provided the answer by attempting to disappear it right after the Gallup poll came out. They aren’t aware of it because the “hitting hard” of global warming in Africa simply isn’t happening.
Another bogus climate claim rubbished by reality.
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For those interested, I have recovered the full report and have placed it in a PDF document here: UNEP_press_release_Feb22-2001
It is not just the UN deleting inconvenient data. In the UK, Peter Stott, Climate Scientist at the Met Office, said: “…..the trend to milder and wetter winters is expected to continue, with snow and frost becoming less of a feature in the future. The famously cold winter of 1962/63 is now expected to occur about once every 1,000 years or more”
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2009/pr20090225.html
This prediction was followed by a very cold winter in 2009 and then by the record-breaking coldest December ever in 2010.
The Met. Office have now removed the page containing Stott’s famous prediction. But for the moment, you can find it archived here http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/+/http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/corporate/pressoffice/2009/pr20090225.html
Why do proponents of this rapidly collapsing global warming theory find it necessary to build their case on lies and hiding data? As the greatest scientific scandal of all time continues to unwind,can it be sustained only by dishonesty and disinformation?
“Define then, “hitting hard” in the context of the UN global warming claim. If you live somewhere, and are “hit hard” by some effect, natural, man-made, you usually know about it. The fabricated ones are the ones you miss.” – Anthony
Anthony, pwl earlier in this thread offered up the missing piece. Perhaps you could let us know which of the effects talked about in the piece, you feel have been fabricated.
Your commentary on the UN’s disappearing act is appropriate considering these articles should remain available in some sort of encyclopedia of releases. This is typical of government practices of late, they make everything “open” but decrease long term study on the subject by quickly removing the available information. This is also true of news media and other resources, as they are quick to remove their own gaffes. Unless you get the original white paper or an original document relating to the information most prime source material is becoming quickly lost because of the drive to digitize everything, regardless of the impact this has on historic documentation.
Considering I can’t find the minutes on a dozen meetings in UN on line because they too have disappeared and they are unrelated to environment, I am a skeptic of any conspiracy. I also know that UN will delete old material in favor of newer studies, maybe this old study was unfavorable towards climate policy but there was the whole 2007 study which broadly and in depth covered most of this and to my thinking probably replaced most of the older studies. Still the old studies should be archived. It is a fair reprimand.
However, This commentary fails to raise my skeptic flag considering we lack any demographics on the survey model. Did they ask tribal Libyans, Egyptian office workers, Nigerian oil well workers, Bedouin’s or did they stick to only people who are literate? Without knowing demographics and survey method the results can be skewed in any direction.
Location based surveys to determine if science is factual is absurd. Determining if a scientific theory based upon human survey is real is as absurd as basing your understanding of chemistry on the common man’s understanding. Ask Americans if they are aware that water is made out of H2O and you might get 80% of the population who know this, ask a goat-herder in eastern Siberia the same question and they may say it is made from the tears of the gods (taking this from a cultural belief of a local tribe in Siberia).
As you insinuate, desert dwellers may be more in tune with their environment but you are making a huge assumption here, which is that they surveyed desert dwellers, or that the largest portion of those who see climate changing are not desert dwellers. See, like America, most of the middle east is modern. Modern buildings come with modern appliances, the most used one being the air conditioner. How much would you know about climate if you spent 90% of your time in an air conditioned house/office/school?
Furthermore this begs another question, which is how much change is associated with the natural world versus the supernatural? We are talking about a part of the world who’s fundamental beliefs still strongly rely on spirits in nature. They circumcise women because of a tribal belief (not ISLAM) which is connected to older supernatural powers. Would they even recognize scientific theory over god-theory? If you asked 1000 Christians when the world began, about 500 of them would say it began 5000 years ago (in fact that survey does exist). Does that mean we should completely ignore scientific evidence to the contrary because of local mythos or Christian dogma?
The original poll made too many assumptions, which is why I think the poll is extremely unscientific. Your response instead of presenting a factual or scientific approach is anything but. It’s using a very poorly executed survey lacking any explanation of methodology to base an insinuation which relies on the idea that sub Saharan and middle eastern peoples are somehow mystically connected to the temperature. That in itself is so unscientific it makes me question your credibility as a skeptic or even neutral observer of science.
The first questions any neutral observer would have asked were: What portion of those surveyed were rural/desert dwellers? Important because rural dwellers are less likely to have large wells, education and air conditioning. What portion are coastal dwellers? important because most Libyans and other sub saharan peoples are coastal dwellers and while interior dwellers will see an increase in heat, coastal dwellers may see an increase in wind which as you know will decrease local heat. What portion were fundamentalist, the portion of the population likely to be skeptical of any science? what is the age of the respondent? from my understanding temperature change scales to geologic age rather than human chronology. An area impacted by temperature change may take 60 years to change 1 degree, fast in geologic terms, slow in human terms. If your respondents are mostly under the age of 30, it would be impossible to detect, we’re talking temperature increase of a tenth of a degree per year. That’s not detectable by human intuition in any environment unless evaporation, sublimation, freezing, and melting are observed, pretty much only at certain temperature extremes
I’m not saying I concur with the current theory on global warming and especially not concurring with the anthropogenic causes, but I seriously have issues with all the unscientific assumptions made in this blog. I hope in the future you spend more time being skeptical and neutral and spend less time making baseless assumptions or drawing unwarranted conclusions.
sceptical says:
“… you state conclusions with no evidence.”
There are volumes of evidence disclosing the chicanery of climate scientists like Mann, Briffa, Wigley, Jones, Famiglietti, Santer, etc., and their pet journals. To help the scales fall from your eyes, you can start right here:
http://bishophill.squarespace.com/blog/2008/8/11/caspar-and-the-jesus-paper.html
And regarding your incorrect belief that the WWF is only incidental to the IPCC [which would still make it wrong, since the IPCC’s remit is to use peer reviewed information, not talking points from heavily biased, alarmist NGO/QUANGOs], IIRC the WWF has provided around 40% of all the IPCC’s AR-4 propaganda. It’s getting more blatant:
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/04/25/wwfs-chief-spokesperson-joins-ipcc
Smokey, nope, no evidence from the internet blog you referenced. Only accusations and inuendo. Your claims about the IPCC and WWF are without merit. Perhaps you should be more skeptical of some of the claims made on the internet.
The WWF has supplied about .0001% of the information in the IPCC report.
Check out here
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/category/world-wildlife-fund/
Interesting. Maybe they have Charles Johnson from the now nearly defunct Little Green Footballs helping them with their website. heh.
It looks like they just moved things around.
http://hqweb.unep.org/Documents.multilingual/Default.asp?DocumentID=192&ArticleID=2776&l=en