Sen. Inhofe: NAS Report Refutes Global Warming Theory

NewsMax.com WiresFriday, June 23, 2006
A Congressionally commissioned review by the National Academy of Sciences refutes the so-called "hockey stick" study that supposedly confirmed the existence of global warming.

The hockey stick study, by Dr. Michael Mann and his colleagues, was thus named because of a stick-shaped graph that plotted global temperatures against time.

The hockey stick graph purported to show that temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere remained relatively stable over 900 years, then spiked upward in the 20th century.

Al Gore showed hockey stick depictions of temperature rises in his global warming documentary "An Inconvenient Truth."

But the NAS's report "Surface Temperature Reconstructions for the Last 2000 Years" noted in its summary that there were "relatively warm conditions centered around A.D. 1000 (identified by some as the ‘Medieval Warm Period') and a relatively cold period (or ‘Little Ice Age') centered around 1700."

Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., chairman of the Committee on Environment and Public Works, said in a statement Thursday:

"Today's NAS report reaffirms what I have been saying all along, that Mann's ‘hockey stick' is broken. Today's report refutes Mann's prior assertions that there was no Medieval Warm Period or Little Ice Age." The NAS report also stated that there are "substantial uncertainties" regarding Mann's claims that the last few decades of the 20th century were the warmest in last 1,000 years.

The report further chastises Mann by declaring: "Even less confidence can be placed in the original conclusions by Mann et al. (1999) that ‘the 1990's are likely the warmest decade, and 1998 the warmest year, in at least a millennium…'

"This report shows that the planet warmed for about 200 years ... when we were coming out of the depths of the Little Ice Age where harsh winters froze the Thames and caused untold deaths.

"Trying to prove man-made global warming by comparing the well-known fact that today's temperatures are warmer than during the Little Ice Age is akin to comparing summer to winter to show a catastrophic temperature trend."

As the special report "Al Gore Spins Global Warming" in the July issue of NewsMax Magazine points out, the Northern Hemisphere apparently cooled from around 1940 until the late 1970s, despite rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases.

"An Inconvenient Truth" makes no mention of this inconvenient event that shatters Gore's depiction of a world relentlessly heating as greenhouse pollution increased.