(originally published as “Global Warming May Be Just European” on Dec 11, 2007)
Readers of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report – Working Group 2 (AR4-WG2) may be forgiven to think a colossal misreading of available data may be at the foundation of contemporary Climate Change/Global Warming scares.
That report contains a map of “significant changes” (SC) already observed around the world. It is repeated throughout, and you can see it in the Summary for Policymakers, page 10, Figure SPM.1.
A total of 29,459 SCs are reported. An impressive number, at first glance.
Only, 96% of those changes regard just Europe.
The IPCC itself could not list more than 1,225 SCs not related to Europe.
This enormous geographical bias does not get better when we count how many of those SCs are actually “consistent with a warming world”.
Planet-wise, there are 26,285. Of those, 96% are in Europe. Actually, 25,022 are European SCs related to “biological systems”.
That’s 95% of the total.
That means that outside of Europe, the IPCC could not find more than 1,150 SCs “consistent with warming”.
Compare that to the number of European SCs NOT-“consistent with warming”: 3,100
We have twice as many changes that are INCONSISTENT with warming in Europe, than CONSISTENT with warming in the rest of the world.
Note also the distribution of the other “observed changes”. Only 7 for the whole of Africa, 114 for Asia, and 144 for the Polar Regions.
But what is most notable is that in the whole of North America (where, one would expect, a lot of researchers reside), only 810 SCs have been reported. Of those, 752 are consistent with warming.
That’s 3% of the total.
So for a summary: 96% from Europe. 3% with North America. Almost nothing for everywhere else.
How global can that be?