Anti-global warming report a hoax

The Global Warming organization of "skeptics" is congratulating an Internet hoaxer for his eye for detail and vast work that was put into a report that purported to assign the blame for "global warming" to sea-grown bacteria.

The report was called "CO2 production by Benthic Bacteria: The Death of Manmade Global Warming Theory?" and includes a research credit line to "Daniel A Klein, Mandeep J Gupta, Philip Cooper, Arne FR Jansson" as well as acknowledgements to the Journal of Geoclimatic Studies, the Department of Climatology at the University of Arizona, and the Department of Atmospheric Physics at Goteborgs Univeritet in Sweden.

"We have found a near-perfect match between the levels of carbon dioxide produced by benthic eubacteria and recent global temperature records. By contrast we note what must be obvious to all those who have studied the figures with an open mind: a very poor match between carbon dioxide produced by burning fossil fuels and recent global temperature records," the study said.

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"Moreover we note that there is no possible mechanism by which industrial emissions could have caused the recent temperature increase, as they are two orders of magnitude too small to have exerted an effect of this size. We have no choice but to conclude that the recent increase in global temperatures, which has caused so much disquiet among policy makers, bears no relation to industrial emissions, but is in fact a natural phenomenom (sic)."

The report was linked to a website carrying backup information, although the website's e-mail links were inoperable and there were no telephone numbers.

"There's a hoax going round, with a very convincing 'study' that claims not only to find a link between 'benthic bacteria' and temperature increases, but also has the authors say that they were intimidated into not publishing their findings," wrote Iain Murray at Global Warming.

"The authors have even made up past contents for the fake journal," he wrote.

Officials at the University of Arizona confirmed to WND there is no "Department of Climatology" and none of the "authors" exists in the university database.

"A quick whois lookup indicates that the site is registered to one David Thorp of Powys, Wales, in the UK. There is a David Thorpe who claims to be a 'prize-winning novelist and environmental journalist' there and who runs the company to whom the site is registered. He blogs at The Low Carbon Kid," Murray said.

"Congratulations to Mr Thorpe on his eye for detail and the work that must have gone in to producing such a convincing-looking study at first sight. I'm sure he'll fool lots of people who will find the 'findings' extremely attractive, but globalwarming.org is not one of them. We are skeptics, after all...," Murray said.

The report said, "It was not our intention in researching this issue to disprove manmade global warming theory. We have received no funds, directly or indirectly, from fossil fuel companies and have no personal interest in the outcome of the debate. We simply noticed an anomaly in the figures used by those who accept the 'consensus' position on climate change and sought to investigate it."

The report was complete with technical descriptions: "The palaeontological (sic) record shows that, from the early Pliocene onwards, benthic bacterial communities have undergone violent fluctuations in mass (Tibbold, 1996). The relationship with algal blooms, whose breakdown product (difluoroethylene sulphate) is toxic to the primary eubacterial predators - Tetrarhynchia brachiopods - is also well-known (Dillon, 1998; Wyn Jones and Torres, 2001)."

Complicated mathematical formulas purportedly used as well as detailed graphs and charts also were created, as well as a long list of footnotes.

WND has reported previously on allegations of inaccuracies over statements regarding global warming.

Al Gore stars in 'An Inconvenient Truth'

For example, "An Inconvenient Truth," which won the 2007 Academy Award for best documentary for Al Gore and paved the way for the former U.S. vice president to be awarded the Nobel Prize, is considered scientifically suspect and alarmist by its critics.

A recent requirement for some municipal employees to see the movie came the same week a British judge identified 11 errors in "An Inconvenient Truth" that must be identified with a disclaimer before the Gore movie can be used in British classrooms.

WND also has reported a New Zealand think tank has written the president of the Academy Awards asking that the Oscar given to the film be taken back in response to the ruling.

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