What's Wrong With This Picture?

The eco friendly blue state of Oregon has a state climatologist, George Taylor . Mr Taylor is an ex-hippie vegetarian who rides a bicycle to work. No surprises so far. Now for the surprise; "Taylor is one of the leading circuit riders for the church of Global Warming Ain't Happening."

His views have been read on the floor of the U.S. Senate and, most recently, influenced global-warming bills in Salem. In the past, he also has tried to undermine global-warming legislation in Canada.

"Look, it's not that complicated," says Taylor, who, as head of the Oregon Climate Service at OSU, is known as the state climatologist. "It's not clear that we are seeing unprecedented warming, and it's definitely untrue that any warming trend can be assigned to human activities. Natural variations in climate are much more significant than any human activities."

A bad scientist with credibility
Taylor is considered a very dangerous man because he has more credibility as the climatologist from Oregon than scientists working for Exxon-Mobile. When he talks bad science people listen.

Taylor's position as the leading climate expert in Oregon, a state with a national environmental reputation, has given ammo to those who are hostile to the idea that the earth is warming up. On Jan. 4 of this year, Oklahoma Republican Sen. James Inhofe, chairman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, said in a Senate floor speech, "As Oregon State University climatologist George Taylor has shown, Arctic temperatures are actually slightly cooler today than they were in the 1930s. As Dr. Taylor has explained, it's all relative."

Inhofe was wrong on two counts. First, Taylor is not a doctor; he has no Ph.D. (he received his master's in meteorology at the University of Utah in 1975). And second, Taylor is flat-out mistaken. Temperatures in the Arctic have, in fact, reached unprecedented levels, according to an exhaustive study by two international Arctic science organizations published last November that confirmed previous, similar results.

Bad Science
It would appear that Taylor is guilty of cherry picking data.

The Arctic report said the North Pole is losing its permafrost, and frozen bogs are melting in Alaska and Siberia, spewing vast amounts of methane, another greenhouse gas. Sea ice and glaciers are retreating, temperatures are rising, the growing season is extending and robins are now living above the Arctic Circle for the first time in history.

Taylor's review said the authors of the Arctic study looked at only the last 35 years, ignoring data from the 1930s that show conditions were comparable to those of today. "Why not start the trend there?" he wrote. "Because there is no net warming over the last 65 years?"

It's not clear what report Taylor was reading. In fact, the Arctic study takes into account an entire thousand years and places the Arctic in the context of the entire globe.

Taylor acknowledges he reviewed only 55 pages of a 140-page summary of the full 1,200-page report, yet still found fault with its sourcing. "Oddly, the [report] does a very poor job of documenting its sources of information," Taylor writes. "For such an ambitious document its science consists primarily of blanket statements without any sort of reference or citation."

If Taylor had waited to review the full report (preliminary versions of chapters are posted on the Web; the final version is due in September), he would have noticed the report's detailed documentation and lengthy list of references.

A dangerous man indeed.

Update (02-07-2007)
The latest on George Taylor here.