Major paper shows CO2’s effect on temperature was overstated 500-2000%
WASHINGTON (7-15-08) - Mathematical proof that there is no “climate crisis” appears today in a major, peer-reviewed paper in Physics and Society, a learned journal of the 46,000-strong American Physical Society, SPPI reports.
Christopher Monckton, who once advised Margaret Thatcher, demonstrates via 30 equations that computer models used by the UN’s climate panel (IPCC) were pre-programmed with overstated values for the three variables whose product is “climate sensitivity” (temperature increase in response to greenhouse-gas increase), resulting in a 500-2000% overstatement of CO2’s effect on temperature in the IPCC’s latest climate assessment report, published in 2007.
Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered http://www.aps.org/units/fps/newsletters/200807/index.cfm demonstrates that later this century a doubling of the concentration of CO2 compared with pre-industrial levels will increase global mean surface temperature not by the 6 °F predicted by the IPCC but, harmlessly, by little more than 1 °F. Lord Monckton concludes – “… Perhaps real-world climate sensitivity is very much below the IPCC’s estimates. Perhaps, therefore, there is no ‘climate crisis’ at all. … The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.”
Larry Gould, Professor of Physics at the University of Hartford and Chair (2004) of the New England Section of the American Physical Society (APS), has been studying climate-change science for four years. He said:
“I was impressed by an hour-long academic lecture which criticized claims about ‘global warming’ and explained the implications of the physics of radiative transfer for climate change. I was pleased that the audience responded to the informative presentation with a prolonged, standing ovation. That is what happened when, at the invitation of the President of our University, Christopher Monckton lectured here in Hartford this spring. I am delighted that Physics and Society, an APS journal, has published his detailed paper refining and reporting his important and revealing results."
“To me the value of this paper lies in its dispassionate but ruthlessly clear exposition – or, rather, exposé – of the IPCC’s method of evaluating climate sensitivity. The detailed arguments in this paper, and, indeed, in a large number of other scientific papers, point up extensive errors, including numerous projection errors of climate models, as well as misleading statements by the IPCC. Consequently, there are no rational grounds for believing either the IPCC or any other claims of dangerous anthropogenic ‘global warming’.”
Lord Monckton’s paper reveals that –
The IPCC’s 2007 climate summary overstated CO2’s impact on temperature by 500-2000%;
CO2 enrichment will add little more than 1 °F (0.6 °C) to global mean surface temperature by 2100;
Not one of the three key variables whose product is climate sensitivity can be measured directly;
The IPCC’s values for these key variables are taken from only four published papers, not 2,500;
The IPCC’s values for each of the three variables, and hence for climate sensitivity, are overstated;
“Global warming” halted ten years ago, and surface temperature has been falling for seven years;
Not one of the computer models relied upon by the IPCC predicted so long and rapid a cooling;
The IPCC inserted a table into the scientists’ draft, overstating the effect of ice-melt by 1000%;
It was proved 50 years ago that predicting climate more than two weeks ahead is impossible;
Mars, Jupiter, Neptune’s largest moon, and Pluto warmed at the same time as Earth warmed;
In the past 70 years the Sun was more active than at almost any other time in the past 11,400 years.
Contact: Robert Ferguson, Science and Public Policy Institute www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org
202-288-5699 bferguson@sppinstitute.org
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Monday, December 7, 2009
SPPI MONTHLY CO2 REPORT : : JULY 2009
Editorial : : The science is in. the scare is out.
Recent papers and data give a complete picture of why the UN is wrong.
NO LONGER can it be credibly argued that “global warming” is worse than previously thought. No longer can it be argued that “global warming” was, is, or will be any sort of global crisis. Recent papers in the peer-reviewed literature, combined with streams of data from satellites and thermometers, now provide a complete picture of why it is that the UN’s climate panel, the worldwide political class, and other “global warming” profiteers are wrong in their assumption that the enterprises of humankind will disastrously warm the Earth.
The global surface temperature record, which we update and publish every month, has shown no statistically-significant “global warming” for almost 15 years. Statistically-significant global cooling has now persisted for very nearly eight years. Even a strong el Nino – expected in the coming months – will be unlikely to reverse the cooling trend.
More significantly, the ARGO bathythermographs deployed throughout the world’s oceans since 2003 show that the top 400 fathoms of the oceans, where it is agreed between all parties that at least 80% of all heat caused by manmade “global warming” must accumulate, have been cooling over the past six years. That now prolonged ocean cooling is fatal to the “official” theory that “global warming” will happen on anything other than a minute scale.
Not only in the oceans but also in the tropical upper atmosphere, realworld measurements are showing up the scaremongers’ computer models as useless. All of the models predict that at altitude in the tropics “global warming” should have happened at thrice the surface rate. But half a century of measurement has shown that that warming has not happened either. That, too, is fatal to the “official” notion.
A recent study by Paltridge et al. tells us why the tropical upper troposphere is not warming at thrice the surface rate. The modelers had told their X-Box 360s to predict that “hot-spot” because the Clausius-Clapeyron relation – one of the very few proven results in climatology – mandates that the space occupied by the warming atmosphere will carry near-exponentially more water vapor, which, by its sheer quantity in the atmosphere, is many times more significant than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
However, Dr. Paltridge’s paper demonstrates that subsidence drying carries the additional moisture down to lower altitudes where the water vapor has less effect because its absorption bands are already saturated there. Subsidence drying allows far more outgoing longwave radiation to escape unimpeded to space than the models predict: obsessed with radiative transports in the atmosphere, they tend to undervalue non-radiative transports such as subsidence drying.
We not only know why the outgoing radiation is not being trapped as predicted – we now know that it is not being trapped. Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT has just published a paper – arguably the most important ever to be published on “global warming” – that plots real-world changes in outgoing long-wave radiation, as measured by the ERBE satellite system, against real-world changes in global mean surface temperature. See the startling graph on page 4.
Observed reality is entirely different from what 11 of the UN’s models predict. Instead of 6 F warming in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration, only 1 F can be expected, because nearly all the radiation that should be trapped in the atmosphere is escaping to space. The scare is truly over.
Monckton of Brenchley
See full report at: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monthly_report/sppi_monthly_co2_report_july.html
Recent papers and data give a complete picture of why the UN is wrong.
NO LONGER can it be credibly argued that “global warming” is worse than previously thought. No longer can it be argued that “global warming” was, is, or will be any sort of global crisis. Recent papers in the peer-reviewed literature, combined with streams of data from satellites and thermometers, now provide a complete picture of why it is that the UN’s climate panel, the worldwide political class, and other “global warming” profiteers are wrong in their assumption that the enterprises of humankind will disastrously warm the Earth.
The global surface temperature record, which we update and publish every month, has shown no statistically-significant “global warming” for almost 15 years. Statistically-significant global cooling has now persisted for very nearly eight years. Even a strong el Nino – expected in the coming months – will be unlikely to reverse the cooling trend.
More significantly, the ARGO bathythermographs deployed throughout the world’s oceans since 2003 show that the top 400 fathoms of the oceans, where it is agreed between all parties that at least 80% of all heat caused by manmade “global warming” must accumulate, have been cooling over the past six years. That now prolonged ocean cooling is fatal to the “official” theory that “global warming” will happen on anything other than a minute scale.
Not only in the oceans but also in the tropical upper atmosphere, realworld measurements are showing up the scaremongers’ computer models as useless. All of the models predict that at altitude in the tropics “global warming” should have happened at thrice the surface rate. But half a century of measurement has shown that that warming has not happened either. That, too, is fatal to the “official” notion.
A recent study by Paltridge et al. tells us why the tropical upper troposphere is not warming at thrice the surface rate. The modelers had told their X-Box 360s to predict that “hot-spot” because the Clausius-Clapeyron relation – one of the very few proven results in climatology – mandates that the space occupied by the warming atmosphere will carry near-exponentially more water vapor, which, by its sheer quantity in the atmosphere, is many times more significant than CO2 as a greenhouse gas.
However, Dr. Paltridge’s paper demonstrates that subsidence drying carries the additional moisture down to lower altitudes where the water vapor has less effect because its absorption bands are already saturated there. Subsidence drying allows far more outgoing longwave radiation to escape unimpeded to space than the models predict: obsessed with radiative transports in the atmosphere, they tend to undervalue non-radiative transports such as subsidence drying.
We not only know why the outgoing radiation is not being trapped as predicted – we now know that it is not being trapped. Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT has just published a paper – arguably the most important ever to be published on “global warming” – that plots real-world changes in outgoing long-wave radiation, as measured by the ERBE satellite system, against real-world changes in global mean surface temperature. See the startling graph on page 4.
Observed reality is entirely different from what 11 of the UN’s models predict. Instead of 6 F warming in response to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration, only 1 F can be expected, because nearly all the radiation that should be trapped in the atmosphere is escaping to space. The scare is truly over.
Monckton of Brenchley
See full report at: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monthly_report/sppi_monthly_co2_report_july.html
FRAUD IN “GLOBAL WARMING” BOOK FOR CHILDREN
A Fundamental Scientific Error in “global warming” Book for Children http://www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org/
September 2007
On page 18 of Laurie David's new children's global warming book, there is a glaring scientific error.
David tells children:
"Deep down in the Antarctic ice are atmosphere samples from the past, trapped in tiny air bubbles. These bubbles, formed when snowflakes fell on the ice, are the key to figuring out two things about climate history: what temperatures were in the past and which greenhouse gases were present in the atmosphere at that time.
The more the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the higher the temperature climbed. The less carbon dioxide, the more the temperature fell. You can see this relationship for yourself by looking at the graph: See full report for graph @ http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/other/childrensbookerror.html
What makes this graph so amazing is that by connecting rising CO2 to rising temperature scientists have discovered the link between greenhouse-gas pollution and global warming."
What really makes their graph “amazing” is that it’s dead wrong. In order to contrive a visual representation for their false central claim that CO2 controls temperature change, David and co-author Cambria Gordon present unsuspecting children with an altered temperature and CO2 graph that falsely reverses the relationship found in the scientific literature.1
The actual temperature curve in the chart was switched with the actual CO2 curve. That is, the authors mislabelled the blue curve as temperature and mislabelled the red curve as CO2 concentration. The real data show that the red curve represents the temperature changes over geological time, followed (lagged) by changes in CO2 concentrations represented by the blue curve. Thus, children tracing the properly labelled curves from right to left (from past to present) can easily see the real, science-based relationship (particularly clear in the interval between 500,000 and 150,000 years ago).
The David-Gordon manipulation is critical because the central premise of the book argues that CO2 drives temperature, yet the ice core data clearly reveal temperature increases generally precede increasing CO2 by several hundred to a few thousand years. This fact may have been too inconvenient for David, who instead presented young readers with an astoundingly irresponsible falsehood. Parents and teachers of these children should be concerned.
Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth also got this wrong, saying: “The relationship is very complicated. But there is one relationship that is more powerful than all the others and it is this. When there is more CO2, the temperature gets warmer, because it traps more heat from the sun …”
The David book for children, like the Al Gore film, has the relationship entirely wrong. The peer-reviewed literature is unanimous in finding that in climate records CO2 changes have historically followed temperature changes and cannot have caused them. The book is mischievous for concluding that this deceptive graph has anything to do with “discovering” a link between additional CO2 concentrations and “global warming”.
On page 103 of their book, David and Gordon cite the work of Siegenthaler et al. (2005), for their written and graphical contention that temperature lags CO2. However, Siegenthaler et al. clearly state the opposite:
“The lags of CO2 with respect to the Antarctic temperature over glacial terminations V to VII are 800, 1600, and 2800 years, respectively, which are consistent with earlier observations during the last four glacial cycles.”
(Siegenthaler et al., 2005, Science, vol. 310, 1313-1317)
1 For a comprehensive review of this literature, see: http://ff.org/centers/csspp/pdf/20070204_idso.pdf
The author of this review paper concluded:
“In considering the findings of the several studies that have broached the question of the relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature over the pasthalf million or so years, it is clear that (1) sometimes the two parameters are totally out of sync with each other, as when one rises and the other falls, (2)sometimes one is in transit to a higher or lower level, while the other is in stasis, and (3) even when both move in harmony, temperature almost alwaysmoves first, and by hundreds to thousands of years. Clearly, there is no way these real-world observations can be construed to even hint at thepossibility that a significant increase in atmospheric CO2 will necessarily lead to any global warming, much less the catastrophic type that is predicted toproduce the apocalyptic consequences that are driving fear-ridden governments to abandon all sense of rationality in the current hysteria over “what shouldbe done about” the ongoing rise in the air’s CO2 content…We need to look at real phenomena that have really occurred in the real world. And in spite ofall the computer simulations to the contrary, we have got to realize what these real data are really telling us.”
Also see: http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/Index.jsp and Soon (2007) “Implications of the secondary role of carbon dioxide andmethane forcing in climate change: Past, present and future”, Physical Geography, in press (http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1276 )
September 2007
On page 18 of Laurie David's new children's global warming book, there is a glaring scientific error.
David tells children:
"Deep down in the Antarctic ice are atmosphere samples from the past, trapped in tiny air bubbles. These bubbles, formed when snowflakes fell on the ice, are the key to figuring out two things about climate history: what temperatures were in the past and which greenhouse gases were present in the atmosphere at that time.
The more the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, the higher the temperature climbed. The less carbon dioxide, the more the temperature fell. You can see this relationship for yourself by looking at the graph: See full report for graph @ http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/other/childrensbookerror.html
What makes this graph so amazing is that by connecting rising CO2 to rising temperature scientists have discovered the link between greenhouse-gas pollution and global warming."
What really makes their graph “amazing” is that it’s dead wrong. In order to contrive a visual representation for their false central claim that CO2 controls temperature change, David and co-author Cambria Gordon present unsuspecting children with an altered temperature and CO2 graph that falsely reverses the relationship found in the scientific literature.1
The actual temperature curve in the chart was switched with the actual CO2 curve. That is, the authors mislabelled the blue curve as temperature and mislabelled the red curve as CO2 concentration. The real data show that the red curve represents the temperature changes over geological time, followed (lagged) by changes in CO2 concentrations represented by the blue curve. Thus, children tracing the properly labelled curves from right to left (from past to present) can easily see the real, science-based relationship (particularly clear in the interval between 500,000 and 150,000 years ago).
The David-Gordon manipulation is critical because the central premise of the book argues that CO2 drives temperature, yet the ice core data clearly reveal temperature increases generally precede increasing CO2 by several hundred to a few thousand years. This fact may have been too inconvenient for David, who instead presented young readers with an astoundingly irresponsible falsehood. Parents and teachers of these children should be concerned.
Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth also got this wrong, saying: “The relationship is very complicated. But there is one relationship that is more powerful than all the others and it is this. When there is more CO2, the temperature gets warmer, because it traps more heat from the sun …”
The David book for children, like the Al Gore film, has the relationship entirely wrong. The peer-reviewed literature is unanimous in finding that in climate records CO2 changes have historically followed temperature changes and cannot have caused them. The book is mischievous for concluding that this deceptive graph has anything to do with “discovering” a link between additional CO2 concentrations and “global warming”.
On page 103 of their book, David and Gordon cite the work of Siegenthaler et al. (2005), for their written and graphical contention that temperature lags CO2. However, Siegenthaler et al. clearly state the opposite:
“The lags of CO2 with respect to the Antarctic temperature over glacial terminations V to VII are 800, 1600, and 2800 years, respectively, which are consistent with earlier observations during the last four glacial cycles.”
(Siegenthaler et al., 2005, Science, vol. 310, 1313-1317)
1 For a comprehensive review of this literature, see: http://ff.org/centers/csspp/pdf/20070204_idso.pdf
The author of this review paper concluded:
“In considering the findings of the several studies that have broached the question of the relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature over the pasthalf million or so years, it is clear that (1) sometimes the two parameters are totally out of sync with each other, as when one rises and the other falls, (2)sometimes one is in transit to a higher or lower level, while the other is in stasis, and (3) even when both move in harmony, temperature almost alwaysmoves first, and by hundreds to thousands of years. Clearly, there is no way these real-world observations can be construed to even hint at thepossibility that a significant increase in atmospheric CO2 will necessarily lead to any global warming, much less the catastrophic type that is predicted toproduce the apocalyptic consequences that are driving fear-ridden governments to abandon all sense of rationality in the current hysteria over “what shouldbe done about” the ongoing rise in the air’s CO2 content…We need to look at real phenomena that have really occurred in the real world. And in spite ofall the computer simulations to the contrary, we have got to realize what these real data are really telling us.”
Also see: http://www.co2science.org/scripts/CO2ScienceB2C/Index.jsp and Soon (2007) “Implications of the secondary role of carbon dioxide andmethane forcing in climate change: Past, present and future”, Physical Geography, in press (http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1276 )
Robert Ferguson, President
209 Pennsylvania Ave., SE suite 299
Washington, D.C. 20003
http://www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org/
(202) 288-5699
(202) 288-5699
CAP-AND-TRADE FOR BABIES?
Investor's Business Daily October 19, 2009
Earth: An environmental writer mainstreams an idea floating around the green fringe —save the earth by population control and give carbon credits to one-child families. Are we threatened by the patter of little carbon footprints?
It's long been a mantra on the left that people are a plague on the earth, ravaging its surface for food and resources, polluting its atmosphere and endangering its species. Now we are endangering its very climate to the point of extinction. Even the result of our breathing — carbon dioxide — has been declared by the EPA to be a dangerous pollutant.
Treaties like Kyoto and the upcoming economic suicide pact to be forged in Copenhagen have focused on the instruments and byproducts of our civilization. Now the focus is shifting increasingly to the people who built it.
New York Times environmental writer Andrew Revkin participated in an Oct. 14 panel discussion on climate change with other media pundits titled "Covering Climate: What's Population Got To Do With It?" People who need people they are not.
Participating via Web cam, Revkin volunteered that in allocating carbon credits as part of any cap-and-trade scheme, "if you can measurably somehow divert fertility rate, say toward accelerating decline in a place with a high fertility rate, shouldn't there be a carbon value to that?"
He went on to say that "probably the single most concrete and substantive thing an American, young American, could do to lower our carbon footprint is not turning off the light or driving a Prius, it's having fewer kids, having fewer children."
"More children equal more carbon dioxide emissions," Rivkin has blogged, wondering "whether this means we'll soon see a market in baby-avoidance carbon credits similar to efforts to sell CO2 credits for avoiding deforestation." Save the trees, not the children.
Rivkin's views are unfortunately shared by people with power and influence. Jonathon Porritt, chairman of Britain's Sustainable Development Commission, believes that "having more than two children is irresponsible" and that people should "connect up their own responsibility for their total environmental footprint."
Earlier this year, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi defended federal contraceptive initiatives as an effort to "reduce costs to the states and to the federal government." For Pelosi, mother of five, the fewer the merrier.
Would this proposed carbon-credit carrot turn someday into a large stick? Would child exemptions disappear after the first child or worse?
After all, we have a White House communications director, Anita Dunn, who considers mass murderer Mao Zedong her favorite philosopher. China has its one-child policy, which it vigorously enforces.
Source: http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=509554.
Earth: An environmental writer mainstreams an idea floating around the green fringe —save the earth by population control and give carbon credits to one-child families. Are we threatened by the patter of little carbon footprints?
It's long been a mantra on the left that people are a plague on the earth, ravaging its surface for food and resources, polluting its atmosphere and endangering its species. Now we are endangering its very climate to the point of extinction. Even the result of our breathing — carbon dioxide — has been declared by the EPA to be a dangerous pollutant.
Treaties like Kyoto and the upcoming economic suicide pact to be forged in Copenhagen have focused on the instruments and byproducts of our civilization. Now the focus is shifting increasingly to the people who built it.
New York Times environmental writer Andrew Revkin participated in an Oct. 14 panel discussion on climate change with other media pundits titled "Covering Climate: What's Population Got To Do With It?" People who need people they are not.
Participating via Web cam, Revkin volunteered that in allocating carbon credits as part of any cap-and-trade scheme, "if you can measurably somehow divert fertility rate, say toward accelerating decline in a place with a high fertility rate, shouldn't there be a carbon value to that?"
He went on to say that "probably the single most concrete and substantive thing an American, young American, could do to lower our carbon footprint is not turning off the light or driving a Prius, it's having fewer kids, having fewer children."
"More children equal more carbon dioxide emissions," Rivkin has blogged, wondering "whether this means we'll soon see a market in baby-avoidance carbon credits similar to efforts to sell CO2 credits for avoiding deforestation." Save the trees, not the children.
Rivkin's views are unfortunately shared by people with power and influence. Jonathon Porritt, chairman of Britain's Sustainable Development Commission, believes that "having more than two children is irresponsible" and that people should "connect up their own responsibility for their total environmental footprint."
Earlier this year, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi defended federal contraceptive initiatives as an effort to "reduce costs to the states and to the federal government." For Pelosi, mother of five, the fewer the merrier.
Would this proposed carbon-credit carrot turn someday into a large stick? Would child exemptions disappear after the first child or worse?
After all, we have a White House communications director, Anita Dunn, who considers mass murderer Mao Zedong her favorite philosopher. China has its one-child policy, which it vigorously enforces.
Source: http://www.investors.com/NewsAndAnalysis/Article.aspx?id=509554.
CLIMATE CHANGE: THIS IS THE WORST SCIENTIFIC SCANDAL OF OUR GENERATION
by Christopher Booker November 28, 2009
Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash.
A week after my colleague James Delingpole , on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.
The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.
Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.
Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.
Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre , an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.
The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.
There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre's blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt's blog Watts Up With That ), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.
They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.
This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones's refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got "lost". Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.
But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to "adjust" recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr. McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.
In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.
What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.
The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics' work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.
Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre's demolition of the "hockey stick", he excoriated the way in which this same "tightly knit group" of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to "peer review" each other's papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.
The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation , rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society – itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause – is far from being what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age.
Christopher Booker's The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the Obsession with 'Climate Change' Turning Out to be the Most Costly Scientific Blunder in History? is available from Telegraph Books.
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6679082/Climate-change-this-is-the-worst-scientific-scandal-of-our-generation.html.
Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with the Climategate whitewash.
A week after my colleague James Delingpole , on his Telegraph blog, coined the term "Climategate" to describe the scandal revealed by the leaked emails from the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit, Google was showing that the word now appears across the internet more than nine million times. But in all these acres of electronic coverage, one hugely relevant point about these thousands of documents has largely been missed.
The reason why even the Guardian's George Monbiot has expressed total shock and dismay at the picture revealed by the documents is that their authors are not just any old bunch of academics. Their importance cannot be overestimated, What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
Professor Philip Jones, the CRU's director, is in charge of the two key sets of data used by the IPCC to draw up its reports. Through its link to the Hadley Centre, part of the UK Met Office, which selects most of the IPCC's key scientific contributors, his global temperature record is the most important of the four sets of temperature data on which the IPCC and governments rely – not least for their predictions that the world will warm to catastrophic levels unless trillions of dollars are spent to avert it.
Dr Jones is also a key part of the closely knit group of American and British scientists responsible for promoting that picture of world temperatures conveyed by Michael Mann's "hockey stick" graph which 10 years ago turned climate history on its head by showing that, after 1,000 years of decline, global temperatures have recently shot up to their highest level in recorded history.
Given star billing by the IPCC, not least for the way it appeared to eliminate the long-accepted Mediaeval Warm Period when temperatures were higher they are today, the graph became the central icon of the entire man-made global warming movement.
Since 2003, however, when the statistical methods used to create the "hockey stick" were first exposed as fundamentally flawed by an expert Canadian statistician Steve McIntyre , an increasingly heated battle has been raging between Mann's supporters, calling themselves "the Hockey Team", and McIntyre and his own allies, as they have ever more devastatingly called into question the entire statistical basis on which the IPCC and CRU construct their case.
The senders and recipients of the leaked CRU emails constitute a cast list of the IPCC's scientific elite, including not just the "Hockey Team", such as Dr Mann himself, Dr Jones and his CRU colleague Keith Briffa, but Ben Santer, responsible for a highly controversial rewriting of key passages in the IPCC's 1995 report; Kevin Trenberth, who similarly controversially pushed the IPCC into scaremongering over hurricane activity; and Gavin Schmidt, right-hand man to Al Gore's ally Dr James Hansen, whose own GISS record of surface temperature data is second in importance only to that of the CRU itself.
There are three threads in particular in the leaked documents which have sent a shock wave through informed observers across the world. Perhaps the most obvious, as lucidly put together by Willis Eschenbach (see McIntyre's blog Climate Audit and Anthony Watt's blog Watts Up With That ), is the highly disturbing series of emails which show how Dr Jones and his colleagues have for years been discussing the devious tactics whereby they could avoid releasing their data to outsiders under freedom of information laws.
They have come up with every possible excuse for concealing the background data on which their findings and temperature records were based.
This in itself has become a major scandal, not least Dr Jones's refusal to release the basic data from which the CRU derives its hugely influential temperature record, which culminated last summer in his startling claim that much of the data from all over the world had simply got "lost". Most incriminating of all are the emails in which scientists are advised to delete large chunks of data, which, when this is done after receipt of a freedom of information request, is a criminal offence.
But the question which inevitably arises from this systematic refusal to release their data is – what is it that these scientists seem so anxious to hide? The second and most shocking revelation of the leaked documents is how they show the scientists trying to manipulate data through their tortuous computer programmes, always to point in only the one desired direction – to lower past temperatures and to "adjust" recent temperatures upwards, in order to convey the impression of an accelerated warming. This comes up so often (not least in the documents relating to computer data in the Harry Read Me file) that it becomes the most disturbing single element of the entire story. This is what Mr. McIntyre caught Dr Hansen doing with his GISS temperature record last year (after which Hansen was forced to revise his record), and two further shocking examples have now come to light from Australia and New Zealand.
In each of these countries it has been possible for local scientists to compare the official temperature record with the original data on which it was supposedly based. In each case it is clear that the same trick has been played – to turn an essentially flat temperature chart into a graph which shows temperatures steadily rising. And in each case this manipulation was carried out under the influence of the CRU.
What is tragically evident from the Harry Read Me file is the picture it gives of the CRU scientists hopelessly at sea with the complex computer programmes they had devised to contort their data in the approved direction, more than once expressing their own desperation at how difficult it was to get the desired results.
The third shocking revelation of these documents is the ruthless way in which these academics have been determined to silence any expert questioning of the findings they have arrived at by such dubious methods – not just by refusing to disclose their basic data but by discrediting and freezing out any scientific journal which dares to publish their critics' work. It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.
Back in 2006, when the eminent US statistician Professor Edward Wegman produced an expert report for the US Congress vindicating Steve McIntyre's demolition of the "hockey stick", he excoriated the way in which this same "tightly knit group" of academics seemed only too keen to collaborate with each other and to "peer review" each other's papers in order to dominate the findings of those IPCC reports on which much of the future of the US and world economy may hang. In light of the latest revelations, it now seems even more evident that these men have been failing to uphold those principles which lie at the heart of genuine scientific enquiry and debate. Already one respected US climate scientist, Dr Eduardo Zorita, has called for Dr Mann and Dr Jones to be barred from any further participation in the IPCC. Even our own George Monbiot, horrified at finding how he has been betrayed by the supposed experts he has been revering and citing for so long, has called for Dr Jones to step down as head of the CRU.
The former Chancellor Lord (Nigel) Lawson, last week launching his new think tank, the Global Warming Policy Foundation , rightly called for a proper independent inquiry into the maze of skulduggery revealed by the CRU leaks. But the inquiry mooted on Friday, possibly to be chaired by Lord Rees, President of the Royal Society – itself long a shameless propagandist for the warmist cause – is far from being what Lord Lawson had in mind. Our hopelessly compromised scientific establishment cannot be allowed to get away with a whitewash of what has become the greatest scientific scandal of our age.
Christopher Booker's The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the Obsession with 'Climate Change' Turning Out to be the Most Costly Scientific Blunder in History? is available from Telegraph Books.
Source: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/comment/columnists/christopherbooker/6679082/Climate-change-this-is-the-worst-scientific-scandal-of-our-generation.html.
Sunday, December 6, 2009
FALLACIES ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING
http://www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org/
by John McLean
September 2007
It is widely alleged that the science of global warming is “settled”. This implies that all the major scientific aspects of climate change are well understood and uncontroversial, and that scientists are now just mopping up unimportant details. The allegation is profoundly untrue: for example the US alone is said to be spending more than $4 billion annually on climate research, which is a lot to pay for detailing; and great uncertainty and argument surround many of the principles of climate change, and especially the magnitude of any human causation for warming. Worse still, not only is the science not “settled”, but its discussion in the public domain is contaminated by many fallacies, which leads directly to the great public confusion that is observed.
This paper explains the eight most common fallacies that underpin public discussion of the hypothesis that dangerous global warming is caused by human greenhouse gas emissions.
1 - Scientists have accurate historical temperature data
Historical temperature records taken near the surface of the Earth are subject to various biases and recording errors that render them incorrect. In the early days thermometers could only show the temperature at the moment of reading and so the data recorded from that time was for just one reading each day. Later the thermometers were able to record the minimum and maximum temperatures, and so the daily readings were those extremes in the 24 hour period. Only in the last 20 or 30 years have instruments been available that record the temperature at regular intervals throughout the 24 hours, thus allowing a true time-based daily average to be calculated.
The so-called "average" temperatures both published and frequently plotted through time are initially based on only a single daily value, then later on the mathematical average of the minimum and maximum temperatures. Although time-based averages are now available for some regions they are not generally used because the better instrumentation is not uniformly installed throughout the world and the historical data is at best a mathematical average of two values. The problem is that these averages are easily distorted by brief periods of high or low temperatures relative to the rest of the day, such as a brief period with less cloud cover or a short period of cold wind or rain.
Another serious problem is that thermometers are often located where human activity can directly influence the local temperature.1 This is not only the urban heat island (UHI) effect, where heat generated by traffic, industry and private homes and then trapped by the man-made physical environment causes elevated temperatures. There is also a land use effect, where human activity has modified the microclimate of the local environment through buildings or changes such as land clearing or agriculture. Only recently have the climatic impacts of these human changes started to receive detailed scrutiny, but many older meteorological records are inescapably contaminated by them.
The integrity of some important historical data is also undermined by reports that various Chinese weather stations that were claimed to be in unchanged locations from 1954 to 1983 had in fact moved, with one station moving 5 times and up to 41 kilometres2. The extent of this problem on a global scale is unknown but worrying, because shifts of less than 500 metres are known to cause a significant change in recordings.
The observed minimum and maximum temperatures that are recorded, albeit with the inclusion of possible local human influences, are sent to one or more of the three agencies that calculate the "average global temperature" (NASA, NOAA, UK Hadley Centre). These agencies produce corrected data, and graphs that depict a significant increase in average global temperature over the last 30 years. However, this apparent rise may at least partly result from the various distortions of surface temperature measurements described above. No-one has independently verified the temperature records, not least because full disclosure of methods and data is not made and the responsible agencies appear very reluctant to allow such auditing to occur.
In reality, there is no guarantee, and perhaps not even a strong likelihood, that the thermometerbased temperature measurements truly reflect the average local temperatures free from any distortions. There is also no proof that the calculations of average global temperatures are consistent and accurate. For example, it is known that at least two of the three leading climate agencies use very different data handling methods and it follows that at least one of them is likely to be incorrect.
It is stating the obvious to say that if we don't know what the global average temperature has been and currently is, then it is difficult to argue that the world is warming at all, let alone to understand to what degree any alleged change has a human cause.
2 - Temperature trends are meaningful and can be extrapolated
That temperature trends plotted over decades are meaningful, and understood to the degree that they can be projected, is one of the greatest fallacies in the claims about man-made global warming. Any trend depends heavily upon the choice of start and end points. A judicious selection of such points for can create a wide variety of trends. For example, according to the annual average temperatures from Britain's CRU:
trend for 1900-2006 = 0.72 °C/century
trend for 1945-2006 = 1.05 °C/century
trend for 1975-2006 = 1.87 °C/century,
None of these trends is any more correct than either of the others.
Despite the common use of temperature trends in scientific and public discussion, they cannot be used to illustrate possible human greenhouse influences on temperature unless episodic natural events, such as the powerful El Nino of 1998, are taken into account and corrected for.
Trends cannot be extrapolated meaningfully unless scientists:
(a) Thoroughly understand all relevant climate factors;
(b) Are confident that the trends in each individual factor will continue; and
(c) Are confident that interactions between factors will not cause a disruption to the overall trend.
The IPCC's Third Assessment Report of 2001 listed 11 possible climate factors and indicated that the level of scientific understanding was "very low" for 7 of them and "low" for another. No similar listing appears in the recent Fourth Assessment Report, but it does contain a list of factors relevant to the absorption and emission of radiation that shows that the level of scientific knowledge of several of those factors is still quite low.
Scientists are still struggling even to understand the influence of clouds on temperature. Observational data shows that low-level cloud outside the tropics has decreased since 1998, but scientists cannot be certain that the decreasing trend will continue, nor what such a decrease would mean. Perhaps clouds act as a natural thermostat and higher temperatures will ultimately create more clouds and this will have a cooling effect.3
Again, if random natural events dictate the historical trend, then extrapolation of the trend makes no sense. Even if those natural events can be expected to continue in the future, their severity – which often dictates the short-term trend – is unknowable.
3 - The accuracy of climate models can be determined from their output
A common practice among climate scientists is to compare the output of their climate models to historical data from meteorological observations. (In fact the models are usually "adjusted" to match that historical data as closely as possible, but let's ignore that for now.)
The accuracy of a model is determined by the accuracy with which it simulates each climatic factor and climatic process rather than the closeness of the match between its output and the historical data. If the internal processing is correct then so too will be the output, but apparently accurate output does not confer accuracy on the internal processes.
Two issues to watch are:
(a) The combination of a number of inaccuracies can produce acceptable output if calculations that are "too high" counterbalance those that are "too low"
(b) If the internal processes are largely based on data that changes almost immediately as a consequence of a change in temperature, then the output of the model will probably appear accurate when compared to historical data, but it will be of no benefit for predicting future changes.
4 - The consensus among scientists is decisive (or even important)
The extent of a claimed consensus that dangerous human-caused global warming is occurring is unknown and the claim of consensus is unsupported by any objective data4. However, this is irrelevant because by its nature any consensus is a product of opinions, not facts.5
Though consensus determines legal and political decisions in most countries, this simply reflects the number of persons who interpret data in a certain way or who have been influenced by the opinions of others. Consensus does not confer accuracy or “rightness”.
Scientific matters are certainly not settled by consensus. Einstein pointed out that hundreds of people agreeing with him were of no relevance, because it would take just one person to prove him wrong.
Science as a whole, and its near neighbour medicine, are replete with examples of individuals or small groups of researchers successfully undermining the prevailing popular theories of the day. This is not to say that individuals or small groups who hold maverick views are always correct, but it is to say that even the most widelyheld opinions should never be regarded as an ultimate truth.
Science is about observation, experiment and the testing of hypotheses, not consensus.
5 - The dominance of scientific papers on a certain subject establishes a truth
This fallacy is closely related to the previous discussion of consensus, but here the impact is an indirect consequence of a dominant opinion.
Funding for scientific research has moved towards being determined by consensus, because where public monies are concerned the issue ultimately comes back to an opinion as to whether the research is likely to be fruitful. Prior to the last 20 or 30 years, research was driven principally by scientific curiosity. That science research funding has now become results-oriented has had a dramatic, negative impact on the usefulness of many scientific results. For, ironically, pursuing science that is thought by politician to be “important” or “in the public interest” often results in science accomplishments that are conformist and fashionable rather than independent and truly useful.
Targeting of “useful” research strongly constricts the range of scientific papers that are produced. A general perception may arise that few scientists disagree with the dominant opinion, whereas the reality may be that papers that reject the popular opinion are difficult to find simply because of the weight of funding, and hence the research effort, that is tailored towards the conventional wisdom.
Science generally progresses by advancing on the work that has gone before, and the usual practice is to cite several existing papers to establish the basis for one's work. Again the dominance of papers that adhere to a conventional wisdom can put major obstacles in the way of the emergence of any counter-paradigm.
6 - Peer-reviewed papers are true and accurate
The peer-review process was established for the benefit of editors who did not have good knowledge across all the fields that their journals addressed. It provided a "sanity check" to avoid the risk of publishing papers which were so outlandish that the journal would be ridiculed and lose its reputation.
In principle this notion seems entirely reasonable, but it neglects certain aspects of human nature, especially the tendency for reviewers to defend their own (earlier) papers, and indirectly their reputations, against challengers. Peer review also ignores the strong tendency for papers that disagree with a popular hypothesis, one the reviewer understands and perhaps supports, to receive a closer and often hostile scrutiny.
Reviewers are selected from practitioners in the field, but many scientific fields are so small that the reviewers will know the authors. The reviewers may even have worked with the authors in the past or wish to work with them in future, so the objectivity of any review is likely to be tainted by this association.
Some journals now request that authors suggest appropriate reviewers but this is a sure way to identify reviewers who will be favourable to certain propositions.
It also follows that if the editor of a journal wishes to reject a paper, then it will be sent to a reviewer who is likely to reject it, whereas a paper that the editor favours to be published will be sent to a reviewer who is expected to be sympathetic. In 2002 the editor-in-chief of the journal "Science" announced that there was no longer any doubt that human activity was changing climate, so what are the realistic chances of this journal publishing a paper that suggests otherwise?
The popular notion is that reviewers should be skilled in the relevant field, but a scientific field like climate change is so broad, and encompasses so many sub disciplines, that it really requires the use of expert reviewers from many different fields. That this is seldom undertaken explains why so many initially influential climate papers have later been found to be fundamentally flawed.
In theory, reviewers should be able to understand and replicate the processing used by the author(s). In practice, climate science has numerous examples where authors of highly influential papers have refused to reveal their complete set of data or the processing methods that they used.
Even worse, the journals in question not only allowed this to happen, but have subsequently defended the lack of disclosure when other researchers attempted to replicate the work.
7 - The IPCC is a reliable authority and its reports are both correct and widely endorsed by all scientists
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) undertakes no research for itself and relies on peer-reviewed scientific papers in reputable journals (see item 6). There is strong evidence that the IPCC is very selective of the papers it wishes to cite and pays scant regard to papers that do not adhere to the notion that manmade emissions of carbon dioxide have caused warming.
Four more issues noted above are also very relevant to the IPCC procedures. The IPCC reports are based on historical temperature data and trends (see 1 & 2), and the attribution of warming to human activities relies very heavily on climate modelling (see item 3). The IPCC pronouncements have a powerful influence on the direction and funding of scientific research into climate change, which in turn influences the number of research papers on these topics. Ultimately, and in entirely circular fashion, this leads the IPCC to report that large numbers of papers support a certain hypothesis (see item 5).
These fallacies alone are major defects of the IPCC reports, but the problems do not end there. Other distortions and fallacies of the IPCC are of its own doing.
Governments appoint experts to work with the IPCC but once appointed those experts can directly invite other experts to join them. This practice obviously can, and does, lead to a situation where the IPCC is heavily biased towards the philosophies and ideologies of certain governments or science groups.
The lead authors of the chapters of the IPCC reports can themselves be researchers whose work is cited in those chapters. This was the case with the so-called "hockey stick" temperature graph in the Third Assessment Report (TAR) published in 2001. The paper in which the graph first appeared was not subject to proper and independent peer review, despite which the graph was prominently featured in a chapter for which the co-creator of the graph was a lead author. The graph was debunked in 20066 and has been omitted without explanation from the Fourth Assessment Report (4AR) of 2007.
The IPCC has often said words to the effect "We don't know what else can be causing warming so it must be humans" (or "the climate models will only produce the correct result if we include manmade influences"), but at the same time the IPCC says that scientists have a low level of understanding of many climate factors. It logically follows that if any natural climate factors
are poorly understood then they cannot be properly modelled, the output of the models will probably be incorrect and that natural forces cannot easily be dismissed as possible causes. In these circumstances it is simply dishonest to unequivocally blame late 20th century warming on
human activity.7
The IPCC implies that its reports are thoroughly reviewed by thousands of experts. Any impression that thousands of scientists review every word of the reports can be shown to be untrue by an examination of the review comments for the report by IPCC Working Group I. (This report is crucial, because it discusses historical observations, attributes a likely cause of change and attempts to predict global and regional changes. The reports by working groups 2 and 3 draw heavily on the findings of this WG I report.) The analysis of the WG I report for the 4AR revealed that:
(a) A total of just 308 reviewers (including reviewers acting on behalf of governments) examined the 11 chapters of the WGI I report
(b) An average of 67 reviewers examined each chapter of this report with no chapter being examined by more than 100 reviewers and one by as few as 34.
(c) 69% of reviewers commented on less than 3 chapters of the 11-chapter report. (46% of reviewers commented on just one chapter and 23% on two chapters, thus accounting for more than two-thirds of all reviewers.)
(d) Just 5 reviewers examined all 11 chapters and two of these were recorded as "Govt of (country)", which may represent a team of reviewers rather than individuals
(e) Every chapter had review comments from a subset of the designated authors for the chapter, which suggests that the authoring process may not have been diligent and inclusive
Chapter 9 was the key chapter because it attributed a change in climate to human activity but:
(a) Just 62 individuals or government appointed reviewers commented on this chapter
(b) A large number of reviewers had a vested interest in the content of this chapter
- 7 reviewers were "contributing editors" of the same chapter
- 3 were overall editors of the Working Group I report
- 26 were authors or co-authors of papers cited in the final draft
- 8 reviewers were noted as "Govt of ..." indicating one or more reviewers who were appointed by those governments (and sometimes the same comments appear under individual names as well as for the government in question)
- Only 25 individual reviewers appeared to have no vested interest in this chapter
(c) The number of comments from each reviewer varied greatly
- 27 reviewers made just 1 or 2 comments but those making more than 2 comments often drew attention to typographical errors, grammatical errors, mistakes in citing certain papers or inconsistencies with other chapters, so how thorough were these reviews with very few comments?
- only 18 reviewers made more than 10 comments on the entire 122-page second order draft report (98 pages of text, 24 of figures) and 9 of those 18 had a vested interest
(d) Just four reviewers, including one government appointed team or individual, explicitly endorsed the entire chapter in its draft form - not thousands of scientists, but FOUR!
The claim that the IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report carries the imprimatur of having been reviewed by thousands, or even hundreds, of expert and independent scientists is incorrect, and even risible. In actuality, the report represents the view of small and self-selected science coteries that formed the lead authoring teams.
More independent scientists of standing (61) signed a public letter to the Prime Minister of Canada cautioning against the assumption of human causation of warming8 than are listed as authors of the 4AR Summary for Policymakers (52). More than 50 scientists also reviewed the Independent Summary for Policymakers, the counter-view to the IPCC's summary that was published by the Fraser Institute of Canada9.
8 - It has been proven that human emissions of carbon dioxide have caused global warming
The first question to be answered is whether the Earth is warming at all. As the discussion of fallacy 1 showed, there is no certainty that this is the case.
But even were warming to be demonstrated, and assuming a reasonable correlation between an increase in carbon dioxide and an increase in temperature, that does not mean that the former has driven the latter. Good evidence exists from thousands of years ago that carbon dioxide levels rose only after the temperature increased, so why should we assume that the order is somehow reversed today?10
The IPCC claims a subjective 90% to 95% probability that emissions of carbon dioxide have caused warming but that assumes (a) that warming has occurred, (b) that such a subjective probability can be assigned and is meaningful, and (c) that because existing climate models cannot produce correct results without including some "human" influence, then the only allowable explanation is that humans have caused warming.
Remarkably these claims are accompanied by an admission that the level of scientific understanding of many climate factors is quite low. This means that the IPCC's claim for dangerous human-caused warming rests primarily on the output of climate models that are unvalidated and recognised to be incomplete.11
The other foundation for the claim of dangerous warming is based upon laboratory work and theoretical physics regarding the ability of molecules of carbon dioxide to absorb heat and re-transmit it. Using these principles, and ignoring other factors, it can be shown that an increase in carbon dioxide beyond pre-industrial levels will cause a very small increase in temperature and that the warming will become less as the concentration of carbon dioxide increases. However, these principles were developed in laboratory environments that don't match the complexity of real world climate, and the "other factors" that are ignored are actually an integral part of the climate system. With few exceptions, the actions and interactions of these factors are poorly understood. Moreover, empirical tests of the amount of warming that will be caused by a doubling of human emissions suggest a non-alarming figure of only about 1 deg. C12. One major stumbling block for the hypothesis that carbon dioxide has caused significant warming is that since continuous and direct measurements of carbon dioxide began in 1958 global temperatures have both risen and fallen while at all times the concentration of carbon dioxide continued to rise.
The other foundation for the claim of dangerous warming is based upon laboratory work and theoretical physics regarding the ability of molecules of carbon dioxide to absorb heat and re-transmit it. Using these principles, and gnoring other factors, it can be shown that an ncrease in carbon dioxide beyond pre-industrial evels will cause a very small increase in temperature and that the warming will become ess as the concentration of carbon dioxide increases. However, these principles were eveloped in laboratory environments that don't match the complexity of real world climate, and the "other factors" that are ignored are actually an integral part of the climate system. With few exceptions, the actions and interactions of these factors are poorly understood. Moreover, empirical tests of the amount of warming that will be caused by a doubling of human emissions suggest a non-alarming figure of only about 1 deg. C12.
One major stumbling block for the hypothesis that carbon dioxide has caused significant warming is that since continuous and direct measurements of carbon dioxide began in 1958 global temperatures have both risen and fallen while at all times the concentration of carbon dioxide continued to rise.
It would seem that if carbon dioxide is causing any warming at all then it is easily overwhelmed by other, probably quite natural, climate forces. Scientists are continuing to investigate the possible impacts of solar forces on climate and in some cases have shown strong correlations. Other scientists are questioning whether cosmic rays may influence the formation of clouds that then control the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface. Changes in ozone have also been proposed as drivers of climate. That all three of these issues are actively being explored gives the lie to claims that climate science is settled and that carbon dioxide is known to be the sole major cause of recent climatic warming.
Very recently several scientists have said words to the effect "Yes, the natural forces do drive the climate but we believe that carbon dioxide adds to the warming", though they notably refrain from defining how much warming the carbon dioxide may have caused.13 The reality is that there is no clear evidence that human emissions of carbon dioxide have any measurable effect on temperatures. Such a claim rests on climate models of unproven accuracy and on lines of physical argument that expressly exclude consideration of other known important drivers of climate change.
Conclusions
The hypothesis of dangerous humancaused warming caused by CO2 emission is embroiled in uncertainties of the fundamental science and its interpretation, and by fallacious public discussion. It is utterly bizarre that, in face of this reality, public funding of many billions of dollars is still being provided for climate change research. It is even more bizarre that most governments, urged on by environmental NGSs and other self-interested parties, have either already introduced carbon taxation or trading systems (Europe; some groups of US States), or have indicated a firm intention to do so (Australia).
At its most basic, if scientists cannot be sure that temperatures are today rising, nor establish that the gentle late 20th century warming was caused by CO2 emissions, then it is nonsense to propose that expensive controls are needed on human carbon dioxide emissions.
Even more alarming still is the self-sustaining nature of the IPCC and its alarmist claims. The IPCC reports determine the direction of climate research and its funding, which ultimately leads to the number of scientific papers which take a particular line, and the dominance of that line of thinking is expressed in the subsequent IPCC report. The process is one of strong positive feedback for alarmist science advice. Advice which now permeates bureaucracies and governments throughout the world, and which is driving swingeingly expensive, unnecessary and ineffective national and international carbon policies.
1 See: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/sppi_originals/u.s._temperature_rankings_rearranged_problems_and_concerns_with_temperature_data_sets.html 2 http://www.informath.org/apprise/a5620/b17.htm
3 http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/sppi_reprint_series/positive_feedback_have_we_been_fooling_ourselves_.html 4 http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton_papers/greenhouse_warming_what_greenhouse_warming_.html 5 http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton_papers/consensus_what_consensus_among_climate_scientists_the_debate_is_not_over.html
6 "Ad Hoc Committee Report on the 'Hockey Stick' Global Climate Reconstruction" (i.e. "Wegman Report") at http://www.climateaudit.org/pdf/others/07142006_Wegman_Report.pdf
7 http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/sppi_originals/the_myth_of_dangerous_human_caused_climate_change.html
8 http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=3711460e-bd5a-475d-a6be-4db87559d605
9 http://www.fraserinstitute.ca/shared/readmore.asp?sNav=pb&id=886
10 http://ff.org/centers/csspp/pdf/20070204_idso.pdf
11 http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton_papers/the_mathematical_reason_why_longrun_climatic_prediction_is_impossible.html
12 http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/pubs/BNL-76939-2006-AB.pdf
13 http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton_papers/greenhouse_warming_what_greenhouse_warming_.html
by John McLean
September 2007
It is widely alleged that the science of global warming is “settled”. This implies that all the major scientific aspects of climate change are well understood and uncontroversial, and that scientists are now just mopping up unimportant details. The allegation is profoundly untrue: for example the US alone is said to be spending more than $4 billion annually on climate research, which is a lot to pay for detailing; and great uncertainty and argument surround many of the principles of climate change, and especially the magnitude of any human causation for warming. Worse still, not only is the science not “settled”, but its discussion in the public domain is contaminated by many fallacies, which leads directly to the great public confusion that is observed.
This paper explains the eight most common fallacies that underpin public discussion of the hypothesis that dangerous global warming is caused by human greenhouse gas emissions.
1 - Scientists have accurate historical temperature data
Historical temperature records taken near the surface of the Earth are subject to various biases and recording errors that render them incorrect. In the early days thermometers could only show the temperature at the moment of reading and so the data recorded from that time was for just one reading each day. Later the thermometers were able to record the minimum and maximum temperatures, and so the daily readings were those extremes in the 24 hour period. Only in the last 20 or 30 years have instruments been available that record the temperature at regular intervals throughout the 24 hours, thus allowing a true time-based daily average to be calculated.
The so-called "average" temperatures both published and frequently plotted through time are initially based on only a single daily value, then later on the mathematical average of the minimum and maximum temperatures. Although time-based averages are now available for some regions they are not generally used because the better instrumentation is not uniformly installed throughout the world and the historical data is at best a mathematical average of two values. The problem is that these averages are easily distorted by brief periods of high or low temperatures relative to the rest of the day, such as a brief period with less cloud cover or a short period of cold wind or rain.
Another serious problem is that thermometers are often located where human activity can directly influence the local temperature.1 This is not only the urban heat island (UHI) effect, where heat generated by traffic, industry and private homes and then trapped by the man-made physical environment causes elevated temperatures. There is also a land use effect, where human activity has modified the microclimate of the local environment through buildings or changes such as land clearing or agriculture. Only recently have the climatic impacts of these human changes started to receive detailed scrutiny, but many older meteorological records are inescapably contaminated by them.
The integrity of some important historical data is also undermined by reports that various Chinese weather stations that were claimed to be in unchanged locations from 1954 to 1983 had in fact moved, with one station moving 5 times and up to 41 kilometres2. The extent of this problem on a global scale is unknown but worrying, because shifts of less than 500 metres are known to cause a significant change in recordings.
The observed minimum and maximum temperatures that are recorded, albeit with the inclusion of possible local human influences, are sent to one or more of the three agencies that calculate the "average global temperature" (NASA, NOAA, UK Hadley Centre). These agencies produce corrected data, and graphs that depict a significant increase in average global temperature over the last 30 years. However, this apparent rise may at least partly result from the various distortions of surface temperature measurements described above. No-one has independently verified the temperature records, not least because full disclosure of methods and data is not made and the responsible agencies appear very reluctant to allow such auditing to occur.
In reality, there is no guarantee, and perhaps not even a strong likelihood, that the thermometerbased temperature measurements truly reflect the average local temperatures free from any distortions. There is also no proof that the calculations of average global temperatures are consistent and accurate. For example, it is known that at least two of the three leading climate agencies use very different data handling methods and it follows that at least one of them is likely to be incorrect.
It is stating the obvious to say that if we don't know what the global average temperature has been and currently is, then it is difficult to argue that the world is warming at all, let alone to understand to what degree any alleged change has a human cause.
2 - Temperature trends are meaningful and can be extrapolated
That temperature trends plotted over decades are meaningful, and understood to the degree that they can be projected, is one of the greatest fallacies in the claims about man-made global warming. Any trend depends heavily upon the choice of start and end points. A judicious selection of such points for can create a wide variety of trends. For example, according to the annual average temperatures from Britain's CRU:
trend for 1900-2006 = 0.72 °C/century
trend for 1945-2006 = 1.05 °C/century
trend for 1975-2006 = 1.87 °C/century,
None of these trends is any more correct than either of the others.
Despite the common use of temperature trends in scientific and public discussion, they cannot be used to illustrate possible human greenhouse influences on temperature unless episodic natural events, such as the powerful El Nino of 1998, are taken into account and corrected for.
Trends cannot be extrapolated meaningfully unless scientists:
(a) Thoroughly understand all relevant climate factors;
(b) Are confident that the trends in each individual factor will continue; and
(c) Are confident that interactions between factors will not cause a disruption to the overall trend.
The IPCC's Third Assessment Report of 2001 listed 11 possible climate factors and indicated that the level of scientific understanding was "very low" for 7 of them and "low" for another. No similar listing appears in the recent Fourth Assessment Report, but it does contain a list of factors relevant to the absorption and emission of radiation that shows that the level of scientific knowledge of several of those factors is still quite low.
Scientists are still struggling even to understand the influence of clouds on temperature. Observational data shows that low-level cloud outside the tropics has decreased since 1998, but scientists cannot be certain that the decreasing trend will continue, nor what such a decrease would mean. Perhaps clouds act as a natural thermostat and higher temperatures will ultimately create more clouds and this will have a cooling effect.3
Again, if random natural events dictate the historical trend, then extrapolation of the trend makes no sense. Even if those natural events can be expected to continue in the future, their severity – which often dictates the short-term trend – is unknowable.
3 - The accuracy of climate models can be determined from their output
A common practice among climate scientists is to compare the output of their climate models to historical data from meteorological observations. (In fact the models are usually "adjusted" to match that historical data as closely as possible, but let's ignore that for now.)
The accuracy of a model is determined by the accuracy with which it simulates each climatic factor and climatic process rather than the closeness of the match between its output and the historical data. If the internal processing is correct then so too will be the output, but apparently accurate output does not confer accuracy on the internal processes.
Two issues to watch are:
(a) The combination of a number of inaccuracies can produce acceptable output if calculations that are "too high" counterbalance those that are "too low"
(b) If the internal processes are largely based on data that changes almost immediately as a consequence of a change in temperature, then the output of the model will probably appear accurate when compared to historical data, but it will be of no benefit for predicting future changes.
4 - The consensus among scientists is decisive (or even important)
The extent of a claimed consensus that dangerous human-caused global warming is occurring is unknown and the claim of consensus is unsupported by any objective data4. However, this is irrelevant because by its nature any consensus is a product of opinions, not facts.5
Though consensus determines legal and political decisions in most countries, this simply reflects the number of persons who interpret data in a certain way or who have been influenced by the opinions of others. Consensus does not confer accuracy or “rightness”.
Scientific matters are certainly not settled by consensus. Einstein pointed out that hundreds of people agreeing with him were of no relevance, because it would take just one person to prove him wrong.
Science as a whole, and its near neighbour medicine, are replete with examples of individuals or small groups of researchers successfully undermining the prevailing popular theories of the day. This is not to say that individuals or small groups who hold maverick views are always correct, but it is to say that even the most widelyheld opinions should never be regarded as an ultimate truth.
Science is about observation, experiment and the testing of hypotheses, not consensus.
5 - The dominance of scientific papers on a certain subject establishes a truth
This fallacy is closely related to the previous discussion of consensus, but here the impact is an indirect consequence of a dominant opinion.
Funding for scientific research has moved towards being determined by consensus, because where public monies are concerned the issue ultimately comes back to an opinion as to whether the research is likely to be fruitful. Prior to the last 20 or 30 years, research was driven principally by scientific curiosity. That science research funding has now become results-oriented has had a dramatic, negative impact on the usefulness of many scientific results. For, ironically, pursuing science that is thought by politician to be “important” or “in the public interest” often results in science accomplishments that are conformist and fashionable rather than independent and truly useful.
Targeting of “useful” research strongly constricts the range of scientific papers that are produced. A general perception may arise that few scientists disagree with the dominant opinion, whereas the reality may be that papers that reject the popular opinion are difficult to find simply because of the weight of funding, and hence the research effort, that is tailored towards the conventional wisdom.
Science generally progresses by advancing on the work that has gone before, and the usual practice is to cite several existing papers to establish the basis for one's work. Again the dominance of papers that adhere to a conventional wisdom can put major obstacles in the way of the emergence of any counter-paradigm.
6 - Peer-reviewed papers are true and accurate
The peer-review process was established for the benefit of editors who did not have good knowledge across all the fields that their journals addressed. It provided a "sanity check" to avoid the risk of publishing papers which were so outlandish that the journal would be ridiculed and lose its reputation.
In principle this notion seems entirely reasonable, but it neglects certain aspects of human nature, especially the tendency for reviewers to defend their own (earlier) papers, and indirectly their reputations, against challengers. Peer review also ignores the strong tendency for papers that disagree with a popular hypothesis, one the reviewer understands and perhaps supports, to receive a closer and often hostile scrutiny.
Reviewers are selected from practitioners in the field, but many scientific fields are so small that the reviewers will know the authors. The reviewers may even have worked with the authors in the past or wish to work with them in future, so the objectivity of any review is likely to be tainted by this association.
Some journals now request that authors suggest appropriate reviewers but this is a sure way to identify reviewers who will be favourable to certain propositions.
It also follows that if the editor of a journal wishes to reject a paper, then it will be sent to a reviewer who is likely to reject it, whereas a paper that the editor favours to be published will be sent to a reviewer who is expected to be sympathetic. In 2002 the editor-in-chief of the journal "Science" announced that there was no longer any doubt that human activity was changing climate, so what are the realistic chances of this journal publishing a paper that suggests otherwise?
The popular notion is that reviewers should be skilled in the relevant field, but a scientific field like climate change is so broad, and encompasses so many sub disciplines, that it really requires the use of expert reviewers from many different fields. That this is seldom undertaken explains why so many initially influential climate papers have later been found to be fundamentally flawed.
In theory, reviewers should be able to understand and replicate the processing used by the author(s). In practice, climate science has numerous examples where authors of highly influential papers have refused to reveal their complete set of data or the processing methods that they used.
Even worse, the journals in question not only allowed this to happen, but have subsequently defended the lack of disclosure when other researchers attempted to replicate the work.
7 - The IPCC is a reliable authority and its reports are both correct and widely endorsed by all scientists
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) undertakes no research for itself and relies on peer-reviewed scientific papers in reputable journals (see item 6). There is strong evidence that the IPCC is very selective of the papers it wishes to cite and pays scant regard to papers that do not adhere to the notion that manmade emissions of carbon dioxide have caused warming.
Four more issues noted above are also very relevant to the IPCC procedures. The IPCC reports are based on historical temperature data and trends (see 1 & 2), and the attribution of warming to human activities relies very heavily on climate modelling (see item 3). The IPCC pronouncements have a powerful influence on the direction and funding of scientific research into climate change, which in turn influences the number of research papers on these topics. Ultimately, and in entirely circular fashion, this leads the IPCC to report that large numbers of papers support a certain hypothesis (see item 5).
These fallacies alone are major defects of the IPCC reports, but the problems do not end there. Other distortions and fallacies of the IPCC are of its own doing.
Governments appoint experts to work with the IPCC but once appointed those experts can directly invite other experts to join them. This practice obviously can, and does, lead to a situation where the IPCC is heavily biased towards the philosophies and ideologies of certain governments or science groups.
The lead authors of the chapters of the IPCC reports can themselves be researchers whose work is cited in those chapters. This was the case with the so-called "hockey stick" temperature graph in the Third Assessment Report (TAR) published in 2001. The paper in which the graph first appeared was not subject to proper and independent peer review, despite which the graph was prominently featured in a chapter for which the co-creator of the graph was a lead author. The graph was debunked in 20066 and has been omitted without explanation from the Fourth Assessment Report (4AR) of 2007.
The IPCC has often said words to the effect "We don't know what else can be causing warming so it must be humans" (or "the climate models will only produce the correct result if we include manmade influences"), but at the same time the IPCC says that scientists have a low level of understanding of many climate factors. It logically follows that if any natural climate factors
are poorly understood then they cannot be properly modelled, the output of the models will probably be incorrect and that natural forces cannot easily be dismissed as possible causes. In these circumstances it is simply dishonest to unequivocally blame late 20th century warming on
human activity.7
The IPCC implies that its reports are thoroughly reviewed by thousands of experts. Any impression that thousands of scientists review every word of the reports can be shown to be untrue by an examination of the review comments for the report by IPCC Working Group I. (This report is crucial, because it discusses historical observations, attributes a likely cause of change and attempts to predict global and regional changes. The reports by working groups 2 and 3 draw heavily on the findings of this WG I report.) The analysis of the WG I report for the 4AR revealed that:
(a) A total of just 308 reviewers (including reviewers acting on behalf of governments) examined the 11 chapters of the WGI I report
(b) An average of 67 reviewers examined each chapter of this report with no chapter being examined by more than 100 reviewers and one by as few as 34.
(c) 69% of reviewers commented on less than 3 chapters of the 11-chapter report. (46% of reviewers commented on just one chapter and 23% on two chapters, thus accounting for more than two-thirds of all reviewers.)
(d) Just 5 reviewers examined all 11 chapters and two of these were recorded as "Govt of (country)", which may represent a team of reviewers rather than individuals
(e) Every chapter had review comments from a subset of the designated authors for the chapter, which suggests that the authoring process may not have been diligent and inclusive
Chapter 9 was the key chapter because it attributed a change in climate to human activity but:
(a) Just 62 individuals or government appointed reviewers commented on this chapter
(b) A large number of reviewers had a vested interest in the content of this chapter
- 7 reviewers were "contributing editors" of the same chapter
- 3 were overall editors of the Working Group I report
- 26 were authors or co-authors of papers cited in the final draft
- 8 reviewers were noted as "Govt of ..." indicating one or more reviewers who were appointed by those governments (and sometimes the same comments appear under individual names as well as for the government in question)
- Only 25 individual reviewers appeared to have no vested interest in this chapter
(c) The number of comments from each reviewer varied greatly
- 27 reviewers made just 1 or 2 comments but those making more than 2 comments often drew attention to typographical errors, grammatical errors, mistakes in citing certain papers or inconsistencies with other chapters, so how thorough were these reviews with very few comments?
- only 18 reviewers made more than 10 comments on the entire 122-page second order draft report (98 pages of text, 24 of figures) and 9 of those 18 had a vested interest
(d) Just four reviewers, including one government appointed team or individual, explicitly endorsed the entire chapter in its draft form - not thousands of scientists, but FOUR!
The claim that the IPCC’s 4th Assessment Report carries the imprimatur of having been reviewed by thousands, or even hundreds, of expert and independent scientists is incorrect, and even risible. In actuality, the report represents the view of small and self-selected science coteries that formed the lead authoring teams.
More independent scientists of standing (61) signed a public letter to the Prime Minister of Canada cautioning against the assumption of human causation of warming8 than are listed as authors of the 4AR Summary for Policymakers (52). More than 50 scientists also reviewed the Independent Summary for Policymakers, the counter-view to the IPCC's summary that was published by the Fraser Institute of Canada9.
8 - It has been proven that human emissions of carbon dioxide have caused global warming
The first question to be answered is whether the Earth is warming at all. As the discussion of fallacy 1 showed, there is no certainty that this is the case.
But even were warming to be demonstrated, and assuming a reasonable correlation between an increase in carbon dioxide and an increase in temperature, that does not mean that the former has driven the latter. Good evidence exists from thousands of years ago that carbon dioxide levels rose only after the temperature increased, so why should we assume that the order is somehow reversed today?10
The IPCC claims a subjective 90% to 95% probability that emissions of carbon dioxide have caused warming but that assumes (a) that warming has occurred, (b) that such a subjective probability can be assigned and is meaningful, and (c) that because existing climate models cannot produce correct results without including some "human" influence, then the only allowable explanation is that humans have caused warming.
Remarkably these claims are accompanied by an admission that the level of scientific understanding of many climate factors is quite low. This means that the IPCC's claim for dangerous human-caused warming rests primarily on the output of climate models that are unvalidated and recognised to be incomplete.11
The other foundation for the claim of dangerous warming is based upon laboratory work and theoretical physics regarding the ability of molecules of carbon dioxide to absorb heat and re-transmit it. Using these principles, and ignoring other factors, it can be shown that an increase in carbon dioxide beyond pre-industrial levels will cause a very small increase in temperature and that the warming will become less as the concentration of carbon dioxide increases. However, these principles were developed in laboratory environments that don't match the complexity of real world climate, and the "other factors" that are ignored are actually an integral part of the climate system. With few exceptions, the actions and interactions of these factors are poorly understood. Moreover, empirical tests of the amount of warming that will be caused by a doubling of human emissions suggest a non-alarming figure of only about 1 deg. C12. One major stumbling block for the hypothesis that carbon dioxide has caused significant warming is that since continuous and direct measurements of carbon dioxide began in 1958 global temperatures have both risen and fallen while at all times the concentration of carbon dioxide continued to rise.
The other foundation for the claim of dangerous warming is based upon laboratory work and theoretical physics regarding the ability of molecules of carbon dioxide to absorb heat and re-transmit it. Using these principles, and gnoring other factors, it can be shown that an ncrease in carbon dioxide beyond pre-industrial evels will cause a very small increase in temperature and that the warming will become ess as the concentration of carbon dioxide increases. However, these principles were eveloped in laboratory environments that don't match the complexity of real world climate, and the "other factors" that are ignored are actually an integral part of the climate system. With few exceptions, the actions and interactions of these factors are poorly understood. Moreover, empirical tests of the amount of warming that will be caused by a doubling of human emissions suggest a non-alarming figure of only about 1 deg. C12.
One major stumbling block for the hypothesis that carbon dioxide has caused significant warming is that since continuous and direct measurements of carbon dioxide began in 1958 global temperatures have both risen and fallen while at all times the concentration of carbon dioxide continued to rise.
It would seem that if carbon dioxide is causing any warming at all then it is easily overwhelmed by other, probably quite natural, climate forces. Scientists are continuing to investigate the possible impacts of solar forces on climate and in some cases have shown strong correlations. Other scientists are questioning whether cosmic rays may influence the formation of clouds that then control the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth's surface. Changes in ozone have also been proposed as drivers of climate. That all three of these issues are actively being explored gives the lie to claims that climate science is settled and that carbon dioxide is known to be the sole major cause of recent climatic warming.
Very recently several scientists have said words to the effect "Yes, the natural forces do drive the climate but we believe that carbon dioxide adds to the warming", though they notably refrain from defining how much warming the carbon dioxide may have caused.13 The reality is that there is no clear evidence that human emissions of carbon dioxide have any measurable effect on temperatures. Such a claim rests on climate models of unproven accuracy and on lines of physical argument that expressly exclude consideration of other known important drivers of climate change.
Conclusions
The hypothesis of dangerous humancaused warming caused by CO2 emission is embroiled in uncertainties of the fundamental science and its interpretation, and by fallacious public discussion. It is utterly bizarre that, in face of this reality, public funding of many billions of dollars is still being provided for climate change research. It is even more bizarre that most governments, urged on by environmental NGSs and other self-interested parties, have either already introduced carbon taxation or trading systems (Europe; some groups of US States), or have indicated a firm intention to do so (Australia).
At its most basic, if scientists cannot be sure that temperatures are today rising, nor establish that the gentle late 20th century warming was caused by CO2 emissions, then it is nonsense to propose that expensive controls are needed on human carbon dioxide emissions.
Even more alarming still is the self-sustaining nature of the IPCC and its alarmist claims. The IPCC reports determine the direction of climate research and its funding, which ultimately leads to the number of scientific papers which take a particular line, and the dominance of that line of thinking is expressed in the subsequent IPCC report. The process is one of strong positive feedback for alarmist science advice. Advice which now permeates bureaucracies and governments throughout the world, and which is driving swingeingly expensive, unnecessary and ineffective national and international carbon policies.
1 See: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/sppi_originals/u.s._temperature_rankings_rearranged_problems_and_concerns_with_temperature_data_sets.html 2 http://www.informath.org/apprise/a5620/b17.htm
3 http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/sppi_reprint_series/positive_feedback_have_we_been_fooling_ourselves_.html 4 http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton_papers/greenhouse_warming_what_greenhouse_warming_.html 5 http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton_papers/consensus_what_consensus_among_climate_scientists_the_debate_is_not_over.html
6 "Ad Hoc Committee Report on the 'Hockey Stick' Global Climate Reconstruction" (i.e. "Wegman Report") at http://www.climateaudit.org/pdf/others/07142006_Wegman_Report.pdf
7 http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/sppi_originals/the_myth_of_dangerous_human_caused_climate_change.html
8 http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=3711460e-bd5a-475d-a6be-4db87559d605
9 http://www.fraserinstitute.ca/shared/readmore.asp?sNav=pb&id=886
10 http://ff.org/centers/csspp/pdf/20070204_idso.pdf
11 http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton_papers/the_mathematical_reason_why_longrun_climatic_prediction_is_impossible.html
12 http://www.ecd.bnl.gov/pubs/BNL-76939-2006-AB.pdf
13 http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/monckton_papers/greenhouse_warming_what_greenhouse_warming_.html
IN PRAISE OF CO2: EARTH ‘IS THE GREENEST IT'S BEEN IN DECADES, PERHAPS IN CENTURIES’
Rising CO2 a Boon for Biosphere – Earth in 'CO2 Famine' – Cutting CO2 'a profoundly evil act'
by Marc Morano August 10, 2009
CLIMATE DEPOT'S CO2 FACT SHEET
Prominent Scientist Tells Congress: Earth in 'CO2 Famine' - Feb. 25, 2009
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=AF8F5B20-802A-23AD-49FB-8A2D53F00437
Excerpt: 'The increase of CO2 is not a cause for alarm and will be good for mankind' : Washington, DC — Award-winning Princeton University Physicist Dr. Will Happer declared man-made global warming fears “mistaken” and noted that the Earth was currently in a “CO2 famine now.” Happer, who has published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers, made his remarks during today's Environment and Public Works Full Committee Hearing. “Many people don't realize that over geological time, we're really in a CO2 famine now. Almost never has CO2 levels been as low as it has been in the Holocene (geologic epoch) – 280 (parts per million - ppm) – that's unheard of. Most of the time [CO2 levels] have been at least 1000 (ppm) and it's been quite higher than that,” Happer told the Senate Committee. To read Happer's complete opening statement click here: http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Hearings.Testimony&Hearing_ID=864d3319-802a-23ad-46a0-15d3b819178d&Witness_ID=7e0930c4-f99f-48fd-bdd2-df4ae79f27ef
“Earth was just fine in those times,” Happer added. “The oceans were fine, plants grew, animals grew fine. So it's baffling to me that we're so frightened of getting nowhere close to where we started,” Happer explained. Happer also noted that “the number of [skeptical scientists] with the courage to speak out is growing” and he warned “children should not be force-fed propaganda, masquerading as science.” [In December, Happer requested to be added to the groundbreaking U.S. Senate Minority Report Update: More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=2674e64f-802a-23ad-490b-bd9faf4dcdb7] Happer was pressed by the Committee on whether rising CO2 fears are valid. “I don't think the laws of nature or physics and chemistry has changed in 80 million years. 80 million years ago the Earth was a very prosperous palace and there is no reason to suddenly think it will become bad now,” Happer added. Happer is a professor in the Department of Physics at Princeton University http://happerlab.princeton.edu/ and former Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy from 1990 to 1993, has published over 200 scientific papers, and is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Sciences. “I believe that the increase of CO2 is not a cause for alarm and will be good for mankind,” Happer told the Committee. “What about the frightening consequences of increasing levels of CO2 that we keep hearing about? In a word, they are wildly exaggerated, just as the purported benefits of prohibition were wildly exaggerated,” he explained.
2008: In praise of CO2: Earth 'is the greenest it's been in decades, perhaps in centuries'
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/08/surprise-earths-biosphere-is-booming-co2-the-cause/
Excerpt: Earths' Biosphere is Booming, Satellite Data Suggests CO2 the Cause - Financial Post, June 07, 2008
Planet Earth is on a roll! GPP is way up. NPP is way up. To the surprise of those who have been bearish on the planet, the data shows global production has been steadily climbing to record levels, ones not seen since these measurements began. GPP is Gross Primary Production, a measure of the daily output of the global biosphere –the amount of new plant matter on land. NPP is Net Primary Production, an annual tally of the globe's production. Biomass is booming. The planet is the greenest it's been in decades, perhaps in centuries. [...] The results surprised Steven Running of the University of Montana and Ramakrishna Nemani of NASA, scientists involved in analyzing the NASA satellite data. They found that over a period of almost two decades, the Earth as a whole became more bountiful by a whopping 6.2%. About 25% of the Earth's vegetated landmass — almost 110 million square kilometres — enjoyed significant increases and only 7% showed significant declines. When the satellite data zooms in, it finds that each square metre of land, on average, now produces almost 500 grams of greenery per year.
Why the increase? Their 2004 study, and other more recent ones, point to the warming of the planet and the presence of CO2, a gas indispensable to plant life. CO2 is nature's fertilizer, bathing the biota with its life-giving nutrients. Plants take the carbon from CO2 to bulk themselves up — carbon is the building block of life — and release the oxygen, which along with the plants, then sustain animal life. As summarized in a report last month, released along with a petition signed by 32,000 U. S. scientists who vouched for the benefits of CO2: “Higher CO2 enables plants to grow faster and larger and to live in drier climates. Plants provide food for animals, which are thereby also enhanced. The extent and diversity of plant and animal life have both increased substantially during the past half-century.”
Higher Carbon Dioxide May Give Pine Trees A Competitive Edge
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090803173246.htm
Excerpt: ScienceDaily (Aug. 4, 2009) — Pine trees grown for 12 years in air one-and-a-half times richer in carbon dioxide than today's levels produced twice as many seeds of at least as good a quality as those growing under normal conditions, a Duke University-led research team reported Aug. 3 at a national ecology conference. Carbon dioxide readings that high are expected everywhere by mid-century. The findings suggest some woody tree species could, in the future, out-compete grasses and other herbaceous plants that scientists had previously found can also produce more seeds under high-CO2, but of inferior quality.
'Crop yields could jump by up to 20%' with rising CO2 – March 6, 2009
http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2009/03/more-co2-please-20-crop-yield-growth.html
Excerpt: "Research carried out by the Department of Primary Industries in Victoria has shown that wheat crop yields could jump by up to 20 per cent under global warming. The trial pumped more carbon dioxide into the air around the wheat, to the level that's expected in 2050. Glenn Fitzgerald, from the DPI, says that it's not all good news though. "The caveat there is that that assumes sufficient water and nitrogen," he says. "We're looking at basically how the fertilisation effect of C02 can offset some of the reductions in water that we know [NOT!] are coming."" "Wheat crop produces more in climate change test" http://www.abc.net.au/rural/news/content/200903/s2509104.htm
Study: Biodiversity boomed during global warming -- teeming with plants and animals – August 7, 2009
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2009/08/07/Biodiversity-boomed-during-global-warming/UPI-90961249672936/
Excerpt: A global warming span from 53 million to 47 million years ago strongly influenced the biodiversity of western North America, geologists said. The warming spurred a biodiversity boom of plants and animals, the researchers reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Today, the middle of Wyoming is a vast desert, and a few antelope and deer are all you see," geologist Michael Woodburne, of the Museum of Northern Arizona, said. Fifty million years ago, however, when temperatures were at their highest, that area of Wyoming was a tropical rain forest teeming with lemur-like primates, small horses, forest rodents and other mammals, Woodburne said. "In fact, there were more species of mammals living in the western part of North America at that time than at any other time," he said. Woodburne's research into global warming was aided by Gregg Gunnell of the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology and Richard Stucky of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
Shock: National Geographic's Moment of Clarity: 'Emerging evidence' reveals 'rising temps could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent' - Sahara Desert Greening Due to Global Warming? - July 31, 2009
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090731-green-sahara.html
Excerpt: Desertification, drought, and despair—that's what global warming has in store for much of Africa. Or so we hear. Emerging evidence is painting a very different scenario, one in which rising temperatures could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent. "Camel Contest" in National Geographic Magazine Ancient Cemetery Found; Brings "Green Sahara" to Life Exodus From Drying Sahara Gave Rise to Pharaohs, Study Says Scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall. If sustained, these rains could revitalize drought-ravaged regions, reclaiming them for farming communities. This desert-shrinking trend is supported by climate models, which predict a return to conditions that turned the Sahara into a lush savanna some 12,000 years ago. [...] The green shoots of recovery are showing up on satellite images of regions including the Sahel, a semi-desert zone bordering the Sahara to the south that stretches some 2,400 miles (3,860 kilometers). Images taken between 1982 and 2002 revealed extensive regreening throughout the Sahel, according to a new study in the journal Biogeosciences.
Oops! UN IPCC Wrong Again: Deserts Getting Greener: 'It has been assumed that global warming would cause an expansion of the world's deserts' - July 16, 2009
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8150415.stm
Excerpt: It has been assumed that global warming would cause an expansion of the world's deserts, but now some scientists are predicting a contrary scenario in which water and life slowly reclaim these arid places. They think vast, dry regions like the Sahara might soon begin shrinking. [...]The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned recently that rising global temperatures could cut West African agricultural production by up to 50% by the year 2020. But satellite images from the last 15 years do seem to show a recovery of vegetation in the Southern Sahara, although the Sahel Belt, the semi-arid tropical savannah to the south of the desert, remains fragile. The fragility of the Sahel may have been exacerbated by the cutting of trees, poor land management and subsequent erosion of soil.
Study: 'Long-term (100 year) rising atmospheric CO2 concentration is not from anthropogenic sources' – April 1, 2009
http://climateresearchnews.com/2009/08/atmospheric-residence-time-of-man-made-co2/
Atmospheric Residence Time of Man-Made CO2: Potential Dependence of Global Warming on the Residence Time (RT) in the Atmosphere of Anthropogenically Sourced Carbon Dioxide - Robert H. Essenhigh - Department of Mechanical Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210 - Energy Fuels, 2009, 23 (5), pp 2773–2784 - DOI: 10.1021/ef800581r - Publication Date (Web): April 1, 2009 - Copyright © 2009 American Chemical Society
Excerpt: With the short (5−15 year) RT results shown to be in quasi-equilibrium, this then supports the (independently based) conclusion that the long-term (100 year) rising atmospheric CO2 concentration is not from anthropogenic sources but, in accordance with conclusions from other studies, is most likely the outcome of the rising atmospheric temperature, which is due to other natural factors. This further supports the conclusion that global warming is not anthropogenically driven as an outcome of combustion. The economic and political significance of that conclusion will be self-evident.
New Study: Most of rising CO2 level is not man-made – August 5, 2009
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V12/N31/EDIT.php
By Tom V. Segalstad, Associate Professor of Resource and Environmental Geology, The University of Oslo, Norway
Excerpt: The rising concentration of atmospheric CO2 in the last century is not consistent with supply from anthropogenic sources. Such anthropogenic sources account for less than 5% of the present atmosphere, compared to the major input/output from natural sources (~95%). Hence, anthropogenic CO2 is too small to be a significant or relevant factor in the global warming process, particularly when comparing with the far more potent greenhouse gas water vapor. The rising atmospheric CO2 is the outcome of rising temperature rather than vice versa. Correspondingly, Dr. Essenhigh concludes that the politically driven target of capture and sequestration of carbon from combustion sources would be a major and pointless waste of physical and financial resources.
Climatologist Dissents: 'Greenhouse effect phenomenon is not a result of human emissions' - 'I am ashamed of what climate science has become today' – April 2009
http://www.tech-know.eu/NISubmission/pdf/Politics_and_the_Greenhouse_Effect.pdf
Hans Jelbring, Ph.D Climatology, Stockholm University, M.Sc, Royal Institute of Technology
Excerpt: Basic scientific principles demonstrate that the overall GE phenomenon is not a result of human emissions of “greenhouse gases”.
[Climate Depot is publishing a series of exclusive A-Z fact sheets on every aspect of the global warming debate. Climate Depot has already published comprehensive fact sheets on: the Arctic; RealClimate.org; Climate Models; Sea Level Rise; Climate Threats & Intimidation; Climate Funding; Global Warming's Global Governance; Amazon and Rainforests; Warming Activists Stuck in Polar Ice; Congressional Cap-and-Trade Bill; Record Cold Temps; Lack of Warming; Report on Obama Admin. Climate Report; Hurricanes; Climate Astrology; Gore Effect.]
Source:
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/2355/Rising-CO2-a-Boon-for-Biosphere-ndash-Earth-in-CO2-Famine-ndash-Cutting-CO2-a-profoundly-evil-act--Climate-Depot-Fact-Sheet-on-CO2
by Marc Morano August 10, 2009
CLIMATE DEPOT'S CO2 FACT SHEET
Prominent Scientist Tells Congress: Earth in 'CO2 Famine' - Feb. 25, 2009
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=AF8F5B20-802A-23AD-49FB-8A2D53F00437
Excerpt: 'The increase of CO2 is not a cause for alarm and will be good for mankind' : Washington, DC — Award-winning Princeton University Physicist Dr. Will Happer declared man-made global warming fears “mistaken” and noted that the Earth was currently in a “CO2 famine now.” Happer, who has published over 200 peer-reviewed scientific papers, made his remarks during today's Environment and Public Works Full Committee Hearing. “Many people don't realize that over geological time, we're really in a CO2 famine now. Almost never has CO2 levels been as low as it has been in the Holocene (geologic epoch) – 280 (parts per million - ppm) – that's unheard of. Most of the time [CO2 levels] have been at least 1000 (ppm) and it's been quite higher than that,” Happer told the Senate Committee. To read Happer's complete opening statement click here: http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Hearings.Testimony&Hearing_ID=864d3319-802a-23ad-46a0-15d3b819178d&Witness_ID=7e0930c4-f99f-48fd-bdd2-df4ae79f27ef
“Earth was just fine in those times,” Happer added. “The oceans were fine, plants grew, animals grew fine. So it's baffling to me that we're so frightened of getting nowhere close to where we started,” Happer explained. Happer also noted that “the number of [skeptical scientists] with the courage to speak out is growing” and he warned “children should not be force-fed propaganda, masquerading as science.” [In December, Happer requested to be added to the groundbreaking U.S. Senate Minority Report Update: More Than 650 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Minority.Blogs&ContentRecord_id=2674e64f-802a-23ad-490b-bd9faf4dcdb7] Happer was pressed by the Committee on whether rising CO2 fears are valid. “I don't think the laws of nature or physics and chemistry has changed in 80 million years. 80 million years ago the Earth was a very prosperous palace and there is no reason to suddenly think it will become bad now,” Happer added. Happer is a professor in the Department of Physics at Princeton University http://happerlab.princeton.edu/ and former Director of Energy Research at the Department of Energy from 1990 to 1993, has published over 200 scientific papers, and is a fellow of the American Physical Society, the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and the National Academy of Sciences. “I believe that the increase of CO2 is not a cause for alarm and will be good for mankind,” Happer told the Committee. “What about the frightening consequences of increasing levels of CO2 that we keep hearing about? In a word, they are wildly exaggerated, just as the purported benefits of prohibition were wildly exaggerated,” he explained.
2008: In praise of CO2: Earth 'is the greenest it's been in decades, perhaps in centuries'
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/06/08/surprise-earths-biosphere-is-booming-co2-the-cause/
Excerpt: Earths' Biosphere is Booming, Satellite Data Suggests CO2 the Cause - Financial Post, June 07, 2008
Planet Earth is on a roll! GPP is way up. NPP is way up. To the surprise of those who have been bearish on the planet, the data shows global production has been steadily climbing to record levels, ones not seen since these measurements began. GPP is Gross Primary Production, a measure of the daily output of the global biosphere –the amount of new plant matter on land. NPP is Net Primary Production, an annual tally of the globe's production. Biomass is booming. The planet is the greenest it's been in decades, perhaps in centuries. [...] The results surprised Steven Running of the University of Montana and Ramakrishna Nemani of NASA, scientists involved in analyzing the NASA satellite data. They found that over a period of almost two decades, the Earth as a whole became more bountiful by a whopping 6.2%. About 25% of the Earth's vegetated landmass — almost 110 million square kilometres — enjoyed significant increases and only 7% showed significant declines. When the satellite data zooms in, it finds that each square metre of land, on average, now produces almost 500 grams of greenery per year.
Why the increase? Their 2004 study, and other more recent ones, point to the warming of the planet and the presence of CO2, a gas indispensable to plant life. CO2 is nature's fertilizer, bathing the biota with its life-giving nutrients. Plants take the carbon from CO2 to bulk themselves up — carbon is the building block of life — and release the oxygen, which along with the plants, then sustain animal life. As summarized in a report last month, released along with a petition signed by 32,000 U. S. scientists who vouched for the benefits of CO2: “Higher CO2 enables plants to grow faster and larger and to live in drier climates. Plants provide food for animals, which are thereby also enhanced. The extent and diversity of plant and animal life have both increased substantially during the past half-century.”
Higher Carbon Dioxide May Give Pine Trees A Competitive Edge
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2009/08/090803173246.htm
Excerpt: ScienceDaily (Aug. 4, 2009) — Pine trees grown for 12 years in air one-and-a-half times richer in carbon dioxide than today's levels produced twice as many seeds of at least as good a quality as those growing under normal conditions, a Duke University-led research team reported Aug. 3 at a national ecology conference. Carbon dioxide readings that high are expected everywhere by mid-century. The findings suggest some woody tree species could, in the future, out-compete grasses and other herbaceous plants that scientists had previously found can also produce more seeds under high-CO2, but of inferior quality.
'Crop yields could jump by up to 20%' with rising CO2 – March 6, 2009
http://heliogenic.blogspot.com/2009/03/more-co2-please-20-crop-yield-growth.html
Excerpt: "Research carried out by the Department of Primary Industries in Victoria has shown that wheat crop yields could jump by up to 20 per cent under global warming. The trial pumped more carbon dioxide into the air around the wheat, to the level that's expected in 2050. Glenn Fitzgerald, from the DPI, says that it's not all good news though. "The caveat there is that that assumes sufficient water and nitrogen," he says. "We're looking at basically how the fertilisation effect of C02 can offset some of the reductions in water that we know [NOT!] are coming."" "Wheat crop produces more in climate change test" http://www.abc.net.au/rural/news/content/200903/s2509104.htm
Study: Biodiversity boomed during global warming -- teeming with plants and animals – August 7, 2009
http://www.upi.com/Science_News/2009/08/07/Biodiversity-boomed-during-global-warming/UPI-90961249672936/
Excerpt: A global warming span from 53 million to 47 million years ago strongly influenced the biodiversity of western North America, geologists said. The warming spurred a biodiversity boom of plants and animals, the researchers reported this week in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. "Today, the middle of Wyoming is a vast desert, and a few antelope and deer are all you see," geologist Michael Woodburne, of the Museum of Northern Arizona, said. Fifty million years ago, however, when temperatures were at their highest, that area of Wyoming was a tropical rain forest teeming with lemur-like primates, small horses, forest rodents and other mammals, Woodburne said. "In fact, there were more species of mammals living in the western part of North America at that time than at any other time," he said. Woodburne's research into global warming was aided by Gregg Gunnell of the University of Michigan Museum of Paleontology and Richard Stucky of the Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
Shock: National Geographic's Moment of Clarity: 'Emerging evidence' reveals 'rising temps could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent' - Sahara Desert Greening Due to Global Warming? - July 31, 2009
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/07/090731-green-sahara.html
Excerpt: Desertification, drought, and despair—that's what global warming has in store for much of Africa. Or so we hear. Emerging evidence is painting a very different scenario, one in which rising temperatures could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent. "Camel Contest" in National Geographic Magazine Ancient Cemetery Found; Brings "Green Sahara" to Life Exodus From Drying Sahara Gave Rise to Pharaohs, Study Says Scientists are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall. If sustained, these rains could revitalize drought-ravaged regions, reclaiming them for farming communities. This desert-shrinking trend is supported by climate models, which predict a return to conditions that turned the Sahara into a lush savanna some 12,000 years ago. [...] The green shoots of recovery are showing up on satellite images of regions including the Sahel, a semi-desert zone bordering the Sahara to the south that stretches some 2,400 miles (3,860 kilometers). Images taken between 1982 and 2002 revealed extensive regreening throughout the Sahel, according to a new study in the journal Biogeosciences.
Oops! UN IPCC Wrong Again: Deserts Getting Greener: 'It has been assumed that global warming would cause an expansion of the world's deserts' - July 16, 2009
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8150415.stm
Excerpt: It has been assumed that global warming would cause an expansion of the world's deserts, but now some scientists are predicting a contrary scenario in which water and life slowly reclaim these arid places. They think vast, dry regions like the Sahara might soon begin shrinking. [...]The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change warned recently that rising global temperatures could cut West African agricultural production by up to 50% by the year 2020. But satellite images from the last 15 years do seem to show a recovery of vegetation in the Southern Sahara, although the Sahel Belt, the semi-arid tropical savannah to the south of the desert, remains fragile. The fragility of the Sahel may have been exacerbated by the cutting of trees, poor land management and subsequent erosion of soil.
Study: 'Long-term (100 year) rising atmospheric CO2 concentration is not from anthropogenic sources' – April 1, 2009
http://climateresearchnews.com/2009/08/atmospheric-residence-time-of-man-made-co2/
Atmospheric Residence Time of Man-Made CO2: Potential Dependence of Global Warming on the Residence Time (RT) in the Atmosphere of Anthropogenically Sourced Carbon Dioxide - Robert H. Essenhigh - Department of Mechanical Engineering, The Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio 43210 - Energy Fuels, 2009, 23 (5), pp 2773–2784 - DOI: 10.1021/ef800581r - Publication Date (Web): April 1, 2009 - Copyright © 2009 American Chemical Society
Excerpt: With the short (5−15 year) RT results shown to be in quasi-equilibrium, this then supports the (independently based) conclusion that the long-term (100 year) rising atmospheric CO2 concentration is not from anthropogenic sources but, in accordance with conclusions from other studies, is most likely the outcome of the rising atmospheric temperature, which is due to other natural factors. This further supports the conclusion that global warming is not anthropogenically driven as an outcome of combustion. The economic and political significance of that conclusion will be self-evident.
New Study: Most of rising CO2 level is not man-made – August 5, 2009
http://www.co2science.org/articles/V12/N31/EDIT.php
By Tom V. Segalstad, Associate Professor of Resource and Environmental Geology, The University of Oslo, Norway
Excerpt: The rising concentration of atmospheric CO2 in the last century is not consistent with supply from anthropogenic sources. Such anthropogenic sources account for less than 5% of the present atmosphere, compared to the major input/output from natural sources (~95%). Hence, anthropogenic CO2 is too small to be a significant or relevant factor in the global warming process, particularly when comparing with the far more potent greenhouse gas water vapor. The rising atmospheric CO2 is the outcome of rising temperature rather than vice versa. Correspondingly, Dr. Essenhigh concludes that the politically driven target of capture and sequestration of carbon from combustion sources would be a major and pointless waste of physical and financial resources.
Climatologist Dissents: 'Greenhouse effect phenomenon is not a result of human emissions' - 'I am ashamed of what climate science has become today' – April 2009
http://www.tech-know.eu/NISubmission/pdf/Politics_and_the_Greenhouse_Effect.pdf
Hans Jelbring, Ph.D Climatology, Stockholm University, M.Sc, Royal Institute of Technology
Excerpt: Basic scientific principles demonstrate that the overall GE phenomenon is not a result of human emissions of “greenhouse gases”.
[Climate Depot is publishing a series of exclusive A-Z fact sheets on every aspect of the global warming debate. Climate Depot has already published comprehensive fact sheets on: the Arctic; RealClimate.org; Climate Models; Sea Level Rise; Climate Threats & Intimidation; Climate Funding; Global Warming's Global Governance; Amazon and Rainforests; Warming Activists Stuck in Polar Ice; Congressional Cap-and-Trade Bill; Record Cold Temps; Lack of Warming; Report on Obama Admin. Climate Report; Hurricanes; Climate Astrology; Gore Effect.]
Source:
http://www.climatedepot.com/a/2355/Rising-CO2-a-Boon-for-Biosphere-ndash-Earth-in-CO2-Famine-ndash-Cutting-CO2-a-profoundly-evil-act--Climate-Depot-Fact-Sheet-on-CO2
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