I received this from a friend who is, as a result, a climate change
skeptic. I don't have the scientific knowledge to refute the claims and
have relied on the IPCC for my information. Does anyone know where such
a refutation of this specific attack can be found or is anyone
knowledgeable enough to compose a reply?
Paul Phillips
Dishonest political tampering with the science on global warming
Bali - December 05, 2007
Christopher Monckton, Denpasar, Bali
Ed note: another view of green house gas
As a contributor to the IPCC's 2007 report, I share the Nobel Peace
Prize with Al Gore. Yet I and many of my peers in the British House of
Lords - through our hereditary element the most
independent-minded of lawmakers - profoundly disagree on fundamental
scientific grounds with
both the IPCC and my co-laureate's alarmist movie An Inconvenient Truth,
which won this year's Oscar for Best Sci-Fi Comedy Horror.
Two detailed investigations by Committees of the House confirm that the
IPCC has deliberately,
persistently and prodigiously exaggerated not only the effect of
greenhouse gases on temperature but also the environmental consequences
of warmer weather.
My contribution to the 2007 report illustrates the scientific problem.
The report's first table of figures - inserted by the IPCC's bureaucrats
after the scientists had finalized the draft, and without their consent
- listed four contributions to sea-level rise.
The bureaucrats had multiplied the effect of melting ice from the
Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets by 10.
The result of this dishonest political tampering with the science was
that the sum of the four items in the offending table was more than
twice the IPCC's published total. Until I wrote to point out the error,
no one had noticed. The IPCC, on receiving my letter, quietly corrected,
moved and relabeled the erroneous table, posting the new version on the
internet and earning me my Nobel prize.
The shore-dwellers of Bali need not fear for their homes. The IPCC now
says the combined
contribution of the two great ice-sheets to sea-level rise will be less
than seven centimeters after 100 years, not seven meters imminently, and
that the Greenland ice sheet (which thickened by 50 cm between 1995 and
2005) might only melt after several millennia, probably by natural
causes, just as it last did 850,000 years ago. Gore, mendaciously
assisted by the IPCC bureaucracy, had exaggerated a hundredfold.
Recently a High Court judge in the UK listed nine of the 35 major
scientific errors in Gore's movie, saying they must be corrected before
innocent schoolchildren can be exposed to the movie. Gore's exaggeration
of sea-level rise was one.
Others being peddled at the Bali conference are that man-made "global
warming" threatens polar bears and coral reefs, caused Hurricane
Katrina, shrank Lake Chad, expanded the actually-shrinking Sahara, etc.
At the very heart of the IPCC's calculations lurks an error more serious
than any of these. The IPCC says: "The CO2 radiative forcing increased
by 20 percent during the last 10 years (1995-2005)."
Radiative forcing quantifies increases in radiant energy in the
atmosphere, and hence in temperature. The atmospheric concentration of
CO2 in 1995 was 360 parts per million. In 2005 it was just 5percent
higher, at 378 ppm. But each additional molecule of CO2 in the air
causes a smaller radiant-energy increase than its predecessor. So the
true increase in radiative forcing was 1 percent, not 20 percent. The
IPCC has exaggerated the CO2 effect 20-fold.
Why so large and crucial an exaggeration? Answer: the IPCC has repealed
the fundamental physical the Stefan-Boltzmann equation - that converts
radiant energy to temperature. Without this equation, no meaningful
calculation of the effect of radiance on temperature can be done. Yet
the 1,600 pages of the IPCC's 2007 report do not mention it once.
The IPCC knows of the equation, of course. But it is inconvenient. It
imposes a strict (and very low) limit on how much greenhouse gases can
increase temperature. At the Earth's surface, you can add as much
greenhouse gas as you like (the "surface forcing"), and the temperature
will scarcely respond.
That is why all of the IPCC's computer models predict that 10km above
Bali, in the tropical upper
troposphere, temperature should be rising two or three times as fast as
it does at the surface. Without that tropical upper-troposphere
"hot-spot", the Stefan-Boltzmann law ensures that surface temperature
cannot change much.
For half a century we have been measuring the temperature in the upper
atmosphere - and it has
been changing no faster than at the surface. The IPCC knows this, too.
So it merely declares that its computer predictions are right and the
real-world measurements are wrong. Next time you hear some
scientifically-illiterate bureaucrat say, "The science is settled",
remember this vital failure of real-world observations to confirm the
IPCC's computer predictions. The IPCC's entire case is built on a guess
that the absent hot-spot might exist.
Even if the Gore/IPCC exaggerations were true, which they are not, the
economic cost of trying to mitigate climate change by trying to cut our
emissions through carbon trading and other costly
market interferences would far outweigh any possible climatic benefit.
The international community has galloped lemming-like over the cliff
twice before. Twenty
years ago the UN decided not to regard AIDS as a fatal infection.
Carriers of the disease were not
identified and isolated. Result: 25 million deaths in poor countries.
Thirty-five years ago the world decided to ban DDT, the only effective
agent against malaria. Result: 40 million deaths in poor countries. The
World Health Organization lifted the DDT ban on
Sept. 15 last year. It now recommends the use of DDT to control malaria.
Dr. Arata Kochi of the
WHO said that politics could no longer be allowed to stand in the way of
the science and the data.
Amen to that.
If we take the heroically stupid decisions now on the table at Bali, it
will once again be the world's
poorest people who will die unheeded in their tens of millions, this
time for lack of the heat and light and power and medical attention
which we in the West have long been fortunate enough to take for granted.
If we deny them the fossil-fuelled growth we have enjoyed, they will
remain poor and, paradoxically, their populations will continue to
increase, making the world's carbon footprint very much larger in the
long run.
As they die, and as global temperature continues to fail to rise in
accordance with the IPCC's laughably exaggerated predictions, the
self-congratulatory rhetoric that is the hallmark of the now-useless,
costly, corrupt UN will again be near-unanimously parroted by lazy,
unthinking politicians and journalists who ought to have done their duty
by the poor but are now - for the third time in three decades - failing
to speak up for those who are about to die.
My fellow-participants, there is no climate crisis. The correct policy
response to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing. Take
courage! Do nothing, and save the world's poor from yet another
careless, UN-driven slaughter.
The writer is an international business consultant specializing in the
investigation of scientific frauds. He is a former adviser to UK prime
minister Margaret Thatcher and is presenter of
the 90-minute climate movie Apocalypse? NO! He can be reached at
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
--
Paul Phillips Professor Emertus, Economics University of Manitoba Home
and Office: 3806 - 36A st., Vernon BC, Canada. ViT 6E9 tel: 1 (250)
558-0830 email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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