does anything about it" - Mark Twain
Well, here we are again. It's only the fourth day of 2008 and already there's a whole stack of stuff to say about our favourite Grumpy Topic …
Global Warming has stopped (if it ever started, of course …)
In an article in the New Statesman recently, David Whitehouse pointed out that "The fact is that the global temperature of 2007 is statistically the same as 2006 and every year since 2001". Whitehouse was BBC Science Correspondent 1988-1998, Science Editor BBC News Online 1998-2006 and the 2004 European Internet Journalist of the Year. He has a doctorate in astrophysics and is the author of "The Sun: A Biography" (John Wiley, 2005).
You can read the article here.
Eco-Nazi extraordinaire
Just so we know the kind of entrenched, "We're right so the rest of you had better just shut up" thinking we're up against, listen to Mayer Hillman. He's a Senior Fellow Emeritus at the Policy Studies Institute in London, and the author of "How we can save the planet" (but don't buy it, we beg you. Don't want to encourage the b*gg*r!).
As a professional town planner and architect he's plainly not qualified to tell the rest of us what to do about Global Warming but he doesn't let a little thing like that stand in his way. In a recent interview he expressed the following views …
"Some people … need bloody educating. And I draw comfort from the fact that when food rationing was introduced in 1939 there were no demonstrations in Trafalgar Square."
"The most dangerous threat of climate change was to our democratic institutions because the implication of democracy is that if you can't persuade the majority to support a particular policy then you can't introduce it."
"When the chips are down I think democracy is a less important goal than is the protection of the planet from the death of life, the end of life on it. This has got to be imposed on people whether they like it or not."
"You don't have to persuade the public to support the introduction of carbon rationing. All you have to do is persuade political leaders to do it."
Bastard.
Three Inconvenient Questions
Californian Senator Tom McLintock isn't taking Al Gore lying down. Sorry, poor choice of expression there - he isn't taking Al Gore in any position whatever, not lying down, not standing up, and definitely not from behind bent over the toilet bowl. In response to Gore's discredited film "An Inconvenient Truth", McLintock has three inconvenient questions of his own …
"First, if global warming is caused by your SUV (4x4), why are we seeing global warming on every other body in the solar system? For the last six years the Martian south polar ice cap has conspicuously receded. Pluto is warming and Jupiter is showing dramatic climate change. Even Neptune's moon Triton has warmed 5% on the absolute temperature scale - the equivalent of a 22 degrees Fahrenheit increase on Earth - from 1989 to 1998.
Meanwhile solar radiation has increased a measurable 0.05% since the 1970s. Is it possible that as the sun gets warmer the planets do so too? That would be a little scary in its own right, except for the second inconvenient question.
If global warming is being caused by your SUV, why is that we have ample historical records of periods in our recent history when the planet's temperature was warmer than it is today? During the Medieval Warm Period from about 900 to 1300 AD, we know that wine grapes were thriving in North Britain and Newfoundland and that the temperature in Greenland was hot enough to support a prosperous agricultural economy for nearly 500 years. That period was brought to an end by the Little Ice Age that lasted from 1300 until 1850. We know that during colonial times, Boston and New York Harbours routinely froze over in winter and during Elizabethan times an annual Winter Festival was held on the Thames which froze solid every year.
And finally the third inconvenient question. If global warming is caused by your SUV, why is it that increases in atmospheric CO2 always follow increases in global temperatures by several hundred years, indicating that CO2 is a by-product of increasing temperatures, not a cause?"
Al Gore has refused the Heartland Institute's offer to organise an international public debate on the issue. Maybe he has difficulty answering these and similar questions …
Is the British Government funding Global Warming?
From our correspondent P**** L**** of Yorkshire …
"You might include the following information in your accurate - and entertaining - review of the way this mythology has been foisted on the public.
The IPCC Summary Reports do not accurately reflect the views of the various scientific committees which report to the IPCC. The IPCC famously has, uniquely, two separate components - a scientific committee composed of working groups of active scientists, which does all the research work and reports on it; and a completely separate group composed of scientific bureaucrats which alone prepares the Summary for Government Policy Makers. Individual working groups have no direct access to the IPCC Report which appears to Governments and the public.
As each scientific committee reviews the research reports submitted by its members and endeavours to assemble a consensus, a "suit" from the organisation which supports the Summary sits with the working committees to ensure that their reports conform to the official position of the IPCC and to the Draft Summary which has already been prepared (without sight of the scientific reports!).
The punch line is that several years ago the United Kingdom volunteered to finance the operation and co-ordination of IPCC scientific work, which is now done through the UK's Hadley Centre. The 'suits' who guide and 'co-ordinate' the reports of the IPCC's working committees to the bureaucrats preparing the Summary are provided and paid for by British taxpayers and operate the policies of the British Government.
How's that for organised spin?"
We've got pretty good at internet searching over the years, and while there's plenty of evidence that IPCC scientists are angry at the way their judgements are being ignored, we've so far been unable to find any definite confirmation about the funding issue. If anyone knows different, please get in touch …
Is the IPCC falling apart? Good!
The recent much-trumpeted international conference on climate change in Bali heard from a number of scientists. Here are some of them …
UN IPCC reviewer and climate researcher Dr.Vincent Gray of New Zealand, who has been involved in vetting IPCC reports since its inception in 1990, shattered the much vaunted infallibility of the IPCC, which is routinely put forward as evidence that "the debate is over" about the man-made causes of global warming. "There is no evidence that carbon dioxide increases are having any affect whatsoever on the climate," he said. "All the science of the IPCC is unsound. I have come to this conclusion after a very long time. If you examine every single proposition of the IPCC thoroughly, you find that the science somewhere fails. It fails not only from the data, but it fails in the statistics, and the mathematics".
Dr. William Alexander, Emeritus Professor of the University of Pretoria in South Africa and a former member of the United Nations Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters, warned that the UN's drive to force poorer countries to adopt policies on climate change would increase poverty and lead to more death.
Owen McShane agreed, arguing that such policies will lead to financial ruin for struggling countries. "Having the same set of rules apply to everybody will blow some economies apart totally while others will be unscathed and I wouldn't be surprised if the ones who remain unscathed are the ones who write the rules," he said.
Had you heard any of these views before? Well, no, you haven't. There were no corporate media reports covering their speeches and presentations. Contrast this with the amount of attention lavished on those who push the UN's pre-determined, politicised and unscientific rhetoric - the Chicken Little "sky is falling" propaganda about the coming apocalypse. This is how the "consensus" scam is maintained - any dissenting view is discouraged, shunned and ignored, just as it was when the "consensus" view that the earth was flat and that it was the centre of the universe was aggressively upheld as scientific fact.
Marc Sheppard is a technology consultant, software engineer, writer, and political and systems analyst. Writing on the American Thinker website last February, he said …
"Of the countless flaws inherent to Pop Science, by far the most pernicious is that, contrary to accepted scientific method, the conclusion precedes any supporting research. Special interests whose agendas may be furthered by the junk premise then incite the media to amplify their positions and ignore both the science and protesting contrarian scientists. Nowhere is this abuse more prevalent and dangerous than in fields of environmental science.
But a more ominous practice has arisen which empowers these special interests to adapt and summarize already compromised research to further fit the desired "consensus" before presenting it as fact to an eager media. This travesty of methodology is brought to you by the folks at the United Nations.
Back in 2001, the U.N's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) submitted its Summary for Policy Makers as a precursor to its Third Assessment Report. Based solely on that summary, left wing environmentalists and their media confederates immediately exhumed their mankind stinks mantras and declared a victory in the anthropogenic global warming debate. Some scientists associated with the report, however, challenged both its bias and the summary's oblique politically correct representation of its conclusions. It appeared that rumors of the debate's demise may have been greatly exaggerated.
Now, nearly 6 years later, it's IPCC report time again and both the methodology and reaction are following the same predictable course of the forerunner. As before, the hot Paris debut of the Fourth Assessment Report policy summary sparked an immediate "case closed" media frenzy. Also as before, the bearers were less than dispassionate. In presenting the February 2nd abstract, Achim Steiner, the head of the UN Environment Program which commissioned the panel, minced no misrepresentative words:
"Ladies and gentlemen, the 2nd of February 2007, here in Paris will perhaps one day be remembered as the day where the question mark was removed behind the debate about whether climate change had anything to do with human activity on this planet."
And, given that the actual report's release was still months away, the reaction was as preposterous as the proclamation.
French clown-President Jacques Chirac called for an economic and political "revolution" to save the planet and warned that "We are on the historic threshold of the irreversible." South Africa's Environmental Affairs Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk called the report "a wake-up call to the world's largest emitter, the United States."
And the Bush Administration must have heard the South African's call. Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman actually told reporters at a press conference in Washington that "Human activity is contributing to changes in the Earth's climate. That issue is no longer up for debate.'' And, of course, U.S newspapers churned out their predictably joyous headlines: "Humans to blame for climate", "Case closed: We're causing global warming. Now, what will we do about it?", "Global warming a human creation, scientists confirm", and "Climate report faults humans for warming".
In an article last summer which focused largely on the tactics of eco-maniac Al Gore, I explored the depths to which the GW attack machine will delve to silence its detractors. Gore target and former IPCC member, Dr. Richard Lindzen said that alarmism dissenters have "seen grant funds disappear, their work derided, and themselves labeled as industry stooges, scientific hacks or worse."
Lindzen has been quite vocal about "global-warming alarmists intimidat[ing] dissenting scientists into silence" and, unlike many of his brethren, has steadfastly refused to succumb. Not surprisingly, the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology in the Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at MIT is now an outspoken critic of the IPCC.
In fact, it was Lindzen who blew the whistle on irregularities in both the 2001 summary and report when he testified before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee in May of that year. After stating that the IPCC was created to support negotiations concerning CO2 emission reductions, he gave an astonishing account of the pressure placed upon the scientists who drafted the report. "...throughout the drafting sessions, IPCC 'coordinators' would go around insisting that criticism of models be toned down, and that "motherhood" statements be inserted to the effect that models might still be correct despite the cited faults. Refusals were occasionally met with ad hominem attacks. I personally witnessed coauthors forced to assert their "green" credentials in defense of their statements."
He then avowed that the vast majority of scientists contributing to the full report played virtually no role in preparing the summary, nor were they given the opportunity to review and approve its contents. Furthermore, it is this unscientific version only, often written to further political agendas, which becomes the basis of media hype and public understanding: "Note that almost all reading and coverage of the IPCC is restricted to the highly publicized Summaries for Policymakers which are written by representatives from governments, NGO's and business; the full reports, written by participating scientists, are largely ignored."
Lindzen also questioned the postponement of the full report and cited numerous factual misrepresentations in the Summary, including one from a chapter he knew a little about: 'The summary does not reflect the full document (which still has not been released although it was basically completed last August). For example, I worked on Chapter 7, Physical Processes. This chapter dealt with the nature of the basic processes which determine the response of climate, and found numerous problems with model treatments especially with clouds and water vapor. The chapter was summarized with the following sentence: "Understanding of climate processes and their incorporation in climate models have improved, including water vapour, sea-ice dynamics, and ocean heat transport."'
Lindzen then addressed the media's frequent misleading references to the participants as the "world's leading climate scientists." He explained that the best science students generally moved into physics, math, and computer science, not climate science. Furthermore, as with all UN projects, the participation of hundreds of countries (many with no climate research experience) supersedes any requirements for best-of-breed contributor selection. This often gains participants previously unavailable prestige; perhaps leaving them somewhat biased toward the not-so-tacit goals of the IPCC.
That same year, Lindzen also participated in a White House commissioned National Academy of Sciences panel to review the IPCC summaries. The media's claim that the NAS report depicted a "consensus" which supported the Kyoto treaty so misrepresented the findings of the panel that Lindzen felt compelled to write an article to set the record straight. According to the Doctor "Our primary conclusion was that despite some knowledge and agreement, the science is by no means settled."
Indeed, these exact words were used in the findings reported to Congress in June of 2001: "Because there is considerable uncertainty in current understanding of how the climate system varies naturally and reacts to emissions of greenhouse gases and aerosols, current estimates of the magnitude of future warming should be regarded as tentative and subject to future adjustments (either upward or downward)."
Yet, Michelle Mitchell of CNN best exemplified the media miscoverage when she declared that the report represented, "a unanimous decision that global warming is real, is getting worse, and is due to man. There is no wiggle room."
And in a recent television appearance Lindzen discredited media claims that the current IPCC summary was any less compromised than its predecessor of 6 years, reiterating that its non-scientist authors write exclusively for their own benefit.
Appearing with Lindzen on the show was Bill Nye (aka TV's "The Science Guy"), who had suggested that thaw-induced fresh water might shut down the Gulf Stream. When Lindzen informed the UCS shill that such an action would require either stopping the Earth's rotation or shutting down the wind, it was Nye's ridiculous postulate that was shut down.
And so, we have a supposedly unbiased media injecting gross exaggeration, childishly irresponsible horror stories, and outright lies. Is it any wonder that we now live in a society where so many have chosen to accept and preach this speculative pablum?
Among the countless other contrarian scientists, Dr. S. Fred Singer's unique wit and position alongside Dr. Lindzen on Al Gore's hit list have earned him a similar place here. In a recent article, the professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia explained that the May release of the complete IPCC document is deliberately timed. The delay, writes the scientist, allows them to "adjust" the scientific report in order to be more consistent with the politically correct summary.
This is an amazing assertion, as it suggests a U.N no longer feeling the need to hide the fact that science is being modified to support conclusions, rather than the accepted and expected opposite sequence. And, as with Dr. Lindzen's questions regarding the similar delay in 2001, the interest this dynamite sparked would hardly light a firecracker.
Singer then took on the report's typical mistake of confusing cause and effect. And he did so in his characteristic good humored fashion: "Some cite the fact that the climate is currently warming and the level of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is increasing. This is true, but correlation is never proof of causation. In Europe, the birth rate is decreasing and so is the number of storks. Does this correlation prove that storks bring babies? Besides, the climate cooled for much of the 20th century, between 1940 and 1975, even while carbon dioxide was increasing rapidly."
Singer also dismissed the true value of "consensus," were one to actually exist on the subject: "But even if a majority of scientists had voted for human-caused global warming, that's not how science works. Unlike in politics, the majority does not rule. Rather, every advance in science has come from a minority that found that observed facts contradicted the prevailing hypothesis. Sometimes it took only one scientist; think of Galileo or Einstein."
The Galileo example is spot on the mark. Although he might have added that in Galileo's day, the debate had supposedly ended over the Earth's placement in the heavens. Yet, in 1616, Galileo was forced to recant his Copernican beliefs that the Earth was not the center of the universe, but rather revolved around the Sun. Obviously, that debate was not quite over either.
So, what are Dr. Singer's own GW theories? In his latest book, "Unstoppable Global Warming-Every 1500 Years", coauthored by Hudson Institute Senior Fellow Dennis T Avery, physical evidence is outlined which supports fluctuations in solar energy causing the title. The book describes how the frequency of the cycle originally emerged from a 1983 study of ice cores in Greenland. That figure was then verified by analysis of an ice core from Antarctica's Vostok Glacier - at the other end of the world, which showed the same 1,500-year cycle through its 400,000-year length. These 1,500 year cycles analyzed include the Little Ice Age of 1300-1850 and the modern warming period which started around 1850 and we experience to this day.
So, we're faced with an organization which not only intimidates its experts into skewing data, but then forsakes them entirely when summarizing their results. Then, after feeding those tainted tidbits to a hungrily awaiting media, they can patiently measure the reaction of the globe they claim to care so much for. This gives them a few months to "cleanse" the report to meet the accepted precepts of the summary. Furthermore, having withheld the contents of the full report, they can always change both if any part of the summary proves too hot-to-handle, citing an error or omission in the digestive process.
Their goal is likely to create a storm of outcry against those nations not bowing to their beloved Kyoto Accords, with one in mind particularly. Perhaps they even believe that the anticipated acquiescence of these enviro-rogue states might just pass stewardship of all things environmental to their dwindling international organization.
To meet that objective, they easily fool the media into promoting laughably nonsensical theories while dismissing or demonizing those of detached science. And, of course, they depend upon that same foolish media to dutifully echo their battle-cries of "consensus" and human guilt where there exists neither.
Unfortunately, they and their ilk have managed to convince their indoctrinated legions that as was once said of war and generals, environmental science is too important to be left to scientists. This is a perilous road, indeed. In 1972, environmentalist thugs demagogued the insecticide DDT right out of use on unproven charges of egregious harm to humans and animals. The result may well have been millions of third-world malaria deaths caused by the failure of the banned chemical's "enviro-friendlier" replacement to control the mosquitoes which spread the disease."
Meanhwile in September last the Heartland Institute, the organisation that challenged Al Gore to that public debate, issued the following …
"In a historic move, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has released the expert review comments and responses to its latest assessment of the science of climate change. That release makes clear literally thousands of comments critical of the report were ignored or rejected by the IPCC lead authors.
Many of the comments are strongly critical of claims contained in the final report, released earlier this year, and are directly at odds with the so-called "scientific consensus" touted by Gore and others calling for immediate government action.
For example, the following comment by Eric Steig appears in Second Order Draft Comments, Chapter 6, section 6-42:
"[T]here are numerous important references left out, and an over-emphasis on papers by the authors themselves, which do not accurately reflect the communities' view. In general, the certainty with which this chapter presents our understanding of abrupt climate change is overstated. There is confusion between hypothesis and evidence throughout the chapter, and a great deal of confusion on the differences between an abrupt 'climate change' and possible, hypothetical causes of such climate changes."
Such internal dissent was widespread and directly contradicts global warming alarmists' assertions that the IPCC final product is the unified view of thousands of scientists.
Instead, the final product is merely the final word of a small number of "lead authors" who were selected by the political branches of their governments.
The reviewers' comments confirm what many scientists have been saying all along--that IPCC does not reflect a unified view or even a consensus view of the world's leading climatologists. "There is a substantial diversity of opinion on climate change, but IPCC sometimes does not best reflect that diversity. It tends to give undue weight to extreme points of view, especially if such views are made quite loudly," said Patrick Michaels, research professor of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia and a past president of the American Association of State Climatologists.
"One way in which IPCC falls short of the ideal is that it tends to gravitate to the opinion of a few loud extremists," Michaels explained. "A good example of this is Mike Mann's hockey stick in the IPCC Third Assessment. Mann's hockey stick was a recent postulation that had yet to be supported by comprehensive analysis. Yet Mann was very aggressive and a lead author. As it turns out, the hockey stick had problems, and IPCC has since reassessed the hockey stick.
"Similarly, the new IPCC report repeatedly refers to possibly unknown processes in ice dynamics that might accelerate the ice loss from Greenland," said Michaels. "That is essentially [NASA scientist and vocal global warming alarmist] James Hansen's opinion. Interestingly, the IPCC report itself references material that shows that such a sea level rise is virtually impossible."
The expert review comments and responses released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are available online here.
The following is from the Canda Free Press …
"A total of 308 reviewers commented on the SOR, but only 32 reviewers commented on more than three chapters and only five reviewers commented on all 11 chapters of the report. Only about half the reviewers commented more than one chapter. It is logical that reviewers would generally limit their comments to their areas of expertise but it's a far cry from the idea of thousands of scientists agreeing to anything.
Compounding this is the fact that IPCC editors could, and often did, ignore reviewers' comments. Some editor responses were banal and others showed inconsistencies with other comments. Reviewers had to justify their requested changes but the responding editors appear to have been under no such obligation. Reviewers were sometimes flatly told they were wrong but no reasons or reliable references were provided. In other cases reviewers tried to dilute the certainty being expressed and they often provided supporting evidence, but their comments were often flatly rejected. Some comments were rejected on the basis of a lack of space - an incredible assertion in such an important document. The attitude of the editors seemed to be that simple corrections were accepted, requests for improved clarity tolerated but the assertions and interpretations that appear in the text were to be defended against any challenge.
An example of rampant misrepresentation of IPCC reports is the frequent assertion that 'hundreds of IPCC scientists' are known to support the following statement, arguably the most important of the WG I report, namely "Greenhouse gas forcing has very likely caused most of the observed global warming over the last 50 years."
In total, only 62 scientists reviewed the chapter in which this statement appears, the critical chapter 9, "Understanding and Attributing Climate Change". Of the comments received from the 62 reviewers of this critical chapter, almost 60% of them were rejected by IPCC editors. And of the 62 expert reviewers of this chapter, 55 had serious vested interest, leaving only seven expert reviewers who appear impartial.
That the IPCC have let this deception continue for so long is a disgrace. Secretary General Ban Kai-Moon must instruct the UN climate body to either completely revise their operating procedures, welcoming dissenting input from scientist reviewers and indicating if reviewers have vested interests, or close the agency down completely. Until then, their conclusions, and any reached at the Bali conference based on IPCC conclusions, should be ignored entirely as politically skewed and dishonest."
John McLean is climate data analyst based in Melbourne, Australia. He posted the following on the internet a couple of weeks ago …
"It's an assertion repeated by politicians and climate campaigners the world over - '2,500 scientists of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) agree that humans are causing a climate crisis'.
But it's not true. And, for the first time ever, the public can now see the extent to which they have been misled. As lies go, it's a whopper. Here's the real situation.
Like the three IPCC 'assessment reports' before it, the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) released during 2007 (upon which the UN climate conference in Bali was based) includes the reports of the IPCC's three working groups. Working Group I (WG I) is assigned to report on the extent and possible causes of past climate change as well as future 'projections'. Its report is titled "The Physical Science Basis". The reports from working groups II and II are titled "Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability" and "Mitigation of Climate Change" respectively, and since these are based on the results of WG I, it is crucially important that the WG I report stands up to close scrutiny.
There is, of course serious debate among scientists about the actual technical content of the roughly 1,000-page WG I report, especially its politically motivated Summary for Policymakers which is often the only part read by politicians and non-scientists. The technical content can be difficult for non-scientists to follow and so most people simply assume that if that large numbers of scientists agree, they must be right.
Consensus never proves the truth of a scientific claim, but is somehow widely believed to do so for the IPCC reports, so we need to ask how many scientists really did agree with the most important IPCC conclusion, namely that humans are causing significant climate change--in other words the key parts of WG I?
The numbers of scientist reviewers involved in WG I is actually less than a quarter of the whole, a little over 600 in total. The other 1,900 reviewers assessed the other working group reports. They had nothing to say about the causes of climate change or its future trajectory. Still, 600 "scientific expert reviewers" sounds pretty impressive. After all, they submitted their comments to the IPCC editors who assure us that "all substantive government and expert review comments received appropriate consideration." And since these experts reviewers are all listed in Annex III of the report, they must have endorsed it, right?
Wrong.
For the first time ever, the UN has released on the Web the comments of reviewers who assessed the drafts of the WG I report and the IPCC editors' responses. This release was almost certainly a result of intense pressure applied by "hockey-stick" co-debunker Steve McIntyre of Toronto and his allies. Unlike the other IPCC working groups, WG I is based in the U.S. and McIntyre had used the robust Freedom of Information legislation to request certain details when the full comments were released.
An examination of reviewers' comments on the last draft of the WG I report before final report assembly (i.e. the 'Second Order Revision' or SOR) completely debunks the illusion of hundreds of experts diligently poring over all the chapters of the report and providing extensive feedback to the editing teams. Here's the reality.
A total of 308 reviewers commented on the SOR, but only 32 reviewers commented on more than three chapters and only five reviewers commented on all 11 chapters of the report. Only about half the reviewers commented more than one chapter. It is logical that reviewers would generally limit their comments to their areas of expertise but it's a far cry from the idea of thousands of scientists agreeing to anything.
Compounding this is the fact that IPCC editors could, and often did, ignore reviewers' comments. Some editor responses were banal and others showed inconsistencies with other comments. Reviewers had to justify their requested changes but the responding editors appear to have been under no such obligation. Reviewers were sometimes flatly told they were wrong but no reasons or reliable references were provided. In other cases reviewers tried to dilute the certainty being expressed and they often provided supporting evidence, but their comments were often flatly rejected. Some comments were rejected on the basis of a lack of space - an incredible assertion in such an important document. The attitude of the editors seemed to be that simple corrections were accepted, requests for improved clarity tolerated but the assertions and interpretations that appear in the text were to be defended against any challenge.
An example of rampant misrepresentation of IPCC reports is the frequent assertion that 'hundreds of IPCC scientists' are known to support the following statement, arguably the most important of the WG I report, namely "Greenhouse gas forcing has very likely caused most of the observed global warming over the last 50 years."
In total, only 62 scientists reviewed the chapter in which this statement appears, the critical chapter 9, "Understanding and Attributing Climate Change". Of the comments received from the 62 reviewers of this critical chapter, almost 60% of them were rejected by IPCC editors. And of the 62 expert reviewers of this chapter, 55 had serious vested interest, leaving only seven expert reviewers who appear impartial.
Two of these seven were contacted by NRSP for the purposes of this article - Dr. Vincent Gray of New Zealand and Dr. Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph, Canada. Concerning the "Greenhouse gas forcing …" statement above, Professor McKitrick explained "A categorical summary statement like this is not supported by the evidence in the IPCC WG I report. Evidence shown in the report suggests that other factors play a major role in climate change, and the specific effects expected from greenhouse gases have not been observed."
Dr. Gray labeled the WG I statement as "Typical IPCC doubletalk" asserting "The text of the IPCC report shows that this is decided by a guess from persons with a conflict of interest, not from a tested model."
Determining the level of support expressed by reviewers' comments is subjective but a slightly generous evaluation indicates that just five reviewers endorsed the crucial ninth chapter. Four had vested interests and the other made only a single comment for the entire 11-chapter report. The claim that 2,500 independent scientist reviewers agreed with this, the most important statement of the UN climate reports released this year, or any other statement in the UN climate reports, is nonsense.
"The IPCC owe it to the world to explain who among their expert reviewers actually agree with their conclusions and who don't," says Natural Resources Stewardship Project Chair climatologist Dr. Timothy Ball. "Otherwise, their credibility, and the public's trust of science in general, will be even further eroded."
That the IPCC have let this deception continue for so long is a disgrace. Secretary General Ban Kai-Moon must instruct the UN climate body to either completely revise their operating procedures, welcoming dissenting input from scientist reviewers and indicating if reviewers have vested interests, or close the agency down completely. Until then, their conclusions, and any reached at the Bali conference based on IPCC conclusions, should be ignored entirely as politically skewed and dishonest."
The Sky is Falling?
And finally, here are some blasts from the past, included to show just how much we can rely on the proclamations of publicity-hungry scientists with their names to make …
1968: "The battle to feed humanity is over. In the 1970s, the world will undergo famines. Hundreds of millions of people are going to starve to death in spite of any crash programs embarked upon now. Population control is the only answer" - Paul Ehrlich "The Population Bomb"
1969 - "I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000" - Paul Ehrlich
1970 - "In ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish" - Paul Ehrlich, Earth Day
1970 - "If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder for the global mean temperature in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000 … this is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age" - Kenneth E.F. Watt, Earth Day
1971: "The continued rapid cooling of the earth since WWII is in accord with the increase in global air pollution associated with industrialization, mechanization, urbanization and exploding population" - Reid Bryson, "Global Ecology; Readings towards a rational strategy for Man"
1975 - "There are ominous signs that the earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production - with serious political implications for just about every nation on earth. The drop in food production could begin quite soon … the evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologist are hard-pressed to keep up with it" - Newsweek
1976 - "Before 1985, mankind will enter a genuine age of scarcity ... in which the accessible supplies of many key minerals will be facing depletion" - Paul Ehrlich
1976 - "This [cooling] trend will reduce agricultural productivity for the rest of the century" - Peter Gwynne, Newsweek
1976 - "This cooling has already killed hundreds of thousands of people. If it continues and no strong action is taken, it will cause world famine, world chaos and world war, and this could all come about before the year 2000" - Lowell Ponte "The Cooling"
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