By Peter Gallagher

Christopher, Viscount Monkton of Brenchley, is a good scholar and a fine writer. This is from an address by The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley to the Local Government Association, Bournemouth, 3 July 2008. Thanks to Dr Benny Peiser’s newsletter where this was first published.This clever recital pulls no punches but you may feel like responding ‘amen’. Here is a short sample of his comments. For more see.

Canute couldn’t stop sea level rising. Officials can’t stop it either.

Even if global temperature has risen, it has risen in a straight line at a natural 0.5C/century for 300 years since the Sun recovered from the Maunder Minimum, long before we could have had any influence (Akasofu, 2008).

Even if warming had sped up, now temperature is 7C below most of the past 500m yrs; 5C below all 4 recent inter-glacials; and up to 3C below the Bronze Age, Roman & mediaeval optima (Petit et al., 1999; IPCC, 1990).

Even if today’s warming were unprecedented, the Sun is the probable cause. It was more active in the past 70 years than in the previous 11,400 (Usoskin et al., 2003; Hathaway et al., 2004; IAU, 2004; Solanki et al., 2005).

Even if the sun were not to blame, the UN’s climate panel has not shown that humanity is to blame. CO2 occupies only one-ten-thousandth more of the atmosphere today than it did in 1750 (Keeling & Whorf, 2004).

Even if CO2 were to blame, no “runaway greenhouse” catastrophe occurred in the Cambrian era, when there was ~20 times today’s concentration in the air. Temperature was just 7 C warmer than today (IPCC, 2001).

Even if CO2 levels had set a record, there has been no warming since 1998. For 7 years, temperatures have fallen. The Jan 2007-Jan 2008 fall was the steepest since 1880 (GISS; Hadley; NCDC; RSS; UAH: all 2008).

Even if the planet were not cooling, the rate of warming is far less than the UN imagines. It would be too small to cause harm. There may well be no new warming until 2015, if then (Keenlyside et al., 2008).

Even if warming were harmful, humankind’s effect is minuscule. “The observed changes may be natural” (IPCC, 2001; cf. Chylek et al., 2008; Lindzen, 2007; Spencer, 2007; Wentz et al., 2007; Zichichi, 2007; etc.).

Even if our effect were significant, the UN’s projected human fingerprint - tropical mid-troposphere warming at thrice the surface rate - is absent (Douglass et al., 2004, 2007; Lindzen, 2001, 2007; Spencer, 2007).

Even if the human fingerprint were present, climate models cannot predict the future of the complex, chaotic climate unless we know its initial state to an unattainable precision (Lorenz, 1963; Giorgi, 2005; IPCC, 2001). Even if computer models could work, they cannot predict future rates of warming. Temperature response to atmospheric greenhouse-gas enrichment is an input to the computers, not an output from them (Akasofu, 2008).

Therefore, extravagant, futile schemes by the State and its organs to mitigate imagined “global warming” will have no more effect than King Canute’s command to the tide not to come in and wet the Royal feet. We must get the science right or we shall get the policy wrong. There is no manmade “climate crisis”. It is a non-problem. The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.