By Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

Kevin Trenberth (Rocky Mountain News, October 24), commenting on Mike Rosen’s article expressing legitimate doubts about the award of the Nobel Peace Prize to Al Gore, makes 23 scientific mistakes, each of which falls in the direction of magnifying the unjustifiable alarm stoked by panicky politicians and extravagantly-funded environmentalists in cahoots with a shrinking clique of scientists in denial of observational climate data.

For example, Trenberth says the most recent warming was “not from 1900 to 1940, but after 1970.” In fact, according to the land and sea temperature records of the National Climate Data Center the rate of warming in the 1920s and 1930s, before humankind had much influence on climate, was as great as it was in the 1980s and 1990s. Since the IPCC’s previous report in 2001, there has been no statistically-significant “global warming” at all.

Also, Trenberth says, “Gore’s statement that ice-sheets melting in Greenland or the West Antarctic would raise sea level by 20 feet is correct, although it was misleading that he did not put a time-frame on this.” Though Trenberth “played a major part” in the IPCC process, he somehow failed to point out that the IPCC itself has said that temperatures would have to remain 5.5 degrees Celsius higher than today’s for several millennia before the Greenland ice sheet would lose even half of its ice. The Greenland ice sheet has in fact recently thickened by 2 inches per year – a total of 20 inches in 10 years (Johannesen et al., 2005).

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