Christopher Monckton on SPPI

“In the July 2008 edition of Physics and Society, a paper by Lord Monckton entitled “Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered” caused enormous worldwide interest when the Society, which had invited Lord Monckton to submit the paper, had reviewed it in detail and had published it, decided a week after publication, and without Lord Monckton’s knowledge or consent, to add a prefatory disclaimer to the paper. Next, a paid official of the Society, a Dr. Smith, drafted and circulated a rebuttal of Lord Monckton’s paper. That rebuttal, and Lord Monckton’s decisive refutation of it, are published here."

R. Arthur Smith’s critique of my paper “Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered” (Physics & Society, July 2008) begins ad hominem, saying most “issues” in my “introductory and concluding polemics” are “well addressed in the standard lists of arguments from ‘skeptics’”. Yet I introduced my paper not with a “polemic” about “issues” but with a heavily-referenced list of the models’ failures to represent the observed climate, not least the downtrend in global temperature since late 2001. In June 2008 global temperature was cooler than when Dr. Hansen started the “global warming” hare with his testimony to Congress 20 years previously. Dr. Smith’s pejorative use of the word “skeptics” is regrettable: as Huxley said, it is the duty of scientists to be skeptical. How would Dr. Smith like it if I said he has a vested interest in the climate bugaboo as a founder of the “Alternative Energy Action Network”, whose website recommends the serially-inaccurate RealClimate blog as though it were reliable? Let us debate ad rem.

Dr. Smith’s criticisms of my paper are superficially ingenious but in reality unmeritorious. Objectively speaking, the IPCC’s method of evaluating climate sensitivity, which is faithfully, concisely, and correctly expounded in the first part of my paper, suffers from multiple exaggerations and contains serious conceptual flaws - such as the abuse of the Bode equation - and is subject to uncertainties whose combined effect is so great as to render meaningless its 2007 conclusion that, to a 90% confidence interval, we have been responsible for more than half of the warming that may have occurred over the past half-century, and which ceased with the great el Nino of 1998.

Were we to be permitted to stray from the mathematics and physics just for a fleeting instant, we might say of the IPCC’s conclusions what Pope Innocent X said of the Treaty of Westphalia - that they are “null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, and empty of meaning for all time.”

See also this letter from an APS Fellow to the Society suporting Monckton’s skepticism.

By Nathaniel Shockey, North Star Writers

That global warming has continued to captivate the media, car companies, energy companies and so many more demonstrates how enormously brainwashed Americans are. Still convinced that “the entire global scientific community has a consensus on the question that human beings are responsible for global warming,” like Al Gore purported? Please.

For starters, in November 2005, Swiss researchers from the journal Quaternary Science Reviews overtly stated, “Whatever slight impact humans might have on the climate, it is too small to measure.” Bob Carter, an environmental scientist at James Cook University testified before a U.S. Senate Committee, saying, “Lower atmosphere satellite-based temperature measurements, if corrected for non-greenhouse influences such as El Nino events and large volcanic eruptions, show little if any global warming since 1979, a period over which atmospheric CO2 has increased by 55 ppm (17 percent).” We’re obviously not causing the type of damage we thought we were.

David Evans, a consultant to the Australian Greenhouse Office from 1999 to 2005, shared in an article for The Australian that his initial reaction to the theory and buzz of global warming in 1999 was one of excitement, feeling “useful and fairly important; we were saving the planet.” He goes on to explain a few points: “The signature of an increased greenhouse effect is a hot spot about 10km up in the atmosphere over the tropics . . . The greenhouse signature is missing. We have been looking and measuring for years, and cannot find it.

“The satellites that measure the world’s temperature all say that the warming trend ended in 2001, and that the temperature has dropped about 0.6C in the past year. “None of these points is controversial. The alarmist scientists agree with them, though they would dispute their relevance.” I probably have significantly punier scientific knowledge than Al Gore, but it is fairly obvious that Gore’s entire premise for his misleading documentary, that we are causing global warming, is questionable at best, and most likely false.

What is truly upsetting about all of this is not that so many of us were duped. It’s that so many of us are still duped. American companies are still spending huge quantities in order to cater to this fraudulent belief. Instead of actually improving their products in ways that actually enhance efficiency and, hence, the strength of the company and the American economy, they’re catering to the brainwashed. 

And in addition to the businesses, we have politicians who are either a) still clinging to empty threats about global warming or b) have seen the holes in the alleged global warming crisis but are too scared to take on the media. Is an alarmist theory that has been all but smothered really worth $6 trillion, which is what the proposed cap-and-trade climate bill is estimated to cost the U.S. by 2050? Does anyone else think this is crazy?  It smells a lot like a control issue to me, but who knows? Maybe there are a lot of ill-informed people who are just really concerned . . . and we elected them to represent us.

Feel free to reach your own conclusions about why so many are still convinced of a totally unconvincing theory. But it is imperative that those of us who have learned to question global warming have the courage to say so. Our country can’t afford a government that wastes absurd amounts of taxpayer dollars fighting windmills. For full post go here.

By Anthony Watts, Watts Up With That

Note: I don’t normally allow the discussion of things related to Nazi Germany here, including discouraging the use of the word “denier” due to it’s “Holocaust Denier” connotations. But this full page ad in the Sunday papers in Europe, touting “climate crime” and “climate cops” is just a bit over the top, and deserves some attention. It is particularly relevant since the sponsoring website climatecops.com has a teachers section, and we’ve just seen some sensibility from Schwarzenegger in Sacramento on this very issue. I find this method of indoctrinating school children to normal everyday living being harmful to the earth with the “climate crime” connotation as distasteful and wrong headed. I have no problems with energy conservation, in fact I encourage it. But combining such advice with a “climate cop” idea is the wrong way to get the message across. Will the result of this now be hiding your electric dryer behind false walls so the kids and neighbors don’t see it? - Anthony

Reposted from the website EU referendum

Can I be the only one more than a little disturbed by the latest campaign to be fronted by energy company npower? Launched today with large colour ads in the Sundays, it appeals directly to children, urging them to enlist as “climate cops”, to root out “climate crimes”, and thus “save the planet”. In a luridly-designed website, mimicking the style of “yoof” cartoons, it offers a bundle of downloads, including a pack of “climate crime cards”, urging its recruits to spy on families, friends and relatives, inviting each of them to build up a “climate crime case file” in order to help them ensure their putative criminals do not “commit those crimes again (or else)!”

Quite what the “or else!” should be is not specified, but since the “climate cops” are being encouraged to keep detailed written records (for those who can read and write), there is nothing to stop these being submitted to the “Climate Cops HQ” for further sanctions, the repeat offenders being sent to re-education camps. And for those “climate cops” that successfully perform the “missions” set (or turn in their own parents), there is the reward of “training” in the “Climate Cop Academy”.

See larger image here

In a system which has echoes of Hitler’s Deutsches Jungvolk movement, and the Communist regime Pioneers, perhaps successful graduates can work up to becoming block wardens, then street and district “climate crime Fuhrers”, building a network of spies and informers. How nicely this ties in with James Hansen’s call to put the chief executives of large fossil fuel companies on trial for high crimes against humanity and nature, accusing them of actively spreading doubt about global warming. Read more here.