By Steve McIntyre, Climate Audit

IPCC Review Editors have an extremely important function under IPCC procedures. In prior discussion of the Replies by WG1 Chapter Authors to Review Comments, we noted their unresponsiveness on issues that we were familiar with e.g. the deletion of the inconvenient post-1960 Briffa reconstruction results, the handling of the Hockey Stick dispute. When the IPCC WG1 (grudgingly) placed the WG1 Review Comments and Replies online- url here they did not place the Review Editor comments online, despite the importance of review editors. Through the diligent efforts of David Holland, the IPCC WG1 and WG2 Review Editor comments have now been obtained and are now online for the first time here - at this point, another Climate Audit exclusive.

When you examine these review comments, as I urge you to do, please remember that this is supposed to be the most carefully reviewed document in human history, where entire stadiums of scientists have carefully weighed each word. Compare that impression to the actual review editor comments, which as you will see do not rise above a form letter for 64 of 69 Review Editor comments discussed here.

First some comments on the obligations of Review Editors set out by the IPCC here. The workload for a Review Editor is said to be “heavy”. They are supposed to ensure that all substantive comments receive “appropriate consideration” and that “genuine controversies are reflected adequately” in the Report. If there are particular points of controversy or areas of major differences - and readers of CA can probably think of a couple -, the Coordinating Lead Authors “in consultation with the Review Editors” are encouraged to organize a “wider meeting with principal Contributing Authors and expert reviewers” - something that obviously did not take place in the topic that was the most controversial in chapter 6. If “significant differences of opinion on scientific issues remain”, Review Editors are obliged to “ensure” that such differences are described in an annex to the Report (no annex exists). Read more of this important post here.

Jim Brown - OneNewsNow

British environmental analyst Christopher Monckton says Al Gore’s latest attack on global warming skeptics shows the former vice president and other climate alarmists are “panicking.” Lord Christopher Monckton, a policy advisor for former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher during the 1980s, says the former vice president can enjoy his “flat earth fantasies” for a few months, but in the end, the world will be laughing at him.

“The alarmists are alarmed, the panic mongers are panicking, the scare mongers are scared; the Gores are gored. Why? Because global warming stopped ten years ago; it hasn’t got warmer since 1998,” he points out. “And in fact in the last seven years, there has been a downturn in global temperatures equivalent on average to about [or] very close to one degree Fahrenheit per decade. We’re actually in a period of global cooling.”

Monckton contends Gore is now “panicking” because he has staked his reputation as a former American VP on “telling the world that we’re all doomed unless we shut down 90 percent of the Western economies.” He also contends that Gore is the largest “global-warming profiteer.”

Gore’s group The Alliance for Climate Protection is currently launching a new $300 million ad campaign that demands reforms in environmental law to help reduce the supposed “climate crisis.” But Monckton points out that in the U.K., Gore is not allowed to speak in public about his “green investment company” because to do so would violate racketeering laws by “peddling a false prospectus.” He says that fact came about after a British high court found Gore’s movie, An Inconvenient Truth, riddled with errors. Monckton challenged Gore to an internationally televised debate on climate change last year. See full story here.

By Dennis T. Avery
Something isn’t following the Greenhouse script. The oceans, which contain 80 to 90 percent of the planet’s heat, have recently stopped warming!  Over the past 4-5 years, “there has been a very slight cooling, but not anything really significant,” Josh Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory recently told National Public Radio. Nothing very significant-except the ocean warming trend has stopped?!  This, in the midst of the biggest furor over global temperatures and climate overheating in human history?  Willis monitors the data from a nifty new set of Argo ocean buoys. They not only record sea surface temperatures but periodically dive 3,000 feet under water and record sub-surface temperatures as they rise back up. These wonderful new Argo floats say the oceans have been cooling slightly for the past 4-5 years, instead of accentuating a continuing global warming trend.

But how can the ocean warming stop?  Greenhouse gases have continued to spew from Chinese factories. Even Europe’s Kyoto-bound economies are still increasing their greenhouse emissions. There should be no relief from the planet’s heating.  Except that over the last 13 months, the earth’s thermometers have dropped for the first time in 30 years. Three global monitoring sites measured a decline of 0.5 to 0.7 degree C. Now we learn that the ocean warming stopped even earlier, 4-5 years ago.

We should have been expecting this, because the sunspot index turned down nine years ago. There’s a 79 percent correlation between the sunspots and the earth’s sea-surface temperatures—with roughly a ten-year lag.  Is ten years the time required for the oceans to respond to changes on the sun?

There is nothing in the climate record that ties the earth’s temperatures to CO2 levels. Al Gore’s movie showed Antarctic ice core temperatures and CO2 moving closely together through four different Ice Ages. Gore implied that more CO2 leads to higher temperatures. But Gore reversed cause and effect. Three different Antarctic studies show the temperatures change 800-1200 years before the CO2 levels. Higher temperatures cause more CO2 in the air, not the other way around.

It’s unthinkable, but what if there’s no “extra heat” being trapped by CO2 right now?  What if CO2 levels don’t matter much?  What if the earth is starting to cool in response to the sun’s declining level of activity?  What an inconvenient truth. Read more here.