On Tuesday, a group of 50 international scientists released a comprehensive new report on the science of climate change that concluded that evidence now leans against global warming resulting from human-related greenhouse gas emissions.
The report, which cites thousands of peer-reviewed articles the United Nations-sponsored panel on climate change ignored, also found that “no empirical evidence exists to substantiate the claim that 2C of warming presents a threat to planetary ecologies or environments” and no convincing case can be made that “a warming will be more economically costly than an equivalent cooling.” The U.N.’s panel is scheduled to release its next report next month.
The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, or NIPCC, which produced the report, is described as “an international panel of scientists and scholars who came together to understand the causes and consequences of climate change.” Unlike the “United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is government-sponsored, politically motivated, and predisposed to believing that climate change is a problem in need of a U.N. solution,” NIPCC “has no formal attachment to or sponsorship from any government or governmental agency” and is “wholly independent of political pressures and influences and therefore is not predisposed to produce politically motivated conclusions or policy recommendations.”
In Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science, which The Heartland Institute published and released on Tuesday, lead authors Craig D. Idso, Robert M. Carter, and S. Fred Singer worked with a team of scientists to produce a 1,200-page report that is “comprehensive, objective, and faithful to the scientific method.” They found that even “if the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide were to double,” whatever “warming may occur would likely be modest and cause no net harm to the global environment or to human well-being.”
Breitbart News obtained a detailed summary of the report’s key findings. The report rebuts the alarmist reports put out by the United Nations’ IPCC, which the authors claim are in “contradiction of the scientific method” because the IPCC assumes that its implicit hypothesis that “dangerous global warming is resulting, or will result, from human-related greenhouse gas emissions” is correct and “that its only duty is to collect evidence and make plausible arguments in the hypothesis’s favor.
According to the study’s authors, “the hypothesis of human-caused global warming comes up short not merely of ‘full scientific certainty’ but of reasonable certainty or even plausibility. The weight of evidence now leans heavily against the theory.”
The U.N.’s IPCC’s first key claim is that “a doubling of atmospheric CO2 would cause warming between 3C and 6C.” The study’s authors, though, conclude that the “IPCC ignores mounting evidence that climate sensitivity to CO2 is much lower than its models assume.” The NIPCC study discovered that warming actually “ceased around the end of the twentieth century and was followed (since 1997) by 16 years of stable temperature.”
The IPCC also claims in its reports that “CO2 caused an atmospheric warming of at least 0.3C over the past 15 years.” The lead authors of the report, though, found that the IPCC used incomplete climate models in their research. In fact, the NIPCC’s authors found that “no excess warming has been demonstrated.”
The IPCC also asserts that a “thermal hot spot should exist in the upper troposphere in tropical regions” even though “observations from both weather balloon radiosondes and satellite MSU sensors show the opposite.” Furthermore, the IPCC also asserts that “both polar regions should have warmed faster than the rest of Earth during the late twentieth century” when, in fact, “the large polar East Antarctic Ice Sheet has been cooling since at least the 1950s.”
The authors write that the United Nations panel has made “climate change into a political issue long before the science was sufficiently advanced to inform policymakers” and that “most government signatories to the UN’s Framework Convention on Climate Change have deferred to the monopoly advice of the IPCC in setting their national climate change policies.”
“More than 20 years down the track, it is now evident this approach has been mistaken,” they write. “One result has been the expenditure of hundreds of billions of dollars implementing energy policies that now appear to have been unnecessary, or at least ill-timed and ineffective.”
NIPCC’s findings “point toward several policy recommendations quite different from those that have come from the IPCC and its related agencies, bureaus, and commissions at the United Nations,” and they include: taking into account “long-term trends” in climate science; seeking out advice from “independent, nongovernment organizations and scientists who are free of financial and political conflicts of interest”; allowing individual nations to “take charge of setting their own climate policies based upon the hazards that apply to their particular geography, geology, weather, and culture”; and recognizing “the theoretical hazard of dangerous human-caused global warming is but one small part of a much wider climate hazard,” which is as much a “geological as it is a meteorological issue.”
The study’s authors conclude that “atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is a mild greenhouse gas that exerts a diminishing warming effect as its concentration increases” and even “doubling the concentration of atmospheric CO2 from its pre-industrial level, in the absence of other forcings and feedbacks, would likely cause a warming of ~0.3 to 1.1C, almost 50% of which must already have occurred.” Further, the study found that “a few tenths of a degree of additional warming, should it occur, would not represent a climate crisis” because, over recent geological time, the earth’s “temperature has fluctuated naturally between about +4C and -6C with respect to twentieth century temperature. A warming of 2C above today, should it occur, falls within the bounds of natural variability.”
Even if a future warming of 2C occurs, the authors observe that though it “would cause geographically varied ecological responses, no evidence exists that those changes would be net harmful to the global environment or to human well-being” because the “current level of ~400 ppm” proves that “we still live in a CO2-starved world. Atmospheric levels 15 times greater existed during the Cambrian Period (about 550 million years ago) without known adverse effects.”
In addition, the earth “has not warmed significantly for the past 16 years despite an 8% increase in atmospheric CO2, which represents 34% of all extra CO2 added to the atmosphere since the start of the industrial revolution.”
The U.N.’s IPCC continues, though, to postulate that “increases in atmospheric CO2 precede, and then force, parallel increases in temperature”; “solar forcings are too small to explain twentieth century warming”; and “a future warming of 2C or more would be net harmful to the biosphere and human well-being.” And the IPCC cites circumstantial evidence to support its global warming alarmism. Such evidence include an “unusual melting” that is occurring in mountain glaciers, Arctic sea ice, and polar icecaps,” rising global sea levels, an increase in “droughts, floods, and monsoon variability and intensity,” more intense “wildfires, rainfall, storms, hurricanes, and other extreme weather events,” and an “unusual melting of Boreal permafrost or sub-seabed gas hydrates is causing warming due to methane release.”
The report dismisses these claims with peer-reviewed evidence and concludes that “neither the rate nor the magnitude of the reported late twentieth century surface warming (1979–2000) lay outside normal natural variability,” “solar forcings of temperature change are likely more important than is currently recognized, and evidence is lacking that a 2C increase in temperature (of whatever cause) would be globally harmful.”
“We conclude no unambiguous evidence exists for adverse changes to the global environment caused by human-related CO2 emissions,” the authors write. “In particular, the cryosphere is not melting at an enhanced rate; sea-level rise is not accelerating; no systematic changes have been documented in evaporation or rainfall or in the magnitude or intensity of extreme meteorological events; and an increased release of methane into the atmosphere from permafrost or sub-seabed gas hydrates is unlikely.”
The authors also note that “forward projections of solar cyclicity imply the next few decades may be marked by global cooling rather than warming, despite continuing CO2 emissions” and warn against using imperfect deterministic climate models to advocate for a “one size fits all” climate policy.
In light of these findings, which are “stated plainly and repeated in thousands of articles in the peer-reviewed literature” that are not “fringe,” the authors emphasize that policymakers “should resist pressure from lobby groups to silence scientists who question the authority of the IPCC to claim to speak for ‘climate science.’”
GWPF Newsletter
IPCC Report Leaked
Scientists Admit They Got Warming Rate Wrong
A leaked copy of the world’s most authoritative climate study reveals scientific forecasts of imminent doom were drastically wrong. The Mail on Sunday has obtained the final draft of a report to be published later this month by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the ultimate watchdog whose massive, six-yearly ‘assessments’ are accepted by environmentalists, politicians and experts as the gospel of climate science. The IPCC recognises the global warming ‘pause’ first reported by The Mail on Sunday last year is real and concede that their computer models did not predict it. But they cannot explain why world average temperatures have not shown any statistically significant increase since 1997. --David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 15 September 2013
Last night Professor Judith Curry, head of climate science at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, said the leaked Summary for Policy-makers showed that ‘the science is clearly not settled, and is in a state of flux’. She said it therefore made no sense that the IPCC was claiming that its confidence in its forecasts and conclusions has increased. ‘The consensus-seeking process used by the IPCC creates and amplifies biases in the science. It should be abandoned in favour of a more traditional review that presents arguments for and against which would better support scientific progress, and be more useful for policy makers.’ --David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 15 September 2013
Dr Benny Peiser, of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, described the leaked report as a ‘staggering concoction of confusion, speculation and sheer ignorance’. As for the pause, he said ‘it would appear that the IPCC is running out of answer… to explain why there is a widening gap between predictions and reality’. --David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 15 September 2013
The British Met Office has issued ‘erroneous statements and misrepresentations’ about the pause in global warming and its climate computer model is fundamentally flawed, says a new analysis by a leading independent researcher. Nic Lewis, a climate scientist and accredited ‘expert reviewer’ for the IPCC, also points out that Met Office’’s flagship climate model suggests the world will warm by twice as much in response to CO2 as some other leading institutes, such as Nasa’s climate centre in America. --David Rose, Mail on Sunday, 15 September 2013
Enlarged
Since the last IPCC report in 2007, much has changed. It is now more than 15 years since global average temperature rose significantly. Indeed, the IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri has conceded that the “pause” already may have lasted for 17 years, depending on which data set you look at. A recent study in Nature Climate Change by Francis Zwiers and colleagues of the University of Victoria, British Columbia, found that models have overestimated warming by 100% over the past 20 years. Explaining this failure is now a cottage industry in climate science. The most plausible explanation of the pause is simply that climate sensitivity was overestimated in the models because of faulty assumptions about net amplification through water-vapor feedback. This will be a topic of heated debate at the political session to rewrite the report in Stockholm, starting on Sept. 23, at which issues other than the actual science of climate change will be at stake. Matt Ridley, The Wall Street Journal, 14 September 2013
There is a degree of nervousness internationally that the central climate change message is being lost as efforts are being made to build a global agreement. The concern is the Abbott government’s change of heart on a carbon tax will encourage other countries to delay or weaken their commitment. The election of an Abbott government has focused attention on Australia. Former prime minister John Howard has been booked to deliver this year’s Global Warming Policy Foundation lecture in November. The title of his address: One Religion is Enough. --Graham Lloyd, The Australian, 14 September 2013
Enlarged
A new study in the journal Nature Climate Change that compared 117 climate predictions made in the 1990′s to the actual amount of warming finds that 99% of them overestimated the amount of warming. On average, the predictions forecasted two times more global warming than actually occurred. --Maxim Lott, Fox News, 12 September 2013
Scientists have had only limited success persuading us to care about climate change so perhaps it is time to call in the philosophers. That appears to be the approach of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which has engaged a philosopher to help to produce its forthcoming report on how to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions. Professor Broome’s role appears to be to rein in the economists in the IPCC team and remind them to take ethics into account when considering how much governments should spend on cutting emissions. He contributed to Lord Stern’s Review of the Economics of Climate Change, which was criticised by many economists for justifying spending billions of pounds mitigating climate change by attaching a much higher value to goods available in the next century. --Ben Webster, The Times, 11 September 2013
1) IPCC Report Leaked: Scientists Admit They Got Warming Rate Wrong Mail on Sunday, 15 September 2013
2) Met Office Misleading Public On Global Warming Pause, New Study Mail on Sunday, 15 September 2013
3) Matt Ridley: Dialing Back The Alarm On Climate Change The Wall Street Journal, 14 September 2013
4) Carbon Tax On Ice, Climate Science Struggles To Deal With Warming Pause - The Australian, 14 September 2013
5) 99% Of Climate Model Predictions Overestimated Global Warming, Study Finds Fox News, 12 September 2013
6) IPCC Calls In Moral Philosopher As People Cool On Global Warming The Times, 11 September 2013
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See How the Media Will Spin the Next IPCC Report -and Why the Spin Is Wrong by Dr. Calvin Beisner
For Immediate Release September 10, 2013
On Friday, September 6th, the American Tradition Institute (ATI), a non-profit public policy organization, along with counsel from the Free Market Environmental Law Clinic (FMELC), filed a lawsuit seeking to compel the University of Arizona (U of A) to produce public records relating to what the London Telegraph’s Christopher Booker called “the worst scientific scandal of our generation”. These records are emails relating to the notorious global warming “Hockey Stick”, and the group that made it famous, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). IPCC is presently in the news for its latest in a running series of proclamations of looming climate catastrophe, and a now ritual proclamation of even greater certainty that economic activity is to blame.
“The public are increasingly aware that they have funded the effort to impose an all-pain, no-gain energy-scarcity agenda on them, from activists in federal bureaucracies and the green pressure groups they love, down to activists ensconced in state universities,” says Chris Horner, ATI Senior Fellow, FMELC attorney and author of The Liberal War On Transparency, who managed the initial request and productions. “As such, we continue to seek copies of records the public paid for, to help bring about the oft-promised, yet rarely voluntary governmental transparency. Too often public institutions require that we engage in protracted battles under open records laws to allow the public a glimpse at the enormous apparatus they are underwriting,” he added.
ATI sought these records in December 2011.[1] After the University acknowledged resistance from the professors involved both of whom, ATI points out to the court, were improperly allowed to decide what emails were responsive to the request, and which ones they would allow the University to produce- U of A ultimately produced several hundred responsive emails.
Included in U of A’s production was a first-ever, 213-page roadmap of several hundred emails the academics insisted could not be released about either the “Hockey Stick” or IPCC. Unfortunately the indexes were also deliberately and uncharacteristically scarce on details, though they do lay out correspondence between the Hockey Stick and IPCC authors (they also identify, e.g., emails about Professor and IPCC coordinating lead author Jonathan Overpeck’s work at the University for the environmentalist pressure group Union of Concerned Scientists, and emails to or from Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia, home to ClimateGate).
ATI filed suit under Arizona’s Public Records Law after the University declined ATI’s request to provide sufficient detail in these indexes about withheld records, or produce the responsive records. The Goldwater Institute is serving as ATI’s local counsel.
ATI’s complaint explains how these emails, produced and held on taxpayer time and assets, involve two academics with:
...a history of using University (public) resources - including to send and receive the emails at issue in this case - for work-related participation in related organizations including the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ("IPCC"), which was the subject of many of the most controversial emails produced, sent, received and/or held on publicly funded computer assets in the “Climategate” leaks.
Through these leaks, and releases under various freedom of information laws, the public learned of troubling practices by a network of publicly funded academics involving, inter alia, questionable use of statistics, organized efforts to subvert transparency laws in the United States and United Kingdom, campaigns to keep dissenting work from publication, recruiting journalists to target opponents and retaliation against scientists and editors involved in publishing dissenting work.
As part of ATI’s transparency project, it has been requesting and obtaining information held by publicly funded agencies and universities related to the important public policy issue of alleged catastrophic man-made global warming, and related policy demands.
ATI is also involved in litigation seeking related records from the University of Virginia, and has had numerous requests satisfied by, and has other requests pending at, various agencies and universities. The Supreme Court of Virginia recently heard argument from ATI explaining why that court should consider the UVA request.
American Tradition Institute (ATI) is a 501 (c) (3) public policy research and public interest litigation foundation advocating restoration of science and free-market principles on environmental issues, including air and water quality and regulation, responsible land use, natural resource management, energy development, property rights, and principles of stewardship. The organization, through its transparency initiative, obtains public information under open records and freedom of information laws, relating to environmental and energy policy and how policymakers use public resources.