Lord Christopher Monckton

The Minnesota Free Market Institute hosted an event at Bethel University in St. Paul on Wednesday evening. Keynote speaker Lord Christopher Monckton, former science adviser to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, gave a scathing and lengthy presentation, complete with detailed charts, graphs, facts, and figures which culminated in the utter decimation of both the pop culture concept of global warming and the credible threat of any significant anthropomorphic climate change.

A detailed summary of Monckton’s presentation is now available here. However, a segment of his remarks justify immediate publication. If credible, the concern Monckton speaks to may well prove the single most important issue facing the American nation, bigger than health care, bigger than cap and trade, and worth every citizen’s focused attention.

Here were Monckton’s closing remarks, as dictated from my audio recording:

At [the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in] Copenhagen, this December, weeks away, a treaty will be signed. Your president will sign it. Most of the third world countries will sign it, because they think they’re going to get money out of it. Most of the left-wing regime from the European Union will rubber stamp it. Virtually nobody won’t sign it.

I read that treaty. And what it says is this, that a world government is going to be created. The word “government” actually appears as the first of three purposes of the new entity. The second purpose is the transfer of wealth from the countries of the West to third world countries, in satisfication of what is called, coyly, “climate debt” - because we’ve been burning CO2 and they haven’t. We’ve been screwing up the climate and they haven’t. And the third purpose of this new entity, this government, is enforcement.

How many of you think that the word “election” or “democracy” or “vote” or “ballot” occurs anywhere in the 200 pages of that treaty? Quite right, it doesn’t appear once. So, at last, the communists who piled out of the Berlin Wall and into the environmental movement, who took over Greenpeace so that my friends who funded it left within a year, because [the communists] captured it - Now the apotheosis as at hand. They are about to impose a communist world government on the world. You have a president who has very strong sympathies with that point of view. He’s going to sign it. He’ll sign anything. He’s a Nobel Peace Prize [winner]; of course he’ll sign it.

[laughter]

And the trouble is this; if that treaty is signed, if your Constitution says that it takes precedence over your Constitution (sic), and you can’t resign from that treaty unless you get agreement from all the other state parties [ And because you’ll be the biggest paying country, they’re not going to let you out of it.

So, thank you, America. You were the beacon of freedom to the world. It is a privilege merely to stand on this soil of freedom while it is still free. But, in the next few weeks, unless you stop it, your president will sign your freedom, your democracy, and your humanity away forever. And neither you nor any subsequent government you may elect will have any power whatsoever to take it back. That is how serious it is. I’ve read the treaty. I’ve seen this stuff about [world] government and climate debt and enforcement. They are going to do this to you whether you like it or not.

But I think it is here, here in your great nation, which I so love and I so admire - it is here that perhaps, at this eleventh hour, at the fifty-ninth minute and fifty-ninth second, you will rise up and you will stop your president from signing that dreadful treaty, that purposeless treaty. For there is no problem with climate and, even if there were, an economic treaty does nothing to [help] it.

So I end by saying to you the words that Winston Churchill addressed to your president in the darkest hour before the dawn of freedom in the Second World War. He quoted from your great poet Longfellow:

Sail on, O Ship of State!
Sail on, O Union, strong and great!
Humanity with all its fears,
With all the hopes of future years,
Is hanging breathless on thy fate!

See post ands Q&A here.

By Madhav Khandekar, Energy and Environment

ABSTRACT
Sea Level Rise (SLR) in response to the present and future warming of the earth’s surface is probably the most contentious issue being debated at present. This brief commentary surveys the most recent literature on ongoing SLR and on the major factors contributing to future rise. It is concluded that the best guess value of SLR for the next 100 years is a relatively modest 23 cm +/- 5 cm which poses little threat to coastal areas of the world either at present or in future.

INTRODUCTION
The topic of Sea Level Rise (SLR) on regional and global scale and its possible linkage to the present and future warming of the earth’s surface is perhaps the most intensely debated issue on climate change at present. A recent Google search shows an astounding 1.8 M listings on global warming & sea level rise issue. Many articles in national & international news papers, popular scientific magazines as well as in scientific journals discuss the possibility of SLR as high as 3 to 7 m as a result of melting of Greenland and Antarctic Ice Sheets due to warming of the earth’s surface by 3C or more in the next 100 years. In
a recent comprehensive paper (Wunsch et al 2007), the lead author Prof (emeritus) Carl Wunsch states: ‘modern sea level rise is a matter of urgent concern from a variety of points of view, but especially because of the possibility of its acceleration and consequent threats to many low-lying parts of the inhabited world’. Recent satellite altimetric data by the TOPEX/Poseidon satellite (Leuliette 2004) suggest that since about 1993, global SLR has been rising at a rate of 2.8 +/- 0.4 mm per year and this has raised the possibility of “accelerated SLR due to significant melting of high-latitude Ice Sheets”.

The IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) in its 1995 climate change documents estimated SLR of about 50 cm by 2100. In the 2001 climate
change documents the IPCC revised this estimate to about 37 cm. In the most recent IPCC assessment, Meehl (2007) projects SLR to be between 14 and 43 cm (with a mean value of 29 cm) by 2100 under the A1B (greenhouse gas) emission scenario in which the earth’s mean temperature is projected to rise between 2.3C and 4.1C by 2100. In view of the large disparities between these estimates and between the estimates of the ongoing rate of rise and the projections for the future, it is the purpose of this article to take a closer look at some of the recent studies to determine the best possible value of SLR for the next 50 to 100 years.

CONCLUDING REMARKS
The best guess value for SLR for the next 100 years appears to be about 230 mm (23 cm) with a 95% confidence interval of +/-50 mm. In view of cooling of the upper oceans observed in recent years and a possible continued cooling of the earth’s mean temperature over the next decade (e.g., Keenlyside et al 2008), the best guess value of SLR from now until 2025 is estimated to be just about 30 mm with a 95% confidence interval of +/-10 mm. This estimate is significantly lower than the range projected by the IPCC fourth assessment report in 2007. In terms of climate policy, such a value of future sea level rise poses no major threat to the coastal regions or low-lying countries (e.g., Bangladesh, The Maldives, Tuwalu) of the world at present or in the foreseeable future. Read full study here.

By Michael Goldfarb, Heartland Institute

It’s been more than 20 years since James Hansen first warned America of impending doom. On a hot summer day in June 1988, Hansen, head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, announced before a Senate committee that “the greenhouse effect has been detected and it is changing our climate now.”

The greenhouse effect would have looked obvious enough to anyone watching on television. The senators conducting the hearing, including Al Gore, had turned the committee room into an oven. That day it was a balmy 98 degrees, and as former Colorado Sen. Timothy Wirth later revealed, the committee members “went in the night before and opened all the windows. And so when the hearing occurred, there was not only bliss, which is television cameras and [high ratings], but it was really hot.”

Holocaust Accusations

Hansen has been a star ever since. On the twentieth anniversary of his testimony to Congress, and still serving in the same role at NASA, Hansen was invited back for an encore performance where he warned that time was running out. He also conducted a media tour that included calling for the CEOs of fossil fuel companies, including ExxonMobil and Peabody Energy, to be put on trial for “high crimes against humanity and nature.”

If you hear the echo of Nuremberg in those trials, it’s because Hansen doesn’t shy away from Holocaust metaphors to make his point. In 2007, Hansen testified before the Iowa Utilities Board not in his capacity as a government employee but “as a private citizen, a resident of Kintnersville, Pennsylvania, on behalf of the planet, of life on Earth, including all species.” Hansen told the board, “if we cannot stop the building of more coal-fired power plants, those coal trains will be death trains - no less gruesome than if they were boxcars headed to crematoria, loaded with uncountable irreplaceable species.”

More recently, but presumably still in his capacity as a private citizen and defender of the Earth, Hansen wrote an op-ed for the Guardian in which he described coal-fired power plants as “factories of death.” This on the heels of testifying in a British court on behalf of six Greenpeace activists on trial for causing $60,000 in criminal damage to a coal-fired power station in England.

The Greenpeace activists had offered climate change as a “lawful excuse” for their actions, and with Hansen’s helpful testimony they were acquitted of all charges. Less than six months later, Hansen - a federal employee - would call for “the largest display of civil disobedience against global warming in U.S. history” as part of a protest at the Capitol power plant in Washington.

Prolific Alarmism

Hansen, by his own count, has conducted more than 1,400 interviews in recent years. Yet Hansen also would insist, in a speech just days before the 2004 presidential election, that the Bush administration had “muzzled” him because of his global warming activism.

When asked about this contradiction in 2007, Hansen told Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA), “for the sake of the taxpayers, they should be availed of my expertise. I shouldn’t be required to parrot some company line.”

But Hansen has never parroted the company line. As the head of NASA’s Weather and Climate Research Program from 1982 to 1994, John Theon was James Hansen’s supervisor. Theon says Hansen’s testimony in 1988 was “a huge embarrassment” to NASA, and he remains skeptical of Hansen’s predictions. “I don’t have much faith in the models,” Theon says, pointing to the “huge uncertainty in the role clouds play.”

Theon describes Hansen as a “nice, likeable fellow,” but worries, “he’s been overcome by his belief - almost religious - that he’s going to save the world.”
Indeed, Roy Spencer, who served as the senior scientist for climate studies at NASA’s Marshall Center, puts Hansen “at the extreme end of global warming alarmism.” Spencer doesn’t know of anyone “who thinks it’s a bigger problem than [Hansen] does.”

Skeptic Muzzled

Spencer, a meteorologist by training and a skeptic of man-made global warming, was genuinely muzzled during the Clinton administration. “I would get the message down through the NASA chain [of command] of what I could and couldn’t say in testimony,” he says. Spencer left NASA with little fuss for a job at the University of Alabama in 2001, but he still seems in awe of Hansen’s ability to do as he pleases. “For many years Hansen got away with going around NASA rules, and they looked the other way because it helped sell Mission to Planet Earth,” the NASA research program studying human effects on climate. Spencer figures that “at some point, someone in the Bush administration said ‘why don’t you start enforcing your rules?’”

Theon says the same kind of models that now predict runaway warming were predicting runaway cooling prior to 1975, when the popular fear was not melting ice caps but a new ice age, and “not one model predicted the cooling we’ve had since 1998.” Spencer insists “it’s all make believe - if you took one look at the assumptions that go into this, you’d laugh.” But none of that seems to matter too much. Read story here.

Temperatures globally were nearly 1F colder at the 20th anniversary of Hansen’s 1988 testimony.