Source: SPPI
Source: SPPI
From Christopher Monckton of Arabia in Doha, Qatar
I have been a bad boy. At the U.N. climate conference in Doha, I addressed a plenary session of national negotiating delegates though only accredited as an observer.
Tsk, tsk. See me after class. Five demerits. Get down and give me 20!
One just couldn’t resist. There they all were, earnestly outbidding each other to demand that the West should keep them in pampered luxury for the rest of their indolent lives, and all on the pretext of preventing global warming that has now become embarrassingly notorious for its long absence.
No one was allowed to give the alternative - and scientifically correct – viewpoint. The U.N.’s wall of silence was rigidly in place.
The microphone was just in front of me. All I had to do was press the button. I pressed it. The Chair recognized Myanmar (Burmese for Burma). I was on.
On behalf of the Asian Coastal Co-operation Initiative, an outfit I had thought up on the spur of the moment (it sounded just like one of the many dubious taxpayer-funded propaganda groups at the conference), I spoke for less than a minute.
Quietly, politely, authoritatively, I told the delegates three inconvenient truths they would not hear from anyone else:
There has been no global warming for 16 of the 18 years of these wearisome, self-congratulatory yadayadathons.
It is at least ten times more cost-effective to see how much global warming happens and then adapt in a focused way to what little harm it may cause than to spend a single red cent futilely attempting to mitigate it today.
An independent scientific enquiry should establish whether the U.N.’s climate conferences are still heading in the right direction.
As I delivered the last of my three points, there were keening shrieks of rage from the delegates. They had not heard any of this before. They could not believe it. Outrage! Silence him! Free speech? No! This is the U.N.! Gerrimoff! Eeeeeeeeeagh!
One of the hundreds of beefy, truncheon-toting U.N. police at the conference approached me as I left the hall and I was soon surrounded by him and a colleague. They took my conference pass, peered at it and murmured into cellphones.
Trouble was, they were having great difficulty keeping a straight face.
Put yourself in their sensible shoes. They have to stand around listening to the tedious, flatulent mendacities of pompous, overpaid, under-educated diplomats day after week after year. Suddenly, at last, someone says “Boo!” and tells the truth.
Frankly, they loved it. They didn’t say so, of course, or they’d have burst out laughing and their stony-faced U.N. superiors would not have been pleased.
I was amiably accompanied out into the balmy night, where an impressive indaba of stony-faced U.N. officials were alternately murmuring into cellphones and murmuring into cellphones. Murmuring into cellphones is what they do best.
After a few minutes the head of security - upper lip trembling and chest pulsating as he did his best to keep his laughter to himself - briefly stopped murmuring into his cellphone and bade me a cheerful and courteous goodnight.
The national delegation from Burma, whose microphone I had borrowed while they were out partying somewhere in the souk, snorted an official protest into its cellphone.
An eco-freako journalist, quivering with unrighteous indignation, wrote that I had been “evicted”. Well, not really. All they did was to say a cheery toodle-pip at the end of that day’s session. They couldn’t have been nicer about it.
The journalist mentioned my statement to my fellow-delegates that there had been no global warming for 16 years. What she was careful not to mention was that she had interviewed me at some length earlier in the day. She had sneered that 97% of climate scientists thought I was wrong.
I had explained to her that 100% of climate scientists would agree with me that there had been no global warming for 16 years if they were to check the facts, which is how science (as opposed to U.N. politics) is done.
I had also told her how to check the facts (but she had not checked them):
Step 1. Get the monthly mean global surface temperature anomalies since January 1997 from the Hadley Centre/CRU. The data, freely available online, are the U.N.’s preferred way to measure how much global warming has happened. Or you could use the more reliable satellite data from the University of Alabama at Huntsville or from Remote Sensing Systems Inc.
Step 2. Put the data into Microsoft Excel and use its routine that calculates the least-squares linear-regression trend on the data. Linear regression determines the underlying trend in a dataset over a given period as the slope of the unique straight line through the data that minimizes the sum of the squares of the absolute differences or “residuals” between the points corresponding to each time interval in the data and on the trend-line. Phew! If that is too much like doing real work (though Excel will do it for you at the touch of a button), find a friendly, honest statistician.
Step 3. Look up the measurement uncertainty in the dataset. Since measuring global temperature reliably is quite difficult, properly-collated temperature data are presented as central estimates flanked by upper and lower estimates known as the “error bars”.
Step 4. Check whether the warming (which is the difference between the first and last value on the trend-line) is greater or smaller than the measurement uncertainty. If it is smaller, falling within the error-bars, the trend is statistically indistinguishable from zero. There has been no warming – or, to be mathematically nerdy, there has been no statistically-significant warming.
The main point that the shrieking delegates here in Doha don’t get is this. It doesn’t matter how many profiteering mad scientists say global warming is dangerously accelerating. It isn’t. Period. Get over it.
The fact that there has been no global warming for 16 years is just that a fact. It does not mean there is no such thing as global warming, or there has not been any global warming in the past, or there will be none in future.
In the global instrumental temperature record, which began in 1860, there have been several periods of ten years or more without global warming. However, precisely because these periods occur frequently, they tend to constrain the overall rate of warming.
Ideally, one should study periods of warming that are either multiples of 60 years or centered on a transition year between the warming and cooling (or cooling and warming) phases of the great ocean oscillations. That way, the distortions caused by the naturally-occurring 30-year cooling and 30-year warming phases are minimized.
Let’s do it. I have had the pleasure of being on the planet for 60 years. I arrived when it first became theoretically possible for our CO2 emissions to have a detectable effect on global temperature. From 1952 to the present, the planet has warmed at a rate equivalent to 1.2 Celsius degrees per century.
Or we could go back to 1990, the year of the first of the four quinquennial Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPeCaC). It predicted that from 1990-2025 the world would warm at 0.3 C/century, giving 1 C warming by 2025.
Late in 2001 there was a phase-transition from the warming to the cooling phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the most influential of the ocean oscillations. From 1990-2001 is 11 years; from 2001-2012 is 11 years. So 1990-2012 is a period centered on a phase-transition: with minimal natural distortion, it will indicate the recent temperature trend.
Since 1990 the world has warmed at 1.4 C, century, or a little under 0.3 C in all. Note that 1.4 C/century is a little greater than the 1.2 C/century observed since 1952. However, the period since 1990 is little more than a third of the period since 1952, and shorter periods are liable to exhibit somewhat steeper trends than longer periods.
So the slightly higher warming rate of the more recent period does not necessarily indicate that the warming rate is rising, and it is certainly not rising dangerously.
For the 21st century as a whole, IPeCaC is predicting not 1.2 or 1.4 C warming but close to 3 C, more than doubling the observed post-1990 warming rate. Or, if you believe the latest scare paper from our old fiends the University of East Anglia, up to 6 C, quadrupling it.
That is not at all likely. The maximum warming rate that persisted for at least ten years in the global instrumental record since 1850 has been 0.17 C. This rate occurred from 1860-1880; 1910-1940; and 1976-2001.
It is only in the last of these three periods that we could have had any warming influence: yet the rate of warming over that period is the same as in the two previous periods.
All three of these periods of rapidish warming coincided with warming phases of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. The climate scare got underway about halfway through the 1976-2001 warming phase.
In 1976 there had been an unusually sharp phase-transition from the cooling to the warming phase. By 1988 James Hansen was making his lurid (and now disproven) temperature predictions before the U.S. Congress, after Al Gore and Sen. Tim Wirth had chosen a very hot June day for the hearing and had deliberately turned off the air-con.
Here is a summary of the measured and predicted warming rates:
Measured warming rate, 1997-2012
0.0 C/century
Measured warming rate, 1952-2012
1.2 C/century
Measured warming rate, 1990-2012
1.4 C/century
Measured warming rate, 1860-1880
1.7C/century
Measured warming rate, 1910-1940
1.7 C/century
Measured warming rate, 1976-2001
1.7 C/century
Predicted warming rate in IPCC (1990), 1990-2025
3.0 C/century
Predicted warming rate in IPCC (2007), 2000-2100
3.0 C/century
Predicted warming rate by UEA (2012), 2000-2100
4.0-6.0 C/century
But it is virtually impossible to tell the negotiating delegates any of what I have set out here. They would simply not understand it. Even if they did understand it, they would not care. Objective scientific truth no longer has anything to do with these negotiations. Emotion is all.
A particularly sad example of the mawkish emotionalism that may yet destroy the economies of the West was the impassioned statement by the negotiating delegate from the Philippines to the effect that, after the typhoon that has just killed hundreds of his countrymen, the climate negotiations have taken on a new, life-or-death urgency.
As he left the plenary session, the delegates stood either side of the central aisle and showed their sympathy by applauding him. Sympathy for his country was appropriate; sympathy for his argument was not.
After 16 years with no global warming – and, if he reads this posting, he will know how to check that for himself rather than believing the soi-disant “consensus” – global warming that has not happened cannot have caused Typhoon Bhopa, any more than it could have caused extra-tropical storm Sandy.
It is possible that illegal mining and logging played no small part in triggering the landslide that killed many of those who lost their lives.
Perhaps the Philippines should join the Asian Coastal Co-Operation Initiative. Our policy is that the international community should assist all nations to increase their resilience in the face of the natural disasters that have been and will probably always be part of life on Earth.
That is an objective worthier, more realistic, more affordable, and more achievable than attempting, Canute-like, to halt the allegedly rising seas with a vote to establish a second “commitment period” under the Kyoto Protocol.
Will someone please tell the delegates? Just press the button and talk. You may not be heard, though. Those who are not partying somewhere in the souk will be murmuring into their cellphones.
Note: After Sandy hit, we wrote that FEMA’s confused, uncoordinated reaction was Obama’s Katrina. Instead in a photo op, Obama congratulated by Chris Christie for a good job while begging for assistance, got a big boost in the polls. A few hours later, he went on campaigning. Many weeks later FEMA is still providing some financial help but putting the suffering people affected by Sandy in a mountain of bureaucracy. Government in action. The real work is being done by the Red Cross and the many church and charity groups. Even today, many trailers that could be used to house people still in the cold are sitting idle in Pennsylvania.
Hurry up and wait.
That’s what first responders were left to do after being deployed by FEMA to assist in the storm-ravaged areas in the initial days after superstorm Sandy, FoxNews.com has learned. A FEMA worker who spoke to FoxNews.com described a chaotic scene at New Jersey’s Fort Dix, where emergency workers arrived as the storm bore down on the Atlantic Coast. The worker said officials at the staging area were unprepared and told the incoming responders there was nothing for them to do for nearly four days.
“They told us to hurry, hurry, hurry,” the worker, who works at the agency’s headquarters in Washington and volunteered to deploy for the storm recovery effort. “We rushed to Fort Dix, only to find out that our liaison didn’t even know we were coming.”
“The regional coordinator even said to us, ‘I don’t know why you were rushed here because we don’t need you,’” said the worker, who spoke out of frustration with the lack of planning and coordination following the devastating storm.
‘I worked in Katrina and Katrina was run better than Sandy.’
- Anonymous FEMA first responder
After arriving in New Jersey, the worker and others waited for three full days and parts of another, even as reports dominated the television of the devastation and suffering wrought by the storm, which struck land on Oct. 29. When they asked for assignments, they couldn’t believe the response, according to the worker.
“They told us to go to the Walmart nearby or to check out the area but told us to stay out of the areas affected by the storm,” the worker said. “If our boss back at headquarters had not been alerted and didn’t make a push to get us assignments, the people running the show on the ground level would have just kept us sitting in the barracks.”
In a Nov. 3 email obtained by FoxNews.com, an administrator back in Washington urged the regional team to get his people into the field after learning they were idled..
“My people are being told to go sightseeing,” the e-mail reads. “They may have a mission in 2-4 days ... I am asking them to reach out to contacts there that may be able to use their expertise ... We will continue to seek these opportunities as otherwise these personnel resources will be wasted ... Please advise way ahead ...”
Told of the worker’s complaints, a FEMA official acknowledged that there were delays in getting responders out into the field but said the time was mostly spent firming up training and accommodations.
“I’m not going to say we couldn’t have done better,” Michael Byrne, a FEMA federal coordinating officer, told FoxNews.com. “I can understand the emotional commitment. They want to jump right in and start with the effort. I feel the same way.
“The time was used to find the best place for them and for quick-training,” he said. “There were logistical challenges but we have been fully engaged in the areas since then.”
But that didn’t jibe with the account of the worker, who said the much-maligned agency seemed more organized during the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. “When there’s disaster, every second counts,” the worker said. “That clock starts ticking once the storm makes landfall. I worked in Katrina and Katrina was run better than Sandy.”
Even after FEMA workers were finally sent out from Fort Dix, many did not have useful information to convey to victims, said the worker. “They are put out in the field and they don’t know what to tell people,” the worker said. “Survivors will fall through the cracks.”
Byrne, who noted there are still 800 FEMA workers in the field helping victims recover, said the responders he dealt with were generally well-prepared. “If there were other people who weren’t able to help, I’d like to know who they are,” he said. “We can always do better, but they have done a great job on short notice.”
The agency has come under fire from residents and elected leaders, including Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-NY) - who represents some of the hardest hit areas in lower Manhattan and Brooklyn. He recently told the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee that FEMA is not prepared to respond effectively to disasters, especially in urban areas.
“Hurricane Sandy should be a major wake-up call,” Nadler said. “When disaster strikes, our densely populated urban areas and economic centers must be able to recover quickly.”
Read more.
Breaking News: MONCKTON gets evicted from Doha COP18 conference
An excerpt from an E &E Newswire story…
After the news conference, and as diplomats gathered for the climate conference president’s assessment of how close countries are to agreement, Monckton quietly slipped into the seat reserved for the delegation of Myanmar and clicked the button to speak.
“In the 16 years we have been coming to these conferences, there has been no global warming,” Monckton said as confused murmurs filled the hall and then turned into a chorus of boos.
The stunt infuriated negotiators and activists here who gather every year to address what they believe is one of the world’s top threats, the steady rise of man-made global warming.
As Monckton was escorted from the hall and security officers stripped him of his U.N. credentials, several people noted that just a few hours earlier a group of young activists had been thrown out of the convention center and deported. Their crime: unfurling an unauthorized banner calling for the Qatari hosts to lead the negotiations to a strong conclusion.
By late today, several activists attending the conference had posted calls to “deport Monckton” on their Twitter feeds.
a href="http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-12-02/obama-plans-for-climate-deal-as-fiscal-cliff-negotiations-rage" title="Bloomberg">Bloomberg
As leaders in Washington obsess about the fiscal cliff, President Barack Obama is putting in place the building blocks for a climate treaty requiring the first fossil- fuel emissions cuts from both the U.S. and China.
State Department envoy Todd Stern is in Doha this week working to clear the path for an international agreement by 2015. While Obama failed to deliver on his promise to start a cap-and-trade program in his first term, he’s working on policies that may help cut greenhouse gases 17 percent by 2020 in the U.S., historically the world’s biggest polluter.
“We are making good progress, and I think we are on track,” Stern told reporters today in Doha when asked if the U.S. can meet its goal even if Congress doesn’t pass climate legislation this decade.
Obama has moved forward with greenhouse-gas rules for vehicles and new power plants, appliance standards and investment in low-emitting energy sources. He’s also doubled use of renewable power and has called for 80 percent of U.S. electricity to come from “clean” energy sources, including nuclear and natural gas, by 2035.
“The president is laying the foundations for real action on climate change,” Jake Schmidt, who follows international climate policy for the Washington-based Natural Resources Defense Council, said in an interview in Doha. “Whether or not he decides to jump feet first into the international arena, we’ll see.”
Treaty Talks
Envoys from more than 190 nations are entering their second week of talks today at the United Nations conference working toward a global warming treaty. Their ambition is to agree to a pact in 2015 that would take force in 2020. It would supersede limits on emissions for industrial nations under the Kyoto Protocol, which the U.S. never ratified.
Negotiations so far continue to be plagued by divisions—largely between rich nations like the U.S. and fast-developing economies such as China and India—over issues including financial aid to help the world’s most vulnerable countries deal with floods, droughts, rising sea levels and other climate- related changes.
This year marks the end of so-called fast-start finance of almost $30 billion pledged by developed economies to poor nations from 2010 through 2012. Industrialized countries have promised to ramp up financing to at least $100 billion by 2020. So far, those nations including the U.S. haven’t provided specifics on their plans for the funding.
‘Pressing Forward”
The Obama administration has “every intention to continue pressing forward” with funding to the extent it can without opposition from Congress, Stern said today.
Another potential sticking point in the climate talks revolve around a push by the European Union and developing countries for the U.S., Japan, Canada and other developed nations to commit to steeper emissions cuts between now and 2020.
Since 1990, the EU has decreased its greenhouse gases by 18 percent, while the U.S. has increased emissions by 10.8 percent, EU Climate Commissioner Connie Hedegaard said in Doha today.
“We’re moving very fast in the wrong direction,” Hedegaard said. “All major economies, being it the EU, or U.S., or emerging economies, all of us will have to do more.”
U.S. negotiators have said they have no plans to raise the level of its emissions-reduction goal for 2020. The U.S. has “done quite significant things” to cut greenhouse gases in Obama’s first four years, Stern said, adding that “more can be done.”
Quiet Effort
Obama’s push so far is being pursued without fanfare as the administration and Congress grapple to avert a budget crisis and $607 billion in automatic spending cuts. Unlike 2009, when Obama failed to prevent the collapse of climate talks in Copenhagen, the U.S. can point to more concrete actions it’s taking in the fight global warming.
The U.S. president has more ammunition at hand. The Environmental Protection Agency is required under the Clean Air Act to move ahead with regulations on emissions from existing power plants. Those are responsible for about a third of U.S. emissions, the largest chunk.
Measures such as those, along with continued low natural gas prices and state actions, can cut emissions 16.3 percent by 2020, Resources for the Future, a research firm, estimates. Emissions already are down 8.8 percent from 2005 levels, according to Jonathan Pershing, a State Department negotiator in Doha.
“The U.S. is in a much stronger position going into the Doha talks despite failure of Congress to pass comprehensive climate legislation,” said Trevor Houser, a former U.S. climate negotiatorwho served during the Copenhagen meeting. “For countries like China that were able to hide behind a perception of U.S. inaction, the fact that U.S. emissions are falling helps increase pressure. It takes away the excuse that action is stalled because of the U.S.”
A summer of extreme weather also is supporting the U.S. delegation in the talks by raising public awareness and concern about the risks of climate change, Pershing said last week in Doha. So far this year, superstorm Sandy devastated the East Coast while wildfires raged in the west and a record drought wrecked crops in the Midwest.
“The combination of those events is certainly changing the minds of Americans and making clear to people at home the consequences of the increased growth in emissions,” he said at a Nov. 26 news conference in Doha.
The portion of Americans who say climate change will affect them a “great deal” or by a “moderate” amount rose by 13 percentage points to 42% from March to September, according to a poll by Yale University and George Mason University.
Piers Corbyn, Today 05:57 AM
Factual error. You refer to CO2 as a ‘pollutant’ when it is not. It is the food of plants and recent increases (from the geologically very low level of ~0.03%) are good for agriculture. Furthermore as a matter of fact there is no observed or proxy real data in the real world which demonstrates that CO2 increases contribute to warming and there is not one scientist in the world who can produce real data from recent centuries or millenia (or more) to show this. I challenge your publication to show otherwise.The great danger of the CO2-warmist delusion is that it is pointing the world in the wrong direction. The world is not warming but cooling and the increase in very extreme events in the last 2 years (eg) is as expected as the world approaches a new Little Ice Age (LIA). Indeed the extreme situations in USA, UK and Europe of summer 2012 were predicted in long range in a large amount of detail using a solar-activity understanding of the approaching Little Ice Age. Agriculture is suffering and will continue to suffer and world food shortages will increase as we move more into LIA Climate Change. This real and present climate change is much worse for agriculture and the world economy than the marginal benefit of the small but unrelated, coincidental, increase in CO2.
Thank you, Piers Corbyn, WeatherAction long range weather and climate forecasters
ICECAP NOTE: Liberals will applaud these efforts and the public may support clean energy. But the mention of natural gas and nuclear as examples is disingenuous. They know the environmentalists and public would not support mass increase of nuclear power and the EPA is working to destroy our ability to extract natural gas through fracking, that has enabled a worldwide boom.