Climate chaos? Don't believe it

By Christopher Monckton

Download Christopher Monckton's references and detailed calculations [pdf]

The Stern report last week predicted dire economic and social effects of unchecked global warming. In what many will see as a highly controversial polemic, Christopher Monckton disputes the 'facts' of this impending apocalypse and accuses the UN and its scientists of distorting the truth

Last week, Gordon Brown and his chief economist both said global warming was the worst "market failure" ever. That loaded soundbite suggests that the "climate-change" scare is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, "creating world government". This week and next, I'll reveal how politicians, scientists and bureaucrats contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions worthier of St John the Divine than of science.

Sir Nicholas Stern's report on the economics of climate change, which was published last week, says that the debate is over. It isn't. There are more greenhouse gases in the air than there were, so the world should warm a bit, but that's as far as the "consensus" goes. After the recent hysteria, you may not find the truth easy to believe. So you can find all my references and detailed calculations here.

The Royal Society says there's a worldwide scientific consensus. It brands Apocalypse-deniers as paid lackeys of coal and oil corporations. I declare my interest: I once took the taxpayer's shilling and advised Margaret Thatcher, FRS, on scientific scams and scares. Alas, not a red cent from Exxon.

In 1988, James Hansen, a climatologist, told the US Congress that temperature would rise 0.3C by the end of the century (it rose 0.1C), and that sea level would rise several feet (no, one inch). The UN set up a transnational bureaucracy, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The UK taxpayer unwittingly meets the entire cost of its scientific team, which, in 2001, produced the Third Assessment Report, a Bible-length document presenting apocalyptic conclusions well beyond previous reports.

This week, I'll show how the UN undervalued the sun's effects on historical and contemporary climate, slashed the natural greenhouse effect, overstated the past century's temperature increase, repealed a fundamental law of physics and tripled the man-made greenhouse effect. Next week, I'll demonstrate the atrocious economic, political and environmental cost of the high-tax, zero-freedom, bureaucratic centralism implicit in Stern's report; I'll compare the global-warming scare with previous sci-fi alarums; and I'll show how the environmentalists' "precautionary principle" (get the state to interfere now, just in case) is killing people.

So to the scare. First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.

Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote: "With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.' "

So they did. The UN's second assessment report, in 1996, showed a 1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than today. But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no medieval warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the warmest for 1,000 years. The graph looked like an ice hockey-stick. The wrongly flat AD1000-AD1900 temperature line was the shaft: the uptick from 1900 to 2000 was the blade. Here's how they did it:

* They gave one technique for reconstructing pre-thermometer temperature 390 times more weight than any other (but didn't say so).

* The technique they overweighted was one which the UN's 1996 report had said was unsafe: measurement of tree-rings from bristlecone pines. Tree-rings are wider in warmer years, but pine-rings are also wider when there's more carbon dioxide in the air: it's plant food. This carbon dioxide fertilisation distorts the calculations.

* They said they had included 24 data sets going back to 1400. Without saying so, they left out the set showing the medieval warm period, tucking it into a folder marked "Censored Data".

* They used a computer model to draw the graph from the data, but scientists later found that the model almost always drew hockey-sticks even if they fed in random, electronic "red noise".



The large, full-colour "hockey-stick" was the key graph in the UN's 2001 report, and the only one to appear six times. The Canadian Government copied it to every household. Four years passed before a leading scientific journal would publish the truth about the graph. Did the UN or the Canadian government apologise? Of course not. The UN still uses the graph in its publications.

Even after the "hockey stick" graph was exposed, scientific papers apparently confirming its abolition of the medieval warm period appeared. The US Senate asked independent statisticians to investigate. They found that the graph was meretricious, and that known associates of the scientists who had compiled it had written many of the papers supporting its conclusion.

The UN, echoed by Stern, says the graph isn't important. It is. Scores of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global and up to 3C warmer than now. Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical Andes: today they're there. There were Viking farms in Greenland: now they're under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found none.

The Antarctic, which holds 90 per cent of the world's ice and nearly all its 160,000 glaciers, has cooled and gained ice-mass in the past 30 years, reversing a 6,000-year melting trend. Data from 6,000 boreholes worldwide show global temperatures were higher in the Middle Ages than now. And the snows of Kilimanjaro are vanishing not because summit temperature is rising (it isn't) but because post-colonial deforestation has dried the air. Al Gore please note.

In some places it was also warmer than now in the Bronze Age and in Roman times. It wasn't CO2 that caused those warm periods. It was the sun. So the UN adjusted the maths and all but extinguished the sun's role in today's warming. Here's how:

* The UN dated its list of "forcings" (influences on temperature) from 1750, when the sun, and consequently air temperature, was almost as warm as now. But its start-date for the increase in world temperature was 1900, when the sun, and temperature, were much cooler.

* Every "forcing" produces "climate feedbacks" making temperature rise faster. For instance, as temperature rises in response to a forcing, the air carries more water vapour, the most important greenhouse gas; and polar ice melts, increasing heat absorption. Up goes the temperature again. The UN more than doubled the base forcings from greenhouse gases to allow for climate feedbacks. It didn't do the same for the base solar forcing.

Two centuries ago, the astronomer William Herschel was reading Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations when he noticed that quoted grain prices fell when the number of sunspots rose. Gales of laughter ensued, but he was right. At solar maxima, when the sun was at its hottest and sunspots showed, temperature was warmer, grain grew faster and prices fell. Such observations show that even small solar changes affect climate detectably.

But recent solar changes have been big. Sami Solanki, a solar physicist, says that in the past half-century the sun has been warmer, for longer, than at any time in at least the past 11,400 years, contributing a base forcing equivalent to a quarter of the past century's warming. That's before adding climate feedbacks.

The UN expresses its heat-energy forcings in watts per square metre per second. It estimates that the sun caused just 0.3 watts of forcing since 1750. Begin in 1900 to match the temperature start-date, and the base solar forcing more than doubles to 0.7 watts. Multiply by 2.7, which the Royal Society suggests is the UN's current factor for climate feedbacks, and you get 1.9 watts – more than six times the UN's figure. The entire 20th-century warming from all sources was below 2 watts. The sun could have caused just about all of it.

Next, the UN slashed the natural greenhouse effect by 40 per cent from 33C in the climate-physics textbooks to 20C, making the man-made additions appear bigger. Then the UN chose the biggest 20th-century temperature increase it could find. Stern says: "As anticipated by scientists, global mean surface temperatures have risen over the past century." As anticipated? Only 30 years ago, scientists were anticipating a new Ice Age and writing books called The Cooling. In the US, where weather records have been more reliable than elsewhere, 20th-century temperature went up by only 0.3C. AccuWeather, a worldwide meteorological service, reckons world temperature rose by 0.45C. The US National Climate Data Centre says 0.5C. Any advance on 0.5? The UN went for 0.6C, probably distorted by urban growth near many of the world's fast-disappearing temperature stations. The number of temperature stations round the world peaked at 6,000 in 1970. It's fallen by two-thirds to 2,000 now: a real "hockey-stick" curve, and an instance of the UN's growing reliance on computer guesswork rather than facts.

Even a 0.6C temperature rise wasn't enough. So the UN repealed a fundamental physical law. Buried in a sub-chapter in its 2001 report is a short but revealing section discussing "lambda": the crucial factor converting forcings to temperature. The UN said its climate models had found lambda near-invariant at 0.5C per watt of forcing. You don't need computer models to "find" lambda. Its value is given by a century-old law, derived experimentally by a Slovenian professor and proved by his Austrian student (who later committed suicide when his scientific compatriots refused to believe in atoms). The Stefan-Boltzmann law, not mentioned once in the UN's 2001 report, is as central to the thermodynamics of climate as Einstein's later equation is to astrophysics. Like Einstein's, it relates energy to the square of the speed of light, but by reference to temperature rather than mass. The bigger the value of lambda, the bigger the temperature increase the UN could predict. Using poor Ludwig Boltzmann's law, lambda's true value is just 0.22-0.3C per watt. In 2001, the UN effectively repealed the law, doubling lambda to 0.5C per watt. A recent paper by James Hansen says lambda should be 0.67, 0.75 or 1C: take your pick. Sir John Houghton, who chaired the UN's scientific assessment working group until recently, tells me it now puts lambda at 0.8C: that's 3C for a 3.7-watt doubling of airborne CO2. Most of the UN's computer models have used 1C. Stern implies 1.9C.

On the UN's figures, the entire greenhouse-gas forcing in the 20th century was 2 watts. Multiplying by the correct value of lambda gives a temperature increase of 0.44 to 0.6C, in line with observation. But using Stern's 1.9C per watt gives 3.8C. Where did 85 per cent of his imagined 20th-century warming go? As Professor Dick Lindzen of MIT pointed out in The Sunday Telegraph last week, the UK's Hadley Centre had the same problem, and solved it by dividing its modelled output by three to "predict" 20th-century temperature correctly.

A spate of recent scientific papers, gearing up for the UN's fourth report next year, gives a different reason for the failure of reality to keep up with prediction. The oceans, we're now told, are acting as a giant heat-sink. In these papers the well-known, central flaw (not mentioned by Stern) is that the computer models' "predictions" of past ocean temperature changes only approach reality if they are averaged over a depth of at least a mile and a quarter. Deep-ocean temperature hasn't changed at all, it's barely above freezing. The models tend to over-predict the warming of the climate-relevant surface layer up to threefold. A recent paper by John Lyman, of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, reports that the oceans have cooled sharply in the past two years. The computers didn't predict this. Sea level is scarcely rising faster today than a century ago: an inch every 15 years. Hansen now says that the oceanic "flywheel effect" gives us extra time to act, so Stern's alarmism is misplaced.

Finally, the UN's predictions are founded not only on an exaggerated forcing-to-temperature conversion factor justified neither by observation nor by physical law, but also on an excessive rate of increase in airborne carbon dioxide. The true rate is 0.38 per cent year on year since records began in 1958. The models assume 1 per cent per annum, more than two and a half times too high. In 2001, the UN used these and other adjustments to predict a 21st-century temperature increase of 1.5 to 6C. Stern suggests up to 10C.

Dick Lindzen emailed me last week to say that constant repetition of wrong numbers doesn't make them right. Removing the UN's solecisms, and using reasonable data and assumptions, a simple global model shows that temperature will rise by just 0.1 to 1.4C in the coming century, with a best estimate of 0.6C, well within the medieval temperature range and only a fifth of the UN's new, central projection.

Why haven't air or sea temperatures turned out as the UN's models predicted? Because the science is bad, the "consensus" is wrong, and Herr Professor Ludwig Boltzmann, FRS, was as right about energy-to-temperature as he was about atoms.

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Another example of widely-accepted fake science

"In the spring of 1981 a handful of young men began turning up in the emergency room at the UCLA hospital in West Los Angeles with swollen lymph nodes, a rare type of pneumonia, and highly suppressed T-cell count. Over the next year this was repeated in New York, Washington, and other major US cities, where doctors watched the spread of acquired immune deficiency syndrome."

So begins Pulitzer Prize-winner John Crewdson's definitive history of the discovery of AIDS and the surrounding scandal in his book Science Fictions: A Scientific Mystery, a Massive Cover-up and the Dark Legacy of Robert Gallo.

Robert Gallo, the National Cancer Institute researcher originally credited with virtually every important AIDS-related discovery, was revealed as a self-serving huckster who stole his laboratory samples from the Pasteur Institute, faked his scientific papers, and with the complicity of the Reagan administration, kept the US blood supply at risk for the AIDS virus for nearly a decade after the rest of the world had begun valid testing of blood for the AIDS virus. Harold Varmus, head of the National Institutes of Health, described Gallo as a "thug" yet Gallo has won every major award short of the Nobel Prize, and maintains a comfortable sinecure at the University of Maryland to this day.

Gallo made headlines in April 1984 as the "discoverer" of the AIDS virus (the year, incidentally, after the Pasteur Institute's patent filing for its AIDS blood test). Gallo claimed to have devised a test for the presence of the virus and to have mastered the art of growing the virus in the large quantities needed for research. Gallo's "discovery" of the cause of AIDS was the HTLV virus - a purported cancer virus that Gallo had previously (and unsuccessfully) promoted as a cause of leukemia, and that fit well with his proposals for funding and research at the National Cancer Institute. Gallo argued that HTLV had been shown to cause immunosuppression. Gallo's claims (which were rejected by most of the scientific community) were touted by the Reagan political machine, and press releases were packaged to produce optimal belief. Health Secretary Margaret Heckler greeted the press in the National Academy of Sciences auditorium packed with journalists and television crews. She declared that "today we add another miracle to the long honor roll of American medicine and science. Today's discovery represents the triumph of science over a dreaded disease." Gallo's "discovery" was a convenient answer to the chorus of critics who complained that the Reagan administration was doing too little to combat AIDS. Heckler dazzled critics with Gallo's American "miracle " and reminded the public of the gratitude it owed to medicine for triumphing over this "dreaded disease".

Gallo lost no time in making money from his deceit. Under pressure from the Reagan administration, the US Patent Office shut the door on any application for an immunoassay (blood test) patent that did not come from Gallo. The Pasteur Institute made its initial application for a US patent in 1983, but it stalled. Gallo and the US Department of Health applied for a patent on the day of Heckler's announcement. It was granted almost at once. The French cried "Foul!" The public wrangling threatened to undermine the integrity of AIDS science. It was settled by an unprecedented agreement between heads of state (Reagan and Jacques Chirac), which gave a percentage of US royalties on test kits to the French. A detailed report in June 1994 by the Inspector-General of the US Department of Health and Human Services on the issues between Gallo and the Pasteur Institute states that Gallo obtained his patent by unlawfully concealing relevant information from the patent office attorney; that he admitted this unlawful act; that Pasteur scientists were first to discover the AIDS virus, to isolate it successfully from several AIDS patients, to describe it in a scientific article, and to use it to make a diagnostic blood test for antibodies to the AIDS virus.

Thus began a decade of US government backed testing for the cancer virus HTLV in the US blood supply. Gallo's HTLV samples ultimately turned out to be not a leukemia causing virus, but samples of the LAV virus stolen from the Pasteur Institute, and cultured in Gallo's laboratory. All the deception had resulted in US blood tests that were essentially worthless, yet which were the enforced standard for all Red Cross testing (the rest of the world had moved to the Western Blot test recommended by the Pasteur Institute).

And this faulty testing meant that thousands of patients contracted AIDS from tainted blood supplies. Other patients were diagnosed with AIDS when they actually were free of the virus. Some of the misdiagnoses ended tragically in suicide.

In 1983, Isaac Asimov the noted science-fiction writer had triple bypass surgery and received blood transfusions containing HIV. His widow Jeppson Asimov recalled that after his triple bypass "the next day he had a high fever... only years later, in hindsight, did we realize that the post transfusion HIV infection had taken hold." In the mid-1980s, his wife noted that her husband had some AIDS symptoms and brought them to the attention of his internist and cardiologist, who pooh-poohed and refused to test him. He was finally tested in February of 1990, prior to further surgery, when he presented HIV-positive with his T cells half the normal level. The fact of Asimov's AIDS was kept secret at the advice of his physicians.

1983 may have been too early for the Pasteur Institutes blood test to actually have been used in the field. Nonetheless, it existed in 1983, and under the right circumstances could have prevented the science fiction writer from receiving tainted blood. But Gallo's grip on the US medical establishment precluded that. Asimov unfortunately choose to have his operation in New York where he had lived his entire life (he traveled infrequently as he was afraid to fly). In 1983, this decision resulted in his infection; nowhere else in the United States had a higher incidence of HIV in the blood supply than New York at that time.

And this is where Gallo's 'science fictions' may indeed have put an end to Asimov's science fiction. There were many others less well known than Asimov who also sufferred greatly and in many cases died as a consequence of Gallo's frauds.

Real science can be a double edged sword; but false science is never anything but a foul and costly crime. The victims of Robert Gallo's malfeasance should never be forgotten. They remind us that fraud - even in the most abstract realms of science - has real consequences for our day-to-day lives.

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SOME REAL GREENIES

Allow me to introduce you to the greenest people I have ever known. They are paragons. If the world had only followed their example we might not now be facing the threat of either drowning in the floodwaters created by global warming or watching fertile land turn into desert. To what extent we'd be enjoying our lives is for you to judge.

They do not own a car and never have. They have never been on an aeroplane. To get where they need to go they use either bus or train. Very occasionally - if they have a particularly heavy suitcase - they might use a taxi, but no more than once or twice a year.

They do not shop in out-of-town supermarkets or buy fancy fruit out of season. They have never tasted a strawberry in January or a kiwi fruit or mange tout at any time of the year. Most of their vegetables are grown in the back garden or their allotment and the food they have to buy comes from local shops.

They have no need for recycling bins because there is virtually nothing to put in them. Indeed, the very notion of recycling is alien to them. The woman uses a shopping bag, so there are no plastic bags to get rid of and she buys her milk in bottles that are washed and returned. Every scrap of potato peeling or old cabbage leaf ends up in the compost heap and there is no kitchen waste because, quite simply, there is no waste. Stale bread is turned into delicious bread pudding and leftover vegetables into a fry-up.

They buy only what they need because they have no fridge. The larder stays cool enough year round and nothing goes rotten. Ever.

They turn off the light if they are not in the room and if they had central heating they would turn that down too. But they don't. They have a fire in one room and the rest of the house is as cold as charity.

You may be starting to smell a rat by now and, yes, I am cheating a little. This virtuous couple with an ecological footprint smaller than a dormouse's paw happens to be my mother and father. It is an accurate picture of how they (and I) lived until I was in my teens. You may very well recognise them if, like me, you were born into a relatively poor working class family 50 or 60 years ago. They were probably your parents too.

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It's the cause of climate change that's in question

There are natural temperature fluctuations that affect climate, writes William Kininmonth (Former head of Australia's National Climate Centre)

The Stern report claims there is only a narrow window of opportunity within which the world must act to prevent dangerous climate change. A primary finding is that research since the 2001 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change shows the climate to be more sensitive to carbon dioxide emissions than thought, thus requiring immediate and drastic action.

Quite properly, Stern recognises that the scientific evidence of human influence on climate is an essential starting point for the economics. It is the science that establishes whether there is a problem, its risk and scale. However, it is in the science discussion that Stern is ignorant of the complexity of climate. The claim that there is no plausible explanation, other than human activities, for the observed warming of the past 30 years is wrong. The report gives no credence to internal variability of the climate system as the ocean and atmosphere fluids interact to transport heat from the tropics to the poles. Nor does it recognise the cyclic centennial to millennial oscillations in the climate record for which there are as yet no agreed explanations. The emergence of Earth from Ice Age conditions 20,000 years ago, when vast ice sheets covering North America and Northern Europe receded, sea level rose 130 metres, and the biosphere expanded and flourished in the warmer, wetter world, is ignored.

Unlike the IPCC, the Stern report does recognise the fading influence of carbon dioxide as concentration increases. Most of the greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide is in the first 50 parts per million (ppm). Beyond this the rate of increase of the greenhouse effect rapidly decreases with increasing concentration. There is no argument with Stern's basic finding that the direct increase in the greenhouse effect from a doubling of carbon dioxide is to increase the Earth's surface temperature by about 1 degree.

The argument is with Stern's further claim that there are positive feedbacks in the climate system that act to amplify the direct warming. The latter is at the heart of the alarmist predictions. Stern's simple explanation is that a warmer atmosphere holds more water vapour, also a greenhouse gas, and it is the extra water vapour that amplifies the direct warming effect.

Thus, the direct warming of about 1 degree is projected to become between 1.4 and 5.8 degrees for a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration. The range of projected global warming arises because the amplification can only be estimated using computer models. Stern says that the climate models use the laws of nature and are thus vastly different from those used in economic analyses, "which rely predominantly on curve fitting". The statement that the "accuracy of climate predictions is limited by computer power" is stunning in its ignorance as even the IPCC highlights a range of scientific uncertainties.

Stern fails to identify the important role of evaporation in cooling Earth's surface. As surface temperature rises, evaporation increases at a near exponential rate. This extraction of heat is a strong damping factor to further temperature rise. There will be no runaway greenhouse effect because the fading influence of carbon dioxide and rapid increase of evaporation combine to restrict temperature rise.

Warming from carbon dioxide increase is relatively small in the context of natural climate variability. It follows that a cut in human-caused carbon dioxide emissions will have little impact on the future climate.

Source

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Many people would like to be kind to others so Leftists exploit that with their nonsense about equality. Most people want a clean, green environment so Greenies exploit that by inventing all sorts of far-fetched threats to the environment. But for both, the real motive is to promote themselves as wiser and better than everyone else, truth regardless.

Global warming has taken the place of Communism as an absurdity that "liberals" will defend to the death regardless of the evidence showing its folly. Evidence never has mattered to real Leftists

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