SUMMING UP IPCC

An email to Benny Peiser from S. Fred Singer [singer@sepp.org]

1. Granted that world climate has warmed since 1975 - although it hasn't since 1998 - what is the cause? Is it natural or human? That's the key question. The IPCC claims it is "very likely" that human-produced greenhouse gases, like carbon dioxide, are the main cause. But what is their evidence? Correlation does not establish a cause; what about 1940-1975 when climate cooled while CO2 rose?

2. Agreement of the global mean trend with the result of a particular climate model is certainly fortuitous. Models provide a wide choice of trends - from 1.4 C to 11.5 C per century. More important, the IPCC ignores the evidence that patterns of warming, temperature trends versus latitude and altitude, disagree with greenhouse models. The inevitable conclusion - in direct contradiction to IPCC - must be: The human contribution to current warming is minor; most of it must be due to natural causes.

3. If indeed natural causes, most likely solar variability, outweigh human causes, then there is little that one can do - even with extreme measures of mitigation. [It is agreed by all that Kyoto is quite ineffective; at very best, a reduction of only 0.07 C by 2050.]

4. So what is left? Adaptation to inevitable climate change - as humanity has done for millennia. And many economists conclude that a warmer climate would be beneficial overall. Temperatures will continue to fluctuate with natural cycles and sea levels will continue to rise, as they have since the peak of the most recent ice age 18,000 years ago.




FRANCE PROPOSES GLOBAL "GREEN POLICE"



Fear of runaway global warming pushed 46 countries to line up Saturday behind France's bid for a new environmental body that could single out - and perhaps police - nations that abuse the Earth. "It is our responsibility. The future of humanity demands it," President Jacques Chirac said in an appeal to put the environment at the top of the world's agenda. ...

"We have 700 multilateral environmental agreements, and none of them seem to work. Environmental institutions are extremely weak," said Cristian Maquieira, a Chilean government environment official. Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Andrei Denisov said that creating a new environment organization would require too much time and money. Instead, he urged reforming the existing U.N. Environment Program and expanding its powers. He praised Chirac's efforts, however, as a "strong chess move" in the campaign to draw attention to the environment. ....

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Global Warming: The Missing Headline

"The IPCC predicted global temperature increases of 1.8 to 4 degrees Celsius (3.2 to 7.1 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100 and sea levels to rise between 7 and 23 inches (18 and 58 centimeters) by the end of the century. ...

"'An additional 3.9-7.8 inches (10-20 centimeters) are possible if recent, surprising melting of polar ice sheets continues,' the report stated." (From CNN)

Talk about the danger of rising sea levels, at least in my experience, is usually accompanied by verbal images of Florida flooding, Manhattan and London under water, and similar catastrophes. If the IPCC figures are correct, the upper end of the range of what might actually happen is a rise of less than a meter over a century--considerably less than the distance between high tide and low. Popular talk about global warming, again in my experience, is usually put in terms quite a bit more apocalyptic than the IPCC's upper estimate of four degrees Celsius by 2100.

So far the only report I have seen is on CNN, but I will be pleasantly surprised if any newspaper headlines the story with "Global Warming a Wet Firecracker? International Panel finds temperature and sea level effects over the next century real but small."

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What the IPPC climate report is not

With all the breathless hoopla in the popular media about the recent Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's fourth report on global warming, it's worth taking a look at what the report is not.

By the way, it's also worth noting that the reporting on the IPCC document in the U.S. print and broadcast media has been atrocious. It's largely been biased, credulous, or lazy, or all three. For example, The News Hour with Jim Lehrer, which usually does a good job of representing various sides of issues, had an utterly skewed report from Margaret Warner, who interviewed two climate experts, Kevin Trenberth and Michael Oppenheimer. Both are well-known advocates, as well as scientists. Their views are worth coverage, but not alone. Warner did no interviews with climate skeptics. The News Hour seriously damaged its credibility.

The same was largely true elsewhere (I didn't expect anything remotely balanced from the New York Times and advocate Andrew Revkin, and I didn't get it). The only broadcast I heard that had a climate skeptic in an interview was the BBC News Hour on Washington's WAMU public radio outlet.

But on to the report and what it isn't. First, it isn't a "scientific" report, as generally portrayed in the media. It is clearly marked "summary for policy makers," which ought to raise red flags from the start. Indeed, the science won't be published until May, when the technical chapters of the IPCC report are released.

If the past is any guide, the technical chapters will be considerably more circumspect and humble than the summary, although there have been charges that the technical chapters are being message massaged to make sure they support the policy decisions... To give an idea of just how "scientific" the summary is, ponder the assertion that there is a 90% certainty that the tiny amount of warming we have seen in the past 50 plus years is manmade. Where does that number come from? How was it derived? What does it mean?

Second, the summary wasn't written by scientists, although the media have claimed that it is the result of the work of more than 2,500 boffins of first rank. Horsefeathers. It was written by UN politicos and bureaucrats, about 35 in all, in order to advance a policy agenda. The summary is an advocacy document. For a good explanation of just how the document was cooked, take a gander at the work of my friend and colleague David Wojick on his blog, The Washington Pest.

Third, the summary offers no practical way to combat the alleged crisis of climate change. The Kyoto Protocol has failed. China and India won't play these kinds of slow-growth games. The putative victim countries - the island and low-lying nations - want reparations in advance for something that isn't likely to occur. It's the feckless Law of the Sea Treaty fiasco all over again.

Finally, there's no reason to believe that the planet as a whole would be a loser in a warmer world. There would be losers (Miami real estate developers, perhaps), and winners (those evil Canadians). All of the hand wringing reports that have been done about the impacts of a warmer climate are essentially bogus, the very definition of junk science.

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Putting some heat on global warming

In some ways, it's almost ironic. While the advocates of man-made global warming turn up the volume on their screeds against the United States, rather sizeable parts of the U.S. find themselves digging out after one of the worst winter storms on record. In California, the citrus industry took a huge hit from an ice storm. Denver was snowed in for the better part of a week. Blizzard conditions in the Great Plains, from Texas to Nebraska, created all sorts of problems, ranging from travel emergencies to extended periods without power to major threats to both humans and livestock. Less than a month after the man-made global warming advocates were pointing to what was deemed "the warmest winter on record," the unseasonably mild December weather, winter arrived with a vengeance.

But somehow, the man-made global warming advocates have been doing their best to spin the winter weather as further proof that Armageddon is rapidly approaching. Just as they have tried to do with any other empirical evidence questioning their beliefs.

Is global warming the danger that some would suggest? Despite the best efforts of the man-made global warming advocates to silence anyone suggesting otherwise, there are, indeed, a number of scientific critics who question whether global warming is a problem, and that the impact of human activity on global warming is negligible at best.

But because the global warming debate has long since become more political than scientific, there are increasingly fewer resources, and recourses, for anyone not in lockstep with man-made global warming advocates. As a result, those who would question the validity of the man-made global warming advocates find themselves facing a new inquisition. Recently, one of the man-made global warming advocates working for The Weather Channel, Heidi Cullen, stated "If a meteorologist can't speak to the fundamental science of climate change, then maybe the (American Meteorological Society) shouldn't give them a seal of approval." Other man-made global warming advocates have been even more dismissive of critics. A CBS reporter compared skeptics to Holocaust deniers, and an environmentalist magazine writer states "We should have war crimes trials for these bastards (global warming skeptics), some sort of climate Nuremburg."

Somehow lost in the call for a new inquisition is the memory of the old inquisition, and how some 400 years ago, a scientist named Galileo was subject to some serious sanctions for his claim that the earth revolved around the sun, not, as the consensus of religious and scientific leaders believed, that the sun revolved around the earth. The modern-day environmental extremists, the foremost proponents of man-made global warming, are as fervent in their beliefs as the religious leaders of Galileo's time, and have embraced their religion of environmentalism as closely as did the Pope and the bishops who threatened Galileo with excommunication did their's. It is because of that extremist influence that many scientists have discovered the best way to get grant money is to curry the favor of those extremists, just as the scientists of Galileo's time discovered the best way to ensure their future was to avoid doing anything that would result in a charge of heresy.

Not surprisingly, scientists who are global warming skeptics are invariably castigated as being under the financial influence of the oil industry, or any other industry which questions global warming, while those who provide support for the environmental extremist cause are never questioned about their financial support.

Historically, there is no question that there has been significant climate change throughout the history of the earth. As recently as 200 years ago, the world was coming out of what has been termed the "Little Ice Age," a period that may have started as early as the 13th century or as late at the 16th, but which unquestionably created considerable havoc in societies which were ill-equipped to handle such changes. And it was only 30 years ago that there was more than a little concern about the possible arrival of a new period of global cooling, a potential new ice age.

Invariably, the man-made global warming advocates point to their computer models to portend the future and the severity of the global warming threat. That, however, can create inexplicable problems. In 2005, Hurricane Katrina hammered New Orleans and much of the Gulf Coast, and Katrina wasn't the only hurricane to create havoc. The 2005 hurricane season was, the global warming advocates intoned, a precursor of what was to come, and what would be coming in 2006, they predicted, would be 17 major tropical storms, resulting in five major hurricanes that would savage the United States. As it turned out, the United States survived 2006 without a major hurricane. But somehow, a major winter storm showed up. Even if it didn't register on the latest computer models.

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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 generally 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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