Global warming is just HALF what we said: World's top climate scientists admit computers got the effects of greenhouse gases wrong

Article below from the Mass-market: "Daily Mail"

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has changed its story after issuing stern warnings about climate change for years

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.

They are cited worldwide to justify swingeing fossil fuel taxes and subsidies for ‘renewable’ energy.

Yet the leaked report makes the extraordinary concession that the world has been warming at only just over half the rate claimed by the IPCC in its last assessment,  published in 2007.

Back then, it said that the planet was warming at a rate of 0.2C every decade – a figure it claimed was in line with the forecasts made by computer climate models.

But the new report says the true figure since 1951 has been only 0.12C per decade – a rate far below even the lowest computer prediction.

The 31-page ‘summary for policymakers’ is based on a more technical 2,000-page analysis which will be issued at the same time. It also surprisingly reveals: IPCC scientists accept their forecast computers may have exaggerated the effect of increased carbon emissions on world temperatures  – and not taken enough notice of natural variability.

* They recognise 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.

* They admit large parts of the world were as warm as they are now for decades at a time between 950 and 1250 AD – centuries before the Industrial Revolution, and when the population and CO2 levels were both much lower.

* The IPCC admits that while computer models forecast a decline in Antarctic sea ice, it has actually grown to a new record high. Again, the IPCC cannot say why.

* A forecast in the 2007 report that hurricanes would become more intense has simply been dropped, without mention.

This year has been one of the quietest hurricane seasons in history and the US is currently enjoying its longest-ever period – almost eight years – without a single hurricane of Category 3 or above making landfall.
graphic

One of the report’s own authors, Professor Myles Allen, the director of Oxford University’s Climate Research Network, last night said this should be the last IPCC assessment – accusing its cumbersome production process of ‘misrepresenting how science works’.

Despite the many scientific uncertainties disclosed by the leaked report, it nonetheless draws familiar, apocalyptic conclusions – insisting that the IPCC is more confident than ever that global warming is mainly humans’ fault.

It says the world will continue to warm catastrophically unless there is drastic action to curb greenhouse gases – with big rises in sea level, floods, droughts and the disappearance of the Arctic icecap.

Last night Professor Judith Curry, head of climate science at Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, said the leaked summary 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.

For example, in the new report, the IPCC says it is ‘extremely likely’ – 95 per cent certain – that human  influence caused more than half  the temperature rises from 1951 to 2010, up from ‘very confident’ –  90 per cent certain – in 2007.

Prof Curry said: ‘This is incomprehensible to me’ – adding that the IPCC projections are ‘overconfident’, especially given the report’s admitted areas of doubt.

Starting a week tomorrow, about 40 of the 250 authors who contributed to the report – and supposedly produced a definitive scientific consensus – will hold a four-day meeting in Stockholm, together with representatives of most of the 195 governments that fund the IPCC, established in 1998 by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP).

The governments have tabled 1,800 questions and are demanding major revisions, starting with the failure to account for the pause.

Prof Curry said she hoped that  the ‘inconsistencies will be pointed out’ at the meeting, adding: ‘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.’ Others agree that the unwieldy and expensive IPCC assessment process has now run its course.

Prof Allen said: ‘The idea of producing a document of near-biblical infallibility is a misrepresentation of how science works, and we need to look very carefully about what the IPCC does in future.’

Climate change sceptics are more outspoken. 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 answers .... to explain why there is a widening gap between predictions and reality’.

The Mail on Sunday has also seen an earlier draft of the report, dated October last year. There are many striking differences between it and the current, ‘final’ version.

The 2012 draft makes no mention of the pause and, far from admitting that the  Middle Ages were unusually warm, it states that today’s temperatures are the highest for at least 1,300 years, as it did in 2007. Prof Allen said the change ‘reflects greater uncertainty about what was happening around the last millennium but one’.

A further change in the new version is the first-ever scaling down of a crucial yardstick, the ‘equilibrium climate sensitivity’ – the extent to which the world is meant to warm each time CO2 levels double.

As things stand, the atmosphere is expected to have twice as much CO2 as in pre-industrial times by about 2050. In 2007, the IPCC said the ‘likeliest’ figure was 3C, with up to 4.5C still ‘likely’.

Now it does not give a ‘likeliest’ value and admits it is ‘likely’ it may be as little as 1.5C – so giving the world many more decades to work out how to reduce carbon emissions before temperatures rise to dangerous levels.

As a result of the warming pause, several recent peer-reviewed scientific studies have  suggested that the true figure for the sensitivity is much lower than anyone – the IPCC included – previously thought: probably less than 2C.

Last night IPCC communications chief Jonathan Lynn refused to comment, saying the leaked report was ‘still a work in progress’.

The Met Office said it would examine the paper and respond in due course.

Q and A on the changed IPCC pronouncements

What they say: ‘The rate of warming since 1951 [has been] 0.12C per decade.’

What this means: In their last hugely influential report in 2007, the IPCC claimed the world was warming at 0.2C per decade. Here they admit there has been a massive cut in the speed of global warming – although it’s buried in a section on the recent warming ‘pause’. The true figure, it now turns out, is not only just over half what they thought – it’s below their lowest previous estimate.

What they say: ‘Surface temperature reconstructions show multi-decadal intervals during the Medieval Climate Anomaly  (950-1250) that were in some regions as warm as in the late 20th Century.’

What this means: As recently as October 2012, in an earlier draft of this report, the IPCC was adamant that the world is warmer than at any time for at least 1,300 years. Their new inclusion  of the ‘Medieval Warm Period’ – long before the Industrial Revolution and  its associated fossil fuel burning – is a concession that its earlier statement  is highly questionable.

What they say: ‘Models do not generally reproduce the observed reduction in surface warming trend over the last 10 - 15 years.’

What this means: The ‘models’ are computer forecasts, which the IPCC admits failed to ‘see... a reduction in the warming trend’. In fact, there has been no statistically significant warming at all for almost 17 years – as first reported by this newspaper last October, when the Met Office tried to deny this ‘pause’ existed.In its 2012 draft, the IPCC didn’t mention it either. Now it not only accepts it is  real, it admits that its climate models  totally failed to predict it.

What they say: ‘There is medium confidence that this difference between models and observations is to a substantial degree caused by unpredictable climate variability, with possible contributions from inadequacies in the solar, volcanic, and aerosol forcings used by the models and, in some models, from too strong a response to increasing greenhouse-gas forcing.’

What this means: The IPCC knows the pause is  real, but has no idea what is causing it. It could be natural climate variability, the sun, volcanoes – and crucially, that the computers have been allowed to give too much weight to the effect carbon dioxide emissions (greenhouse gases) have on temperature change.

What they say: ‘Climate models now include more cloud and aerosol processes, but there remains low confidence in the representation and quantification of these processes in models.’

What this means: Its models don’t accurately forecast the impact of fundamental aspects of the atmosphere – clouds, smoke and dust.

What they say: ‘Most models simulate a small decreasing trend in Antarctic sea ice extent, in contrast  to the small increasing trend in observations... There is low confidence in the scientific understanding of the small observed increase in Antarctic sea ice extent.’

What this means: The models said Antarctic ice would decrease. It’s actually increased, and the IPCC doesn’t know why.

What they say: ‘ECS is likely in the range 1.5C to 4.5C... The lower limit of the assessed likely range is thus less than the 2C in the [2007 report], reflecting the evidence from new studies.’

What this means: ECS – ‘equilibrium climate sensitivity’ – is an estimate of how much the world will warm every time carbon dioxide levels double. A high value means we’re heading for disaster. Many recent studies say that previous IPCC claims, derived from the computer models, have been way too high. It looks as if they’re starting to take notice, and so are scaling down their estimate for the first time.

SOURCE




‘Children of skeptical reporter should murder him’: vile abuse on Guardian site

The Mail on Sunday’s report last week that Arctic ice has had a massive rebound this year from its 2012 record low was followed up around the world – and recorded 174,200 Facebook ‘shares’, by some distance a record for an article on the MailOnline website.

But the article and its author  also became the object of extraordinarily vitriolic attacks from climate commentators  who refuse to accept any evidence that may unsettle  their view of the science.

A Guardian website article claimed our report was ‘delusional’ because it ignored what it called an ‘Arctic death spiral’ caused by global warming.

Beneath this, some readers who made comments had their posts removed by the site moderator, because they ‘didn’t abide by our community standards’.

But among those that still remain on the site is one which likens the work of David Rose – who is Jewish – to Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic rant Mein Kampf.

Another suggests it would be reasonable if he were to be murdered by his own children.  A comment under the name DavidFTA read: ‘In a few years, self-defence is going to be made  a valid defence for parricide [killing one’s own father], so Rose’s children will have this article to present in their defence at the trial.’

Critics of the article entirely ignored its equally accurate statement that there is mounting evidence the Arctic sea ice retreat has in the past been cyclical: there were huge melts in the 1920s, followed by later advances.

Some scientists believe that  this may happen again, and may already be under way – delaying the date when the ice cap  might vanish by decades or  even centuries.

Another assault was mounted by Bob Ward, spokesman for the Grantham Institute for Climate Change at the London School  of Economics.  Mr Ward tweeted that the article was ‘error-strewn’.

The eminent US expert Professor Judith Curry, who unlike Mr Ward is a climate scientist with a long list of  peer-reviewed publications to  her name, disagreed.

On her blog Climate Etc she defended The Mail on Sunday, saying the article contained ‘good material’, and issued a tweet which challenged Mr Ward to say what these ‘errors’ were.

He has yet to reply.

SOURCE




British Met office calculations way off

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.

The Met Office model’s current value for the ‘equilibrium climate sensitivity’ (ECS) – how much hotter the world will get each time CO2 doubles – is 4.6C. This  is above the IPCC’s own ‘likely’ range and the 95 per cent certainty’ level established by recent peer-reviewed research.

Lewis’s paper is scathing about the ‘future warming’ document issued by the Met Office in July, which purported to explain why the current 16-year global warming ‘pause’ is unimportant, and does not mean the ECS is lower than previously thought.

Lewis says the document made misleading claims about other scientists’ work – for example, misrepresenting important details of a study by a team that included Lewis and 14 other  IPCC experts. The team’s paper, published in the prestigious journal Nature Geoscience in May, said the best estimate of the ECS was 2C or less – well under half the Met Office estimate.

He also gives evidence that another key Met Office model is inherently skewed. The result is that it will always produce  high values for CO2-induced warming, no matter how its control knobs are tweaked, because its computation of the  cooling effect of smoke and dust  pollution – what scientists call ‘aerosol forcing’ – is simply incompatible with the real world.

This has serious implications,  because the Met Office’s HadCM3 model is used to determine the Government’s climate projections, which influence policy.

Mr Lewis concludes that the Met Office modelling is ‘fundamentally unsatisfactory, because it effectively rules out from the start the possibility that both aerosol forcing and climate sensitivity are modest’. Yet this, he writes, ‘is the combination that recent observations support’.

SOURCE




Monckton dynamites the "97% consensus"

The Viscount Monckton has written to the editor of Environmental Research Letters and asked that the 97% consensus paper by Cook et al. be withdrawn due to its sheer mendacity.  I have received a copy of Monckton's very thorough letter and offer some excerpts from it below:

The paper claimed a 97.1% “scientific consensus” among the abstracts of 11,944 climate change papers published from 1991-2012. The true “consensus” was not 97.1%. It was 0.3%.

The defective paper’s introduction said: “We examined a large sample of the scientific literature on global CC [the abstracts of 11,944 papers on climate change], published over a 21 year period [1991-2012], in order to determine the level of scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW (anthropogenic global warming, or AGW)”.

Computerized and manual examination by Legates et al. (2013) of the authors’ data-file, made available only some weeks after the paper had appeared, showed that on that file the authors had marked as few as 64 abstracts out of 11,944 (0.5% of the entire sample) as explicitly endorsing that “scientific consensus” as defined in the introduction to their paper. Legates et al., on further examining the 64 abstracts, found that only 41 of them, or 0.3% of the entire sample, had in fact explicitly endorsed that “scientific consensus”.

However, the defective paper you published concluded with these words: “Among papers expressing a position on AGW, an overwhelming percentage (97.2% based on self-ratings, 97.1% based on abstract ratings) endorses the scientific consensus on AGW.”

The authors had stated at the outset their intention to determine the level of “scientific consensus that human activity is very likely causing most of the current GW (anthropogenic global warming, or AGW)”.  They had listed this standard, quantified definition of “scientific consensus” in their paper as

“(1) Explicit endorsement with quantification (explicitly states that humans are the primary cause of recent global warming)”,  the first of seven “levels of endorsement” to which they assigned the abstracts.

Yet they did not disclose in their paper how few abstracts – just 64 – they had marked as having stated support for that standard, quantified “scientific consensus”.

To conceal how very small this number was, they added together all of the abstracts they had assigned to the first three of their seven categories, treating all three categories as one, and did not state the three values separately. An impartial peer reviewer would have spotted this.

The seven categories or “levels of endorsement” listed in the paper, with the abstracts marked on the data file or disclosed in the paper as falling within each category, were – Level of endorsement of “scientific consensus” in 11,944 abstracts

Marked

1 Explicitly states that humans are the primary cause of global warming 64
2 Explicit endorsement without quantification [We cause some warming] 922
3 Implicit endorsement  2910
4a No opinion 7930
4b Uncertain 40
5 Implicit rejection 54
6 Explicit rejection without quantification 15
7 Explicit rejection with quantification 9
Total 11,944

So Cook et al. totally misrepresented their own data





More than 170 missing in Colorado floods

Extensive drought  last year was an indicator of  global warming, so these "Biblical" floods must signify global cooling

BY AIR and by land, the rescue of hundreds of people stranded by epic US mountain flooding has accelerated as debris-filled rivers became muddy seas that extended into towns and farms miles from the Rockies.

Helicopters and hundreds of National Guard troops on Saturday searched mountainous terrain for people as food and water supplies ran low in remote communities cut off since Thursday.

Thousands were being driven from their homes in convoys.

For the first time since the harrowing floods began on Wednesday, Colorado got its first broad view of the devastation.

Four people have been confirmed dead since flooding began on Wednesday.

More than 170 people remained unaccounted for in Boulder County, but that number could include people who are still stranded or who escaped but have not made contact yet, said Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle.

Still more rain was expected on Saturday. And the outlook for anyone who preferred to stay behind was bleak: weeks without power, mobile phone service or running water.

SOURCE





Cockney Rebels against British solar farm

When developers started planning a solar farm in a picturesque village, perhaps they should have found out who lived there first.

Because then they’d have realised one of its residents fronts a band with ‘Rebel’ in the name ... so there was always going to be trouble.

Steve Harley, of 1970s rock group Cockney Rebel, has joined his fellow villagers to protest against plans to cover 40 acres of land in the Stour Valley with solar panels.

The unspoiled area was the subject of paintings by Constable and Gainsborough.

Under the plan, 25,000 panels surrounded by a security fence will be built in a field on the edge of Belchamp Otten in Essex.

Harley, 62, who made his name with hits including Make Me Smile (Come Up and See Me),  has lived in the village for 25 years.  He said: ‘It is a shockingly ugly plan that will ruin a beautiful part of our heritage.

‘It won’t create any jobs, it won’t benefit the village in any way at all and we fear that this will be the first of many similar applications for solar farms here.

‘We live among green fields of grass, yellow fields of corn and blue fields of flax. These massive and monstrous fields of glass and alloy are unthinkable to those of us who love  the countryside.

‘Solar panels belong on brownfield sites and roof-tops – not on the fields of the Stour Valley,  an area painted by Constable  and Gainsborough.’

The developers claim the solar panels, which would provide power for up to 1,700 homes, will be mostly hidden from view. But residents who object to the scheme say the panels will be clearly visible for miles around.

Terry McGuire, chairman of Belchamp St Paul and Belchamp Otten parish council, said: ‘We fear these things might escalate – there is already talk of plans for even larger solar farms next door to this site.

'They will have a massive impact on this community and could open the floodgates, and we will strongly resist all such schemes.’

Local resident Andrew Clarke said: ‘We have one of the best unspoilt medieval landscapes in Britain which has been documented and to compromise it would set a depressing and irreversible precedent.’

Sovereign Energy Partners has applied for planning permission for the development, which is under consideration.  Charles Houston, a chartered  surveyor at the firm, said: ‘Following a generally positive response from the community we submitted our application to the council once we had ticked all the boxes.

'We understand residents’ concerns about cumulative impact but they are unfounded.  ‘We spent a lot of money preparing our landscape and visual impact assessment survey which covers all angles on that impact but if we have missed anything then the planning officer will ask us to carry out more.’

SOURCE




GREENIE ROUNDUP FROM AUSTRALIA

Three current articles below

Carbon tax to blame for loss, says senior Leftist

FORMER ACTU secretary Bill Kelty has accused Labor of underestimating Tony Abbott for years, declaring the party's breach of trust with voters over the carbon tax was a bigger cause of its defeat than the disunity cited by senior ALP figures.

Mr Kelty, who is backing Bill Shorten in the mould of Bob Hawke and Paul Keating to become the next ALP leader, said the seeds for last Saturday's loss could be traced back to the failure of Labor to explain to voters why Kevin Rudd was dumped in favour of Julia Gillard in 2010.

"To be honest, I think they lost the election in two points of history," Mr Kelty said.

"They didn't ever explain the change of leadership from Rudd to Gillard. Therefore they didn't lose the next election, but they didn't win it either. So there goes that first downward trend. People couldn't understand why it wasn't explained to them.

"Second, when Julia Gillard actually announced the Greens policy (of introducing a carbon tax), people saw it as a breach of faith, a breach of trust. When people have come to a view that they don't trust you, when you have broken a commitment to them, when enough people believe that, it gives them a great opportunity therefore not to be interested in politics, they just wait until the next election."

Mr Kelty's frank assessment contrasts with a raft of senior Labor MPs, including Tony Burke, Tanya Plibersek and Greg Combet, who have primarily blamed Labor's defeat on the leadership instability and party division.

Mr Kelty said when trust was lost between a government and voters over broken policy commitments, "You can see it".

"With Paul Keating, it was after the budget in 1993. People said: 'I think you have broken our commitment of trust, it's very hard for us to vote for you,' " he said. "When Anna Bligh decided to sell assets and she didn't explain it to the electorate beforehand, then it broke that covenant of trust.

"All the other things don't matter. When that essential covenant of trust between the electorate and those who are elected is broken, it's very, very hard to rebuild."

Asked about senior Labor MPs citing disunity for the defeat, he said: "You just think when that essential covenant of trust is broken, don't blame the media, don't blame all these petty divisions, always look for the fundamental cause. I think you learn in politics that the last thing you break is the covenant of trust."

Mr Kelty said Labor had underestimated Mr Abbott "for some years (and) you should never underestimate your opposition".

"Abbott has a lot of ability and works very hard," he said. "I think the best way to deal with Abbott is to deal with him honestly, combatively and fairly, and recognise his talent and work hard at it - the same way Abbott did against Rudd.

"If you want a lesson, then some of the lessons you get in life is that Howard stood up to Bob (Hawke), and to Paul Keating. He never beat them, in a sense, but he was a campaigner against them, was honorable, and he just worked assiduously at it."

He did not want to be critical of Anthony Albanese but believed Mr Shorten was better-placed to be the next leader.

"If the party wants to look to the next generation, look to the next generation, and I think Shorten is more of the next generation," he said.

Mr Shorten was an "old-fashioned leader, in the sense, that he is more Hawke, and more Keating, and more traditional Labor". "I think he's got to that point in his life where I think he has the maturity and the responsibility to lead the Labor Party," Mr Kelty said.

The process of opening up the leadership to party members had its advantages and disadvantages but "there's no point complaining about it".

'It gives the party an opportunity to give a legitimacy to a new leader," he said.

SOURCE

Coalition takes axe to climate programs

PUBLIC servants are drawing up plans to collapse 33 climate change schemes run by seven departments and eight agencies into just three bodies run by two departments under a substantial rewrite of the administration of carbon abatement schemes under the Coalition.

Coalition climate action spokesman Greg Hunt briefed public servants on the dramatic restructure of the federal climate change bureaucracy before the election was called and yesterday confirmed the Coalition was committed to proceeding with the plan.

Under the simplification, the Department of the Environment and the Department of Resources and Energy will run all of the climate change programs under the Coalition's direct-action program.

The move is forecast to save the government tens of millions of dollars. The Coalition budgeted for savings of $7 million this financial year rising to $13m in each of the next three years for a saving of $45m across the budget period.

The changes will see all carbon abatement schemes run by three bodies: the Australian Renewable Energy Agency, which will be overseen by the Department of Resources and Energy; and the Clean Energy Regulator and Low Carbon Australia, which will be run by the Department of the Environment.

The Climate Change Authority, which sets emissions caps, the Climate Commission, which has conducted research into climate change, and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which funds renewable technologies, are all slated to be abolished under the plans.

Treasury has responsibility for Low Carbon Australia and the CEFC, while the Industry Department has control over a range of clean technology programs. The Department of Agriculture runs a series of carbon farming programs, while the Department of Families runs household assistance packages, home energy savings programs and the remote indigenous energy program.

Under the Coalition, Low Carbon Australia will be responsible for purchasing emissions reductions under the Coalition's direct action program.

"What we've said is we will commence the merger as soon as the process of appointing the ministry and swearing in the ministry has been complete," Mr Hunt told the 2GB radio station in Sydney yesterday. "To be frank, during the course of the pre-election period, when we were allowed to consult with departments, we laid out the fact that there would be a merger. "We were express and clear and absolute about that, and we indicated we would like it to begin right from the outset. I imagine that the public servants are preparing to do that. Our agenda was clear and open and that is an official process we'll go through as soon as possible."

The moves came as Tony Abbott continued briefings with senior public servants, including the secretary of the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet Ian Watt, as he continued his transition-to-government plans.

The CEFC confirmed yesterday it had stopped making loans for energy efficiency and clean energy programs. Staff at the $10 billion green bank are seeking a meeting with the incoming Abbott government as a top priority.

"The CEFC congratulates the new government upon its election and will welcome the opportunity to consult with the incoming responsible ministers," the bank's chief executive Oliver Yates said. "The CEFC has approached the Coalition to engage in consultations about the transition and looks forward to engaging with the new government concerning how its activities can best be supportive of their policy priorities under Direct Action."

The Coalition will need to legislate to abolish the CEFC, which has amassed a $560m investment portfolio and leveraged $1.6bn in private sector investment. But the bank is understood to be lobbying a Coalition government to utilise its staff and assets as part of its Direct Action scheme, and change its investment mandate so it could work within the framework of the Coalition's policy.

An Abbott government will need to legislate if it seeks to abolish the Climate Change Authority, which is proceeding with work on a draft report about emissions reductions targets that is due to be completed next month. In the wake of Labor and Greens declarations that they would oppose the abolition of carbon pricing, Mr Abbott said he expected the parliament to "respect the mandate that the new government has".

"It will obviously be an issue (for the Labor Party) . . . whether it learns from its mistakes and whether it's prepared to accept that it simply got it wrong when it came to these toxic new taxes," Mr Abbott said.

SOURCE

Climate sceptic MP Dennis Jensen wants to be science minister

Coalition MP Dennis Jensen, who is a vocal climate science sceptic, has called on Prime Minister-elect Tony Abbott to appoint him as science minister.

"At the moment to be honest I'm feeling under-utilised," said Dr Jensen, the member for Tangney in Western Australia, who has a master's degree in physics and a PhD in material science.

"I think that I've got a lot to offer," he added. "I've got some unique attributes."

Mr Abbott was expected to give the science portfolio to Victorian MP Sophie Mirabella, but she may lose her seat of Indi to the popular independent Cathy McGowan.

Dr Jensen suggests he would be better qualified than anyone to take charge of science.

"I'm not aware of any other scientist [in the Parliament]," he said.

Dr Jensen has made headlines by questioning the scientific consensus that humans are contributing to global warming.

Dr Jensen believes carbon dioxide is contributing somewhat to global temperatures, but not as much as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is suggesting.

Moreover, Dr Jensen does not think governments should be taking urgent action to reduce carbon dioxide emissions.

"In the climate area there is appeal to authority and appeal to consensus, neither of which is scientific at all," Dr Jensen told Fairfax Media on Thursday.

"Scientific reality doesn't give a damn who said it and it doesn't give a damn how many say it."

It was wrong to accept the view of the 97 per cent of climate scientists who agree that climate-warming trends over the past century are very likely caused by human activities, because "the argument of consensus . . . is a flawed argument," Dr Jensen said.

The colourful Englishman, Lord Christopher Monckton, who toured Australia to debunk the "bogus science" of global warming, was closer to the mark, Dr Jensen suggested.

"Most of the stuff [Lord Monckton] says is entirely reasonable," Dr Jensen said.

"Some of it I don't agree with but on the whole a lot of what he says is in my view correct."

Dr Jensen also commended the work of Richard Lindzen, professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Professor Lindzen is known as one of the most qualified global-warming sceptics in international science.

Dr Jensen said if he were appointed science minister, his vision for science in Australia would centre on encouraging more young people to study science and fixing up the funding model of the Australian Research Council to encourage more innovation.

SOURCE

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