05 MAR 2010

The IPCC’s climate “science”

The IPCC’s 1990 First Assessment Report made wildly-exaggerated projections of how global temperature would rise. Yet for the past 15 years there has been no statistically-significant “global warming” at all, as a leading IPCC scientist has now admitted. For nine years there has been a rapid cooling trend. None of the IPCC’s computer models predicted that.

The 1995 Second Assessment Report, in the scientists’ final draft, said five times there was no discernible human influence on climate. Yet one man rewrote the report, replacing all five statements with a single statement saying precisely the opposite. He later said IPCC processes permitted this single-handed rewrite, which has been the official policy ever since.

The 2001 Third Assessment Report contained a graph contradicting the First Report by falsely abolishing the medieval warm period, which, like the Roman, Minoan, and Holocene optima, and 7500 of the past 11,400 years, and each of the four previous interglacial warm periods, and most of the past 600 million years, was warmer than today. Some 800 scientists from more than 460 institutions in 42 countries over 25 years have written peer-reviewed, learned papers providing evidence that the Middle Ages were warmer than today.

The 2007 Fourth Assessment Report’s key conclusion that, with 90% confidence, most of the warming since 1950 was manmade is disproven by measurements. A natural decline in global cloud cover from 1983-2001 (Pinker et al., 2005) caused most of that warming.

The IPCC’s false “90% confidence” estimate was not reached by scientists: it was decided by a show of hands among political representatives who had few scientific qualifications.

A lead author of the Fourth Assessment Report admits that, “to influence governments”, he knowingly inserted a falsehood to the effect that the Himalayas will be ice-free in 25 years.

Many other false conclusions of the IPCC were authored not by scientists but by campaigning journalists, members of environmental propaganda groups or IPCC bureaucrats.

The first table of figures in the IPCC’s 2007 Report did not add up. Bureaucrats had inserted it, overstating tenfold 40 years’ contributions of Greenland and Antarctic ice to sea-level rise.

The IPCC’s conclusion that CO2 has a major warming effect is false. In the pre-Cambrian era 750 million years ago the Earth was an ice-planet, with glaciers at sea level at the Equator: yet atmospheric CO2 concentration was 300,000 ppmv – 700 times today’s 388 ppmv. If CO2 had the large warming effect the IPCC imagines, the glaciers could not have been there.

In the Cambrian era 550 million years ago, CO2 concentration was 7000 ppmv (IPCC, 2001): yet that was when the first calcite corals achieved algal symbiosis. In the Jurassic era 175 million years ago, CO2 concentration was 6000 ppmv (IPCC, 2001): yet that was when the first aragonite corals came into existence. While the oceans continue to run over rocks, they must remain pronouncedly alkaline. Ocean “acidification” is a chemical impossibility.

Many peer-reviewed papers (e.g. Douglass et al., 2004, 2008, 2009; Schwartz, 2007; Monckton, 2008; Lindzen & Choi, 2009) show that the IPCC has exaggerated the warming effect of greenhouse gases up to 7-fold. Without that exaggeration, there is no climate crisis.

The economics of “global warming”

Millions have died of starvation, or are menaced by it, because the world’s governments have unwisely trusted the UN’s climate panel (the IPCC) and the self-serving national scientific institutions that have profiteered by parroting its now-discredited findings.

The World Bank has reported that three-quarters of the doubling of world food prices that occurred two years ago is directly attributable to the global dash for biofuels.

Herr Ziegler, the UN’s Right-to-Food Rapporteur, has said that while millions are starving the diversion of farmland from food to biofuels is “a crime against humanity”.

Lord Stern’s discredited report on climate economics unrealistically adopted a near-zero discount rate for appraisal of “investment” in carbon-dioxide mitigation and doubled the IPCC’s already-exaggerated high-end estimate of the warming to be expected from CO2. Without these grave economic and scientific errors, no case for spending any taxpayers’ money on mitigation of CO2 emissions can be made.

A carbon-trading scheme that sets a low price for the right to emit a ton of carbon dioxide is merely a tax and does not affect the climate, while a high price drives our jobs and industries overseas to countries which emit more CO2 than us, raising mankind’s global CO2 footprint. The chief profiteers from carbon trading are banks.

A steelworks at Redcar is to close with the loss of 1700 jobs, because the European carbon-trading scheme has made it uneconomic. Precisely the same steelworks will be re-erected in India. Net effect on the climate: nil. Net effect on British workers’ jobs: catastrophic.

If we were to shut down the entire global carbon economy altogether, and go back to the Stone Age but without even the right to light a carbon-emitting fire in our caves, it would take 41 years to forestall just 1 C° of “global warming”. The cost is disproportionate.

Even if the IPCC were right in imagining that a doubling of CO2 concentration will cause as much as 3.26 ± 0.69 C° of “global warming”, adaptation as and if necessary would be orders of magnitude cheaper and more cost-effective than attempting to limit CO2 emissions.
 

“Global warming” profiteers

Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, who chairs IPCC’s climate science panel, is a railroad engineer. The Charity Commission is investigating TERI-Europe, a charity of which Pachauri and his predecessor as IPCC science chairman were trustees. The charity filed false accounts three years running, under-declaring its income by many hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Dr. “Phil” Jones, director of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, on which the IPCC has relied for its global temperature record, has stepped down after a whistleblower published emails between him and other leading IPCC scientists revealing fabrication, manipulation, concealment and destruction of scientific results.

Dr. Jones has admitted that his Unit has lost much of the data on which the IPCC relies. The Climategate files show his Unit received tens of millions in increased taxpayer funding so that it could investigate “global warming”.

Al Gore has made hundreds of millions from “global warming”. In 2007 a High Court judge found nine errors in his climate movie serious enough to require 77 pages of corrective guidance to be sent to every school in England.

As for Gore’s notion that sea level would imminently rise by 20 feet (0.61 m), the judge ruled: “The Armageddon scenario that he depicts is not based on any scientific view.” IPCC (2007) projects 1-2 ft by 2100: Mörner (2004, 2010) projects sea-level rise of just 4 ± 4 in.

Gore said a scientific study had found polar bears dying as they swam to find ice. In fact, Monnett & Gleason (2006) had reported just four bears killed in a bad storm. For 30 years there has been no decline in sea-ice in the Beaufort Sea, where the bears died. There are many times more polar bears today than in 1940.

Gore said Mount Kilimanjaro’s glacier had lost much of its ice because of “global warming”. In fact, the cause was desiccation of the atmosphere caused by regional cooling (Molg et al., 2003). Mean summit temperature has averaged –7 °C for 30 years and, in that time, summit temperature has never risen above –1.6 °C. The Fürtwängler glacier at the summit began receding in the 1880s, long before mankind could have had any influence over the climate. Half the glacier had gone before Hemingway wrote The Snows of Kilimanjaro in 1936.
 

Interim outline of what is to be done

Royal Commission on “global warming” science and economics

UKIP will appoint a Royal Commission on “global warming” science and economics, under a High Court Judge, with advocates on either side of the case, to examine and cross-examine the science and economics of “global warming” with all the evidential rigour of a court of law.

The remit of the Royal Commission will be to decide –
•	Whether and to what degree the IPCC has exaggerated climate sensitivity to CO2 or other greenhouse gases;
•	Whether and under what conditions, if any, the IPCC’s imagined consequences of the present rate of atmospheric CO2 enrichment will be beneficial or harmful;
•	Whether and under what conditions, if any, mitigation of “global warming” by reducing carbon emissions will be cheaper and more cost-effective than adaptation as, and if, necessary.
•	Whether and under what conditions any emissions-trading scheme can make any appreciable difference to the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere, and whether and to what degree, if any, any such difference would affect global surface temperature.
Other climate-change measures Pending the report of the Royal Commission, UKIP will immediately –
•	Repeal the Climate Change Act, and close the Climate Change Department.
•	Halt all UK contributions to the IPCC and to the UN Framework Convention;
•	Halt all UK contributions to any EU climate-change policy, including carbon trading;
•	Freeze all grant aid for scientific research into “global warming”.
In any event, UKIP will immediately –
•	Commission enough fossil-fuelled and nuclear power stations to meet demand;
•	Cease to subsidize wind-farms, on environmental and economic grounds;
•	Cease to subsidize any environmental or “global-warming” pressure-groups;
•	Forbid public authorities to make any “global-warming”-related expenditure;
•	Relate Met Office funding to the accuracy of its forecasts;
•	Ban “global warming” propaganda, such as Gore’s movie, in schools;
•	Divert a proportion of the billions now wasted on the non-problem of “global warming” towards solving the world’s real environmental problems.

UKIP has been calling for a rational, balanced approach to the climate debate since 2008, when extensive manipulation of scientific data first became clear. There must be an immediate halt to needless expenditure on the basis of a now-disproven hypothesis. Given our unprecedented national debt crisis, not a penny must be wasted, not a single job lost to satisfy vociferous but misguided campaigners, often led by ill-informed media celebrities, profiteering big businesses, insurance interests and banks. The correct policy approach to the non-problem of “global warming” is to have the courage to do nothing.

UKIP’s formal policy document on climate and energy will be published in March.