Other voices on climate change

“Regarding the currently popular theory that mankind is responsible for global warming, I am very pleased to deliver good news from the front lines of climate change research. … Despite decades of persistent uncertainty over how sensitive the climate system is to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, we now have new satellite evidence which strongly suggests that the climate system is much less sensitive than is claimed by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

“Another way of saying this is that the real climate system appears to be dominated by “negative feedbacks” — instead of the “positive feedbacks” which are displayed by all twenty computerized climate models utilized by the IPCC…. If true, an insensitive climate system would mean that we have little to worry about in the way of manmade global warming and associated climate change. And, as we will see, it would also mean that the warming we have experienced in the last 100 years is mostly natural. Of course, if climate change is mostly natural then it is largely out of our control, and is likely to end - if it has not ended already, since satellite-measured global temperatures have not warmed for at least seven years now.”

Click on “Continue Reading” for the full text of Spencer’s testimony to the U.S. Environment and Public Works committee follows. The text plus Spencer’s graphs and charts can be found at this site.

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“Even if temperature had risen above natural variability, the recent solar Grand Maximum may have been chiefly responsible. Even if the sun were not chiefly to blame for the past half-century’s warming, the IPCC has not demonstrated that, since CO2 occupies only one-ten-thousandth part more of the atmosphere that it did in 1750, it has contributed more than a small fraction of the warming. Even if carbon dioxide were chiefly responsible for the warming that ceased in 1998 and may not resume until 2015, the distinctive, projected fingerprint of anthropogenic “greenhouse-gas” warming is entirely absent from the observed record.

“Even if the fingerprint were present, computer models are long proven to be inherently incapable of providing projections of the future state of the climate that are sound enough for policymaking. Even if per impossibile the models could ever become reliable, the present paper demonstrates that it is not at all likely that the world will warm as much as the IPCC imagines.

“Even if the world were to warm that much, the overwhelming majority of the scientific, peer-reviewed literature does not predict that catastrophe would ensue. Even if catastrophe might ensue, even the most drastic proposals to mitigate future climate change by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide would make very little difference to the climate. Even if mitigation were likely to be effective, it would do more harm than good: already millions face starvation as the dash for biofuels takes agricultural land out of essential food production: a warning that taking precautions, “just in case”, can do untold harm unless there is a sound, scientific basis for them. Finally, even if mitigation might do more good than harm, adaptation as (and if) necessary would be far more cost-effective and less likely to be harmful.”

To read the rest of this article, click here.

“There is little doubt that globally averaged temperatures are unusually warm today (at this writing, 2008). While a majority of climate researchers believe that this warmth is mostly (or completely) due to the activities of mankind, this is as much a statement of faith as it is of science. For in order to come to such a conclusion, we would need to know how much of the temperature increase we’ve seen since the 1800’s is natural. There has not yet been a single peer-reviewed scientific study which has ruled out natural climate variability as the cause of most of our recent warmth — for instance, a small change in globally averaged cloud cover. …

“The fact is, science doesn’t understand why these natural climate variations occur, and can not reliably distinguish between natural and possible human influences on global temperatures. So, if scientists have no other natural explanation for a warming trend, they tend to assume that it is man-made. For instance, you might have heard claims to the effect that no peer-reviewed scientific study has refuted the claim that global warming is man-made. Well, there have indeed been some papers that have at least questioned the theory that our current warmth is man-made….but the publishing of alternative explanations is hindered by the fact that our long-term global climate observations (e.g. of cloud characteristics) are not good enough to measure the small changes that might offer an alternative explanation for our current warmth.

“Science can not deal with what we can not measure. But scientists could at least admit to incomplete knowledge — unfortunately, most of them do not.”

To read the rest of this excellent article, click here.

“Disconcerting as it may be to true believers in global warming, the average temperature on Earth has remained steady or slowly declined during the past decade, despite the continued increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide, and now the global temperature is falling precipitously. All four agencies that track Earth’s temperature (the Hadley Climate Research Unit in Britain, the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies in New York, the Christy group at the University of Alabama, and Remote Sensing Systems Inc in California) report that it cooled by about 0.7C in 2007. This is the fastest temperature change in the instrumental record and it puts us back where we were in 1930. If the temperature does not soon recover, we will have to conclude that global warming is over.

“All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead. It will be difficult for people to face the truth when their reputations, careers, government grants or hopes for social change depend on global warming, but the fate of civilization may be at stake”

To read this article by Phil Chapman, a geophysicist and astronautical engineer who was the first Australian to become a NASA astronaut, click here.

“There is, of course serious debate among scientists about the actual technical content of the [IPCC's] roughly 1,000-page Working Group I report, especially its politically motivated Summary for Policymakers, which is often the only part read by politicians and non-scientists. The technical content can be difficult for non-scientists to follow and so most people simply assume that if large numbers of scientists agree, they must be right. Consensus never proves the truth of a scientific claim, but is somehow widely believed to do so for the IPCC reports, so we need to ask how many scientists really did agree with the most important IPCC conclusion, namely that humans are causing significant climate change - in other words the key parts of WG I?

“The numbers of scientist reviewers involved in WG I is actually less than a quarter of the whole, a little more than 600 in total. The other 1,900 reviewers assessed the other working group reports. They had nothing to say about the causes of climate change or its future trajectory. Still, 600 “scientific expert reviewers” sounds pretty impressive. After all, they submitted their comments to the IPCC editors who assure us that “all substantive government and expert review comments received appropriate consideration”. And since these experts reviewers are all listed in Annex III of the report, they must have endorsed it, right?

“Wrong.”

To read more of this article by Tom Harris and John McLean for Australia’s On-line Opinion website, click here.

“Even among global warming alarmists, projections of global warming for 2100 have decreased significantly since early modeling efforts. The response to a doubling of CO2 exhibited by the many models used for the Third Assessment Report range between 2.7° and 5.4° F. If such trends continue — and all models except one (the Canadian model) exhibit a gradual, consistent rise over time — global air temperatures should increase by 2.5° F and air temperatures in the United States by about 1° F during the 21st century. Most of this warming should occur in the coldest winter air masses, while summer rainfall should increase slightly. Such a warming could hardly be called unprecedented or catastrophic.

“In general, our climate has and will continue to exhibit intricate patterns not reliably reproduced by global climate simulations, thus underscoring their scientific incompleteness — and lack of reliability for prediction of future climate scenarios.”

To read this article by David R. Legates and published by the National Centre for Policy Analysis, click here.

“We appear to be overplaying this global warming issue as global warming is nothing new. It has happened in the past, not once but several times, giving rise to glacial-interglacial cycles. We appear to be now only in the middle of an interglacial cycle showing a trend toward warming as warming and cooling are global and have occurred on such a scale when humans had not appeared on the planet. If we read geology correctly, the earth we live on is not dead but is dynamic and is continuously changing. The causes of these changes are cosmogenic and nothing we are able to do is likely to halt or reverse such processes.”

For the rest of this article by B.P. Radhakrishna, President of the Geological Society of India, click here.

“What Friedrich Hayek called the “fatal conceit” — the idea that government can know the future’s possibilities and can and should control the future’s unfolding — is the left’s agenda. The left exists to enlarge the state’s supervision of life, narrowing individual choices in the name of collective goods. Hence the left’s hostility to markets. And to automobiles — people going wherever they want whenever they want.

“Today’s “green left” is the old “red left” revised. Marx, a short-term pessimist but a long-term optimist, prophesied deepening class conflict but thought that history’s violent dialectic would culminate in a revolution that would usher in material abundance and such spontaneous cooperation that the state would wither away. The green left preaches pessimism: Ineluctable scarcities (of energy, food, animal habitat, humans’ living space) will require a perpetual regime of comprehensive rationing. The green left understands that the direct route to government control of almost everything is to stigmatize, as a planetary menace, something involved in almost everything — carbon.”

To read the full article by Washington Post columnist George Will, click here.

“The problem with the alleged scientific consensus is that it has always been a half-truth; or less than half, depending on how you calculate. We are in a natural warm period. That’s true, but Gore, and other activists - including the IPCC - stepped over the boundary when giving the impression that scientific consensus supported a list of scary predictions intended to promote political action, as well as the claim that the primary cause of global warming is human pollution, especially in the form of carbon dioxide - CO2. Ice has been melting; but since a warm period is pretty much opposite an ice-age, that is what one would expect. Polar bears are still killing and eating seals, happily I suppose.

“In the scientific debate, the straw that broke the camel’s back was the last decade of real temperature data. Reality just hasn’t held with the IPCC predictions. Not only has it not gotten hotter at an increasing rate, as Al Gore’s presentations with absolute certainty predicted, it just hasn’t gotten hotter. CO2 has been increasing but there’s nothing to suggest that it’s a dangerous substance. The evidence actually contradicts the idea that it is a major contributor to warming. There’s more CO2 but it’s not getting hotter. You don’t have cause and effect if you don’t get the predicted effect. The so-called “global warming skeptics” have won. Al Gore and the IPCC are wrong.”

To read the full article by Roger F. Gay, click here.

“Consensus” climate science continually complains that the lists of those who oppose the human-caused global warming hypothesis, such as the 31,000 scientists who have signed the Oregon Petition, are inflated by scientists who are not climate experts, and therefore not qualified to have an opinion, as opposed to the IPCC’s “2,500″ contributors, who do have that right. This post, from Climate Resistance, examines the British and U.S. membership of one IPCC report and discovers that most of those listed as contributors — surprise! — aren’t climate scientists, either. It notes:

“We downloaded IPCC WGII’s latest report on “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability”. There were 380 contributors to the report. … Of the 51 UK contributors to the report, there were 5 economists, 3 epidemiologists, 5 who were either zoologists, entomologists, or biologists. 5 worked in civil engineering or risk management/insurance. 7 had specialisms in physical geography (we gave the benefit of the doubt to some academics whose profiles weren’t clear about whether they are physical or human geographers). And just 10 have specialisms in geophysics, climate science or modelling, or hydrology. But there were 15 who could only be described as social scientists. If we take the view that economics is a social science, that makes 20 social scientists.

“Of 70 US contributors, there were 7 economists, 13 social scientists, 3 epidemiologists, 10 biologists/ecologists, 5 engineers, 2 modellers/statisticians, 1 full-time activist (and 1 part time), 5 were in public health and policy, and 4 were unknowns. 17 worked in earth/atmospheric sciences.”

To read the full article click here.