Ouch!

Christopher Monckton of Brenchley Speaks Out Again

Monckton is a fiercely intelligent British aristocrat. The American Physical Society, a forum on physics and society, has recently published a thorough critique of the IPCC's pseudo-science by Monckton. Those of you that love equations will enjoy. The conclusion to the paper is worth quoting in full:

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.

In short, we must get the science right, or we shall get the policy wrong. If the concluding equation in this analysis (Eqn. 30) is correct, the IPCC’s estimates of climate sensitivity must have been very much exaggerated. There may, therefore, be a good reason why, contrary to the projections of the models on which the IPCC relies, temperatures have not risen for a decade and have been falling since the phase-transition in global temperature trends that occurred in late 2001. Perhaps real-world climate sensitivity is very much below the IPCC’s estimates. Perhaps, therefore, there is no “climate crisis” at all. At present, then, in policy terms there is no case for doing anything. The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.

Read the full text here.

As credulous politicians in both Australia and New Zealand are currently trying to talk up emissions trading schemes, claiming that they will deliver both economic growth and wealth, claims that are deceptive, misleading and downright dishonest, we stand at the edge of the precipice. In 1930, a recession turned into a five year world-wide depression, because of incompetence and diametrically-wrong government policies. It is now highly likely that we will see a replay mutatis mutandis of that folly, which resulted in extreme suffering of millions. In fact, with biofuel madness it has already begun.

Once analyzed rigorously, the IPCC's formulations and pronouncements have turned out to be hot air in search of whispers. Any government that devises economic and social policies based on such folly makes itself unfit to govern. As Monckton says, if you don't get the science right, you shall get the policies wrong. How true.