Here’s an interesting piece to have on hand for one of
those days when someone tries to convince you that there is “consensus” on
global warming.
Norm
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/11/05/nosplit/nwarm05.xml
Climate chaos? Don't
believe it
By Christopher
Monckton, Sunday Telegraph
Last Updated: 12:14am
GMT 05/11/2006
|
Download
Christopher Monckton's references and detailed calculations
[pdf] The
Stern report last week predicted dire economic and social effects of
unchecked global warming. In what many will see as a highly
controversial polemic, Christopher Monckton disputes the 'facts' of this
impending apocalypse and accuses the UN and its scientists of distorting
the truth
Last
week, Gordon Brown and his chief economist both said global warming was
the worst "market failure" ever. That loaded soundbite suggests that the
"climate-change" scare is less about saving the planet than, in Jacques
Chirac's chilling phrase, "creating world government". This week and
next, I'll reveal how politicians, scientists and bureaucrats contrived
a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions worthier
of St John the Divine than of science. Sir
Nicholas Stern's report on the economics of climate change, which was
published last week, says that the debate is over. It isn't. There are
more greenhouse gases in the air than there were, so the world should
warm a bit, but that's as far as the "consensus" goes. After the recent
hysteria, you may not find the truth easy to believe. So you can find all
my references and detailed calculations here. The
Royal Society says there's a worldwide scientific consensus. It brands
Apocalypse-deniers as paid lackeys of coal and oil corporations. I
declare my interest: I once took the taxpayer's shilling and advised
Margaret Thatcher, FRS, on scientific scams and scares. Alas, not a red
cent from Exxon. In 1988,
James Hansen, a climatologist, told the US Congress that temperature
would rise 0.3C by the end of the century (it rose 0.1C), and that sea
level would rise several feet (no, one inch). The UN set up a
transnational bureaucracy, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC). The UK taxpayer unwittingly meets the entire cost of its
scientific team, which, in 2001, produced the Third Assessment Report, a
Bible-length document presenting apocalyptic conclusions well beyond
previous reports. This week, I'll show how the UN undervalued the sun's
effects on historical and contemporary climate, slashed the natural
greenhouse effect, overstated the past century's temperature increase,
repealed a fundamental law of physics and tripled the man-made
greenhouse effect. Next
week, I'll demonstrate the atrocious economic, political and
environmental cost of the high-tax, zero-freedom, bureaucratic
centralism implicit in Stern's report; I'll compare the global-warming
scare with previous sci-fi alarums; and I'll show how the
environmentalists' "precautionary principle" (get the state to interfere
now, just in case) is killing people. So to
the scare. First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the last four
ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve of
temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look
similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN
didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in
temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels. Next,
the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at the end
of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist at
the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150
years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote:
"With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant
credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change.
They thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the
service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down.
A major person working in the area of climate change and global warming
sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the
Medieval Warm Period.' " So they
did. The UN's second assessment report, in 1996, showed a 1,000-year
graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was warmer than
today. But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no medieval
warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the warmest
for 1,000 years. The graph looked like an ice hockey-stick. The wrongly
flat AD1000-AD1900 temperature line was the shaft: the uptick from 1900
to 2000 was the blade. Here's how they did it: • They
gave one technique for reconstructing pre-thermometer temperature 390
times more weight than any other (but didn't say
so). • The
technique they overweighted was one which the UN's 1996 report had said
was unsafe: measurement of tree-rings from bristlecone pines. Tree-rings
are wider in warmer years, but pine-rings are also wider when there's
more carbon dioxide in the air: it's plant food. This carbon dioxide
fertilisation distorts the calculations. • They
said they had included 24 data sets going back to 1400. Without saying
so, they left out the set showing the medieval warm period, tucking it
into a folder marked "Censored Data". • They
used a computer model to draw the graph from the data, but scientists
later found that the model almost always drew hockey-sticks even if they
fed in random, electronic "red noise".
The
large, full-colour "hockey-stick" was the key graph in the UN's 2001
report, and the only one to appear six times. The Canadian Government
copied it to every household. Four years passed before a leading
scientific journal would publish the truth about the graph. Did the UN
or the Canadian government apologise? Of course not. The UN still uses
the graph in its publications. Even
after the "hockey stick" graph was exposed, scientific papers apparently
confirming its abolition of the medieval warm period appeared. The US
Senate asked independent statisticians to investigate. They found that
the graph was meretricious, and that known associates of the scientists
who had compiled it had written many of the papers supporting its
conclusion. The UN,
echoed by Stern, says the graph isn't important. It is. Scores of
scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global
and up to 3C warmer than now. Then, there were no glaciers in the
tropical Andes: today they're there. There were Viking farms in
Greenland: now they're under permafrost. There was little ice at the
North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in
1421 and found none. The
Antarctic, which holds 90 per cent of the world's ice and nearly all its
160,000 glaciers, has cooled and gained ice-mass in the past 30 years,
reversing a 6,000-year melting trend. Data from 6,000 boreholes
worldwide show global temperatures were higher in the Middle Ages than
now. And the snows of Kilimanjaro are vanishing not because summit
temperature is rising (it isn't) but because post-colonial deforestation
has dried the air. Al Gore please note. In some
places it was also warmer than now in the Bronze Age and in Roman times.
It wasn't CO2 that caused those warm periods. It was the sun. So the UN
adjusted the maths and all but extinguished the sun's role in today's
warming. Here's how: • The UN
dated its list of "forcings" (influences on temperature) from 1750, when
the sun, and consequently air temperature, was almost as warm as now.
But its start-date for the increase in world temperature was 1900, when
the sun, and temperature, were much cooler. • Every
"forcing" produces "climate feedbacks" making temperature rise faster.
For instance, as temperature rises in response to a forcing, the air
carries more water vapour, the most important greenhouse gas; and polar
ice melts, increasing heat absorption. Up goes the temperature again.
The UN more than doubled the base forcings from greenhouse gases to
allow for climate feedbacks. It didn't do the same for the base solar
forcing. Two
centuries ago, the astronomer William Herschel was reading Adam Smith's
Wealth of Nations when he noticed that quoted grain prices fell when the
number of sunspots rose. Gales of laughter ensued, but he was right. At
solar maxima, when the sun was at its hottest and sunspots showed,
temperature was warmer, grain grew faster and prices fell. Such
observations show that even small solar changes affect climate
detectably. But recent solar changes have been
big. Sami
Solanki, a solar physicist, says that in the past half-century the sun
has been warmer, for longer, than at any time in at least the past
11,400 years, contributing a base forcing equivalent to a quarter of the
past century's warming. That's before adding climate
feedbacks. The UN
expresses its heat-energy forcings in watts per square metre per second.
It estimates that the sun caused just 0.3 watts of forcing since 1750.
Begin in 1900 to match the temperature start-date, and the base solar
forcing more than doubles to 0.7 watts. Multiply by 2.7, which the Royal
Society suggests is the UN's current factor for climate feedbacks, and
you get 1.9 watts – more than six times the UN's
figure. The
entire 20th-century warming from all sources was below 2 watts. The sun
could have caused just about all of it. Next,
the UN slashed the natural greenhouse effect by 40 per cent from 33C in
the climate-physics textbooks to 20C, making the man-made additions
appear bigger. Then the
UN chose the biggest 20th-century temperature increase it could find.
Stern says: "As anticipated by scientists, global mean surface
temperatures have risen over the past century." As anticipated? Only 30
years ago, scientists were anticipating a new Ice Age and writing books
called The Cooling. In the
US, where weather records have been more reliable than elsewhere,
20th-century temperature went up by only 0.3C. AccuWeather, a worldwide
meteorological service, reckons world temperature rose by 0.45C. The US
National Climate Data Centre says 0.5C. Any advance on 0.5? The UN went
for 0.6C, probably distorted by urban growth near many of the world's
fast-disappearing temperature stations. The
number of temperature stations round the world peaked at 6,000 in 1970.
It's fallen by two-thirds to 2,000 now: a real "hockey-stick" curve, and
an instance of the UN's growing reliance on computer guesswork rather
than facts. Even a
0.6C temperature rise wasn't enough. So the UN repealed a fundamental
physical law. Buried in a sub-chapter in its 2001 report is a short but
revealing section discussing "lambda": the crucial factor converting
forcings to temperature. The UN said its climate models had found lambda
near-invariant at 0.5C per watt of forcing. You
don't need computer models to "find" lambda. Its value is given by a
century-old law, derived experimentally by a Slovenian professor and
proved by his Austrian student (who later committed suicide when his
scientific compatriots refused to believe in atoms). The
Stefan-Boltzmann law, not mentioned once in the UN's 2001 report, is as
central to the thermodynamics of climate as Einstein's later equation is
to astrophysics. Like Einstein's, it relates energy to the square of the
speed of light, but by reference to temperature rather than
mass. The
bigger the value of lambda, the bigger the temperature increase the UN
could predict. Using poor Ludwig Boltzmann's law, lambda's true value is
just 0.22-0.3C per watt. In 2001, the UN effectively repealed the law,
doubling lambda to 0.5C per watt. A recent paper by James Hansen says
lambda should be 0.67, 0.75 or 1C: take your pick. Sir John Houghton,
who chaired the UN's scientific assessment working group until recently,
tells me it now puts lambda at 0.8C: that's 3C for a 3.7-watt doubling
of airborne CO2. Most of the UN's computer models have used 1C. Stern
implies 1.9C. On the
UN's figures, the entire greenhouse-gas forcing in the 20th century was
2 watts. Multiplying by the correct value of lambda gives a temperature
increase of 0.44 to 0.6C, in line with observation. But using Stern's
1.9C per watt gives 3.8C. Where did 85 per cent of his imagined
20th-century warming go? As Professor Dick Lindzen of MIT pointed out in
The Sunday Telegraph last week, the UK's Hadley Centre had the same
problem, and solved it by dividing its modelled output by three to
"predict" 20th-century temperature correctly. A spate
of recent scientific papers, gearing up for the UN's fourth report next
year, gives a different reason for the failure of reality to keep up
with prediction. The oceans, we're now told, are acting as a giant
heat-sink. In these papers the well-known, central flaw (not mentioned
by Stern) is that the computer models' "predictions" of past ocean
temperature changes only approach reality if they are averaged over a
depth of at least a mile and a quarter. Deep-ocean temperature hasn't
changed at all, it's barely above freezing. The models tend to
over-predict the warming of the climate-relevant surface layer up to
threefold. A recent paper by John Lyman, of the US National Oceanic and
Atmospheric Association, reports that the oceans have cooled sharply in
the past two years. The computers didn't predict this. Sea level is
scarcely rising faster today than a century ago: an inch every 15 years.
Hansen now says that the oceanic "flywheel effect" gives us extra time
to act, so Stern's alarmism is misplaced. Finally,
the UN's predictions are founded not only on an exaggerated
forcing-to-temperature conversion factor justified neither by
observation nor by physical law, but also on an excessive rate of
increase in airborne carbon dioxide. The true rate is 0.38 per cent year
on year since records began in 1958. The models assume 1 per cent per
annum, more than two and a half times too high. In 2001, the UN used
these and other adjustments to predict a 21st-century temperature
increase of 1.5 to 6C. Stern suggests up to 10C. Dick
Lindzen emailed me last week to say that constant repetition of wrong
numbers doesn't make them right. Removing the UN's solecisms, and using
reasonable data and assumptions, a simple global model shows that
temperature will rise by just 0.1 to 1.4C in the coming century, with a
best estimate of 0.6C, well within the medieval temperature range and
only a fifth of the UN's new, central projection. Why
haven't air or sea temperatures turned out as the UN's models predicted?
Because the science is bad, the "consensus" is wrong, and Herr Professor
Ludwig Boltzmann, FRS, was as right about energy-to-temperature as he
was about atoms. |