“We owe it to our children and our children’s children to investigate all aspects of carbon dioxide and global change. And when we do so, we find a wealth of beneficial effects from atmospheric carbon dioxide enrichment” -- Sherwood B. Idso (père), New York Times letter, May 7, 1990
“Actually, what makes skeptics skeptical is the accumulating evidence that theories predicting catastrophe from man-made climate change are impervious to evidence…" --George Will, Oct. 1, 2009
“Climate Change Reconsidered, The Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change” (NIPCC) is 856 pages. Why an 856-paged report on Climate Change when the official body, the UN’s International Panel for Climate Change, already has written one? Because the IPCC Fourth-Assessment Report is fundamentally flawed, yet is the basis for catastrophic economic and energy policies in the U.S. and around the world?
The IPCC announces that from the mid-twentieth-century, “very likely” the observed CO2-induced global warming, from greenhouse gases, is man-made. The NIPCC disagrees, announcing that man-made greenhouse gases are not playing a substantial role in warming.
The IPCC asserts that global warming will increase death, disease, and injury from heat waves, floods, storms, fires, and droughts. The NIPCC, discussing all the relevant studies, disagrees, asserting that a warmer world would be a healthier and safer world.
The IPCC Report -- charges the NIPCC -- is selective. It exaggerates and omits or ignores key studies. It is political, not scientific. The participating IPCC scientists, who were selected by their UN member governments, have as their objective to support the position of their governments or to induce them to accept the IPCC Report. Their numerous “Summary for Policy-Makers” have been gone over, word by word, and edited by their governments. That’s not the way science is done.
The IPCC Report warrants the section-by-section refutation which Climate Change Reconsidered (CCR) provides. CCR’s two lead authors are Craig Idso, of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, and S. Fred Singer, of the Science and Environmental Policy Project. The Heartland Institute published the CCR in June, 2009.
A few quotations from the CCR Report give its flavor:
“There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate.” That statement appears also in the anti-Global Warming Petition signed by 31,478 scientists, their names printed, state by state, on pages 739-855.
IPCC’s “State-of-the-art climate models totally neglect the biological processes we have described here. Until we fully understand the ultimate impact of the OCS [carbonyl sulfide] cycle on climate, and then incorporate them into the climate models, we cannot be certain how much of the warming experienced during the twentieth century, if any, can be attributed to anthropogenic causes.”
Authors Idso and Singer have much to say about IPCC’s treatment of clouds (pp. 16-19):
"Correctly parameterizing the influence of clouds on climate is an elusive goal that the creators of atmospheric general circulation models (GCM) have yet to achieve.” Discussing the reasons, Idso and Singer continue, “These deficiencies are extremely important because these particular clouds exert a major cooling influence on the surface temperatures of sea below them…”
Randall et al say (2003) that “the representation of cloud processes in global atmospheric models has been recognized for decades as the source of much of the uncertainty surrounding predictions of climate variability. They report, however, that ‘despite the best efforts of [the climate modeling] community . . . the problem remains largely unsolved.’ What is more, they say, ‘at the current rate of progress, cloud parameterization deficiencies will continue to plague us for many more decades into the future.’”
The study by Zhang and twenty climate modelers reports “a four-fold difference in high clouds among the models, and that the majority of the models simulated only 30 to 40 percent of the observed middle clouds. . . . For low clouds, they report that half the models underestimated them, such that the grand mean of low clouds from all models was only 70 to 80 percent of what was observed. . . . ”
“Failure to model any one of these elements [clouds, radiation, and precipitation] would be grounds for rejecting claims that the IPCC provides the evidence needed to justify regulation of anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions.” (p. 25)
The authors, examining 15 studies for the effect on human longevity of the additional CO2 and warming when the planet was recovering from the Little Ice Age, conclude, “In light of these many diverse observations of both plants and animals, there is some reason to believe that the historical increase of CO2 in the air has helped lengthen human lifespans since the advent of the Industrial Revolution, and that its continued upward trend will provide more of the same benefit.” (p. 694)
CCR is a veritable Book of Knowledge for serious scholars and should be helpful to sincere policy-makers no longer dependant upon the want of candor and want of industry of the IPCC.
By Natalie Sirkin
C2009
Comments
P.11
“When hopes and dreams are loose in the streets, it is well for the timid to lock doors , shutter windows and lie low until the wrath has passed. For there is often a monstrous incongruity between the hopes, however noble and tender, and the actions that follows them. It is as if ivied maidens and garlanded youths were to herald the four horsemen of the apocalypse.
And p.12
“People who see their lives as irremediably spoiled cannot find a worth-while purpose in self-advancement...Their innermost craving is for a new life – a rebirth – or failing this, a chance to acquire new elements of pride, confidence, hope, a sense of purpose and worth by an identification with a holy cause. An active mass movement offers them opportunities for both...”
and P. 13
“ It is true that in the early adherents of a mass movement there are also adventurers who join in the hope that that the movement will give a spin to their wheel of fortune and whirl them to fame and power.”
And
Eric Hoffer, 1979 – “Before the Sabbath”
p. 7
“ I am curious about Pechorin, a Russian intellectual of the mid-nineteenth century who wrote a poem on “How sweet it is to hate one’s native land and eagerly await its annihilation.”