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| “Consensus”? What “Consensus”?Among Climate Scientists, The Debate Is Not Over |
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| Written by Viscount Monckton of Brenchley | ||||||||
| Thursday, 19 July 2007 | ||||||||
Page 6 of 6
Conclusion One has only to cut away the alarmist rhetoric and the media distractions, one has only to focus on the central question in the climate-change debate, and at once the fact that there is no scientific consensus about climate change is laid bare. The central question is this: By how much will global temperature increase in response to any foreseeable increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide? On that question, which the bureaucrats call the “climate sensitivity question”, there is no consensus whatsoever among the scientific community. We have seen how Hansen’s initial attempt at prediction, albeit using one of the largest computer models of the climate on the planet, turned out to contain an unfortunate element of exaggeration. It is inevitably the extreme scenarios that attract the attention of politicians and the media. The UN’s own attempts to reach “consensus” on the climate sensitivity question demonstrate all too clearly not only that it cannot perform simple additions credibly but also that it does not even agree with itself. The internal inconsistencies in the UN’s documents are numerous and growing. We have already seen how it has changed its mind on sea level, as well as performing incorrect addition sums for what appears to have been a political purpose. On the climate sensitivity question, too, the IPCC does not agree with itself. In 2001, it said that the sum of the major climate “forcings” that contribute to temperature change was approximately 2.4 watts per square meter. Now it has decided that the “forcing” from carbon dioxide is largely canceled out by the negative “forcing” from the pollution that accompanies fossil-fuel burning, particularly in China and India, preventing sunlight from reaching the Earth. Likewise, if one aggrgates up the UN’s central estimates of the contributions of all climate “forcings” and temperature “feedbacks” to the projected warming from increased greenhouse gases, the total comes to just half the UN’s published central estimate of a 3.2C temperature increase in response to a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 concentration. Once again, a large exaggeration is evident, right at the heart of the alarmist case. If the UN’s documents do not even agree with themselves, how can any kind of “consensus” be claimed? The Russian Academy of Sciences and the US Association of State Climatologists are just two of the scientific organizations that have trenchantly expressed serious doubts about the imagined “consensus” on climate change. They have recently been joined by the Administrator of NASA, who has said that it is arrogant to make the Panglossian assumption that today’s climate is the best of all possible climates, and still more arrogant to assume that any of the more or less futile remedial measures which have been advocated will make any significant climatic difference. The Administrator ought to know: for it is his organization that gathers much of the weather data via satellite upon which the rickety edifice of the climate-change “consensus” is constructed. A growing number of scientists who had previously subscribed to the alarmist presentation of the “consensus” are no longer sure. They are joining the numerous climatologists – many of them with outstanding credentials – who have never believed in the more extreme versions of the alarmist case. Indeed, many scientists now say that there has been no discernible human effect on temperature at all. For instance, Buentgen et al. (2006) say: “The 20th-century contribution of anthropogenic greenhouse gases and aerosol remains insecure.”Let the last word go to Mike Hulme, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research in the UK, who has himself undergone something of a conversio morum on climate change, and has written:
“The IPCC is not going to talk about tipping points; it's not going to talk about five-meter rises in sea level; it's not going to talk about the next ice age because the Gulf Stream collapses; and it's going to have none of the economics of the Stern Review. It's almost as if a credibility gap has emerged between what the British public thinks and what the international science community think. …
“Over the last few years a new environmental phenomenon has been constructed … - the phenomenon of ‘catastrophic’ climate change. It seems that mere ‘climate change’ was not going to be bad enough, and so now it must be ‘catastrophic’ to be worthy of attention. The increasing use of this pejorative term - and its bedfellow qualifiers ‘chaotic’, ‘irreversible’, ‘rapid’ - has altered the public discourse around climate change. “This discourse is now characterised by phrases such as ‘climate change is worse than we thought’, that we are approaching ‘irreversible tipping in the Earth's climate’, and that we are ‘at the point of no return’. I have found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied their thirst for environmental drama and exaggerated rhetoric. It seems that it is we, the professional climate scientists, who are now the (catastrophe) sceptics. How the wheel turns!”
Christopher Walter, Third
Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, is a former policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher
during her years as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. He may reached through SPPI, or directly at (
 +44 1882 632341) (
This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it
).
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