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CARIE RANNOCH PH17 2QJ       

From: The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
30 March 2009

The Hon. Representative Ed Markey, and The Hon. Representative Joe Barton,
Committee on Energy and Commerce, US House of Representatives, Washington, DC.

Gentlemen,

Questions raised by the Subcommittee on Energy & Environment

I am most grateful for the fairness and good humor with which Chairman Markey conducted the hearing of 26 March 2009 on the question of adaptation to “global warming”. The calibre, commitment, and concern of Hon. Gentleladies and Gentlemen on both sides of the House were self-evident.

However, my notes of the hearing indicate that certain national and international executive agencies may have materially, serially, seriously, and successfully misled your Congress for several years about the imagined extent, anthropogenic component, and effects of “global warming”.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower, in his farewell address to the nation in 1961, gave a warning “that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” He said –

“Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. ... The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present – and is gravely to be regarded.”

Nearly all of your nation’s scholars and scientists owe their primary livelihood to the involuntary generosity of the taxpayer. Some of your rent-seeking, scientific-technological elite, taking willful and shameless advantage of the taxpayer’s largesse and of the scientific illiteracy that is now widespread, are mightily enriching themselves by misleading your Congress into appropriating disproportionately large sums to permit them to address the non-problem of anthropogenic “global warming”.

The right policy to address a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing. Therefore I am copying this letter to the President of the United States and to Madame Speaker Pelosi, with a recommendation that they should heed President Eisenhower’s warning, and should abandon all measures and expenditures in attempted mitigation of anthropogenic “global warming” until global mean surface temperature shall have increased by at least 2 Fahrenheit degrees compared with the temperature in the year 2000. That small, harmless, beneficial increase is not likely to occur for at least a century, if then.

At the hearing on March 26, 2009, Congressman Joe Barton required me to supply to the Committee further and better particulars in justification and verification of the three graphs that were included in my written testimony and were displayed during my oral testimony.

Also, I was later asked to provide to the Committee some justification and verification of my assertion that the cumulative frequency, intensity, and duration of all hurricanes, typhoons, and tropical cyclones is currently less than at any time in the 30-year satellite record.

In addition, I made notes of concerns raised by Hon. Members of the Committee during their interventions and am taking the opportunity to respond to them in this letter.

I apologize to the Committee that traveling commitments have prevented me from supplying the necessary responses on the day of the hearing itself. No discourtesy was intended. Without objection, I hope that this letter and its technical attachment will be entered into the official record of the hearing.

Has our planet cooled for seven years?

Representative Barton bluntly asked Tom Karl, the Director of the National Climatic Data Center, whether he thought I had misled Congress by presenting in my testimony a graph establishing that there has been global cooling for seven years, at a rate equivalent to 3.5 Fahrenheit degrees per century –

7 years’ global cooling at 3.5 F°/century
 
What “global warming”? The spline-curve plots the monthly mean of the global surface temperature anomalies published by the Hadley Center/Climate Research Unit and by the US National Climatic Data Center, and of the satellite lower-troposphere anomalies published by Remote Sensing Systems Inc. and by the University of Alabama at Huntsville. Beneath the spline-curve, the bright red straight line, the least-squares linear regression trend on the data, shows a (largely-unreported) global cooling for seven years at a rate equivalent to 3.5 F°/century. The pink zone shows the UN’s projected range of equilibrium warming rates over the period on the “business-as-usual” scenario A2. Within this zone, the pale pink region represents one standard deviation either side of the UN’s central estimate of 7 F° warming to 2100. The basis of calculation for this and similar global-temperature graphs is fully set forth in the technical paper annexed at Flag 1.

It was evident from the surprise of Representative Barton on seeing this graph that witnesses in support of what I shall call the “official” viewpoint at previous hearings on the question of “global warming” have somehow succeeded in withholding from the Committee the fact that global temperatures have been falling rapidly for seven years, contrary to the predictions of all of the computer models on which the UN relies. The Committee may well wonder what else the “official” witnesses have been withholding.

In this response to the Committee’s request for further and better particulars, I shall red-flag each point at which, were this an investigation into scientific fraud, my report to the prosecuting authorities would identify information or conduct that might merit further inquiry. A red flag should not be taken as indicating that fraud has occurred: that is a matter for a criminal jury. It is, however, an indication of an apparent irregularity giving grounds for concern and further inquiry, in the investigator’s opinion.

Red flag 1: Mr. Karl, in response to a very clearly-phrased and repeated question from Representative Barton, did not forthwith admit that global temperatures have indeed been falling rapidly for seven years. I do not know why he failed to admit this fact: for the global-temperature dataset compiled by the National Climatic Data Center, of which he is the Director, unequivocally confirms seven years’ rapid global cooling –

7 years’ global cooling unequivocally confirmed by NCDC
 
NCDC’s own dataset shows seven years’ global cooling: The temperature dataset published by the National Climatic Data Center shows global cooling at a rate equivalent to 1.4 Fº/century. During the 20th century, global temperature rose by 1.3 Fº.

Red flag 2: Mr. Karl said that combining surface and tropospheric datasets, as I had combined them in this graph, was not an approach that his agency used, implying that the results might be misleading and might not truly demonstrate global cooling.

The advantage of a composite global-temperature index, however, is that the satellite datasets for the lower troposphere (not, as Mr. Karl implied, for the troposphere as a whole) are to some extent less prone to heat-island distortions arising from progressive urbanization than the terrestrial datasets on their own.

The composite index is accordingly more reliable than any individual dataset, particularly since there is evidence that at least one of the terrestrial datasets has been tampered with by its administrators to create a false impression that global temperature in the late 20th century rose more sharply than it did in reality – a point to which I shall return infra.

Indeed, all four of the datasets which were used in the compilation of the composite graph in my testimony, specifically including Mr. Karl’s NCDC dataset, are unanimous in demonstrating that global temperature has been falling throughout the seven years 2002-2008 inclusive –

7 years’ global cooling confirmed by Hadley, NCDC, RSS, and UAH
      
Unanimity: Each of the four separate datasets used in the compilation of the composite global-temperature index shows seven years’ rapid global cooling. Each of the four individual graphs is generally similar to the graph of the combined datasets. Therefore use of the composite index was reasonable, fairly reflecting the underlying datasets.

Red flag 3: The NCDC global-temperature dataset shows a downtrend in global temperature over the past seven years that is conspicuously out of line with the other three datasets. The NCDC’s downtrend, equivalent to 1.4 Fº/century, is little more than one-third of the other three datasets’ downtrends.

I have not yet had the opportunity to investigate why the NCDC’s dataset appears to understate by a substantial margin the global cooling of the past seven years.

However, the NCDC’s dataset appears to produce outputs very close to those of the NASA Goddard Institute of Space Studies, which has had to be excluded from the composite index because of persistent problems of objectivity and of reliability.

Red flag 4: I shall illustrate these problems with 100 years’ temperature data from the temperature station at Santa Rosa, headquarters of NOAA, the parent organization of the NCDC –

Prestidigitation: The raw temperature data (left) show cooling. The data after adjustment by GISS show warming, because data from the 1930s have been altered. The reason for this alteration of historical data is unclear and requires investigation.

Two questions arise. First, does the adjustment of the temperature data by GISS apply only to a few stations, making little difference to the global trend? Secondly, has the adjustment of the data become greater over time, indicating prima facie that a systematic and unjustifiable bias has been introduced?

Red flag 5: These questions may be simply answered by making a second comparison: this time between the GISS global dataset after data adjustment as it stood in 1999 and the same dataset after adjustment as it stood in 2008.

Any difference between the earlier and later versions of the adjusted dataset would be prima facie evidence of a bias that would require further explanation before any reliance could be placed upon the dataset –

Why the NASA GISS global-temperature dataset is not considered reliable
 
Bias over time: The GISS global-temperature dataset, after adjustment, as it stood in 1999 (left) and in 2008 (right). The data peak in the 1930s has been reduced in the later version of the dataset, and the 1998 peak has been markedly increased, artificially increasing the warming rate over the period. I am grateful to Dr. Anthony Watts for making these graphs public.

The data adjustments by GISS, therefore, are sufficient to affect the entire global database, and the comparison between the earlier and later versions of the adjusted global database over time shows that the adjustment that produces a warming bias has been increased over the years.

It is considerations such as these that cast doubt upon the reliability of the NASA GISS global-temperature dataset, and hence upon that of the very similar NOAA NCDC dataset. The Committee may wish to investigate this and other apparent defects and irregularities in the compilation of the official global-temperature datasets.