| Letter to Represenatives Ed Markey & Joe Barton |
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| Written by Christopher Monckton | ||||||||
| Tuesday, 14 April 2009 | ||||||||
Page 6 of 6 Conclusion The evidence that I have adduced in this letter confirms that the three graphs that I presented in my testimony before the Committee demonstrate what I had said they demonstrated that –
The UN has reached this sixteenfold exaggeration of the effect of rising CO2 concentration on temperature inadvertently, by doubling the true values of four parameters that are then multiplied together in the models to yield the projected anthropogenic temperature increase to the year 2100. Without this prodigious and unfortunate exaggeration (and even if per impossibile it were to come to pass), not one of the catastrophes imagined by several witnesses and by certain Hon. Members on the Committee will be at all likely to occur. There was no “climate crisis”; there is no “climate crisis”; there will be no “climate crisis”. The right response to the non-problem of “global warming” is to have the courage to do nothing. You are the guardians of the public purse: do not loose the purse-strings too readily when the scientists cry “Wolf!” The measures that your Administration currently proposes by way of addressing the non-problem of “global warming” might have been calculated to do maximum damage to the very poorest voters – those who depend upon the taxes of the prosperous for their very survival; those in low-paid jobs in heavy industries that are heavy emitters; those who run the Mom-and-Pop enterprises that are tomorrow’s big businesses; those low-income families who pay a disproportionately large proportion of their income to energy providers. Rightly, one of the Administration’s own supporters on your Committee has stated that the principal purpose of “cap-and-trade” is not to “Save The Planet” – which it would not do even if it worked – but to raise revenue. If you wish to raise excessive revenue, be honest about it. Say that you intend to tax and tax and tax again. But desist from claiming that you are raising the revenue with the aim of preventing “climate crisis”. Already, every opinion poll demonstrates that, notwithstanding the most lavishly-funded propaganda campaign by the classe politique since Goebbels tried to make Nazism look good, the people are not buying the “global warming” scare any more. Already, millions face death by starvation, not because of “global warming” (for warmer weather saves lives, while cold weather kills), but because of the misplaced fear of “global warming” that a few malicious and ill-intentioned members of the scientific-technological elite have fraudulently engendered, with the acquiescence of a cloud of what Lenin called “useful idiots” among the academic community who have found it expedient to drift along with the scare by not looking too closely at any of the facts. The facts are what I have given you in this letter. You need not believe a word I say: for every fact I have given you is taken from the peer-reviewed scientific literature or from the plentiful scientific data that are publicly available. Why not verify what I have said – perhaps by the simple expedient of directing some well-targeted questions at the IPCC? Thus far, you have accepted what it says, either because maintaining that “global warming” is a “global crisis” is politically expedient, congenial, or convenient, or because you are impressed by the IPCC’s reputation. The fallacy of reputation – the argumentum ad verecundiam – is one of the well-worn, Aristotelian fallacies of logic. No sound conclusion can be founded upon it. Bernie Madoff had a reputation. He was one of the five founders of NASDAQ. Yet the report identifying some 30 red flags in his pattern of trading was ignored for years by the SEC. Why? Because, as the classe politique so often does, it fell for the argumentum ad verecundiam rather than getting someone to check out the red flags. You have been fairly and clearly warned that a single penny more spent on “global warming” would be a penny wasted. Your nation faces many formidable economic problems. Economic problems tend to hit the poor harder than the rich. Do not divert any more of your nation’s shrinking capital towards the further enrichment of the scientific-technological elite that has exploitatively abused its verecundia and your population’s ignorance of science for the sake of its own enrichment – an enrichment that is ultimately and chiefly at the expense of the poor. I am concerned at the very large number of red flags, indicating the need for further investigation to prevent irregularities, inaccuracies, or exaggerations, that have been thrown up by this single Committee hearing. It is right, therefore, that I should warn the Committee in the plainest terms that numerous powerfully-placed rent-seekers among what Eisenhower called “the scientific-technological elite” appear to be systematically and deliberately overstating the minimal consequences of the minimal warming that is likely to occur. For convenience, I now enumerate the 50 red flags mentioned in this letter. In each case I indicate the question or questions requiring further investigation to which the red-flagged irregularity gives rise. I should make it plain that, in each instance where it appears that a member of the Committee has been misled, I am not asserting or implying that that Hon. Member is in any way guilty of or complicit in any fraud: merely that he or she has been misled by others who may or may not themselves have deliberately intended to mislead the House. Red Flags Enumerated 1. Global temperature has been falling rapidly for seven full years: however, this fact appears to have been kept from the Committee, and the director of an agency whose own global-temperature dataset clearly shows the seven-year decline repeatedly failed to admit when questioned by the Committee that there have indeed been seven full years of global cooling, raising the question why, on the central issue of the rate at which “global warming” is or is not occurring, the official was reluctant to admit the seven-year cooling that his own agency’s global-temperature dataset plainly shows. 2. The same official sought to maintain that the methods I had used might not be appropriate for demonstrating that there had been seven years’ cooling, when in fact all four of the global-temperature datasets that had been combined to generate the dataset plotted in my temperature graph had shown the seven-year cooling, raising the question why the official was reluctant to admit that, on all individual measures and accordingly on all measures combined, global temperature has been falling rapidly for seven years. 3. The global-temperature dataset of the National Climatic Data Center shows global cooling at a rate little more than one-third of that shown by the other three datasets, raising the question whether there is a methodological bias either in the NCDC’s dataset or in the other three datasets. 4. The raw GISS temperature data for the Santa Rosa automated temperature reporting station show a century of falling temperatures, while the adjusted data show a century of rising temperatures, at least in part because 70-year-old temperature records have been amended, raising the question why long-established historical temperature data have been altered many decades ex post facto. 5. The adjusted global GISS temperature data for 2008, when compared with the adjusted global GISS temperature data for 1999, show that 70-year-old temperature records have been adjusted more substantially in 2008 than in 1999, raising the question whether the data-tampering at individual stations has increased over time, with the intention of making the 20th-century temperature increase appear substantially greater than it was. 6. The senior official who appeared before the Committee said that if the past seven years’ cooling had occurred it had occurred partly because of a cooling event, the La Nina phase of the El Nino Southern Oscillation, that had endured for three years, when his own agency’s global-temperature dataset showed that it had endured for just six months and no dataset showed it persisting for more than one year, raising the question why the official had overstated the impact of the La Nina cooling event on the global cooling of the past seven years. 7. The same official said that the global cooling of the past seven years, if it had occurred, was a consequence of natural variability in the climate, raising the question why the official did not also say that the warming of the preceding 300 years might also have been attributable to natural variability. 8. The same official said that 13 of the past 14 years had been the warmest on record, but his own agency’s record (which dates back only to 1880) shows only 12 of the past 14 years as being the warmest on record, raising the question why the official regarded the cluster of recent warm years as evidence of anthropogenic warming rather than as continuing evidence of the past 300 years’ natural warming. 9. A graph relied upon by the UN’s climate panel in its 2007 report, and in a recent lecture by the panel’s chairman, Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, and by the US Environmental Protection Agency in the Technical Support Document in support of its forthcoming “Endangerment Finding” against carbon dioxide and five other heteroatomic gases, uses the endpoint fallacy, raising the question whether their conclusion that the rate of “global warming” accelerated between 1850 and 2005 is unscientific and improperly motivated. 10. In one of nine serious “errors” identified by a UK High Court Judge in Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, it is suggested that in the palaeoclimate it was CO2 concentration that changed before global temperature, when in fact it was temperature that changed before CO2 concentration, raising the question why Congress (and Her Majesty’s Government) still treats Gore as though he were a ranking expert on “global warming”. 11. The IPCC’s 1990 report showed a graph demonstrating that the medieval warm period was warmer than the present, but the 2001 report showed a graph suggesting that the warm period was cooler than the present, raising the question of the extent to which the imagined “consensus” on “global warming” agrees with itself. 12. The IPCC’s purported abolition of the medieval warm period depended critically upon proxies for pre-instrumental temperature derived from the width of tree-rings in bristlecone pines, previously stated by the IPCC to be unsuitable because the tree-rings widen not only when it is warmer but also when it is moister and particularly when there is more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, raising the question why the IPCC chose to accord to a graph based on a methodology that it had previously found unsound the unique privilege of being reproduced six times at full scale and in full color in its 2001 report. 13. For many years the compilers of the defective graph on which the UN relied refused outright to part with their computer programs or data, raising the questions whether they did not wish their data or methods to be scrutinized by other scientists, and whether it should be a precondition of taxpayer-funded research grants that all methods, programs and data are made publicly available at the time of publication. 14. A proxy data series that appeared to indicate that the present was warmer than any previous period in the past 600 years was given 390 times the weight of a data series that appeared to show the medieval warm period was warmer than the present, raising the question whether the two data series were objectively weighted. 15. The computer program that calculated the graph relied upon by the IPCC in its 2001 report generated graphs indicating that the present is warmer than any previous period in the past 600 years, even when random red noise rather than genuine proxy temperature data was input to the program, raising the question whether the program had been tuned to bias the results so as to overemphasize the comparative magnitude of recent warming. 16. The US Environmental Protection Agency, in the Technical Support Document underlying its “Endangerment Finding” in respect of CO2 and five other heteroatomic gases, will rely upon a graph showing four datasets from papers by the authors of the proven-defective 600-year northern-hemisphere temperature graph that appeared in the IPCC’s 2001 report, and those authors’ associates, to show that the medieval warm period was not as warm as the present, raising the question why the EPA has chosen to overlook papers over the past 25 years by at least 670 scientists from 391 institutions in 40 countries confirming the historical record to the effect that the medieval warm period was real, global, and warmer than the present. 17. The Wegman report commissioned for the House noted a suspicious spate of papers apparently confirming the results of the authors of the defective graph that purported to abolish the medieval warm period, raising the questions why almost all of the papers were at odds with the established literature on the temperatures prevalent over the past 600 years, and why almost all of the papers were written by associates of the authors of the defective graph. 18. For fully seven years the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration has been linear and not (as predicted) exponential, and has been well below the least of the IPCC’s predictions for the “business-as-usual” scenario A2, raising the questions why the IPCC cannot (as it admits) add up the atmospheric “carbon budget” to within a factor of two, and why its prediction of this central quantity is so greatly exaggerated. 19. The senior official who testified before the Committee, commenting on the graph showing CO2 concentration rising at well below the least of the IPCC’s predictions, said that CO2 emissions were rising at well above the greatest of the IPCC’s predictions, raising the question why he did not admit that it is the concentrations of CO2 remaining in the atmosphere, not the emissions, that influence global temperature. 20. Satellite observation demonstrates that the diminution over time in outgoing long-wave radiation from the Earth’s surface is one-seventh to one-tenth of what the models relied upon by the IPCC predict, raising the questions whether global-temperature response to atmospheric enrichment with carbon dioxide has been overstated sevenfold to tenfold, and why the senior official who testified before the Committee attributed the observational results merely to orbital degradation of the satellites. 21. A paper by Svante Arrhenius (1896), in which it is concluded that in response to a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration global temperature will increase by some 5 Celsius degrees (9 Fahrenheit degrees), is frequently cited by Al Gore, Sir David King, and other supporters of the “official” position on “global warming”, raising the question why they do not also cite Arrhenius’ reconsideration of the matter in a paper of 1906, in which – after the Stefan-Boltzmann radiative-transfer equation had become available to him and had enabled a considerable simplification of the calculation – he concluded that temperature response would be not 5 Celsius degrees but just 1.6 Celsius degrees (2.9 Fahrenheit degrees). 22. The IPCC’s central estimate of temperature response to doubling carbon dioxide concentration was 3.8 Celsius degrees in 1995; 3.5 in 2001; and 3.26 in 2007, raising the questions whether the “consensus” on this central issue agrees with itself, and how much further the central estimate of climate sensitivity must fall before it accords with both theory and observation. 23. The IPCC’s method of calculating temperature increase in response to a given proportionate increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration involves multiplying together four quantities not one of which can be definitively established either by theory or by observation and experiment, raising the question whether small overstatements of the values of each of the four quantities on the part of the IPCC have led to a large exaggeration of the temperature response to atmospheric enrichment with carbon dioxide. 24. Though climate sensitivity is the central issue in the debate over the magnitude of the supposed influence of humankind over the climate, the IPCC’s 2001 and 2007 reports do not deal with it at the outset, and its consideration of the four key parameters whose product is anthropogenic temperature increase is scattered among different chapters or sub-chapters written by different authors, raising the questions whether the obscurantism in the IPCC’s treatment of this central issue is deliberate, and whether any of the individual contributors to or reviewers of the IPCC’s climate assessment reports realize how prone the IPCC’s methodology is to very large exaggerations of climate sensitivity. 25. The models relied upon by the IPCC predict that the warming rate in the tropical mid-troposphere will be thrice the surface warming rate, raising the question why the predicted differential in warming rates has never been observed in 50 years of radiosonde and drop-sonde measurements and in 30 years of satellite observations. 26. The absence of the model-predicted tropical upper-troposphere “hot-spot” requires climate sensitivity to be divided by at least 3, raising the question whether the IPCC has greatly exaggerated the radiative forcing that is thought to arise from atmospheric enrichment with heteroatomic gases such as carbon dioxide. 27. Between the 70-year solar Grand Minimum of 1645-1715, when the Sun was less active than for 10,000 years, and the 70-year solar Grand Maximum of 1925-1995, when the Sun was at least as active as it had been for 11,400 years, solar activity increased rapidly, raising the question whether the IPCC has underestimated the influence of the Sun in causing the 300 years’ warming that ended in 1998. 28. The IPCC uses a value for the Planck parameter that is higher than any other in the mainstream scientific literature, raising the question whether it is justified in repealing the fundamental equation of radiative transfer by taking the temperature and radiant-energy inputs to the Planck parameter from planetary emitting surfaces six miles apart. 29. The IPCC imagines that temperature feedbacks more than triple the radiative forcing from atmospheric enrichment with heteroatomic gases, raising the question whether it has overstated the values of certain feedbacks, particularly the water-vapor feedback and the cloud-albedo feedback. 30. The apparent exaggeration by the IPCC of all four of the parameters whose product is anthropogenic temperature increase raises the question whether it has exaggerated that temperature increase as much as sixteenfold. 31. The senior official who testified before the Committee said there had been an increase in the number of tropical storms in the Atlantic over the past 150 years, raising the questions whether the data are sufficient to establish that conclusion given that satellite observation has only been available for 30 years, and why the official did not mention that the number of Atlantic hurricanes that make landfall has shown no trend in 150 years. 32. The senior official who testified before the Committee challenged my use of the Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index, which has just recorded its lowest value in the 30-year satellite record, raising the question why he considered it inappropriate to rely upon the two-year running sum of the combined frequency, duration, and intensity of all hurricanes, typhoons, and tropical cyclones worldwide. 33. The data show that the frequency of typhoons and tropical cyclones has declined throughout the 30-year satellite record; that for 60 years there has been no increase either in maximum wind-speed or in the number of violent Atlantic hurricanes; that for 60 years the number of severe tornadoes in the US has been falling; and that for 60 years the number of deaths from US tornadoes has been falling, raising the question why the official did not consider any of these data relevant enough to bring to the Committee’s attention in response to its question about hurricanes and other intense storms. 34. The senior official who testified before the Committee said in his testimony that “global warming” would cause various catastrophes, including sea-level rise, ocean acidification, changes in rainfall, increased frequency and intensity of extreme-weather events such as heatwaves, coastal storms, droughts and heavy downpours, coastal erosion and inundation, changes in crop yields and ocean productivity and in climate-related diseases and pests, raising the question why he did not cite Schulte (2008), who found that of 539 papers containing the search phrase “global climate change” and published since the beginning of 2004 not one had offered any evidence for any catastrophe arising from “global warming”. 35. Professor Nils-Axel Moerner, who has published 520 papers on sea-level rise, concluded in a 2004 study of the Maldives that there had been no sea-level rise there for 1250 years, and that global sea level in the 21st century would rise by 8 inches, as it did in the 20th century, raising the question how the chairman of the Committee had been misled – perhaps by officials – into the belief that sea-level rise, particularly in the Maldives, would be likely to occur in a dangerous degree as a result of “global warming”. 36. The senior official who testified before the Committee said that sea-level rise would be a problem because of “global warming”, raising the question why he did not tell the Committee that there has been no statistically-significant sea-level rise for three years, and that sea level has risen in the past 16 years at a rate equivalent to no more than 1 ft/century. 37. In 2005, in An Inconvenient Truth, Al Gore predicted that sea level would rise imminently by 20 feet, inundating coastlines worldwide, leading a UK High Court Judge to find that “the Armageddon scenario that he depicts is not based on any scientific view”, raising the question why in 2005 he spent $4m on a condo in the St. Regis Tower, San Francisco, just feet from the ocean at Fisherman’s Wharf. 38. In 2009, Dr. James Hansen of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies wrote that sea level would rise by 246 feet (75 meters) as a result of “global warming”, raising the question why exaggerations such as this are becoming ever more flagrant while sea level is not rising at all. 39. The proportion of the atmosphere occupied by carbon dioxide has increased by little more than 1 part in 10,000 over the past 250 years, raising the question how a member of the Committee had been misled into believing that “global warming” might lead to mass extinctions. 40. The IPCC has repeatedly stated that individual extreme-weather events cannot be attributed to “global warming”, and the droughts of the Great Plains, and the great US floods, in the first half of the 20th century were worse than anything seen since, raising the question how a member of the Committee had been misled into believing that particular droughts or floods could be attributed to “global warming”. 41. Most “tropical” diseases occur in the tropics not because the weather is warm but because public health measures are poor, and, in particular, it is known that the malaria mosquito can survive in Arctic temperatures, and that the largest outbreak of malaria in modern times occurred in Siberia, killing tens of thousands in the Arctic, raising the question how a member of the Committee had been misled into believing that “global warming” might facilitate the transmission of “tropical” diseases. 42. The Sahara has shrunk by 300,000 square kilometers in the past 30 years as vegetation has greened what was once a wasteland, allowing nomadic tribes to return to lands they had not settled in living memory, raising the question how a member of the Committee had been misled into believing that drought in the Horn of Africa (where drought is permanent) could have been caused by “global warming”. 43. Hurricane Katrina was a Category 3 storm when it made landfall, and the damage it did was caused by the failure of the New Orleans levees, raising the question why a member of the Committee had been misled into sharing Al Gore’s view, condemned by a UK High Court Judge as baseless, that Hurricane Katrina was attributable to “global warming”. 44. The 3175 automated bathythermographs of the Argo network, deployed throughout the world’s oceans in 2003, have shown that in the past five years there has been a slight cooling of the oceans, raising the question how a member of the Committee had been misled into believing that the oceans had been warming and might lead to inundation of the Louisiana coastline, where subsidence of the land rather than rising sea level is known to be the cause of coastal inundation. 45. Increased snowfall cannot reasonably be attributed to “global warming”, raising the question how a member of the Committee had been misled into believing that a 40% increase in snow cover in North Carolina this winter was attributable to “global warming”, particularly when there has been a seven-year period of global cooling. 46. Global temperatures have been falling for seven years, and the rate of increase in carbon dioxide concentration in the same period has been well below the least of the IPCC’s projections, raising the question why the representative of the National Wildlife Federation told the Committee that “global warming” is “worse than expected”. 47. Polar bears evolved 200,000 years ago from land-based brown bears and, therefore, survived the last interglacial period 125,000 years ago, when global temperatures were 11 Fahrenheit degrees warmer than the present, and their population has quintupled since the 1940s, for it is hunting that was the real threat to them and that is now controlled, raising the question why the representative of the National Wildlife Federation told the Committee that polar bears were threatened with extinction. 48. Most of the world’s 160,000+ glaciers are in Antarctica, at altitudes and latitudes too high to be affected by “global warming”, and Antarctica has cooled for half a century, and the 9575 glaciers that debouch from the Himalayas into India show no change in the pattern of advance and recession in the 200 years since the Raj first monitored them, raising the question how a member of the Committee was misled into believing that “global warming” is causing glacial recession and decline in snow cover, which has shown no trend in half a century and reached a record high extent last winter. 49. The summit glacier of Kilimanjaro has not been melting because of “global warming” but ablating because of regional cooling and imprudent postcolonial deforestation, raising the question why Al Gore blames the recession of the glacier (half of which had already receded before Hemingway wrote The Snows of Kilimanjaro in 1936) on “global warming”, a conclusion with which a UK High Court Judge has disagreed. 50. Carbon dioxide concentration has been up to 20 times today’s levels in the palaeoclimate, and yet the creatures of the ocean survived and flourished, which they could not have done if the higher carbon dioxide concentration had appreciably acidified the oceans, raising the question how a member of the Committee had been misled into believing that current geologically-low concentrations of carbon dioxide could cause any appreciable or dangerous acidification of the oceans, which remain pronouncedly alkaline and contain 70 times as much carbon dioxide as the atmosphere. Recommendation At root, all of the red-flagged irregularities, errors, and exaggerations identified herein have their origin in the IPCC’s central exaggeration of the four parameters whose product is the temperature response to anthropogenic increases in carbon dioxide concentration. I recommend, therefore, that the Committee should consider again, and carefully, the question whether the anthropogenic effect on global mean surface temperature has – albeit inadvertently – been considerably exaggerated. Upon this question all else depends. If climate sensitivity is as low as theory and the satellite data are agreed in showing it to be, then that is the end of the “climate crisis”, and it would be foolish to spend trillions on addressing a non-problem when there are so many real problems that need to be addressed. I shall be happy to answer any further questions from the Committee if required. With all good wishes, MONCKTON OF BRENCHLEY Attached: Technical paper on verification of IPCC projections, as promised to Representative Barton during the hearing. |
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