TESTIMONY OF IAIN MURRAY

VICE-PRESIDENT FOR STRATEGY, COMPETITIVE ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

LEGISLATIVE HEARING ON S. 1733, CLEAN ENERGY

What follows is a small sampling of quotations from the much larger U.S. Senate Minority Report by Senator James M. Inhofe, Republican Ranking Member of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee.  It quotes various experts regarding the claims by the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) about human caused global warming.

Many scientists quoted – but not all – volunteered their statements for the Minority Report and consider themselves climate skeptics.  Some are among the 2,500 UN scientist reviewers of the IPCC Reports who the UN claims support IPCC conclusions.  The statements by the UN scientists below prove there is not a consensus, even at the UN, on the IPCC conclusion that “Greenhouse gas forcing has very likely caused most of the observed global warming over the last 50 years.”  In truth, the chapter of the IPCC Report making that conclusion was reviewed by only 62 scientists.

Major media sources continue to parrot the assertion that, except for a few fringe scientists, a scientific consensus exists on climate change.  Here, the UN IPCC scientists and others speak for themselves.  I invite you to make your own judgment as to their qualifications and whether their views should be considered or their voices even heard.

- Senator Orrin G. Hatch

 

Climate feedbacks are estimated from fluctuations in the outgoing radiation budget from the latest version of Earth Radiation Budget Experiment (ERBE) nonscanner data. It appears, for the entire tropics, the observed outgoing radiation fluxes increase with the increase in sea surface temperatures (SSTs). The observed behavior of radiation fluxes implies negative feedback processes associated with relatively low climate sensitivity. This is the opposite of the behavior of 11 atmospheric models forced by the same SSTs. Therefore, the models display much higher climate sensitivity than is inferred from ERBE, though it is difficult to pin down such high sensitivities with any precision. Results also show, the feedback in ERBE is mostly from shortwave radiation while the feedback in the models is mostly from longwave radiation. Although such a test does not distinguish the mechanisms, this is important since the inconsistency of climate feedbacks constitutes a very fundamental problem in climate prediction.

The notion of a static, unchanging climate is foreign to the history of the earth or any other planet with a fluid envelope. The fact that the developed world went into hysterics over changes in global mean temperature anomaly of a few tenths of a degree will astound future generations.

The EPA Administrator must view the IPCC's claims with considerable skepticism.  The IPCC's findings are flawed, biased and unproven. The implied level of “endorsement” by scientific participants in the IPCC–process is not supported by the data. The international standards of independent refereed peer review have not been met by the IPCC. Thus, EPA should not rely on the IPCC reports for its proposed Endangerment Finding and the Technical Support Document.