RE: [lpsf-discuss] p/o: Preaching the climate catechism

Here's another good one from Richard Rider

Mike

RICHARD RIDER COMMENT: Here's another piece questioning the science
used to "prove" global warming, and the magnitude of the projected risk.
Much in this article has been mentioned before, but this is just a tad
more authentic with better specific proof material in opposition to the
accepted wisdom.

Again, a disclaimer. We are indeed likely to be experiencing recent
global warming, but past global warmings cannot be explained by man's
pollution. How come this time it IS man's pollution? If so, what
caused the previous global warming periods?

Excerpt:

"This week, I'll show how the UN undervalued the sun's effects on
historical and contemporary climate, slashed the natural greenhouse
effect, overstated the past century's temperature increase, repealed a
fundamental law of physics and tripled the man-made greenhouse effect.

Next week, I'll demonstrate the atrocious economic, political and
environmental cost of the high-tax, zero-freedom, bureaucratic
centralism implicit in Stern's report; I'll compare the global-warming
scare with previous sci-fi alarums; and I'll show how the
environmentalists' "precautionary principle" (get the state to interfere
now, just in case) is killing people."

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/11/05/nosplit/
nwarm05.xml

Climate chaos? Don't believe it

By Christopher Monckton, Sunday Telegraph

Last Updated: 12:14am GMT 05/11/2006

Download Christopher Monckton's references and detailed calculations
[pdf]
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2006/11/05/warm-refs.pdf;jsess
ionid=PWC5KYTPSS5X1QFIQMFCFFWAVCBQYIV0>

The Stern report last week predicted dire economic and social effects of
unchecked global warming. In what many will see as a highly
controversial polemic, Christopher Monckton disputes the 'facts' of this
impending apocalypse and accuses the UN and its scientists of distorting
the truth

Biblical droughts, floods, plagues and extinctions?

Last week, Gordon Brown and his chief economist both said global warming
was the worst "market failure" ever. That loaded soundbite suggests that
the "climate-change" scare is less about saving the planet than, in
Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, "creating world government". This week
and next, I'll reveal how politicians, scientists and bureaucrats
contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and
extinctions worthier of St John the Divine than of science.

Sir Nicholas Stern's report on the economics of climate change, which
was published last week, says that the debate is over. It isn't. There
are more greenhouse gases in the air than there were, so the world
should warm a bit, but that's as far as the "consensus" goes. After the
recent hysteria, you may not find the truth easy to believe. So you can
find all my references and detailed calculations here
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2006/11/05/warm-refs.pdf;jsess
ionid=PWC5KYTPSS5X1QFIQMFCFFWAVCBQYIV0> .

The Royal Society says there's a worldwide scientific consensus. It
brands Apocalypse-deniers as paid lackeys of coal and oil corporations.
I declare my interest: I once took the taxpayer's shilling and advised
Margaret Thatcher, FRS, on scientific scams and scares. Alas, not a red
cent from Exxon.

In 1988, James Hansen, a climatologist, told the US Congress that
temperature would rise 0.3C by the end of the century (it rose 0.1C),
and that sea level would rise several feet (no, one inch). The UN set up
a transnational bureaucracy, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC). The UK taxpayer unwittingly meets the entire cost of its
scientific team, which, in 2001, produced the Third Assessment Report, a
Bible-length document presenting apocalyptic conclusions well beyond
previous reports.

This week, I'll show how the UN undervalued the sun's effects on
historical and contemporary climate, slashed the natural greenhouse
effect, overstated the past century's temperature increase, repealed a
fundamental law of physics and tripled the man-made greenhouse effect.

Next week, I'll demonstrate the atrocious economic, political and
environmental cost of the high-tax, zero-freedom, bureaucratic
centralism implicit in Stern's report; I'll compare the global-warming
scare with previous sci-fi alarums; and I'll show how the
environmentalists' "precautionary principle" (get the state to interfere
now, just in case) is killing people.

So to the scare. First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the
last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth
curve of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to
look similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison.
The UN didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the
changes in temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.

Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at
the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a
geoscientist at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article
reconstructing 150 years of North American temperatures from borehole
data. He later wrote: "With the publication of the article in Science, I
gained significant credibility in the community of scientists working on
climate change. They thought I was one of them, someone who would
pervert science in the service of social and political causes. One of
them let his guard down. A major person working in the area of climate
change and global warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We
have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.' "

So they did. The UN's second assessment report, in 1996, showed a
1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was
warmer than today. But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no
medieval warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the
warmest for 1,000 years. The graph looked like an ice hockey-stick. The
wrongly flat AD1000-AD1900 temperature line was the shaft: the uptick
from 1900 to 2000 was the blade. Here's how they did it:

* They gave one technique for reconstructing pre-thermometer temperature
390 times more weight than any other (but didn't say so).

* The technique they overweighted was one which the UN's 1996 report had
said was unsafe: measurement of tree-rings from bristlecone pines.
Tree-rings are wider in warmer years, but pine-rings are also wider when
there's more carbon dioxide in the air: it's plant food. This carbon
dioxide fertilisation distorts the calculations.

* They said they had included 24 data sets going back to 1400. Without
saying so, they left out the set showing the medieval warm period,
tucking it into a folder marked "Censored Data".

* They used a computer model to draw the graph from the data, but
scientists later found that the model almost always drew hockey-sticks
even if they fed in random, electronic "red noise".

The large, full-colour "hockey-stick" was the key graph in the UN's 2001
report, and the only one to appear six times. The Canadian Government
copied it to every household. Four years passed before a leading
scientific journal would publish the truth about the graph. Did the UN
or the Canadian government apologise? Of course not. The UN still uses
the graph in its publications.

Even after the "hockey stick" graph was exposed, scientific papers
apparently confirming its abolition of the medieval warm period
appeared. The US Senate asked independent statisticians to investigate.
They found that the graph was meretricious, and that known associates of
the scientists who had compiled it had written many of the papers
supporting its conclusion.

The UN, echoed by Stern, says the graph isn't important. It is. Scores
of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global
and up to 3C warmer than now. Then, there were no glaciers in the
tropical Andes: today they're there. There were Viking farms in
Greenland: now they're under permafrost. There was little ice at the
North Pole: a Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in
1421 and found none.

The Antarctic, which holds 90 per cent of the world's ice and nearly all
its 160,000 glaciers, has cooled and gained ice-mass in the past 30
years, reversing a 6,000-year melting trend. Data from 6,000 boreholes
worldwide show global temperatures were higher in the Middle Ages than
now. And the snows of Kilimanjaro are vanishing not because summit
temperature is rising (it isn't) but because post-colonial deforestation
has dried the air. Al Gore please note.

In some places it was also warmer than now in the Bronze Age and in
Roman times. It wasn't CO2 that caused those warm periods. It was the
sun. So the UN adjusted the maths and all but extinguished the sun's
role in today's warming. Here's how:

* The UN dated its list of "forcings" (influences on temperature) from
1750, when the sun, and consequently air temperature, was almost as warm
as now. But its start-date for the increase in world temperature was
1900, when the sun, and temperature, were much cooler.

* Every "forcing" produces "climate feedbacks" making temperature rise
faster. For instance, as temperature rises in response to a forcing, the
air carries more water vapour, the most important greenhouse gas; and
polar ice melts, increasing heat absorption. Up goes the temperature
again. The UN more than doubled the base forcings from greenhouse gases
to allow for climate feedbacks. It didn't do the same for the base solar
forcing.

Two centuries ago, the astronomer William Herschel was reading Adam
Smith's Wealth of Nations when he noticed that quoted grain prices fell
when the number of sunspots rose. Gales of laughter ensued, but he was
right. At solar maxima, when the sun was at its hottest and sunspots
showed, temperature was warmer, grain grew faster and prices fell. Such
observations show that even small solar changes affect climate
detectably. But recent solar changes have been big.

Sami Solanki, a solar physicist, says that in the past half-century the
sun has been warmer, for longer, than at any time in at least the past
11,400 years, contributing a base forcing equivalent to a quarter of the
past century's warming. That's before adding climate feedbacks.

The UN expresses its heat-energy forcings in watts per square metre per
second. It estimates that the sun caused just 0.3 watts of forcing since
1750. Begin in 1900 to match the temperature start-date, and the base
solar forcing more than doubles to 0.7 watts. Multiply by 2.7, which the
Royal Society suggests is the UN's current factor for climate feedbacks,
and you get 1.9 watts - more than six times the UN's figure.

The entire 20th-century warming from all sources was below 2 watts. The
sun could have caused just about all of it.

Next, the UN slashed the natural greenhouse effect by 40 per cent from
33C in the climate-physics textbooks to 20C, making the man-made
additions appear bigger.

Then the UN chose the biggest 20th-century temperature increase it could
find. Stern says: "As anticipated by scientists, global mean surface
temperatures have risen over the past century." As anticipated? Only 30
years ago, scientists were anticipating a new Ice Age and writing books
called The Cooling.

In the US, where weather records have been more reliable than elsewhere,
20th-century temperature went up by only 0.3C. AccuWeather, a worldwide
meteorological service, reckons world temperature rose by 0.45C. The US
National Climate Data Centre says 0.5C. Any advance on 0.5? The UN went
for 0.6C, probably distorted by urban growth near many of the world's
fast-disappearing temperature stations.

The number of temperature stations round the world peaked at 6,000 in
1970. It's fallen by two-thirds to 2,000 now: a real "hockey-stick"
curve, and an instance of the UN's growing reliance on computer
guesswork rather than facts.

Even a 0.6C temperature rise wasn't enough. So the UN repealed a
fundamental physical law. Buried in a sub-chapter in its 2001 report is
a short but revealing section discussing "lambda": the crucial factor
converting forcings to temperature. The UN said its climate models had
found lambda near-invariant at 0.5C per watt of forcing.

You don't need computer models to "find" lambda. Its value is given by a
century-old law, derived experimentally by a Slovenian professor and
proved by his Austrian student (who later committed suicide when his
scientific compatriots refused to believe in atoms). The
Stefan-Boltzmann law, not mentioned once in the UN's 2001 report, is as
central to the thermodynamics of climate as Einstein's later equation is
to astrophysics. Like Einstein's, it relates energy to the square of the
speed of light, but by reference to temperature rather than mass.

The bigger the value of lambda, the bigger the temperature increase the
UN could predict. Using poor Ludwig Boltzmann's law, lambda's true value
is just 0.22-0.3C per watt. In 2001, the UN effectively repealed the
law, doubling lambda to 0.5C per watt. A recent paper by James Hansen
says lambda should be 0.67, 0.75 or 1C: take your pick. Sir John
Houghton, who chaired the UN's scientific assessment working group until
recently, tells me it now puts lambda at 0.8C: that's 3C for a 3.7-watt
doubling of airborne CO2. Most of the UN's computer models have used 1C.
Stern implies 1.9C.

On the UN's figures, the entire greenhouse-gas forcing in the 20th
century was 2 watts. Multiplying by the correct value of lambda gives a
temperature increase of 0.44 to 0.6C, in line with observation. But
using Stern's 1.9C per watt gives 3.8C. Where did 85 per cent of his
imagined 20th-century warming go? As Professor Dick Lindzen of MIT
pointed out in The Sunday Telegraph last week, the UK's Hadley Centre
had the same problem, and solved it by dividing its modeled output by
three to "predict" 20th-century temperature correctly.

A spate of recent scientific papers, gearing up for the UN's fourth
report next year, gives a different reason for the failure of reality to
keep up with prediction. The oceans, we're now told, are acting as a
giant heat-sink. In these papers the well-known, central flaw (not
mentioned by Stern) is that the computer models' "predictions" of past
ocean temperature changes only approach reality if they are averaged
over a depth of at least a mile and a quarter.

Deep-ocean temperature hasn't changed at all, it's barely above
freezing. The models tend to over-predict the warming of the
climate-relevant surface layer up to threefold. A recent paper by John
Lyman, of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, reports
that the oceans have cooled sharply in the past two years. The computers
didn't predict this. Sea level is scarcely rising faster today than a
century ago: an inch every 15 years. Hansen now says that the oceanic
"flywheel effect" gives us extra time to act, so Stern's alarmism is
misplaced.

Finally, the UN's predictions are founded not only on an exaggerated
forcing-to-temperature conversion factor justified neither by
observation nor by physical law, but also on an excessive rate of
increase in airborne carbon dioxide. The true rate is 0.38 per cent year
on year since records began in 1958. The models assume 1 per cent per
annum, more than two and a half times too high. In 2001, the UN used
these and other adjustments to predict a 21st-century temperature
increase of 1.5 to 6C. Stern suggests up to 10C.

Dick Lindzen emailed me last week to say that constant repetition of
wrong numbers doesn't make them right. Removing the UN's solecisms, and
using reasonable data and assumptions, a simple global model shows that
temperature will rise by just 0.1 to 1.4C in the coming century, with a
best estimate of 0.6C, well within the medieval temperature range and
only a fifth of the UN's new, central projection.

Why haven't air or sea temperatures turned out as the UN's models
predicted? Because the science is bad, the "consensus" is wrong, and
Herr Professor Ludwig Boltzmann, FRS, was as right about
energy-to-temperature as he was about atoms.