Am I still allowed to question climate change?

[Grandad.Malky]

I'd just thought i'd like to give this thread a bump.

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/weather/6921281/Britain-facing-one-of-the-coldest-winters-in-100-years-experts-predict.html

 

Yep. this global warming is cracking fun.........

 

Ah but our google experts will tell you its “climate change” :rolleyes:

[top4718]

I use trains now and again for business trips to London, the already extortionate fare has just increased by £6 for a return trip.

 

This is in a country that is urging us to use public transport, the hypocrisy of this is staggering.

 

Like I said earlier, global warming may be true or false but some are going to make a good few quid out of it in the meantime.

[convert]

 

1 January 2010

His Excellency Mr. Kevin Rudd,

Prime Minister, Commonwealth of Australia.

 

Prime Minister,

 

Climate change: proposed personal briefing

 

Your speech on 6 November 2009 to the Lowy Institute, in which you publicly expressed some concern at my approach to the climate question, has prompted several leading Australian citizens to invite me come on tour to explain myself in a series of lectures in Australia later this month. I am writing to offer personal briefings on why “global warming” is a non-problem to you and other party leaders during my visit. For convenience, I am copying this letter to them, and to the Press.

 

 

You say I am one of “those who argue that any multilateral action is by definition evil”. On the contrary: my first question is whether any action at all is required, to which – as I shall demonstrate – the objective economic and scientific answer is No. Even if multilateral action were required, which it is not, national governments in the West are by tradition democratically elected. Therefore, a fortiori, transnational or global governments should also be made and unmade by voters at the ballot-box. The climate ought not to be used as a shoddy pretext for international bureaucratic-centralist dictatorship. We committed Europeans have had more than enough of that already with the unelected but all-powerful Kommissars of the hated EU, who make nine-tenths of our laws by decree (revealingly, they call them “Directives” or “Commission Regulations”). The Kommissars (that is the official German word for them) inflict their dictates upon us regardless of what the elected European or any other democratic Parliament says or wishes. Do we want a worldwide EU? No.

 

You say I am one of “those who argue that climate change does not represent a global market failure”. Yet it is only recently that opinion sufficient to constitute a market signal became apparent in the documents of the IPCC, which is, however, a political rather than a scientific entity. There has scarcely been time for a “market failure”. Besides, corporations are falling over themselves to cash in on the giant financial fraud against the little guy that carbon taxation and trading have already become in the goody-two-shoes EU – and will become in Australia if you get your way.

 

...

 

The questions I address are a) whether there is a climate problem at all; and b) even if there is one, and even if per impossibile it is of the hilariously-overblown magnitude imagined by the IPCC, whether waiting and adapting as and if necessary is more cost-effective than attempting to mitigate the supposed problem by trying to reduce the carbon dioxide our industries and enterprises emit.

 

Let us pretend, solum ad argumentum, that a given proportionate increase in CO2 concentration causes the maximum warming imagined by the IPCC. The IPCC’s bureaucrats are careful not to derive a function that will convert changes in CO2 concentration directly to equilibrium changes in temperature. I shall do it for them.

 

We derive the necessary implicit function from the IPCC’s statement to the effect that equilibrium surface warming ÄT at CO2 doubling will be (3.26 ± ln 2) C°. Since the IPCC, in compliance with Beer’s Law, defines the radiative forcing effect of CO2 as logarithmic rather than linear, our implicit function can be derived at once. The coefficient is the predicted warming at CO2 doubling divided by the logarithm of 2, and the term (C/C0) is the proportionate increase in CO2 concentration. Thus,

 

dT = (4.7 ± 1) ln(C/C0) Celsius degrees

 

We are looking at the IPCC’s maximum imagined warming rate, so we simply write –

 

dT = 5.7 ln(C/C0) Celsius degrees

 

Armed with this function telling us the maximum equilibrium warming that the IPCC predicts from any given change in CO2 concentration, we can now determine, robustly, the maximum equilibrium warming that is likely to be forestalled by any proposed cut in the current upward path of CO2 emissions. Let me demonstrate.

 

By the end of this month, according to the Copenhagen Accord, all parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change are due to report what cuts in emissions they will make by 2020. Broadly speaking, the Annex 1 parties, who will account for about half of global emissions over the period, will commit to reducing current emissions by 30% by 2020, or 15% on average in the decade between now and 2020.

 

Thus, if and only if every Annex 1 party to the Copenhagen Accord complies with its obligations to the full, today’s emissions will be reduced by around half of that 15%, namely 7.5%, compared with business as usual. If the trend of the past decade continues, with business as usual we shall add 2 ppmv/year, or 20 ppmv over the decade, to atmospheric CO2 concentration. Now, 7.5% of 20 ppmv is 1.5 ppmv.

 

We determine the warming forestalled over the coming decade by comparing the business-as-usual warming that would occur between now and 2020 if we made no cuts in CO2 emissions with the lesser warming that would follow full compliance with the Copenhagen Accord. Where today’s CO2 concentration is 388 ppmv:

 

Business as usual:

ÄT = 5.7 ln(408.0/388) = 0.29 C°

 

subtract

 

Copenhagen Accord:

ÄT = 5.7 ln(406.5/388) = 0.27 C°

 

“Global warming” forestalled, 2010-2020 = 0.02 C°

 

One-fiftieth of a Celsius degree of warming forestalled is all that complete, global compliance with the Copenhagen Accord for an entire decade would achieve. Yet the cost of achieving this result – an outcome so small that our instruments would not be able to measure it – would run into trillions of dollars. Do your Treasury models demonstrate that this calculation is in any way erroneous? If they do, junk them.

 

You say “formal global and national economic modelling” shows “that the costs of inaction are greater than the costs of acting”. You ask for my “equivalent evidence basis to Treasury modelling published by the Government of the industry and employment impacts of climate change”. I respond that the rigorous calculation that I have described, which your officials may verify for themselves, shows that whatever costs may be imagined to flow from anthropogenic “global warming” will scarcely be mitigated at all, even by trillions of dollars of expenditure over the coming decade.

 

Every economic analysis except that of the now-discredited Lord Stern, with its near-zero discount rate and its absurdly inflated warming rates, comes to the same ineluctable conclusion: adaptation to climate change, in whatever direction, as and if necessary, is orders of magnitude more cost-effective than attempts at mitigation. In a long career in policy analysis in and out of government, I have never seen so cost-ineffective a proposed waste of taxpayers’ money as the trillions which today’s scientifically-illiterate governments propose to spend on attempting – with all the plausibility of King Canute – to stop the tide from coming in.

 

Remember that I have done this calculation on the basis that everyone who should comply with the Copenhagen Accord actually does comply. Precedent does not look promising. The Kyoto Protocol, the Copenhagen Accord’s predecessor, has been in operation for more than a decade, and it was supposed to reduce global CO2 emissions by 2012. So far, after billions spent on global implementation of Kyoto, global CO2 emissions have risen compared with when Kyoto was first signed.

 

Remember too that we have assumed the maximum warming that the CO2 imagines might occur in response to a given proportionate increase in CO2 concentration. Yet even the IPCC’s central estimate of CO2’s warming effect, according to an increasing number of serious papers in the peer-reviewed literature, is a five-fold exaggeration. If those papers are right, after a further decade of incomplete compliance and billions squandered, warming forestalled may prove to be just a thousandth of a degree.

 

Now ask yourself this. Are you, personally, and your advisers, personally, and your administration’s officials, personally, willing to make the heroically pointless sacrifices that you so insouciantly demand of others in the name of Saving The Planet For Future Generations? I beg leave to think not. At Flag 1 I have attached what I have reason to believe is a generally accurate list of the names and titles of the delegation that you led to Copenhagen to bring back the non-result whose paltriness, pointlessness and futility we have now rigorously demonstrated. There are 114 names on the list. One hundred and fourteen. Enough to fill a mid-sized passenger jet. Half a dozen were all that was really necessary – and perhaps one from each State in Australia. If you and your officials are not willing to tighten your belts when a tempting foreign junket at taxpayers’ expense is in prospect, why, pray, should the taxpayers tighten theirs?

 

You say that climate-change “deniers” – nasty word, that, and you should really have known better than to use it – are “small in number but too dangerous to be ignored”, and “well resourced”. In fact, governments, taxpayer-funded organizations, taxpayer-funded teachers, and taxpayer-funded environmental groups have spent something like 50,000 times as much on “global warming” propaganda as their opponents have spent on debunking this new and cruel superstition. And that is before we take account of the relentless prejudice of the majority of the mainstream news media.

 

How, then, it is that we, the supposed minority who will not admit that the emperor of “global warming” is adequately clad, are somehow prevailing? How is it that we are convincing more and more of the population not to place any more trust in the “global warming” theory? The answer is that the “global warming” theory is not true, and no amount of bluster or braggadocio, ranting or rodomontade will make it true.

 

You say that our aim, in daring to oppose the transient fashion for apocalypticism, is “to erode just enough of the political will that action becomes impossible”. No. Our aim is simply to ensure that the truth is widely enough understood to prevent the squandering of precious resources on addressing the non-problem of anthropogenic “global warming”. The correct policy response to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing. No interventionist likes to do nothing. Nevertheless, the do-nothing option, scientifically and economically speaking, is the right option.

 

You say that I and others like me base our thinking on the notion that “the cost of not acting is nothing”. Well, after a decade and a half with no statistically-significant “global warming”, and after three decades in which the mean warming rate has been well below the ever-falling predictions of the UN’s climate panel, that notion has certainly not been disproven in reality.

 

However, the question I address is not that but this. Is the cost of taking action many times greater than the cost of not acting? The answer to this question is Yes.

 

Millions are already dying of starvation in the world’s poorest nations because world food prices have doubled in two years. That abrupt, vicious doubling was caused by a sharp drop in world food production, caused in turn by suddenly taking millions of acres of land out of growing food for people who need it, so as to grow biofuels for clunkers that don’t. The scientifically-illiterate, economically-innumerate policies that you advocate – however fashionable you may conceive them to be – are killing people by the million.

 

You say my logic “belongs in a casino, not a science lab”. Yet it is you who are gambling with poor people’s lives, and it is you – or, rather, they – who are losing: and losing not merely their substance but their very existence. The biofuel scam is born of the idiotic notion – a notion you uncritically espouse – that increasing by less than 1/2000 this century the proportion of the Earth’s atmosphere occupied by CO2 may prove catastrophic. At a time when so many of the world’s people are already short of food, the UN’s right-to-food rapporteur, Herr Ziegler, has roundly and rightly condemned the biofuel scam as nothing less than “a crime against humanity”.

 

The scale of the slaughter is monstrous, with food riots (largely unreported in the Western news media, and certainly not mentioned by you in your recent speech) in a dozen regions of the Third World over the past two years. Yet this cruel, unheeded slaughter is founded upon a lie: the claim by the IPCC that it is 90% certain that most of the “global warming” since 1950 is manmade. This claim – based not on science but on a show of hands among political representatives, with China wanting a lower figure and other nations wanting a higher figure – is demonstrably, self-servingly false. Peer-reviewed analyses of changes in cloud cover over recent decades – changes almost entirely unconnected with changes in CO2 concentration – show that it was this largely-natural reduction in cloud cover from 1983-2001 and a consequent increase in the amount of short-wave and UV solar radiation reaching the Earth that accounted for five times as much warming as CO2 could have caused.

 

Nor is the IPCC’s great lie the only lie. If you will allow me to brief you and your advisers, I will show you lie after lie after lie after lie in the official documents of the IPCC and in the speeches of its current chairman, who has made himself a multi-millionaire as a “global warming” profiteer.

 

However, if you will not make the time to hear me for half an hour before you commit your working people to the futile indignity of excessive taxation and pointless over-regulation without the slightest scientific or economic justification, and to outright confiscation of their farmland without compensation on the fatuous pretext that the land is a “carbon sink”, then I hope that you will at least nominate one of the scientists on your staff to address the two central issues that I have raised in this letter: namely, the egregious cost-ineffectiveness of attempting to mitigate “global warming” by emissions reduction, and the measured fact, well demonstrated in the scientific literature, that a largely-natural change in cloud cover in recent decades caused five times as much “global warming” as CO2. It is also a measured fact that, while those of the UN’s computer models that can be forced with an increase in sea-surface temperatures all predict a consequent fall in the flux of outgoing radiation at top of atmosphere, in observed reality there is an increase. In short, the radiation that is supposed to be trapped here in the troposphere to cause “global warming” is measured as escaping to space much as usual, so that it cannot be causing more than around one-fifth of the warming the IPCC predicts.

 

My list of the Copenhagen junketers from Australia’s governing class is attached. All those taxpayer dollars squandered, just to forestall 0.02 C° of “global warming” in ten years. Yet, in the past decade and a half, there has been no “global warming” at all. Can you not see that it would be kinder to your working people to wait another decade and see whether global temperatures even begin to respond as the IPCC has predicted? What is the worst that can happen if you wait? Just 0.02 C° of global warming that would not otherwise have occurred. It’s a no-brainer.

 

Yours faithfully,

 

VISCOUNT MONCKTON OF BRENCHLEY

Looks like it's time for the Aussies to put up or shut up.

[dec00275]

thanks for that

[convert]

The church of AGW continues to crumble...

 

Call me a cynic, but wasn't it a bit premature of the climate change monkeys to have called 2009 the "fifth warmest year on record" back in November? We have now had the coldest December since Surrey was home to mastodons and pterodactyls and mammoths stalked the Lincolnshire Wolds -- a fact which you might hope they will factor into their figures somewhere, but I wouldn't bet on it.

 

I assume the climate change people believe that the year ends in December, as the rest of us do, rather than November. It's possible that for perfectly good reasons those boffins at the University of East Anglia have decided to remove December entirely from recent yearly climate figures, on the grounds that it is always a bit parky and does not entirely support the thesis that the Earth is getting hotter and all the polar bears are going to die.

 

Incidentally, they also predicted that 2010 was going to be scorching, the hottest year ever: let's keep an eye on the figures, then. And when it transpires that 2010 was actually fairly mild, wait for the explanation as to how man-made climate change is sometimes responsible for keeping temperatures very stable and not that hot at all.

 

 

Has anyone actually seen any (unadjusted) figures for 2009...

 

Can anyone tell me how many Polar bears have actually died?

 

Can anyone tell me how many old people are going to die from the ridiculous effect that the wealth re-distribution, carbon trading scheme taxation will have on their heating bills?

 

 

What we need now is a major political party to present us with a true alternative to these stupid CO2 reduction schemes; a party willing to invest in short to medium term nuclear power whilst 'greener' (wash my mouth out with carbolic) options are delveoped; a party to stick 2 fingers up at the IPCC and the EU and invest in science, to look at how we adapt to climate change, rather than the current self perpetuating 'science' to falsify the source of climate change.

[Greybeard]

What we need now is a major political party to present us with a true alternative to these stupid CO2 reduction schemes;

 

Whether a cash cow is stupid or not depends on your point of view. I read recently that the Met Office pension scheme has large investments in carbon trading schemes

[JIbbo]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8438408.stm

 

Last month was the coldest December in almost 30 years according to readings taken at the Armagh Observatory.

 

The mean temperature was 1.5C, the coldest average measurement since 1981.

 

The average temperature for 2009, at 9.87C, was close to the average of 9.94C for the last 20 years.

 

But actually colder than the 20 year average...........

 

Wheres this global warming ?

[retep]

Here's a weather record going back to 1853 Oxford 1883 Sheffield,

click on the dots,

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/stationdata/

[Wildcat]

Looks like it's time for the Aussies to put up or shut up.

 

Viscount Monckhausen

 

The guy is a looney.

 

Or as Ethan Baron of the Canadian newspaper The Province said his assertions are the product of a "whacked-out, far-right ideology, combined with an ego the size of the Antarctic ice sheet."

 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Monckton,_3rd_Viscount_Monckton_of_Brenchley#Views_on_AIDS

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/blog/2009/oct/20/climate-change-denial-monckton

 

Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, whose academic qualification is a classics degree, maintains that "politicians, scientists and bureaucrats contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions worthier of St John the Divine than of science." He came to public notice with a long paper published on the website of the Sunday Telegraph, accusing the UN of scientific fraud. His paper was filled with sciencey equations and calculations, which were rapidly dismissed as bunkum by real scientists.

 

He has threatened several of those who have challenged his scientific claims with libel suits, but they have not yet materialised. Though he has never held a seat in the Lords, he maintained in a threatening letter to two US senators that he was "a member of the Upper House of the United Kingdom legislature".

 

He has also claimed that, among other unlikely feats, he was responsible for winning the Falklands war. His grand statements about climate science and his own credentials have earned him the nickname among some environmentalists of Viscount Monckhausen

 

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2009/mar/06/climate-change-deniers-top-10

[Wildcat]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/northern_ireland/8438408.stm

 

Last month was the coldest December in almost 30 years according to readings taken at the Armagh Observatory.

 

The mean temperature was 1.5C, the coldest average measurement since 1981.

 

The average temperature for 2009, at 9.87C, was close to the average of 9.94C for the last 20 years.

 

But actually colder than the 20 year average...........

 

Wheres this global warming ?

 

Do you understand Global warming is not just about UK temperatures?

 

Australia for example is worried about its fruit crops because Spring has been so hot.... what does that prove? it proves it is hotter than normal in Autralia, and nothing in isolation about global warming.

 

http://www.fruitnet.com/content.aspx?cid=5211&rid=2

Edited January 4, 2010 by Wildcat