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Written by Christopher Monckton, Denpasar,
Bali |
| Tuesday, 11
December 2007 |
Christopher Monckton, Denpasar, Bali
As a contributor to the IPCC's 2007 report, I share the Nobel
Peace Prize with Al Gore. Yet I and many of my peers in the
British House of Lords - through our hereditary element the most
independent-minded of lawmakers - profoundly disagree on
fundamental scientific grounds with both the IPCC and my
co-laureate's alarmist movie An Inconvenient Truth, which won
this year's Oscar for Best Sci-Fi Comedy Horror.
Two detailed investigations by Committees of the House confirm
that the IPCC has deliberately, persistently and prodigiously
exaggerated not only the effect of greenhouse gases on
temperature but also the environmental consequences of warmer
weather.
My contribution to the 2007 report illustrates the scientific
problem. The report's first table of figures - inserted by the
IPCC's bureaucrats after the scientists had finalized the draft,
and without their consent - listed four contributions to
sea-level rise. The bureaucrats had multiplied the effect of
melting ice from the Greenland and West Antarctic Ice Sheets by
10.
The result of this dishonest political tampering with the
science was that the sum of the four items in the offending
table was more than twice the IPCC's published total. Until I
wrote to point out the error, no one had noticed. The IPCC, on
receiving my letter, quietly corrected, moved and relabeled the
erroneous table, posting the new version on the internet and
earning me my Nobel prize.
The shore-dwellers of Bali need not fear for their homes. The
IPCC now says the combined contribution of the two great
ice-sheets to sea-level rise will be less than seven centimeters
after 100 years, not seven meters imminently, and that the
Greenland ice sheet (which thickened by 50 cm between 1995 and
2005) might only melt after several millennia, probably by
natural causes, just as it last did 850,000 years ago. Gore,
mendaciously assisted by the IPCC bureaucracy, had exaggerated a
hundredfold.
Recently a High Court judge in the UK listed nine of the 35
major scientific errors in Gore's movie, saying they must be
corrected before innocent schoolchildren can be exposed to the
movie. Gore's exaggeration of sea-level rise was one.
Others being peddled at the Bali conference are that man-made
"global warming" threatens polar bears and coral reefs, caused
Hurricane Katrina, shrank Lake Chad, expanded the
actually-shrinking Sahara, etc.
At the very heart of the IPCC's calculations lurks an error more
serious than any of these. The IPCC says: "The CO2 radiative
forcing increased by 20 percent during the last 10 years
(1995-2005)." Radiative forcing quantifies increases in radiant
energy in the atmosphere, and hence in temperature. The
atmospheric concentration of CO2 in 1995 was 360 parts per
million. In 2005 it was just 5percent higher, at 378 ppm. But
each additional molecule of CO2 in the air causes a smaller
radiant-energy increase than its predecessor. So the true
increase in radiative forcing was 1 percent, not 20 percent. The
IPCC has exaggerated the CO2 effect 20-fold.
Why so large and crucial an exaggeration? Answer: the IPCC has
repealed the fundamental physicalthe Stefan-Boltzmann equation -
that converts radiant energy to temperature. Without this
equation, no meaningful calculation of the effect of radiance on
temperature can be done. Yet the 1,600 pages of the IPCC's 2007
report do not mention it once.
The IPCC knows of the equation, of course. But it is
inconvenient. It imposes a strict (and very low) limit on how
much greenhouse gases can increase temperature. At the Earth's
surface, you can add as much greenhouse gas as you like (the
"surface forcing"), and the temperature will scarcely respond.
That is why all of the IPCC's computer models predict that 10km
above Bali, in the tropical upper troposphere, temperature
should be rising two or three times as fast as it does at the
surface. Without that tropical upper-troposphere "hot-spot", the
Stefan-Boltzmann law ensures that surface temperature cannot
change much.
For half a century we have been measuring the temperature in the
upper atmosphere - and it has been changing no faster than at
the surface. The IPCC knows this, too. So it merely declares
that its computer predictions are right and the real-world
measurements are wrong. Next time you hear some
scientifically-illiterate bureaucrat say, "The science is
settled", remember this vital failure of real-world observations
to confirm the IPCC's computer predictions. The IPCC's entire
case is built on a guess that the absent hot-spot might exist.
Even if the Gore/IPCC exaggerations were true, which they are
not, the economic cost of trying to mitigate climate change by
trying to cut our emissions through carbon trading and other
costly market interferences would far outweigh any possible
climatic benefit.
The international community has galloped lemming-like over the
cliff twice before. Twenty years ago the UN decided not to
regard AIDS as a fatal infection. Carriers of the disease were
not identified and isolated. Result: 25 million deaths in poor
countries.
Thirty-five years ago the world decided to ban DDT, the only
effective agent against malaria. Result: 40 million deaths in
poor countries. The World Health Organization lifted the DDT ban
on Sept. 15 last year. It now recommends the use of DDT to
control malaria. Dr. Arata Kochi of the WHO said that politics
could no longer be allowed to stand in the way of the science
and the data. Amen to that.
If we take the heroically stupid decisions now on the table at
Bali, it will once again be the world's poorest people who will
die unheeded in their tens of millions, this time for lack of
the heat and light and power and medical attention which we in
the West have long been fortunate enough to take for granted.
If we deny them the fossil-fuelled growth we have enjoyed, they
will remain poor and, paradoxically, their populations will
continue to increase, making the world's carbon footprint very
much larger in the long run.
As they die, and as global temperature continues to fail to rise
in accordance with the IPCC's laughably-exaggerated predictions,
the self-congratulatory rhetoric that is the hallmark of the
now-useless, costly, corrupt UN will again be near-unanimously
parroted by lazy, unthinking politicians and journalists who
ought to have done their duty by the poor but are now - for the
third time in three decades - failing to speak up for those who
are about to die.
My fellow-participants, there is no climate crisis. The correct
policy response to a non-problem is to have the courage to do
nothing. Take courage! Do nothing, and save the world's poor
from yet another careless, UN-driven slaughter.
The writer is an international business consultant specializing
in the investigation of scientific frauds. He is a former
adviser to UK prime minister Margaret Thatcher and is presenter
of the 90-minute climate movie Apocalypse? NO! He can be reached
at
monckton@mail.com
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