10 April 2007

IPCC Report slammed as “dangerous nonsense…lacking in scientific rigour”

“Dangerous unscientific nonsense” and “lacking in scientific rigour” are descriptions by two scientist members of the New Zealand Climate Science Coalition of the latest report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just released. No climate-sensitive environmental parameter been shown to be changing at a rate that exceeds its historic natural rate of change, let alone in a way that can be unequivocally associated with human causation.

Dr Vincent Gray, of Wellington, is the only person in New Zealand who has been an expert reviewer on every draft of the many IPCC Reports. He recalls” “My greatest achievement was the second report where the draft had a chapter ‘Validation of Climate Models’. I commented that since no climate model has ever been ‘validated’ that the word was inappropriate. They changed the word to ‘evaluate’ 50 times, and since then they have never ‘predicted’ anything. All they do is make ‘projections’ and ‘estimates’.

“No climate model has ever been properly tested, which is what ‘validation’ means, and their ‘projections’ are nothing more than the opinions of ‘experts’ with a conflict of interest, because they are paid to produce the models. There is no actual scientific evidence for all these ‘projections’ and ‘estimates'. It should be obvious that they are ridiculous. Try and tell the people of Northland that they are about to run out of water.

“Global temperatures have not been rising for eight years. New Zealand temperatures in the last 50 years have gone down with volcanoes and up with El Niños but have no signs of ‘warming’. Christchurch has not warmed since 1917. The sea level in Auckland has been much the same since 1960.

“The claims of the IPCC are dangerous unscientific nonsense,” says Dr Gray.

An Australian based member of the coalition, Professor Bob Carter, of James Cook University, Townsville , is at present at the US headquarters of the Ocean Drilling Programme at Texas A & A University, studying seabed cores from the southwest Pacific. Writing in the UK Daily Telegraph yesterday he has condemned the latest IPCC report for what he describes as “its lack of scientific rigour”.

Professor Carter describes what the cores reveal: “As the cores pass through the logging sensor that measures their character, the rhythmic pattern of ancient climate change is displayed: friendly, fossiliferous brown sands for the warm interglacial periods, and hostile, sterile grey clays for the cold glaciations.

“For more than 90 per cent of recent geological time, the cores show that the earth has been colder than today. We modern humans are lucky to live towards the end of the most recent of the intermittent, and welcome, warm interludes. It is a 10,000 year-long period called the Holocene, during which our civilisations have evolved and flourished.

“Backwards for hundreds of thousands of years, the core alternations march. Some, metronomic in their occurrence, are ruled by changes in the earth's orbit at periods of about 20,000, 41,000 and 100,000 years; others are paced by fluctuations in solar output on a scale of centuries or millennia; and others display irregular yet rapid oceanographic and climate shifts that are caused by we know not what. Climate, it seems, changes ceaselessly in either direction: sometimes cooling, sometimes warming, often for reasons that we do not yet fully understand.

“Similar cores through polar ice reveal, contrary to received wisdom, that past temperature changes were followed - not preceded, but followed - by changes in the atmospheric content of carbon dioxide. Yet the public now believes strongly that increasing human carbon dioxide emissions will cause runaway warming; it is surely a strange cause of climate change that naturally postdates its supposed effect?

“Am I the first scientist to have observed these climate patterns? Of course not. That climate changes frequently, rapidly and sometimes unpredictably has been conventional knowledge among earth environmental scientists since the early days of ocean drilling in the 1970s.

“Yet we do not read about natural climate change in the everyday news. Instead, newspapers, radio and television stations bludgeon us with a merciless stream of human-caused global-warming alarmism, egged on by a self-interested gaggle of journalists, environmental lobbyists, scientific and business groups, church leaders and politicians, all of whom preach that we must ‘stop climate change’ by reducing human CO2 emissions.

“Many different fields of study are involved and all are the subject of intensive ongoing research. From this research emerges one inescapable fact: that in no case yet has any climate-sensitive environmental parameter been shown to be changing at a rate that exceeds its historic natural rate of change, let alone in a way that can be in unequivocally associated with human causation.

“Our most accurate depiction of atmospheric temperature over the past 25 years comes from satellite measurements (see graph of temperature variations below) rather than from the ground thermometer record. Once the effects of non-greenhouse warming (the El Niño phenomenon in the Pacific, for instance) and cooling (volcanic eruptions) events are discounted, these measurements indicate an absence of significant global warming since 1979 - that is, over the very period that human carbon dioxide emissions have been increasing rapidly. The satellite data signal not only the absence of substantial human-induced warming, by recording similar temperatures in 1980 and 2006, but also provide an empirical test of the greenhouse hypothesis as understood by the public - a test that the hypothesis fails.

“In the present state of knowledge, no scientist can justify the statement: ‘Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperature since the mid-20th century is very likely due [90 per cent probable] to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations,’ as stated in the IPCC’s 2007 Summary for Policy Makers,” said Professor Carter.

www.climatescience.org.nz

ENDS

Gordon Campbell: On John Key’s Agenda For The Nation

There seemed to be three main components to John Key’s speech :

a) tax cuts largely paid for by a hike in GST
b) mining in national parks and on conservation land, while building more roads.
c) giving firms easier access to the r&d from Crown Research Institutes, so that business can continue to get the taxpayer to pick up the tab for the research that keeps them competitive.

After all, corporate welfare is always such a blessed thing – its only social welfare that corrodes enterprise and ambition. More>>