Four Basic IPCC Lies

A big hat tip to JR at Just Right for his post about the latest article from Lawrence Solomon in his series, The Deniers.

Lawrence Solomon’s column "The Deniers: Part XXI" in yesterday’s National Post focuses on Polish scientist Dr. Zbigniew Jaworowski, whose research proved a key IPCC assumption false.

"The IPCC relies on ice-core data -- on air that has been trapped for hundreds or thousands of years deep below the surface," Dr. Jaworowski explains.

"These ice cores are a foundation of the global warming hypothesis, but the foundation is groundless -- the IPCC has based its global-warming hypothesis on arbitrary assumptions and these assumptions, it is now clear, are false."

While Dr. Jaworowski’s work is extremely important, the results aren’t that surprising. What is more surprising, shocking really, is that there was an organized effort to suppress his research on the grounds that it is "immoral" to do research that might contradict a preferred hypothesis:

....in 1994 Dr. Jaworowski, together with a team from the Norwegian Institute for Energy Technics, proposed a research project on the reliability of trace-gas determinations in the polar ice. The prospective sponsors of the research refused to fund it, claiming the research would be "immoral" if it served to undermine the foundations of climate research.

Several years earlier, in a peer-reviewed article ...Dr. Jaworowski criticized the methods by which CO2 levels were ascertained from ice cores, and cast doubt on the global-warming hypothesis. The institute's director, while agreeing to publish his article, also warned Dr. Jaworowski that "this is not the way one gets research projects." Once published, the institute came under fire .... Although none of the critics faulted Dr. Jaworowski's science, the institute nevertheless fired him to maintain its access to funding.

Which all leads nicely into this which I've been planning to post for the past few days. I believe that peer-reviewed article mentioned by JR was: CO2: The Greatest Scientific Scandal of Our Time, Zbigniew Jaworowski, M.D., Ph.D., D.Sc. in which he explains the political nature of the IPCC:

On Feb. 2, 2007, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) again uttered its mantra of catastrophe about man-made global warming. After weeks of noisy propaganda, a 21-page “Summary for Policymakers” of the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report, 2007, was presented in grandiose style in Paris to a crowd of politicians and media, accompanied by a blackout of the Eiffel Tower to show that electric energy is bad. The event induced a tsunami of hysteria that ran around the world. This was probably the main aim of this clearly political paper, prepared by governmental and United Nations bureaucrats, and published more than three months before the IPCC’s 1,600-page scientific report, which is to be released in May. In the words of the IPCC, this delay is needed for adjustment of the main text, so that “Changes . . . [could be] made to ensure consistency with the ‘Summary for Policymakers.’ ” Not a single word in these 1,600 pages is to be in conflict with what politicians said beforehand in the summary!

The IPCC's full Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) - the one containing the science, has now been released but you would never know it because it got next to no attention from the media.

Jaworowski explains what he calls the Four Basic IPCC Lies:

The four basic statements in the “Summary for Policymakers” are:

1. Carbon dioxide, the most important anthropogenic emissions increased markedly as a result of human activities, and its atmospheric concentration of 379 ppmv (parts by volume) in 2005 by far exceeded the natural range of 180 to 300 ppmv over the last 650,000 years.

2. Since 1750, human activities warmed the climate.

3. The warmth of the last half-century is unusual, is the highest in at least the past 1,300 years, and is “very likely” caused by increases in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations;

4. Predictions are made that anthropogenic warming will continue for centuries, and between 2090 and 2099 the global average surface temperature will increase 1.1°C to 6.4°C. Various scare stories of global catastrophes are prophesied to occur if man-made emissions are not curbed by drastic political decisions. The obvious beneficial effects of warming for man and all the biosphere are downplayed.

Except for CO2, all these points are garlanded with qualifications such as “likely,” “very likely,” “extremely likely,” “with very high confidence,” and “unequivocal.”

In fact, to the contrary, all these points are incorrect.

You will have to read the 16 page report, which can be downloaded here in PDF format to see the explanations.

But there's more: the IPCC chose to ignore more than 90,000 direct CO2 measurements because the data from them not fit their preclusion that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are causing global warming:

We thus find ourselves in the situation that the entire theory of man-made global warming—with its repercussions in science, and its important consequences for politics and the global economy—is based on ice core studies that provided a false picture of the atmospheric CO2 levels. Meanwhile, more than 90,000 direct measurements of CO2 in the atmosphere, carried out in America, Asia, and Europe between 1812 and 1961, with excellent chemical methods (accuracy better than 3%), were arbitrarily rejected. These measurements had been published in 175 technical papers. For the past three decades, these well-known direct CO2 measurements, recently compiled and analyzed by Ernst-Georg Beck (Beck 2006a, Beck 2006b, Beck 2007), were completely ignored by climatologists—and not because they were wrong. Indeed, these measurements were made by several Nobel Prize winners, using the techniques that are standard textbook procedures in chemistry, biochemistry, botany, hygiene, medicine, nutrition, and ecology. The only reason for rejection was that these measurements did not fit the hypothesis of anthropogenic climatic warming. I regard this as perhaps the greatest scientific scandal of our time.

Jaworowski previously gave a statement to the the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation in which he concluded:

The basis of most of the IPCC conclusions on anthropogenic causes and on projections of climatic change is the assumption of low level of CO2 in the pre-industrial atmosphere. This assumption, based on glaciological studies, is false. Therefore IPCC projections should not be used for national and global economic planning. The climatically inefficient and economically disastrous Kyoto Protocol, based on IPCC projections, was correctly defined by President George W. Bush as “fatally flawed”. This criticism was recently followed by the President of Russia Vladimir V. Putin. I hope that their rational views might save the world from enormous damage that could be induced by implementing recommendations based on distorted science.