New report counters IPCC AR4

The Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (N-IPCC - not to be confused with the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the IPCC) will be published this week by the Heartland Institute.

It promises to be the most complete, up-to-date, authoritative summary of peer-reviewed critical positions with respect to "Anthropogenic Global Warming".

The report is titled Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate and is edited by S. Fred Singer. From the report's Forward:

In his speech at the United Nations’ climate conference on September 24, 2007, Dr. Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, said it would most help the debate on climate change if the current monopoly and one-sidedness of the scientific debate over climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were eliminated. He reiterated his proposal that the UN organize a parallel panel and publish two competing reports.

The present report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) does exactly that. It is an independent examination of the evidence available in the published, peer-reviewed literature – examined without bias and selectivity. It includes many research papers ignored by the IPCC, plus additional scientific results that became available after the IPCC deadline of May 2006.

The report is highly critical of the UN's Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) released last year. From the N-IPCC's Summary for Policymakers (SPM):

The Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Working Group-1 (Science) (IPCC-AR4 2007), released in 2007, is a major research effort by a group of dedicated specialists in many topics related to climate change. It forms a valuable compendium of the current state of the science, enhanced by having an index, which had been lacking in previous IPCC reports. AR4 also permits access to the numerous critical comments submitted by expert reviewers, another first for the IPCC.

While AR4 is an impressive document, it is far from being a reliable reference work on some of the most important aspects of climate change science and policy. It is marred by errors and misstatements, ignores scientific data that were available but were inconsistent with the authors’ pre-conceived conclusions, and has already been contradicted in important parts by research published since May 2006, the IPCC’s cut-off date.

In general, the IPCC fails to consider important scientific issues, several of which would upset its major conclusion – that “most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations” (emphasis in the original).

The IPCC does not apply generally accepted methodologies to determine what fraction of current warming is natural, or how much is caused by the rise in greenhouse (GH) gases. A comparison of ‘fingerprints’ from best available observations with the results of state-of-the-art GH models leads to the conclusion that the (human-caused) GH contribution is minor. This fingerprint evidence, though available, was ignored by the IPCC.

The following is taken from the report's Conclusions:

The extent of the modern warming – the subject of the first question – appears to be less than is claimed by the IPCC and in the popular media. We have documented shortcomings of surface data, affected by urban heat islands and by the poor distribution of land-based observing stations.

(...)

This report shows conclusively that the human greenhouse gas contribution to current warming is insignificant. Our argument is based on the well established and generally agreed-to ‘fingerprint’ method. Using data published by the IPCC and further elaborated in the U.S.-sponsored CCSP report, we have shown that observed temperature trend patterns disagree sharply with those calculated from greenhouse models.

And finally, this statement on Policy Implications:

Our findings, if sustained, point to natural causes and a moderate warming trend with beneficial effects for humanity and wildlife. This has obvious policy implications: Schemes proposed for controlling CO2 emissions, including the Kyoto Protocol, proposals in the U.S. for federal and state actions, and proposals for a successor international treaty to Kyoto, are unnecessary, would be ineffective if implemented, and would waste resources that can better be applied to genuine societal problems [Singer, Revelle and Starr 1991].

Even if a substantial part of global warming were due to greenhouse gases – and it is not – any control efforts currently contemplated would give only feeble results. For example, the Kyoto Protocol – even if punctiliously observed by all participating nations – would decrease calculated future temperatures by only 0.02 degrees C by 2050, an undetectable amount.

In conclusion, this NIPCC report falsifies the principal IPCC conclusion that the reported warming (since 1979) is very likely caused by the human emission of greenhouse gases. In other words, increasing carbon dioxide is not responsible for current warming. Policies adopted and called for in the name of ‘fighting global warming’ are unnecessary.

It is regrettable that the public debate over climate change, fueled by the errors and exaggerations contained in the reports of the IPCC, has strayed so far from scientific truth. It is an embarrassment to science that hype has replaced reason in the global debate over so important an issue.

Contributors to the N-IPCC report are: Warren Anderson United States, Dennis Avery United States, Franco Battaglia Italy, Robert Carter Australia, Richard Courtney United Kingdom, Joseph d’Aleo United States, Fred Goldberg Sweden, Vincent Gray New Zealand, Kenneth Haapala United States, Klaus Heiss Austria, Craig Idso United States, Zbigniew Jaworowski Poland, Olavi Karner Estonia, Madhav Khandekar Canada, William Kininmonth Australia, Hans Labohm Netherlands, Christopher Monckton United Kingdom, Lubos Motl Czech Republic, Tom Segalstad Norway, S. Fred Singer United States, Dick Thoenes Netherlands, Anton Uriarte Spain, Gerd Weber Germany.

Related: Climate change not due to greenhouse gases, NYT: Global Warming Skeptics Convene in New York, The Earth Times: Research of Hundreds More Scientists Shows the Natural 1,500-Year Climate Cycle, Fox News: Global Warming: Is it really a crisis?

Sowell: Cold Water on ‘Global Warming’

Thomas Sowell is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, Stanford, CA. He outlines the importance of the "International Conference on Climate Change" Global Warming: Truth or Swindle?

It has almost become something of a joke when some "global warming" conference has to be cancelled because of a snowstorm or bitterly cold weather.

But stampedes and hysteria are no joke — and creating stampedes and hysteria has become a major activity of those hyping a global warming "crisis."

They mobilize like-minded people from a variety of occupations, call them all "scientists" and then claim that "all" the experts agree on a global warming crisis.

Their biggest argument is that there is no argument.

A whole cottage industry has sprung up among people who get grants, government agencies who get appropriations, politicians who get publicity and the perpetually indignant who get something new to be indignant about. It gives teachers something to talk about in school instead of teaching.

Those who bother to check the facts often find that not all those who are called scientists are really scientists and not all of those who are scientists are specialists in climate. But who bothers to check facts these days?

A new and very different conference on global warming will be held in New York City, under the sponsorship of the Heartland Institute, on March 2nd to March 4th — weather permitting.

It is called an "International Conference on Climate Change." Its subtitle is "Global Warming: Truth or Swindle?" Among those present will be professors of climatology, along with scientists in other fields and people from other professions.

They come from universities in England, Hungary, and Australia, as well as from the United States and Canada, and include among other dignitaries the president of the Czech Republic.

There will be 98 speakers and 400 participants.

The theme of the conference is that "there is no scientific consensus on the causes or likely consequences of global warming."

Many of the participants in this conference are people who have already expressed skepticism about either the prevailing explanations of current climate change or the dire predictions about future climate change.

These include authors of such books as "Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years" by Fred Singer and Dennis Avery, and "Shattered Consensus," edited by Patrick J. Michaels.

This will be one of the rare opportunities for the media to hear the other side of the story — for those old-fashioned journalists who still believe that their job is to inform the public, rather than promote an agenda.

Read the whole thing.

Study: Part of Global-Warming Model May Be Wrong

via Fox News:

Part of the scientific consensus on global warming may be flawed, a new study asserts.

The researchers compared predictions of 22 widely used climate "models" — elaborate schematics that try to forecast how the global weather system will behave — with actual readings gathered by surface stations, weather balloons and orbiting satellites over the past three decades.

The study, published online this week in the International Journal of Climatology, found that while most of the models predicted that the middle and upper parts of the troposphere —1 to 6 miles above the Earth's surface — would have warmed drastically over the past 30 years, actual observations showed only a little warming, especially over tropical regions.

"Can the models accurately explain the climate from the recent past? It seems that the answer is no," said lead study author David H. Douglass, a physicist specializing in climate at the University of Rochester.

Douglass and his co-authors S. Fred Singer, a physicist at the University of Virginia, and John R. Christy, a climatologist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, are noted global-warming skeptics.

Careful Review of Science Refutes Global Warming Myths

A review by Jay Lehr published in Environment News March 2007 issue:

With their new book, Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Years, S. Fred Singer and Dennis T. Avery skewer all the misinformation that has been used for so long in an attempt to convince society that mankind is the root cause of all global climate change.

The book is truly amazing! It meticulously supports, with hundreds of detailed, published references, the clear facts and conclusions that the Earth's climate has been traveling a well-defined rollercoaster path of temperature change for at least 900,000 years.

Everyone reading this review should buy two copies of the book, keeping one in plain view at their home or office while sending one to a friend or government official who may be called upon to make a decision regarding CO2 emissions into our atmosphere.

via The Heartland Institute