By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
The IPCC, having spent almost two months working out how to respond to my complaint about a notoriously bogus graph in its Fourth Assessment Report, has found itself not guilty. In doing so, it is wilfully perpetuating a fraud, which will now be reported to the prosecuting authorities.
My complaint was as follows:
“The graph purports to show, but does not show, that the rate of global warming has been accelerating and that the accelerated global warming is anthropogenic.”
The conclusion the IPCC draws by superimposing multiple trend-lines on the HadCRUt curve of global mean surface temperature anomalies since 1850 is that because the trend-lines starting more recently are steepest the world is warming ever faster and we are to blame. The caption to the graph makes this clear:
“Note that for shorter recent periods, the slope is greater, indicating accelerated warming. … increases in carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases dominate the observed warming after the mid-1970s …”.
Dr. Pachauri, the IPCC’s climate-science chairman, drew the same two bogus conclusions from this graph in a lecture in New South Wales some years ago:
“… In recent years this graph has become much steeper. If you draw a line through the last 100 years, the slope is a 0.74 C° line. But if you look at the last 50 years, [it is] almost twice as steep as the total 100-year period. So it would be appropriate to conclude that … warming is taking place at a much faster rate, and clearly if we don’t bring about some changes we’d have much faster changes in future.”
I had invited the IPCC to reconsider its use of a technique so bogus that if one applies multiple trend-lines to a sine-wave (which has a zero trend) one can demonstrate either that the trend is ever more rapidly declining or that it is ever more rapidly increasing.
In fact, the global temperature trend is not increasing. In the 101 months since January 2005, the benchmark date for the IPCC’s forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), there has been no global warming.
The bright blue trend-line on the HadCRUt dataset shows cooling. Yet the bright red line showing the AR5 projections suggests that a rapid warming should be taking place. In little more than eight years the IPCC’s projection is already more than a quarter of a Celsius degree (or half a Fahrenheit degree) above observed reality:
The IPCC knows perfectly well that the two conclusions it invited readers to draw in the caption from the slopes of the multiple trend-lines in the graph are indefensible, misleading, and – let us not mince words – fraudulent. It avoids admitting its error by breaking down my complaint into five parts, of which only the first two go to the substance of my complaint. And, even with these two, the IPCC carefully avoids addressing the substance of my complaint:
1. M of B complaint: the graph “purports to show that the rate of global warming has been accelerating”.
IPCC response: “The indicated trends on the two figures are factually correct. They are correctly determined and clearly indicated on the legend accompanying these figures. … Therefore, the claim is not warranted.”
But I had not complained that the trend-lines had been incorrectly determined. Indeed, I had demonstrated that correctly-calculated trend-lines applied to a sine-wave could produce false conclusions very similar to that of the IPCC. The inaccuracy about which I had complained lay in the drawing of improper conclusions from the trend-lines.
2. M of B: the graph “purports to show that the accelerated global warming is anthropogenic”.
IPCC: “The figures were not used to make a statement on the causes of a possible increase in trend. … Detection and attribution assessments are based on a comprehensive evaluation of detection and attribution research that is presented in AR4 Chapter 9. That chapter’s assessments are not based on evidence of differences in linear trends between different periods. Therefore, the claim is not warranted.”
But the IPCC’s caption plainly attributes the rapid warming from the 1970s onward to Man. So the graphs were used, and explicitly used, “to make a statement on the causes of a possible increase in trend”. Besides, if Chapter 9 had already reached its assessment by other means, what was the purpose of the bogus graph, except to mislead?
3. M of B (subsidiary point): I had understood that the graph was and altered version of what had appeared in the scientists final draft.
IPCC: “The figures in question appeared in the Final Drafts of Chapter 3 and of the Technical Summary with the same numbering as in the published versions. The trends, including the detailed legend with the numerical values and the uncertainties were included in the Final Draft as in the published version, except for copy-editing changes. Trends were added in the Final Draft versions of these figures in response to comments on the Second Order Draft … Therefore, the claim is not warranted.”
Score half a point for the IPCC here. The graph with the bogus trend-lines had appeared in the final draft. However, it had appeared without the trend-lines in all versions that preceded the final draft. Someone had added the trend-lines, but should not have done so.
4. M of B (subsidiary point): The text accompanying the defective graph says: “An increasing rate of warming has taken place over the last 25 years, …”.
IPCC: From the context it is clear that the authors emphasize that the global mean is not the complete picture (“ … with important regional variations”) and that trends are not smooth (“… has occurred in two phases …”, and “… more strongly from the 1970s …”), and that all these statements are factually correct and discuss in words what is visible in the graph. “Therefore, the claim is not warranted.”
But my complaint is not about what may have been said elsewhere in the report, nor about whether what was said elsewhere in the report was factually correct. It is about the bogus graph, whose accompanying text must be read first and foremost in the context of the graph that it accompanies. The fact that “the global mean is not the complete picture” has nothing whatever to do with whether or not it is appropriate to draw inaccurate conclusions from the relative slopes of multiple arbitrarily-chosen trend-lines.
5. M of B (subsidiary point): the text accompanying the graph says, “The rate of warming averaged over the last 50 years (0.13°C ± 0.03°C per decade) is nearly twice that for the last 100 years.”
IPCC: The quoted words “are factually correct. Therefore the claim is not warranted. In conclusion, the Co-Chairs of WGI and the WGI Bureau find that no action is warranted in response to this claim.”
But I had nowhere asserted that the quoted words were not factually correct. I had stated that it was not appropriate for the IPCC to draw from the relative slopes of the various trend lines the unjustifiable conclusion that the rate of global warming was accelerating and that we were to blame.
It would not be difficult to persuade a jury that the IPCC’s assertion that various data were “factually correct”, when I had at no point challenged the factual correctness, merely the inappropriate conclusions that had been drawn, was evidence of its continuing attempt to mislead the public.
I have shown the bogus graph to hundreds of audiences all around the world. Recently I have been asking them to imagine that they were a fraud jury. All have voted to convict – and, on almost every occasion, the votes have been unanimous.
The difficulty, though, is that the IPCC, as one of a proliferating number of supranational agencies, is not answerable to any jurisdiction, except possibly that of Switzerland, where it is headquartered.
If the IPCC were answerable to the British courts, I should invite the police to prosecute and then, if they did not act, I should go before the magistrates myself. I have done it before. If the case is sound, a summons will be issued against the accused. I once hauled the British Secret Police (delicately called the “Crime Agency”) before the beaks, got a summons, and forced these thugs into a humiliating climbdown. But that is another story.
The Swiss authorities have established a specialist bureau to investigate frauds, the Bureau de l’Escroquerie. Its expertise is considerable, and it is well used to dealing with frauds a great deal more complex than those of the IPCC.
Whether the Swiss authorities will act on my complaint to them remains to be seen. Don’t hold your breath. However, now that the IPCC knows that a formal complaint has been submitted, it had better tread more carefully. If the Swiss police were to receive multiple complaints about different aspects of the IPCC’s misconduct – the Himalayan glaciers affair, for instance – they would not be able to look the other way indefinitely.
So, if the IPCC wishes to survive (and, frankly, it has had its day), it will have to be a great deal more careful in future to comply with the scientific method – and with the criminal law.
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Brilliant, keep up the pressure.
Steve T
I assume IPCC will update in their next report the first graph with the obvious missing slope of the last 12.5 years?
We need to keep exposing every aspect of this fraud until the obvious inaction against it is making a mockery of law and justice that all can see.
Play on, you clown!
It is unfortunate that IPCC headquarters are not located in Italy, where seismologists were prosecuted and found guilty of manslaughter for not predicting of L’Aquila earthquake.
Mankind will thank you.
Demanding that other nations change their cultures and behaviors under threat of violence and wrath of God. There’s a word for that.
For a possible venue, perhaps Nuremberg would do.
Sir:
I get just a bit lost. Is Climate Change on a sine curve?
Surely you are not saying that.
Sincerely,
That’s what I like to see.
A bit of MoB justice!
Secrets and Lies
by Golem XIV on JUNE 27, 2013 in LATEST
Every credit has its debit, every positive its negative. So for every secret there must be a lie, and every lie must be kept secret.
This is the currency of power today. Fiat truth.
We are not allowed to have any secrets any more. And yet those who insist they must know the truth about us, who spy upon us to extract our secrets, tell us. in return, only lies.
It is a dangerous, corroding imbalance of power, because lies, like debts, compound.
Living the lie
We all know the famous Goebbels quote,
“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it.
From Sadam’s weapons of mass destruction and missiles that could hit us in just 40 minutes of sexed up bullshit, to the stress tests that show us every bank is perfectly solvent and however many billions they launder they are never guilty and no one goes to goal because they are too big to fail and too connected to even question.
The eye of providence looks out and approves of what is done – Annuit cœptis.
But who does the all seeing eye, that sits atop the pyramid of power on the mighty dollar bill, work for now? Is it really you and me? That is what we are told to believe. But is it true? I think there are too many secrets but few of them are yours and mine.
The private dealings of the ordinary citizen are considered suspect and must, we are told, be rooted out. The secrets and outright lies of the corporate and governmental worlds, however – they are confidential. They are protected – behind razor-wire threats of legal action and closed door tribunals of hand picked experts.
A few weeks ago I sat and listened to the former leader of the Conservative party, now an elder statesman of British politics, Michael Howard, tell an audience that governments need to lie. He is a clever man. He quoted Goebbels and then gave this carefully chosen example.
Imagine, he said, that a Chancellor knew that he was going to have to devalue the currency. The evening before the appointed hour, he is asked by a journalist if he is going to devalue. If he tells the truth and says yes, there will be a run on the currency and great damage will be done. So he lies. “No”, he says, “I have absolutely no plans to devalue at all.” And then next morning he devalues as he had planned.
“Was this not”, Mr Howard asked, “the right thing, the only thing to do?” And all agreed it was. The unspoken lesson that everyone seemed to accept was stability is more important than the truth.
I find this a very frightening notion.
But Mr Howard presented his lie well. He went on to quote the next, less well known line from the Goebbels quote.
The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie.
And this, he said smiling at us, is what protects you. The chancellor’s lie only needed to last a few hours. The nation only lived inside his lie overnight.
But now think of the lies we have been told since 2008. Our banking system and the banks in it, we were told, were basically sound just suffering from a shortage of liquidity. And yet, in reality, it was not a problem of liquidity, it was insolvency.
The liquidity lie had to be rolled over and the interest on it, paid. So another lie, that bank assets were not worthless just ‘impaired’, had to be told and maintained. And to do that the truth had to be hidden, off balance sheet, in mark to model and offshore.
Our governments have spent trillions maintaining their lies and have forced us to live those lies for five years now. But there are costs. Living a lie is morally and politically corrosive, not to mention expensive. Just this week, as reported in the FT, the Italian Treasury ‘uncovered’ a nest of lies. It appears that the Italian government, in the run up to joining the euro, paid at least one of the big banks to help it hide the true extent of its debts by agreeing derivative swaps. Greece used similar swaps to massage its debts. The now infamous Titlos agreement with Goldman Sachs being the best known.
The Italian agreements – there were several amounting to around €36 billion in value – would have been known to Mario Draghi who was at the time of some of the agreements at least (1998-9) Secretary of the Treasury. Shortly after this (2002) he left the government and joined Goldman.
It now turns out the terms of the agreements were such that the Italian tax payer could face billions in losses. Of course those who will be forced to pay, were never consulted, not even told of the agreements. They were …confidential of course. Commercially sensitive and politically secret – so often bedfellows aren’t they? Kept secret from those who would be required to pay the bill when it came due.
Our leaders, our liars, haven’t bothered to protect us from the consequences of the lies at all. Too expensive. So austerity, disparity and stagnation are everywhere around us. Forced on us by those who suffer none of them, insulated as they are by wealth and power and privilege. Consequences are for little people, not their Betters.
Our ‘Betters’ have found Goebbels was wrong. You don’t have to protect the people from the consequences of the lies you tell them, as long as you can blame those consequences on someone else. On unforeseen global economic forces, on conniving foreigners who devalue their currency, or terrorists or whistleblowers. Or even the people themselves for taking on debts they couldn’t afford or on ‘necessity’ and ‘precedent’ – the bond holders cannot be made to pay – it goes against international precedent.
We, the people, need to strike back at the secret deals done between the elites of the political and financial revolving door, and make it clear that we will not pay for anything about which we were not told.
Once the cry was, “No taxation without representation”. Today the cry must be, “No debt without consultation.”
Suppressing the Truth
What Mr Howard did not quote is the next line from Goebbels.
It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.”
But again Goebbels has been superceded. Repression is so last century. Why repress when you can simply drown it out. All it takes is for the media outlets to be owned by a few powerful and like- minded friends. A few media moguls and corporate giants, whose plastic pundits raise their voices while the dolly bird presenters flash their thighs. It’s all so full throttle and frantic, and charged with desire and greed.
Anyone who disagrees is a conspiracy theorist. Anyone who breaks ranks is a whistleblower and whistleblowers are domestic terrorists, dysfunctional loners with personality problems and axes to grind.
When the truth is vilified, hunted, gagged and goaled, then the State has chosen to go to war with the nation.
We are at war.
From: http://www.golemxiv.co.uk/2013/06/secrets-and-lies/
MiLord, Thank you, thank you, thank you. The time is running out on the global warming fools. Every day that passes makes it one day sooner to when you, Anthony, JoNova, and Bishop Hill are recognized as the heroes you are.
Absolutely brilliant, but what gave me a chuckle was the recollection of a rather recent suggestion by one Lord Monckton of Brenchley that we should not be driving the crooks into a corner. Instead, we were advised to do everything possible to help them discover the error of their ways, and to modestly turn away while they are busy saving face.
The idea of prosecution can’t possibly come from the same Lord Monckton, can it?
[snip – usual off-topic hater stuff – mod]
Sir:
Let’s put the question slightly differently.
We’re at the top of a sine curve, about to head down.
Not a perfect curve…could be true.
Sincerely,
I suggest getting copies of the books from the 90s published in the UK as part of the Global Environmental Change Series. They are quite graphic that the science being used is in fact sociology with a hope of restructuring all aspects of society.
To quote GECS “emphasizes the way human aspirations, choices and everyday behaviour influences changes in the global environment. In the aftermath of UNCED and Agenda 21, this series helps crystallize the contribution of social science thinking to global change.”
The IPCC is just the old “nothing as practical as a good [social science] theory.” In the case of the IPCC, it gains global redistribution, political power, and lots of insider sweet crony contracts. The book Social Theory and the Global Environment even concedes that Limits to Growth would have required central planning of the economy, but that was not the aspect focused on. No people treated it as flawed physical science, not as aspirational social science.
That’s still the point but Sustainability sounds better. The UN really does want to treat us all as 21st century serfs. With beliefs and attitudes and values they plan to dictate until we all believe in a common good purpose that Mao would have envied.
Comparing the short-term trend that concides with the warming phase of the multidecadal oscillation to the long-term trends that smoothes out the multidecadal oscillation is comparing apples to oranges. Therefore, the conclusion derived from such comparison is flowed. The proper method is to compare the warming rates for equal trend period of say 5-years for the last 100 years. This result after detrending clearly shows the multidecdal oscillation as shown:
http://www.woodfortrees.org/plot/hadcrut4nh/mean:60/from:1871/detrend:0.74
Why are democracies and democratic republics subjecting themselves to will of other primarily totalitarian governments?
History has many examples of science being twisted to promote a political agenda.
Whether the IPCC is prosecuted or not, the authority given them via the UN should be revoked and/or ignored by free nations. (And their cash cut off.)
But you all must think of the cheeeldren < Yep, free Duffle coats all round to combat warbal gloaming – Simples really 🙂
PS I don’t mean to “derail” the post. I’ll refrain from rebuttals to comments outside the context of the post.
I wonder what period they’re smoothing over. It seems to be deliberately selected to hide the cooling over the last number of years. It looks like it ends about 2007. It looks to me like the smoothing itself may be bogus.
The thing that stands out even with their doctored graph is that the slope from 1910 to 1940 is the same as what they purport to be the current trend.
It’s a condition of joining the UN that employees of the UN and its agencies are exempt from all of a country’s laws. The UN itself has no laws. Thus fraud (and everything else we consider a crime) is perfectly legal if you are a United Nations employee.
@Vern
The sine curve was just an ad absurdem example to show how you can mislead! No one is suggesting a sine wave pattern in the climate.
Christopher: Best wishes for your pursuit of the IPCC.
I don’t think there’s any court in the Western World that would hold them responsible. They serve the interest of the state.