Testimony of
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
California State Assembly
21 March 2012
IN the 6 decades since 1950 the world has warmed at a rate equivalent to 2 F°/century. The IPCC’s central estimate is that in the 9 decades to 2100 the rate will be 6 F°/century, three times the observed rate.
Two-thirds of the warming predicted by the IPCC’s (non-peer-reviewed) models is supposed to arise from temperature feedbacks. None of these feedbacks can be measured. There is no consensus about how big they are. There are powerful scientific reasons to suspect the IPCC has very greatly overstated them.
The principal conclusions of each of the four IPCC Assessment Reports are questionable:
- 2007: The IPCC twice concludes that the rate of warming is speeding up and we are to blame. But it uses a false statistical technique to reach its conclusion.
- 2001: The IPCC concludes that today’s temperatures are warmer than in 1300 years. How it reached this conclusion is under criminal investigation.
- 1995: The scientists had concluded that no discernible human effect on climate could be found. Just one man rewrote the report to say the opposite.
- 1990: The IPCC predicted rapid warming. A generation has passed and the predicted warming has not happened. This and many other predictions are overblown:
- Global temperature is rising more slowly than IPCC’s least estimate;
- Sea level has been rising for eight years at just 1.3 inches/century;
- Ocean heat content has barely risen in 6 years;
- Hurricanes and tropical cyclones are quieter than for 30 years;
- Global sea-ice extent has changed little in 30 years;
- Methane concentration is up just 20 parts per billion since 2000;
- The tropical hot-spot the IPCC predicts as our footprint is absent;
- Outgoing radiation is escaping to space much as usual.
California’s carbon tax, with other statewide measures to curb CO2 emissions, will cost $450 billion by 2020. Even if 25% of California’s emissions are abated by 2020, just 0.4% of global emissions will have been abated; CO2 concentration by 2020, instead of the business-as-usual 413 parts per million by volume the IPCC predicts, will be 412.9 ppmv; just one-thousandth of a Fahrenheit degree of warming will be abated; the cost of abating the 0.3 F° warming the IPCC predicts to 2020 by measures as cost-(in)effective as California’s policies would be $180 trillion, or $25,500 per head of global population, or a third of global GDP over the period; and the cost of preventing the 6 F° warming the IPCC predicts by 2100 would be $2700 trillion, or more than 10 times the maximum 3%-of-GDP cost of climate-related damage arising from not mitigating this predicted 21st-century warming at all.
Environmental over-regulation, cap-and-tax, “renewable”-energy mandates, and a 40-year ban on most offshore drilling are crippling California. The Monterey Shale holds 15 billion barrels of oil, yet over-regulation has cut production by more than a third to just 200 million barrels a year. Now 11% are jobless in California, second only to Nevada in the US (50% are jobless in construction); the 2012/13 State deficit is $6 billion; unfunded pension liabilities are $250 billion; 50,000 rich Californians (one-third of them) fled in 2007-2009, taking their businesses and jobs with them: twice as many firms fled the once-Golden State in 2011 as in 2010; Intel says it will never build another plant here; Globalstar, Trizetto, and eEye fled in just one month; Boeing, Toyota, Apple, Facebook, and DirecTV have all fled. The waggons are heading East.
The bottom line: No policy to abate global warming by taxing, trading, regulating, reducing, or replacing greenhouse-gas emissions will prove cost-effective solely on grounds of the welfare benefit from climate mitigation. CO2 mitigation strategies that are inexpensive enough to be affordable will be ineffective; strategies costly enough to be effective will be unaffordable. Focused adaptation to any adverse consequences of any warming that may occur is many times more cost-effective. Since the premium greatly exceeds the cost of the risk, don’t insure. Every red cent spent now on trying to stop global warming is a red cent wasted. Don’t mitigate: sit back, enjoy the sunshine, and adapt only if and when and to the extent necessary. That, however unfashionable, is the economically prudent and scientifically sensible course.
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Details: http://coalitionofenergyusers.org/monckton-event/
Nice! It’s a shame that Bjorn Lomborg has stepped away from thinking like this, which he expressed so ably in Cool It.
OT, I have a letter in today’s <Wall Street Journal.
Oops
“…twice as many firms fled the once-Golden State in 2011 as in 2011;…
Oops again
“…twice as many firms fled the once-Golden State in 2011 as in 2011;…”
Lord Mockton is a very intelligent man who knows of what he speaks. However, I think he needs to hire a proof reader.
[Fixed, thanks. ~dbs, mod.]
Monckton’s Legislature audience undoubtedly had their Dem ears firmly plugged shut so that they could maintain their customary deafness to reality.
Sorry bad link, multitasking again. This should work:
http://wp.me/pnsGM-fd
Can’t argue with the bottom line.
twice as many firms fled the once-Golden State in 2011 as in 2011;
fix this one too
[Done. ~dbs]
The future of our grandchildren is at stack. Why destroy it?
The brainwashing- lets face it ,Its being taught in most schools, has condemned humanity.
It’s just crazy!!!
Ps. Buy the way stock up on food well before the AUSTRALIAN Carbon dioxide tax starts. That means NOW.
Best of luck HUMANITY.
“The Monterey Shale holds 15 billion barrels of oil, yet over-regulation has cut production by more than a third to just 200 billion barrels a year.” That’s strange?
Monckton makes many great points. I would like to see him add the point that a slightly warmer planet, with a higher atmospheric concentration of CO2 would, more than likely, be a net positive. Not negative.
Supreme Court brings some unanimous pain to the EPA today, maybe Sacramento would be willing to listen.
I really like Monckton and his message, but it falls on deaf ears when the policymakers already know that their policy decisions are based on an agenda with no relation to climate change. Agenda 21 rules. They do not care about the climate, but they can force people to do what they want more easily if they have what appears to be a tangible excuse.
Crippling the world’s economies and creating a permanent recession with attendant zero growth is their goal.
“Sustainability” is their goal which means no progress, no growth, and active conservation of everything, regardless of its abundance. After all, their goal is to save the world for the next generation, with the assumption, baseless as it is, that there will be nothing for the next generation if they do not interfere in a Draconian fashion now.
This is a very status quo view of the world and does not apply to the real world. Everything changes, including what we do. Their worries are largely based on assuming that we will keep do the same things we are doing today forever. We have never do that before, so why would be do it now? Because they want it that way in order to create a crisis.
All of the positions taken in Agenda 21 and sustainability (which really does not exist as nothing is sustainable) are assumptions based on opinions, unbiased environmentalist panic, and the Precautionary Principle, which assumes that everything is bad until proven otherwise. How can you prove that something is not bad if you are never allowed to use it? You cannot prove a negative anyhow.
If the last one to leave turns the light out, they will finally achieve their desired state of perfection.
Another oops: “The Monterey Shale holds 15 billion barrels of oil, yet over-regulation has cut production by more than a third to just 5 billion barrels a year”.
Five billion barrels a year is 13.7 million barrels a day. Which is more than the entire daily U.S. production. He must have meant 5 million bbl.
[Fixed. ~dbs, mod.]
I wonder when the Politicians and Academia will realize the Golden Goose is in its death throes or are they hoping China will welcome them.
Coolology is the only science that can save us from ourselves. Coolologists have discovered the perils of global cooling. Protective measures against possible dire effects of cooling must be taken now.
As long as policies will get certain people votes, and certain people (often the same people) unearned monies, it will be difficult to thwart political “remedies” to a made-up problem. Lord Monckton is a lone voice in the wilderness. I enjoy hearing him.
If the effects of CO2 are logarithmic then the chances that in the next 9 decades the rate of warming will 3 times that observed over the course of the preceding 6 decades seems even more bizarre.
There is strong reason to suspect that the sensitivity to CO2 has been over assumed and that in the real world it is considerably less than IPCC predictions.
5 billion barrels per year is more than twice the oil production of the entire US per year
[Fixed. ~dbs, mod.]
Jean Parisot says:
March 21, 2012 at 11:34 am
Supreme Court brings some unanimous pain to the EPA today, maybe Sacramento would be willing to listen.
______________________
The link is http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/03/21/supreme-court-epa-unanimous-decision-clean-water-act_n_1369831.html
It is a slight step away from the heavy foot of the bureaucrats in DC.
I would like to thank the Marxist/Communist/lemmings for advertising their support for the EPA’s economic suicide efforts. I suspect their efforts will be largely wasted here. Fantastic!
Thanks to Lord Monckton for his valiant efforts to curb the onslaught of the tyrants with reason and real science. I am with you sir.
Nice punchy, easy-to-understand stuff from Lord Monkton. Short, sweet and to the point. I’ve seen and read him go on at length about things, with quite a bit of maths, but this is put over in terms the average person can understand readily* – really accessible stuff that’s pretty impossible for anyone to logically argue against (without invoking the precautionary principle, comparing it to cancer diagnosis and all that tired old BS).
The costs of mitigation, such as “carbon capture and storage”, are absolutely mental – absolutely off the flaming scale of irrational, delusional and self destructive behaviour. But that’s what we’re getting, apparently:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/9155255/National-Grid-and-Petrofac-plan-1bn-Scottish-carbon-capture-and-storage-plant.html
And people just flaming well shrug?
Forgive me if I sound exasperated, but I am. Hopefully I’ll feel better tomorrow.
* Of course, the average person doesn’t actually give a sh!t, even when you explain things in the clearest possible terms, they just roll their glazed-over eyes and say something like “well it doesn’t really effect me”. Therein lies the problem, in my opinion.
Lord Monckton makes very good points, yet they are the same points that skeptics tire of making over and over. Each time the alarmists trot out the usual objections. I’m guessing the same (non) objections will be raised today. So let me raise them so as to save the trolls the bother.
Point 1: “Global temperature is rising more slowly than IPCC’s least estimate;”
Alarmist objection 1: But when you measure the slope from 1976 to 2007 you clearly see a warming trend.
This is true, but there has been no significant warming in 12 years, which means that the RATE of warming has not increased as forecast, but has slowed.
Alarmist objection 2: But 12 years is too short, you have to take 30 years?
But why 30 years? This is completely arbitrary. Why not 900 years? Oh wait – that pesky MWP. Drat!
Point 2: Ocean heat content has barely risen in 6 years;
Alarmist objection(s): The heat has bypassed the Argo buoys and is hiding in the deep ocean.
or: Argo buoys have a systemic bias.
or (and this might be used for point 1): Aerosols from China is masking the warming.
It’s California, will they listen? Probably not.
But I do have to say that my great-great uncle was the one who made the beautiful furniture in both houses of the California legislature, and I’ve been there too, many times, so that puts me what? Two degrees of separation from Monckton?
Yeah, the Monck and I are just tight like that.
Excellent!
Here’s what Europe is doing to hasten its economic collapse in the name of Global Warming:
China blocks Airbus orders over EU emissions scheme
China is blocking orders for at least US$12 billion ($14.5 billion) worth of Airbus jets to protest against the European Union’s emissions trading fees, in a new challenge to the programme aimed at fighting global warming, the planemaker said yesterday.
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.
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EU officials defended the emissions system. Asked about the Airbus complaint, EU spokesman Isaac Valero Ladron said: “I’m not in a position to make any comments about possible trade decisions. I think it’s in everybody’s interest to reduce greenhouse gases, which affects climate change, and airplanes affect that, as well.”
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Goodbye Airbus…Hello Boeing!
Have you ever wondered why global minimum anomaly temperatures are never shown alongside the global temperature anomaly. Could it be they are actually showing a decrease.