UPDATE: The Russian TV channel “RT” aka “TV-Novosti” blames Monckton for the failure of COP18 to fail to reach an agreement:
The 18th Climate Change Summit in Doha is drawing to an end after once again failing to find common consensus on what it calls a major threat to human existence. Failure seemed inevitable after climate skeptic Lord Monckton crashed the event.
LOL! Source here
From Christopher Monckton of Brenchley in Doha, Qatar
I have been a bad boy. At the U.N. climate conference in Doha, I addressed a plenary session of national negotiating delegates though only accredited as an observer.
One just couldn’t resist. There they all were, earnestly outbidding each other to demand that the West should keep them in pampered luxury for the rest of their indolent lives, and all on the pretext of preventing global warming that has now become embarrassingly notorious for its long absence.
No one was allowed to give the alternative – and scientifically correct – viewpoint. The U.N.’s wall of silence was rigidly in place.
The microphone was just in front of me. All I had to do was press the button. I pressed it. The Chair recognized Myanmar (Burmese for Burma). I was on.
On behalf of the Asian Coastal Co-operation Initiative, an outfit I had thought up on the spur of the moment (it sounded just like one of the many dubious taxpayer-funded propaganda groups at the conference), I spoke for less than a minute.
Quietly, politely, authoritatively, I told the delegates three inconvenient truths they would not hear from anyone else:
• There has been no global warming for 16 of the 18 years of these wearisome, self-congratulatory yadayadathons.
• It is at least ten times more cost-effective to see how much global warming happens and then adapt in a focused way to what little harm it may cause than to spend a single red cent futilely attempting to mitigate it today.
• An independent scientific enquiry should establish whether the U.N.’s climate conferences are still heading in the right direction.
As I delivered the last of my three points, there were keening shrieks of rage from the delegates. They had not heard any of this before. They could not believe it. Outrage! Silence him! Free speech? No! This is the U.N.! Gettimoff! Eeeeeeeeeagh!
One of the hundreds of beefy, truncheon-toting U.N. police at the conference approached me as I left the hall and I was soon surrounded by him and a colleague. They took my conference pass, peered at it and murmured into cellphones.
Trouble was, they were having great difficulty keeping a straight face.
Put yourself in their sensible shoes. They have to stand around listening to the tedious, flatulent mendacities of pompous, overpaid, under-educated diplomats day after week after year. Suddenly, at last, someone says “Boo!” and tells the truth.
Frankly, they loved it. They didn’t say so, of course, or they’d have burst out laughing and their stony-faced U.N. superiors would not have been pleased.
I was amiably accompanied out into the balmy night, where an impressive indaba of stony-faced U.N. officials were alternately murmuring into cellphones and murmuring into cellphones. Murmuring into cellphones is what they do best.
After a few minutes the head of security – upper lip trembling and chest pulsating as he did his best to keep his laughter to himself – briefly stopped murmuring into his cellphone and bade me a cheerful and courteous goodnight.
The national delegation from Burma, whose microphone I had borrowed while they were out partying somewhere in the souk, snorted an official protest into its cellphone.
An eco-freako journalist, quivering with unrighteous indignation, wrote that I had been “evicted”. Well, not really. All they did was to say a cheery toodle-pip at the end of that day’s session. They couldn’t have been nicer about it.
The journalist mentioned my statement to my fellow-delegates that there had been no global warming for 16 years. What she was careful not to mention was that she had interviewed me at some length earlier in the day. She had sneered that 97% of climate scientists thought I was wrong.
I had explained to her that 100% of climate scientists would agree with me that there had been no global warming for 16 years if they were to check the facts, which is how science (as opposed to U.N. politics) is done.
I had also told her how to check the facts (but she had not checked them):
Step 1. Get the monthly mean global surface temperature anomalies since January 1997 from the Hadley Centre/CRU. The data, freely available online, are the U.N.’s preferred way to measure how much global warming has happened. Or you could use the more reliable satellite data from the University of Alabama at Huntsville or from Remote Sensing Systems Inc.
Step 2. Put the data into Microsoft Excel and use its routine that calculates the least-squares linear-regression trend on the data. Linear regression determines the underlying trend in a dataset over a given period as the slope of the unique straight line through the data that minimizes the sum of the squares of the absolute differences or “residuals” between the points corresponding to each time interval in the data and on the trend-line. Phew! If that is too much like doing real work (though Excel will do it for you at the touch of a button), find a friendly, honest statistician.
Step 3. Look up the measurement uncertainty in the dataset. Since measuring global temperature reliably is quite difficult, properly-collated temperature data are presented as central estimates flanked by upper and lower estimates known as the “error bars”.
Step 4. Check whether the warming (which is the difference between the first and last value on the trend-line) is greater or smaller than the measurement uncertainty. If it is smaller, falling within the error-bars, the trend is statistically indistinguishable from zero. There has been no warming – or, to be mathematically nerdy, there has been no statistically-significant warming.
The main point that the shrieking delegates here in Doha don’t get is this. It doesn’t matter how many profiteering mad scientists say global warming is dangerously accelerating. It isn’t. Period. Get over it.
The fact that there has been no global warming for 16 years is just that – a fact. It does not mean there is no such thing as global warming, or there has not been any global warming in the past, or there will be none in future.
In the global instrumental temperature record, which began in 1860, there have been several periods of ten years or more without global warming. However, precisely because these periods occur frequently, they tend to constrain the overall rate of warming.
Ideally, one should study periods of warming that are either multiples of 60 years or centered on a transition year between the warming and cooling (or cooling and warming) phases of the great ocean oscillations. That way, the distortions caused by the naturally-occurring 30-year cooling and 30-year warming phases are minimized.
Let’s do it. I have had the pleasure of being on the planet for 60 years. I arrived when it first became theoretically possible for our CO2 emissions to have a detectable effect on global temperature. From 1952 to the present, the planet has warmed at a rate equivalent to 1.2 Celsius degrees per century.
Or we could go back to 1990, the year of the first of the four quinquennial Assessment Reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPeCaC). It predicted that from 1990-2025 the world would warm at 3.0 Cº/century, giving 1 Cº warming by 2025.
Late in 2001 there was a phase-transition from the warming to the cooling phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, the most influential of the ocean oscillations. From 1990-2001 is 11 years; from 2001-2012 is 11 years. So 1990-2012 is a period centered on a phase-transition: with minimal natural distortion, it will indicate the recent temperature trend.
Since 1990 the world has warmed at 1.4 Cº, century, or a little under 0.3 Cº in all. Note that 1.4 Cº/century is a little greater than the 1.2 Cº/century observed since 1952. However, the period since 1990 is little more than a third of the period since 1952, and shorter periods are liable to exhibit somewhat steeper trends than longer periods.
So the slightly higher warming rate of the more recent period does not necessarily indicate that the warming rate is rising, and it is certainly not rising dangerously.
For the 21st century as a whole, IPeCaC is predicting not 1.2 or 1.4 Cº warming but close to 3 Cº, more than doubling the observed post-1990 warming rate. Or, if you believe the latest scare paper from our old fiends the University of East Anglia, up to 6 Cº, quadrupling it.
That is not at all likely. The maximum warming rate that persisted for at least ten years in the global instrumental record since 1850 has been 0.17 Cº. This rate occurred from 1860-1880; 1910-1940; and 1976-2001.
It is only in the last of these three periods that we could have had any warming influence: yet the rate of warming over that period is the same as in the two previous periods.
All three of these periods of rapidish warming coincided with warming phases of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. The climate scare got underway about halfway through the 1976-2001 warming phase.
In 1976 there had been an unusually sharp phase-transition from the cooling to the warming phase. By 1988 James Hansen was making his lurid (and now disproven) temperature predictions before the U.S. Congress, after Al Gore and Sen. Tim Wirth had chosen a very hot June day for the hearing and had deliberately turned off the air-conditioning.
Here is a summary of the measured and predicted warming rates:
| Measured warming rate, 1997-2012 | 0.0 Cº/century |
| Measured warming rate, 1952-2012 | 1.2 Cº/century |
| Measured warming rate, 1990-2012 | 1.4 Cº/century |
| Measured warming rate, 1860-1880 | 1.7 Cº/century |
| Measured warming rate, 1910-1940 | 1.7 Cº/century |
| Measured warming rate, 1976-2001 | 1.7 Cº/century |
| Predicted warming rate in IPCC (1990), 1990-2025 | 3.0 Cº/century |
| Predicted warming rate in IPCC (2007), 2000-2100 | 3.0 Cº/century |
| Predicted warming rate by UEA (2012), 2000-2100 | 4.0-6.0 Cº/century |
But it is virtually impossible to tell the negotiating delegates any of what I have set out here. They would simply not understand it. Even if they did understand it, they would not care. Objective scientific truth no longer has anything to do with these negotiations. Emotion is all.
A particularly sad example of the mawkish emotionalism that may yet destroy the economies of the West was the impassioned statement by the negotiating delegate from the Philippines to the effect that, after the typhoon that has just killed hundreds of his countrymen, the climate negotiations have taken on a new, life-or-death urgency.
As he left the plenary session, the delegates stood either side of the central aisle and showed their sympathy by applauding him. Sympathy for his country was appropriate; sympathy for his argument was not.
After 16 years with no global warming – and, if he reads this posting, he will know how to check that for himself rather than believing the soi-disant “consensus” – global warming that has not happened cannot have caused Typhoon Bhopa, any more than it could have caused extra-tropical storm Sandy.
It is possible that illegal mining and logging played no small part in triggering the landslide that killed many of those who lost their lives.
Perhaps the Philippines should join the Asian Coastal Co-Operation Initiative. Our policy is that the international community should assist all nations to increase their resilience in the face of the natural disasters that have been and will probably always be part of life on Earth.
That is an objective worthier, more realistic, more affordable, and more achievable than attempting, Canute-like, to halt the allegedly rising seas with a vote to establish a second “commitment period” under the Kyoto Protocol.
Will someone please tell the delegates? Just press the button and talk. You may not be heard, though. Those who are not partying somewhere in the souk will be murmuring into their cellphones.
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Footnote by Anthony: Here is the video on Monckton’s address to the Doha COP18 conference.
No video has yet surfaced of him being “evicted” as the Telegraph journalist claims, suggesting that Monckton’s account of leaving the hall might be more accurate. The chair on the dais says “thank you” at the end, and didn’t call for security to evict Monckton.
Note: See also this week’s Friday Funny for Josh’s take on this. – Anthony
RACookPE1978 says:
“please, take into consideration that only ’22 years with global warming’ can be easily dismissed as a natural deviation from a large scale trend.”
True. When trends are discussed, the longer the time frame, the more clearly and accurately a trend can be seen. SkS constantly cherry-picks very short time frames in a mendacious attempt to show that global warming is accelerating. It is not; they are simply being dishonest.
The long term global warming trend is not accelerating, as can be seen by viewing a very long time frame.
In fact, rather than accelerating, global warming has recently stalled. This has repeatedly happened before — and during times when CO2 was much lower, proving that CO2 has no measurable effect. QED
If CO2 has any effect on temperature, it is clear that the effect is minuscule; far below anything the alarmist crowd [or even many skeptics] believe it is. Otherwise, the effect of CO2 could be measured following its recent 40% rise. But there are no such empirical measurements or observations.
Since the effect [if any] of CO2 is demonstrably too tiny to measure, no further funds should be expended on the “carbon” false alarm. For all practical purposes, CO2 has zero effect on global temperatures. Any refutation must be backed up with testable, empirical measurements. Otherwise, any such disagreements are nothing more than evidence-free conjectures.
True, true.
But Greg and David, let me re-phrase that question two ways:
1) How long can “man made global warming” be said to be measured?
That is, over all history of recorded actual temperatures, over what period (for how long a period of time) have BOTH man-released CO2 AND global temperatures actually increased at the same time?
2) Over the recorded temperature period of man-released CO2,
– global CO2 levels have been steady, and temperatures decreased. (~25 years)
– global CO2 levels have been steady, and temperatures were steady. (~15 years)
– global CO2 levels have been steady, and temperatures increased. (~25 years)
– global CO2 levels have been increased, and temperatures decreased. (~20 years)
– global CO2 levels have been increased, and temperatures were steady. (~10 years)
– global CO2 levels have been increased, and temperatures increased. (~22 years)
– global CO2 levels have been increased, and temperatures were steady. (so far, 16 years)
Can we prove then that the single, isolated, short 22 year period of common CO2-increase-and-temperature-increase is “proof” of natural variability?
How long must we wait before that single short 22 year period drops below the “one standard deviation” of natural variation?
Or has it already dropped two (or three) standard deviations below “randomly rising since the Little Ice Age” natural temperature cycle?
One learns so much from the educated. For example “keening”. Look it up.
Ah, the methane madness, or “Blazing Saddles”, analogy is excellent! I was nearly excommunicated as a teen for doing the such a deed during the homily…Maybe it was my burst of laughter which I could not contain (as a teenager). Crawling under the pew (pun?) was not an escape option. It was definitely shock and awe as seen with the above video. Totally. 🙂
So much for being “inclusive.”
Greg House:
re your post at December 8, 2012 at 9:19 am.
No! You are plain wrong both philosophically and practically.
You say
“So, when our hero says again and again that there is global warming, warmists say “thank you”. And when he says “16 years without global warming”, they can easily point out to other periods without global warming and easily dismiss those “16 years without global warming” as a natural deviation from a large scale trend. As I said before, this is not a winning strategy.”
Our objective is to inform about the truth. You can’t tell the truth witha lie.
Global warming was a reality but it stopped 16 years ago. It may resume or cooling will set in. But it stopped 16 years ago.
And that 16-year stop cannot be explained if the hypothesis of man-made global warming is true.
So, the 16 year stop demonstrates that the hypothesis of man-made global warming is wrong.
It does not matter whether similar periods of no warming happened in the past because the climate models say the 16 years of cooling cannot happen now when we have emiited our CO2.
So, the models are wrong and their ‘projections’ must be wrong.
It is easy to tell that to anybody.
Richard
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-20653018
“Climate talks: UN forum extends Kyoto Protocol to 2020
Delegates at UN climate talks in Qatar have agreed to extend the Kyoto Protocol until 2020, avoiding a major new setback.
The deal, agreed by nearly 200 nations, keeps the protocol alive as the only legally binding plan for combating global warming.
However, it only covers developed nations whose share of world greenhouse gas emissions is less than 15%. ”
So the EU, Australia and another few industrialised countries have signed up to industrial suicide and the Chinese must have grins on from ear to ear. Wonder what Obama will do with a Rep congress. They are never going to join this show.
D Böehm says: “December 8, 2012 at 9:37 am : “Since the effect [if any] of CO2 is demonstrably too tiny to measure, no further funds should be expended on the “carbon” false alarm.”
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Unfortunately, our hero has repeatedly stated that doubling of CO2 causes like 1C or more increase in temperature. Warmists are thankful again.
Latest on DOHA
BBC: Doha conclusion: dismal failure!
Richard S Courtney says, December 8, 2012 at 9:49 am: “Our objective is to inform about the truth. You can’t tell the truth witha lie.
Global warming was a reality but it stopped 16 years ago. It may resume or cooling will set in. But it stopped 16 years ago.
And that 16-year stop cannot be explained if the hypothesis of man-made global warming is true.
So, the 16 year stop demonstrates that the hypothesis of man-made global warming is wrong.”
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This is a very weak point, Richard, see my argumentation above.
And, by the way, Christopher supports the concept of “man-made global warming”. His arguments about it not being catastrophic can be easily dismissed. I do not understand, why warmists avoid debating him. If I was one, Christopher would be my favorite opponent. I would admit some minor uncertainties or mistakes and let him confirm the main message about “man-made global warming”. His argumentation about feedbacks and costs can be easily dismissed, too.
Joe Guerk says:
December 7, 2012 at 1:27 pm
“Asian Coastal Co-operation Initiative”
I wish he had used “Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere”
Be careful of what you wish for. Read ‘War Without Mercy’ by John Dower
Just been listening to Harrabin bleating on about the UK’s historical CO2 emissions on the BBC news channel mentioned the cash wanted by smaller.poorer countries over the damage climate will do???? what a sanctimonious w****r this supposed journalist is, really starting to stick in my craw that i am paying for the P****^ wages and salaryout of my license fee 🙁
LazyTeenager says:
December 8, 2012 at 1:51 am
Having spent a fair amount of time staring at real time charts looking for a signal I know from personal experience how easy it is to get your hopes up over some noise blip or other.
+++++++
Human beings hear sentences in records played backwards. And you will hear different sentences from the same exact sounds, depending on what you have been told you will hear. This has been widely studied and verified as a result of the Manson murders.
What we are hearing is the exact same thing as seeing faces and animals when looking at clouds. The human brain is a pattern recognition machine, that is very good at matching patterns, even when no pattern exists.
What are brains are very poor at is recognizing that random events have no pattern. When there is no pattern, our brains invent one from past experience.
As a result, humans are easily fooled. We see witches where there are no witches. When something happens that we cannot explain, our brains assume that someone else must be the cause. The solution is then to take action to stop them. Eventually the ultimate solution is discovered, human sacrifice in one form or another.
Where is the astounding, astonishing and unprecedented change in climate that requires a scientific explanation? Ho and hum. I see none. Extremes, within the normal range, of this and that occur (rain, wind, temperature) but so what? Nothing could be more abnormal than the absence of unusual weather.
It is part of that present and recent normality that the Earth continues to gently warm a very little. I dread the day when it cools down and downer. Yet, providing governments do not completely suppress economic advance, and if the next ice age does not arrive for a few hundred years, humanity will be well equipped to prosper even then.
The Doha’n dummies are done: http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/12/08/climate-talks-idUSL5E8N83HC20121208
Kyoto is still alive, but barely, since Russia, Japan and Canada are now out, and the U.S. was never in. The farce will continue limping along.
Greg House,
I am sorry you could not understand my comment, which referred specifically to measurements. I made it clear that without empirical measurements proving that CO2 causes global warming, believers in AGW are merely stating a conjecture. They need to back it up with verifiable, testable scientific evidence. But the only empirical measurements that exist show that ∆CO2 follows ∆T.
There is nothing wrong with a Conjecture; it is the first step in the scientific method hierarchy, before Hypothesis, Theory and Law. But there was more scientific evidence for planetary movements in an Earth-centric universe than there is for AGW. At least pre-Copernicus there were verifiable, predictable, accurate measurements of epicycles, even though they were based on a false premise. With AGW, there are no empirical measurements. Thus there is no way to quantify AGW, which is why there is wide disagreement over the CO2 sensitivity number.
Promoters of AGW need to produce empirical, testable measurements to support their conjecture. They have tried, but failed. Based on that failure, my view is that AGW may or may not exist. If it does exist, it’s effect is much more insignificant than claimed. OTOH, Dr Miskolczi may be correct: at current and projected concentrations, CO2 may have no warming effect because it has already saturated its IR window.
The sensitivity number for CO2 is estimated by some well qualified climatologists [eg: Miskolczi] as being 0.0ºC for 2xCO2. Some [Lindzen, Spencer] give estimate of below 0.5ºC for 2xCO2. Others [Idso, pere & fils] estimate under 0.3ºC. And the UN/IPCC estimate for 2xCO2 is 3ºC+. But the real world is actively falsifying the IPCC’s increasingly preposterous sensitivity estimate.
So it all comes down to measurement. If the effect of CO2 at current concentrations is too small to measure, there is not much science supporting AGW.
CO2 goes up. Temperatures don’t go up over the last 16 years. Human effects should have made any natural cooling irrelevant according the AGW hypothesis. Yet, natural cooling is overwhelming any human activity.
What frame of mind does it take to believe that something exists when it doesn’t?
Should the climate scientists not try to explain natural climate change before announcing that we are all doomed? Some skeptic scientists are doing exactly that. Unfortunately, I don’t think people would be too interested in funding natural climate change.
LazyTeenager says: December 8, 2012 at 1:59 am
And here is a riddle for you.
If the recent temperature trend is really and truly flat, what does that say about the urban heat island effect? After all the argument has been made here that the surface temperature trend is spurious and largely due to UHI.
_________________________________
It says that real global temperatures are already falling, but we cannot detect that because the ever-increasing UHI signal is masking that fall.
Duhhh….
Mycroft says:
December 8, 2012 at 10:33 am
+1
Mycroft says: December 8, 2012 at 10:33 am
Just been listening to Harrabin bleating on about the UK’s historical CO2 emissions on the BBC news channel mentioned the cash wanted by smaller.poorer countries over the damage climate will do???? what a sanctimonious w****r this supposed journalist is.
_________________________
Then go to the BBC website, and make an official complaint via their online complaints system.
You do get replies from them, and they do sound harassed. I have made five complaints about this w******* already, and the excuses are getting more lame by the minute. One day, come the glorious day, we will get an apology and Harrabin will get a spanking.
Equate Harrabin’s lies to the lies told over Jimmy Saville – they hate that and it sends the complaints department into a complete tizzy. They are really afraid down there, really afraid, and it is beginning to show.
.
As only a dull and boring engineer I wonder why the emphasis on the linear trends when we know that the climate pattern contains many known cycles. Looked at from this perspective many years ago , like about the time the name changed from global warming, it was obvious that we were in a phase where two cycles were combining and both at their peak. When you subtract this there was still a rise but not one to worry about and if you subtracted the bit that was pop up hot spots in the Arctic, purely coincidentally just where the ice melts, the difference became really trivial. I know this is not climate science it is signal analysis but I really felt it deserved some sort of explanation as to why it should be ignored rather than equating those who asked why this didn’t matter to climate scientists with holocaust deniers and .perverts as some of those in senior positions did and not just in private either.
Lord Monckton, did you by any chance say something like this while leaving the room?
The truth of Lord Monckton’s conclusion that there has been no global warming in the past 16 years depends upon what is meant be the phrase “no global warming.” Monckton’s description of the procedure by which he reaches this conclusion makes it clear that the phrase “no global warming” is the equivalent of the popular phrase “no statistically significant global warming” (NSSGW). The conclusion that there has been NSSGW in the past 16 years rests on three assumptions. These are:
1) the mean value of the temperature in the underlying statistical population varies linearly with time,
2) at constant time, the temperature is normally distributed and,
3) the elements of the underlying statistical population are statistically independent.
These assumptions are premises to the argument that is made by Monckton.
Unfortunately, climatologists have yet to identify the statistical population that underlies their inquiry into global warming. For this reason, Monckton is incapable of supporting the premises to his argument and it follows that Monckton’s conclusion must be regarded as unproved.
Pwned!
Fantastic Chris !
Keep pressing their buttons.
Terry Oldberg says:
December 8, 2012 at 12:46 pm
The truth of Lord Monckton’s conclusion
Terry, just look at the graph! If you look at the underlying statistics you can be sure what there is has been warmed up slightly more than decency permits. Hey and it is the keepers of the data that themselves have recognized the “travesty” of no warming. Surely you wouldn’t dare argue with them now.