The IPCC fraud case (but not the planet) hots up
Guest essay by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Two weeks ago I reported the central error in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007) to its secretariat. After the contributing scientists had submitted their final draft report, the bureaucrats and politicians had tampered with the HadCRUt3 graph of global instrumental temperatures since 1850 by adding four trend-lines to the anomaly curve and drawing from their relative slopes the unjustifiable and statistically indefensible conclusion, stated twice in the published report, that global warming was “accelerating” and that the “acceleration” was our fault.
Global warming is not accelerating. The planet is not hotting up. There has been no warming for 17 years on any measure, as the IPCC’s climate-science chairman now admits. That includes the Hadley/CRU data. There has been no warming for 23 years according to RSS satellite dataset.
The IPCC’s central projection of warming since 2005 (bright red), taken from the forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report, is visibly at odds with the linear-regression trend (bright blue) on the latest version (HadCRUt4) of the monthly global mean surface temperature anomaly curve (dark blue):
I received no reply to my report of the IPCC’s erroneous conclusion that global warming was “accelerating”. So today I wrote to the IPCC again:
“I am an expert reviewer for the Fifth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. I wrote to you two weeks ago to report a serious error in the Fourth Assessment Report. I have had no reply. My letter of two weeks ago is attached, together with a copy of a letter I have sent to the Inter-Academy Council asking it to use its good offices to persuade you to reply. I have also sent a letter, for information only at this stage, to the police in Geneva, since it appears that a fraud may have been committed by the IPCC.”
In my letter to the police in Geneva, which I also copied to the Serious Fraud Office in London and the Office of the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Virginia, I wrote:
“The attached correspondence evidences a fraud at the IPCC. Its secretariat has not responded to my report of an error in its Fourth Assessment Report (2007). The error is serious. I can prove it is deliberate. It is designed to demonstrate by deception that the world is warming ever faster and that we are to blame. It is one of a series of ingenious, connected frauds that have profited a few at great expense to many.
“The frauds are wilful deceptions calculated to cause loss to taxpayers by tampering with scientific data and results so as to exaggerate the rate and supposed adverse consequences of global warming. Scientific debate is legitimate: subjective distortion of objective science for profit is not.
“This letter is for information. If after a further week the IPCC (to which I am copying this letter) fails to acknowledge my report of its error as its own procedures require, I shall invite you to investigate this and other connected frauds, which involve larger sums than any previous fraud.”
The IPCC has not delayed in replying this time:
“We acknowledge receipt of your message copied below and of your letter dated 4 May 2013, received earlier today as an attachment to that message. Your email with attachments of today is the first communication received at the IPCC Secretariat from you on this matter.
“We would like to inform you that the error claim that you have submitted is now being taken care of as per the IPCC Protocol for Addressing Errors in IPCC Assessment Reports, Synthesis Reports, Special Reports or Methodology Reports, available on the IPCC website. Steps 1 and 2 of the protocol are now completed; the IPCC Working Group I will deal with next steps as appropriate. As per the protocol, the IPCC Secretariat will inform you of the conclusions of the process.”
I have thanked the IPCC for passing on my report of its error in the Fourth Assessment Report and have told the police the IPCC have now replied. It is clear from the IPCC Secretariat’s reply that Dr. Pachauri, to whom I had reported the error in writing and in person as long ago as 2009, had not passed my report of the error to the Secretariat as he should have done. No doubt there will now be an internal enquiry to discover why he did not pass it on.
When the error has been investigated and the IPCC has reported back to me, I shall let you – and the prosecuting authorities of three nations – know the outcome.
Monckton of Brenchley:
*Your continuing attacks on my character are irrelevant, unfounded and illegal.
*That linear regression is “well established” is irrelevant.
*That the straight line is “a representation of the trend in the data” is irrelevant.
That “On the basis of linear regression the IPCC has drawn various conclusions about the rate of global warming, including the conclusion that there has been no warming for 17 years” is irrelevant.
*That I disagree with with “every textbook of elementary statistics” would have to be a conclusion from research conducted on “every textbook of elementary statistics.” In view of the prodigious effort that would be required, I doubt that this research has taken place. If it has, please cite it. If not but if you have found a single textbook of elementary statistics with which I disagree, please cite it and describe the points of disagreement.
Terry Oldberg: I am curious if to know what you think of the IPCC’s models. Do they pass muster in providing knowledge about climate?
Mario Lento:
Thanks for asking for my view on whether the IPCC models provide knowledge. As “knowledge” lacks a precise commonly accepted definition, I prefer to answer the question of whether they provide information about the outcomes from policy decisions on CO2 emissions. They provide no such information. That they provide no information makes them worthless for their intended purpose.
Though they provide no information, the models must seem to policy makers to provide information for they proceed toward regulation of CO2 emissions as though having information. That this is so seems to result from applications of the equivocation fallacy on the part of participating climatologists and governments. I’ve published a pair of peer reviewed articles on this topic. The latest is at http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=7923 .
Terry Oldberg says:
May 24, 2013 at 4:11 pm
I do not assume that there is a linear trend Terry. Perhaps I was not not clear. What I hoped to make clear was that the time frames matter. During the past 18 years, certainly, the trend (that is the matter instigated by the IPCC) is NOT accelerating in the direction of warmth.
Mario Lento:
Whether linear or non-linear, trend analysis suffers from illogicality. It stems from the fact that in doing scientific research one works in an arena in which information is incomplete. A consequence is for the future to unfold as a sequence of events whose outcomes are uncertain. Thus, for example, if rain in the next 24 hours is predicted, it might not rain.
henry@terry
I am not sure what it is that you are accusing the good lord of. I see him as our spokesman for all of us who KNOW that CO2 does not cause warming, or if it does, only very indirectly so, by causing the biosphere to boom. Namely if you look at my tables at Las Vegas, that used to be a desert, you will see the difference Tmax – Tmin decreasing whereas in Tandil (ARG) where they hacked all the trees down, you see Tmax – Tmin rising.
I agree with you that global temp. as such is difficult to estimate. Therefore, from the beginning I figured that we must rather look at the average change from the average in a specific period of time at a certain place (weather station). To do that you need linear regression.So all of the (black) figures you are looking at in my tables, are the result of a linear regression.
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/02/21/henrys-pool-tables-on-global-warmingcooling/
My sample of weather stations was balanced by latitude and 70/30 sea/land. I looked at average yearly temps. so that the influence of longitude is cancelled out.
How do I know my tables are right? First of all, if you look at the table for means, you will see that we warmed by about 0.013 or 0.014 degrees C/annum over the past 32 years. A similar result is reported by Spencer and he looked at data from the satellites. Others also reported the same result. So we warmed by about 0.4 K over the past 32 years, on average.
This warming is an average, taking over time. Obviously the speed of warming in each year is different. This is best seen in my first table, on the bottom, where we can see a gradual drop in maximum temperatures that seemed to follow a binomial distribution. In the end, I decided it must be an A-C wave. I hope it is, because if it is not, I am not sure where we will end up.
So, don’t tell me statistics does not work. It works!! And it tells everything you want to know. I am stunned that nobody has yet been able to reproduce my results.They are all just lazy, or they rather do not want to know what the figures are telling us.
[The average temperature data from the stations were obtained from http://www.tutiempo.net.
I tried to avoid stations with many missing data. Nevertheless, it is very difficult finding weather stations that have no missing data at all. If a month’s data was found missing or if I found that the average for a month was based on less than 15 days of that month’s data, I looked at the average temperatures of that month of the preceding- and following year, averaged these, and in this way estimated the temperatures of that particular month’s missing data]
Based on my results, we can see that by 2040 we will be back to where we were in 1950, more or less.
Henry P:
I’m with you in your enthusiasm for bringing the discipline of mathematical statistics to bear on the AGW issue. In attempting to apply this discipline, frequently people make logical errors. A long background in the design and management of scientific studies equips me to spot these errors. When I spot them, I flag these errors for the perpetrators in the hope that we can work them out of our collective thinking on the AGW issue.
I disagree with you, though, when you claim to know that CO2 does not cause global warming. The global temperature record going back to its beginning in 1850 contains only 5 or 6 events. This number of events is too few by a factor of at least 30 for scientifically based conclusions to be reached about whether CO2 does or does not cause global warming.
Henry@lord Monckton
Something that I have been wanting to ask you, and I am sure many others also would like to know, for clarity and for the sake of honesty,
do you actually make some money out of your activism against the whole global warming scam?
If the forecast is that the likelihood of rain tomorrow is 90% and rains falls tomorrow, the forecast was 100% correct. If the forecast is that the likelihood of rain tomorrow is 10% and rains falls tomorrow, the forecast was 100% correct. Science is wonderful!
mitigatedsceptic:
If the model claimed the likelihood of rain tomorrow to be 90% and it rained tomorrow and the forecast was 100% correct the methodology was illogical and unscientific..
henry@terry
My tables show that the ratio maxima : means : minima
is something like 6:2:1, if you take it over the longest period.
So clearly it was max pulling up means and minima.
Data sets other than my own only report means
(very shortsighted since you can get all info?)
Like I said, a few places where there was a big increase in greenery
showed some heat entrapment. So what do you want?
In the end I decided that more carbon is OK, seeing as that it (i.e. more greenery) might help us a bit against common (coming) cold.. (it is mot much, looking at figures for energy on photo synthesis). Note that as from 1995 we have started on a curve downwards, globally cooling. According to my calculation we are now about 1926, i.e.
ca. 6 years away from the drought known as the Dust Bowl droughts 1932-1939 that devastated the Great Plains.
http://blogs.24.com/henryp/2013/04/29/the-climate-is-changing/
Since Mr. Oldberg continues to assert that linearity is an input to linear regression rather than an output from it, there is little point in continuing to instruct him. His motives are unclear, but his contributions are unhelpful and silly.
Henry P asks how much I make out what he calls “global warming activism”. Well, I occasionally get a speaking fee, and that’s about it. And I’m not an “activist”: merely an interested observer who conducts his own research from time to time, publishes it, and tells people about it if they ask.
But if Exxon-Mobil are reading this, perhaps they could arrange for this month’s check to reach me. And last month’s hasn’t arrived either. In fact, every single check they ever sent has failed to arrive. Perhaps global warming has interfered with the US Postal Service.
Monckton of Brenchley:
Your latest argument is that my argument is discredited because it is “unhelpful” and “silly.” However, your argument is illogical. In logic, an argument is discredited if and only if its conclusion is proved to be untrue. This, you have repeatedly failed to do. In case you’ve missed it, my argument is that the linearity of the relation from the time to the population mean is unproved where the “population” contains the global temperatures at Earth’s surface. To claim the existence of an algorithm that establishes the linearity without revealing the nature of this algorithm does not constitute a proof.
Similarly, I also asked Shell why they did not support me….
I got no answer other that they decided to go with the “public opinion”
I suspect that public opinion will quickly sway our way once people have to shovel snow in late spring and when summer starts with freezing temps at night…..
I have long been mystified by the flat spot in the global temperature curve from 1940 to 1980 and to a lesser extent 1890 to 1920. It certainly doesn’t correspond to the CO2 concentration.
http://irregulartimes.com/index.php/archives/2009/09/13/global-temperature-statistics-the-denial-edition/
The climate is reasonably predictable, it is what we expect, but weather is what we get, and weather kills us. Spring, summer, autumn & winter, northern hemisphere and southern hemisphere come in different months. Sea Ice melts during the Arctic and antarctic summers when there is sunlight nearly 24 hours a day. But real climate change is between mini ice age and full glacial episodes to warmer interglacial periods we are experiencing now.
No agriculture was possible until about 10,000 years ago, anywhere on the globe. We need warmth, so we get more precipitation to grow and cultivate plants. These gizzards of climatologists ripping off the tax payer, urging we pay for environmental damage being experienced by third world countries and islands is a rip off. However, we can offer help for them to reach sustainable agricultural methodologies that suit their region. Good luck Lord Monckton and I hope you get a reasonable response and Australia bans their carbon tax.
Don’t forget cities create pollution and the Urban Heat Island affect. Luckily most agriculture is conducted outside large cities so what is the need to examine the temps in country areas? Important of course. Remove humans and cars from large cities? Because they are the biggest polluters.
Lord Monckton would remember the 1950s London SMOGS, I lived in Potters Bar and traveled by steam train to the City where I worked for the Bank of England, Cheapside, next to St.Pauls. The old Lady of Threadneedle street, (B of E HQ where they keep the gold bullion) had air purifiers in their buildings. To cut out the SMOG being breathed in by workers, especially in the gold bullion vaults. My petticoat had a 2 inch hemline smut or dirt ring, steam trains were filthy things to travel on, although I loved them. Smoke free zones were introduced by 1963 and within 10 years dolphins were coming into the lower reaches of the Thames, and swallows nesting on business houses again, (a good luck omen). Diesel and electric trains kept our underwear cleaner, LOL.
Lord M.,
Pretending to have faith that the authorities will proceed and investigate as mandated may well be a necessary and useful stratagem. It’s hard to read when my fogging eyes are rolling involuntarily, however.
Monckton takes on the Masters of obfuscation and perdition-by-process, once again. They will bide their time, concoct some gobbledeguk and wriggle out of it as ever. Bureaucrats won’t be dictated to by their subjects, but Monckton won’t let them off the hook. It can only end in tears.
Pass the popcorn…
Which police has jurisdiction over the UN bureaucratocracy anyway, btw.?
As UN employees don’t pay national taxes which state’s laws are they subject to, when transacting UN business ?
Haven’t there already been attempts to ‘clarify there position’ as being effectively outside the law of any Nation.
Might it therefore take something like a UN resolution to sanction them ?
Do these UN IPCC representatives have a conscience ? Or is it just about con-science ?
Edie, they have Dr Pacharie or whomever running T.E.R.I that promotes clean and green energy for third world countries. One Kenyan bush hospital had one solar panel, and could not run a small refrigerator to keep vaccines in, and run the lights at the same time. So they use gas lamps at night! That is a poor hospital.