John Coleman fires back on the IPCC Synthesis Report

A RESPONSE FROM CLIMATE SKEPTIC JOHN COLEMAN FOUNDER OF THE WEATHER CHANNEL

When you read a news story about the United Nations Panel on Climate Change issuing new climate warnings and making a plea for immediate action to counter the impending climate crisis, do you ever wonder what a climate change skeptic thinks when he reads that news report.

I would like to share such an experience with you.

This is the Associated Press news report with my thoughts as I read it inserted in bold.

COPENHAGEN, Denmark (AP) — Climate change is happening, it’s almost entirely man’s fault and limiting its impacts may require reducing greenhouse gas emissions to zero this century, the U.N.’s panel on climate science said Sunday.

The first four words are very important. “Climate Change is happening.”  You bet it is.  The climate of planet Earth has been constantly changing for 4.5 billion years. Earth has been frozen into a sort of ice ball at least four times in its history (the Ice Ages) and has been as warm or warmer than it is today at least three times (Interglacial Periods) during its history.  Smaller changes such as the Medieval Warm Period and the Little Ice Age occur more often and still smaller swings in climate occur almost constantly. 

Climate scientists, the media, environmentalists, bureaucrats and politicians have all been thinking about climate in a wrong way for a couple of decades now.  They seem to have been thinking that there is a “normal” climate and it was what the climate as it existed on the day mankind burned fossil fuel for the first time.  They have been positioning the climate debate to tell us that it is our responsibility to return the climate to exactly as it was then.

On top of this we have this strange thing about climate going on right now: Our constantly changing climate is hardly changing at all at a time we are being lectured that we are causing catastrophic climate change. By what measure can you contend that “Climate Change is happening” right now. Global temperatures have been essentially plateaued for 18 years.  The failure of temperature rise is well measured and documented in both surface temperature programs and the satellite total atmospheric measurements.  The polar ice caps are not melting as has been loudly predicted over and over again in recent years. The Antarctic Ice is at an all-time maximum in the modern satellite era in which accurate measurements have been possible.  The Arctic Ice is currently within its normal range within this period.  The number and intensity of tornadoes has been diminishing in recent years.  The number and strength of hurricanes is likewise diminished. The oceans are not rising significantly. Droughts and floods and other storms are less extensive and severe than in the period of records. The number and severity of heat waves is below “normal”. The number of polar bears is increasing. So there is no reasonable way to conclude that at this time that important, meaningful or significant “Climate Change is happening.”  The bottom line is that our climate is changing but not very much and no climate change crisis seems to be occurring.

Now to the second part of that first sentence. How can it be said about climate change that “it is almost entirely man’s fault”?  When you read the scientific papers on which the IPCC reports are based, the predicted climate change results almost entirely form the release of carbon dioxide (CO2) into the air by our burning of fossils to power our civilization. But I have read several papers by Ph.D. Climate Skeptics that totally debunk the carbon dioxide greenhouse gas theory.  And, as for the evidence, what is going on now is overwhelming evidence that CO2 is not a significant greenhouse gas. Consider this: there has been no significant atmospheric warming for 18 years despite a continued steady rise in the amount of (CO2) mankind is exhausting into the atmosphere from our burning of fossil fuels. The steady rise in CO2 is well documented.  Think about that: the pause in temperature increases is rolling on despite the continuing steady increase in the level of CO2 in the air.  So the basic theory that man is causing climate change by burning fossil fuels has failed to verify.  Scientifically it is just plain dead.

The fourth and final volume of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s giant climate assessment offered no surprises, nor was it expected to since it combined the findings of three reports released in the past 13 months.

But it underlined the scope of the climate challenge in stark terms. Emissions, mainly from the burning of fossil fuels, may need to drop to zero by the end of this century for the world to have a decent chance of keeping the temperature rise below a level that many consider dangerous.

So there it is in the third paragraph of the AP story.  The problem is CO2 emissions and if we don’t totally eliminate them by 2100 the climate of Earth will be destroyed. It is so amazing that despite the failure of the CO2 greenhouse theory they say we must stop burning fossil fuels.

The IPCC did not say exactly what such a world would look like but it would likely require a massive shift to renewable sources to power homes, cars and industries combined with new technologies to suck greenhouse gases from the atmosphere.

The report warned that failure to reduce emissions could lock the world on a trajectory with “irreversible” impacts on people and the environment. Some impacts already being observed included rising sea levels, a warmer and more acidic ocean, melting glaciers and Arctic sea ice and more frequent and intense heat waves.

The impacts listed in this sentence are totally invalid. The rise is sea levels is almost undetectable and showing no sign of increasing.  Sea level rise requires Antarctic ice melt and the ice pack at the South Pole is the greatest in thickness and extend in measured history.  As already noted, as well, temperatures have not increased in 18 years.  The rate of the historic temperature increase of our atmosphere in the years we have been using fossil fuels is no greater than the rise through the entire period since the end of the Little Ice Age. 

Several scientific papers have debunked the environmentalistic “sky is falling” reports about the increase in the acidity of the oceans. 

And, as for the glaciers: they have been slowly melting since the end of the last ice age.  Who is to say what is the normal extent of glacial ice? Should it be what it was in 1800 or 1900 or 2000?  Ice has constantly come and gone as the climate has drifted.

“Science has spoken. There is no ambiguity in their message. Leaders must act. Time is not on our side,” U.N. Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon said at the report’s launch in Copenhagen.

Science has spoken is definitely the truth.  The reason it has spoken is the untold part of this story.  Ever since Al Gore spread the Global Warming scare through the Democrat Party and our Federal Government, huge and ever increasing scientific grants of our tax dollars have been rolling out to University climate research groups and both government and private climate research organizations and to related environmental organizations.  If you propose to do a research paper on sea level rise, the death of a species of butterflies because of global warming or devise a new global warming computer model, you can easily obtain millions of dollars in a research grant. But if your proposed research is less than supportive of the global warming theory, you will not be funded.  It is the simple and well known power of money.  So the scientists have to “drink the global warming cool aid” and climb aboard the gravy train. It is the only way they and their organizations, departments or research institutes can survive.  These dollars produce the research papers that the United Nations Panel on Climate Change utilizes to support its reports.  So the money rolls and “the science is settled”.

However, some climate scientists when they have tenure (job protection) and have climbed as far up the academic ladder as they are ever going to go and particularly when they are reaching retirement age, un–board the climate train and speak out as climate skeptics.  I have a long list of these brave men and women, many of whom I have met at Climate Conference, others who I have watched on videos and whose papers I have read.  They are my heroes and the list is now over a thousand long.  Add other Ph.D.’s in other fields and 9,000 have signed a petition (The Oregon Petition) that debunks global warming/climate change.  Add other non–Ph.D. scientists to the group and a total of 31,000 thousand have signed that petition. So you can say science has spoken only if you are willing to discount, toss out, ignore and disrespect the thousands of scientist and their papers and articles, blogs and speeches that debunk the global warming theory.  And the media, including the AP (this is an Associated Press article) and almost all the other mainstream media is instructed from above to ignore the skeptics. That is because the media is managed by dedicated liberal Democrats who support without question the pronouncements of the Al Gore, et al.

And, of course, the United Nations officials are more than happy to ride Al Gore’s coat tails all the way to the bank and as much one world government as they can accomplish using the Global Warming scare as an engine.

Amid its grim projections, the report said the tools are there to set the world on a low-emissions path and break the addiction to burning oil, coal and gas which pollute the atmosphere with heat-trapping CO2, the chief greenhouse gas.

The basic “CO2 is a major greenhouse gas” theory that has propelled the global warming/climate change campaign has failed to verify, so there is no scientific basis for making grim projections.  Yet the scientists are constantly making those predictions because they know the media will use them and in the process make the scientists into “climate stars”.  This in turn gets them invited to fancy UN conferences and gets them lush new research grants.  But alas, all of their predictions will fail to verify because they are based on the failed CO2 greenhouse theory.

As for the movement to “break the addiction to burning oil, coal and gas” be very careful. It would destroy our civilization and bankrupt us all if we simply cut off the fossil fuels today.  The development of wind and solar (green energy) is costing us about 20 billion a year in subsidies and tax incentives and that is significantly harming our economy at this time. Since the burning of fossil fuels is not causing a climate crisis, it would be very wise to drop those subsidies and incentives and let our economy perk up.

But that doesn’t mean that fossil fuels will power our civilization forever.  Remember that 90 percent of the scientist who ever lived are alive today.  And many of them are probing every concept for a better way to power our civilization.  One exciting new material that won the Nobel prize for Physics in 2010 is graphene.  It will probably lead to 1000 times more effective solar cells and superior batteries within 30 years. Thorium and other safer and less expensive nuclear power systems that do not create a waste storage problem are in development.  Hydrogen may, at last, play a role.  Ocean current and wave power generation may actually work out in time. Space power generation is also in the concept stage.  Certainly by 2100 we will have reduced fossil fuel to a minimum or dropped it all together as old fashioned.  In the meantime, It is far and away the best power source we have and our engineers and scientists have done an amazing job of finding ways to all but eliminate any pollution from its use.

“All we need is the will to change, which we trust will be motivated by knowledge and an understanding of the science of climate change,” IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri said.

Our Federal Government through the Environmental Protection Agency and the United Nations Panel on Climate Change are using the threat of catastrophic results from climate change to force us to move ahead with the elimination of fossil fuels before we have full time, dependable, cost effective replacements. And this is costing us dearly.  The average American family of four is already paying an additional 1,200 dollars a year for food, fuel and power as a result of the anti-fossil fuel initiatives. As the EPA carbon fees roll out and as coal powered electrical plants are shut down that cost per family is projected to increase to over 4 thousand a year. That can be a very serious matter, cutting off poor families from having funds for other expenditures for the kids from healthcare to food to higher education.  

The IPCC was set up in 1988 to assess global warming and its impacts. The report released Sunday caps its latest assessment, a mega-review of 30,000 climate change studies that establishes with 95-percent certainty that most of the warming seen since the 1950s is man-made. The IPCC’s best estimate is that just about all of it is man-made, but it can’t say that with the same degree of certainty.

There is the number of scientific papers on Climate Change that we tax payers have bought so far: 30 thousand.  That is simply overwhelming.  Thirty thousand papers and billions of dollars and what is their plan?  To keep on spending our tax dollars on research and have more big meetings and publish more reports and try to increase their 95% confidence in their work to 100%.  Does this sound a bit extreme to anyone else but me?

Today only a small minority of scientists challenge the mainstream conclusion that climate change is linked to human activity.

Yes, the huge grants and incentives have attracted a large crowd of supporters.  Money does have amazing power.  But, we, the small minority, are out here and are at least making enough of a stir that we get a line in the AP report.

Global Climate Change, a NASA website, says 97 percent of climate scientists agree that warming trends over the past century are very likely due to human activities.

Even with all the money flowing, that 97% figure which is constantly tossed out, particularly by politicians, comes from a totally manipulated study.  It has been debunked several times.  You can search the internet for the debunking; it is there.

The American public isn’t as convinced. A year-old survey by Pew Research showed 67 percent of Americans believed global warming is occurring and 44 percent said the earth is warming mostly because of human activity. More recently, a New York Times poll said 42 percent of Republicans say global warming won’t have a serious impact, a view held by 12 percent of Democrats and 22 percent of independents.

On one hand, it is very gratifying to me as climate change skeptic to see that the general public is not totally convinced that there is a global warming/climate change crisis.  On the other hand, I am frustrated that a scientific issue has become political issue.  Scientific answers cannot be based on political agendas.  That is a total distortion of logic.  But, I admit I am amazed after the huge and continuing teaching of global warming in our schools (partially through the continued showing of the Al Gore Si-Fi movie “An Inconvenient Truth”) that anyone under 30 holds on to any skeptical view of global warming.

Sleep-deprived delegates approved the final documents Saturday after a weeklong line-by-line review that underscored that the IPCC process is not just about science. The reports must be approved both by scientists and governments, which means political issues from U.N. climate negotiations, which are nearing a 2015 deadline for a global agreement, inevitably affect the outcome.

The tax dollar paid for process of meetings and research and documents will continue and continue.  Scientists, Bureaucrats and Politicians are building careers and amassing small fortunes by being part of the process. (But it seems unlikely that any of them will amass as much money as Al Gore who has apparently created a billion dollars of worth from his climate change activities.) And, many of them truly believe their work is going to save the planet from climate disaster.  When you are on the gravy train, it is very difficult to consider a skeptics view.  I understand that.  But, I will keep on trying, but alas there is no money on this side of debate.  I keep looking in my mailbox for that big check from the Koch brothers. But it never comes.

The rift between developed and developing countries in the U.N. talks opened up in Copenhagen over a passage on what levels of warming could be considered dangerous. After a protracted battle, the text was dropped from a key summary for policy-makers — to the disappointment of some scientists.

The atmosphere of Earth knows no boundaries.  So while the “rich” countries cut their greenhouse gasses, the developing countries increase their production of CO2.  I know that CO2 is not a significant greenhouse gas so there is no significant problem in this, but this leads to extreme conflict and pressures in the international negotiations.  And, in some developing nations no modern scientific measures that clean up the fossil fuels and power plants are being used, so the air is heavily polluted with ash, carbon monoxide and particulate matter.  This is huge problem and is shortening lives and killing people.  This we should be dealing with, but unfortunately the debate is about CO2.

“If the governments are going to expect the IPCC to do their job,” said Princeton professor Michael Oppenheimer, a lead author of the IPCC’s second report, they shouldn’t “get caught up in fights that have nothing to do with the IPCC.”

The omission meant the word “dangerous” disappeared from the summary altogether. It appeared only twice in a longer underlying report compared to seven times in a draft produced before the Copenhagen session. The less loaded word “risk” was mentioned 65 times in the final 40-page summary.

“Rising rates and magnitudes of warming and other changes in the climate system, accompanied by ocean acidification, increase the risk of severe, pervasive, and in some cases irreversible detrimental impacts,” the report said.

World governments in 2009 set a goal of keeping the temperature rise below 2 degrees C (3.6 F) compared to before the industrial revolution. Temperatures have gone up about 0.8 C (1.4 F) since the 19th century.

There is much to note in the paragraphs above, but the most amazing point to me is that an increase in world average temperature of 1.4 degrees in the last 200 years is regarded as a significant fact.  First of all, 200 years ago we could hardly measure temperature accurately. Even when I was a boy, 75 years ago, a thermometer was a tube of mercury stapled on a little strip of wood with lines and numbers printed on it.  How accurately did this measure the temperature of the air and to what degree of accuracy could it be read. A difference of one degree was hard to discern, much less a tenth of degree. And certainly when you look at temperature charts (created from ice cores, carbon measurements in stones and tree ring measurements) and all the ups and downs since thermometers were invented, the ups and downs in temperatures are no different from the increases and pauses in the age of fossil fuels.   

Emissions have risen so fast in recent years that the world has used up two-thirds of its carbon budget, the maximum amount of CO2 that can be emitted to have a likely chance of avoiding 2 degrees of warming, the IPCC report said.

“This report makes it clear that if you are serious about the 2-degree goal … there is nowhere to hide,” said Alden Meyer of the Union of Concerned Scientists, an advocacy group. “You can’t wait several decades to address this issue.”

All of the above is based on the mistaken idea that if your reduce the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere that the temperature will fall.  Experience tells us unequivocally that there is no significant relationship between the level of CO2 in the atmosphere and the temperature.  If reducing CO2 doesn’t work, what other idea does the IPCC have to reduce temperatures.  I think the answer to that is none.

U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry said the report demands “ambitious, decisive and immediate action.”

“Those who choose to ignore or dispute the science so clearly laid out in this report do so at great risk for all of us and for our kids and grandkids,” Kerry said in a statement.

Mr. Kerry has made several very strong statements about Climate Change including one in which he said When I think about the array of global climate – of global threats – think about this: terrorism, epidemics, poverty, the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction – all challenges that know no borders – the reality is that climate change ranks right up there with every single one of them. My guess is that Kerry’s hero is Al Gore and he is competing for some of those big climate change dollars.

The IPCC said the cost of actions such as shifting to solar and wind power and other renewable sources and improving energy efficiency would reduce economic growth only by 0.06 percent annually.

I want to see this document because I find the figure quoted as unbelievable.  Perhaps they are lumping the effect of the switch on the economic growth of all countries on Earth together. Maybe the figures are simply being manipulated.

Pachauri said that should be measured against the implications of doing nothing, putting “all species that live on this planet” at peril.

Here he goes again.  We are all going to die if we don’t do what he wants.  I love this blue marble, our planet Earth.  I understand that we, the people of Earth, must protect this planet for future generations. If I thought for a second that the climate of planet Earth were being put into peril, or even at a small risk, by our use of fossil fuels, I would yield immediately to the IPCC, Al Gore and John Kerry.  But the evidence is very clear, CO2 is not a significant greenhouse gas.

The report is meant as a scientific roadmap for the U.N. climate negotiations, which continue next month in Lima, Peru. That’s the last major conference before a summit in Paris next year, where a global agreement on climate action is supposed to be adopted.

Meetings, conferences, research papers, news releases, speeches and protests.  Climate change is a major industry. And, we are all paying for it every April 15^th or every pay day. Will this ever end?  Not so long as the money is flowing.

The biggest hurdle is deciding who should do what. Rich countries are calling on China and other major developing countries to set ambitious targets; developing countries saying the rich have a historical responsibility to lead the fight against warming and to help poorer nations cope with its impacts. The IPCC avoided taking sides, saying the risks of climate change “are generally greater for disadvantaged people and communities in countries at all levels of development.”

Oh the drama of it all.  Who will win, the rich countries or the poor countries.  End of this act. Slow fade to black.