The Profiteers of climate doom

Ten killer questions that expose how wrong and ideologically driven they are

by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, Willie Soon and David R. Legates

A century or so from now, based on current trends, today’s concentration of carbon dioxide in the air will have doubled. How much warming will that cause? The official prediction, 1.5-4.5 degrees Celsius (2.7-8.1 degrees Fahrenheit) per doubling of CO2, is proving a substantial exaggeration.

Professor William Happer of Princeton, one of the world’s foremost physicists, says computer models of climate rely on the assumption that CO2’s direct warming effect is about a factor of two higher than what is actually happening in the real world. This is due to incorrect representations of the microphysical interactions of CO2 molecules with other infrared photons.

As if that were not bad enough, the official story is that feedbacks triggered by direct warming roughly triple the warming, causing not 1 but 3 degrees of warming per CO2 doubling. Here, too, the official story is a significant exaggeration, as demonstrated by Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT, perhaps the world’s most knowledgeable climatologist.

The wild exaggerations of both the direct CO2 warming and the supposedly more serious add-on warming are rooted in an untruth: the falsehood that scientists know enough about how clouds form, how thunderstorms work, how air and ocean currents flow, how ice sheets behave, how soot in the air behaves.

In truth, we do not understand climate enough to make even an uneducated guess about how much global warming our adding CO2 to the air will cause. Other things being equal, we will cause some warming, but – based on actual measurements to date – not much.

The national science academies and the UN’s climate panel have profitably contrived what the late Stephen Schneider called “scary scenarios,” based on inadequate knowledge coupled with ideological bias. Etatiste (government empowered or paid) politicians and bureaucrats have gone along with them.

A quarter-century has passed since the panel first predicted how fast the world would warm. Measurements since then show the predictions were much overblown. But don’t take it from us.

Ask any climatologist the following ten killer questions.

1: What is the source of the warming that surface thermometer datasets now say has occurred in the past 18 years?

The official (simplified) theory is that photons interacting with CO2 molecules in the upper air give off heat that warms that air, which in turn warms the lower air, which warms Earth’s surface.

Yet the two satellite datasets show no global warming of the lower air for almost 19 of the 21 years of annual UN global-warming conferences. Even if CO2 had warmed the upper air as predicted (and the satellites show it has not), that warming could not have reached the surface through lower air that has not warmed. Therefore, if the surface has warmed in the past couple of decades, as the surface datasets now pretend, CO2 cannot have been the cause.

In 2006 the late Professor Robert Carter, a down-to-earth geologist who considered global warming a non-problem, wrote in Britain’s Daily Telegraph that in the eight full years 1998-2005 the Hadley Centre’s global temperature dataset showed no global warming at all.

Since then, that dataset (and all the other surface datasets) was recently adjusted upward to create global warming that actual measurements did not show. The Hadley data now indicate a warming trend over those same eight years, equivalent to more than 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) per century.

2: Why, just two years ago, did every surface temperature dataset agree with the satellites that there had been no global warming so far in this century? And why was every surface dataset altered in the two years preceding the Paris climate conference – in a manner calculated to show significant warming – even though the satellite records continue to show little or no warming?

3: Why do all the datasets, surface as well as satellite, show a lot less warming than predicted? Why has the rate of warming over the past quarter century been only one-third to one-half of the average prediction made by the UN’s climate panel in its 1990 First Assessment Report, even after the numerous questionable adjustments to the surface temperature datasets?

Figure 1.

The startling temperature clock (Figure 1) shows the UN panel’s 1990 predictions as orange and red zones meeting at the red needle that represents the IPCC’s then average prediction that by now there should have been global warming equivalent to 2.8 degrees C (4.9 degrees F) per century.

But the blue needles, representing the warming reported by the three much-manipulated surface temperature datasets, show little more than half that warming. The green needles, representing the satellite datasets, show only a third of what the UN had predicted with “substantial confidence” in 1990.

4: Why is the gap between official over-prediction and observed reality getting wider?

An updated temperature clock (Figure 2) shows the global warming that the UN’s panel predicted in its 2001 Third Assessment Report, compared with measured warming from then until 2015. The measured warming rate, represented by the green zone, is manifestly less than the warming rate since 1990, even though CO2 concentration has risen throughout this time.

Figure 2

5: Why is the gap widening between warming rates measured by satellite and by surface datasets?

It is legitimate to infer that the surface datasets have been altered to try to bring the reported warming closer to the failed but (for now) still profitable predictions. (That is, the altered datasets still bring profits in the form of money, fame and power to the failed prophets of climate doom.)

6: Why should anyone invest trillions of dollars – to replace fossil fuels with expensive renewable energy – on the basis of official predictions in 1990 and 2001 that differ so greatly from reality?

Plainly, this is not the “settled science” we were told it was.

7: Why has the observed rate of warming, on all datasets, been tumbling for decades notwithstanding predictions that it would at least remain stable?

One-third of all mankind’s supposed warming influence on the climate since 1750 has occurred since the late 1990s, and yet satellites show scarcely a flicker of global warming in almost 19 years.

Likewise, the strength and frequency of hurricanes, tornadoes, floods and droughts – and the rate of sea level rise – are still completely within the realm of natural variability and human experience, even though atmospheric CO2 levels have increased noticeably in recent decades. And that extra carbon dioxide is fertilizing plants, making crops and forests grow faster and better, and “greening” the Earth.

Not only the amount but also the pattern of warming fails to match predictions. To the nearest tenth of one per cent, there is no CO2 in the air. (400 ppm is only 0.04% of the atmosphere.) Yet the UN’s panel said in 2007 that carbon dioxide would warm the upper air six miles above the tropical surface at twice or thrice the surface rate.

That tropical mid-troposphere “hot-spot” (one of us gave it its name) was supposed to be the undeniable fingerprint of manmade global warming. Its existence would prove manmade warming.

8: So, where is the tropical upper-air hot-spot?

Satellites do not show it. Millions of measurements taken by balloon-borne radiosondes do not show it. It is missing. If warming is manmade, there should be a distinct difference between measured surface and upper-air warming rates. It has not been there, for decades.

Similarly, just as official predictions claim CO2-driven warming will be greatest in the upper air, which will in turn warm Earth’s surface, so they also claim that the near-surface air will warm the ocean surface, which will warm the deep oceans – and that is where the global warming has been “hiding.”

Yet measurements from more than 3,600 automated buoys throughout the ocean (that dive down a mile and a quarter and take detailed temperature and salinity profiles every ten days) show that the deeper strata are warming faster than the near-surface strata.

9: Why, if CO2-driven warming ought to warm the surface ocean first, is the ocean warming from below? And why has the ocean been warming throughout the eleven full years of the ARGO dataset at a rate equivalent to only 1 degree every 430 years?

As NASA thermal engineer Hal Doiron bluntly puts it: “When I look at the ocean, I see one of the largest heat-sinks in the solar system. While the ocean endures, there can’t be much manmade global warming.” And he had to get his heat calculations right or astronauts died.

Believers have silenced serious and legitimate scientific questions such as these, by unleashing an organized, well-funded, remarkably vicious campaign of personal vilification against anyone who dares to ask any question, however polite or justifiable, about the Party Line. Most scientists, politicians and journalists have learned that they will have a much quieter life if they just drift along with what most scientists privately concede is sheer exaggeration.

Believers also insist there is a “consensus” that manmade global warming is likely to prove dangerous.

10: Given that the authors of the largest-ever survey of peer-reviewed opinion in learned papers found that only 64 of 11,944 papers (0.5% of the total) actually said their authors agreed with the official “consensus” proposition that recent warming was mostly manmade – on what rational, evidence-based, scientific ground is it daily asserted that “97% of scientists” believe recent global warming is not only manmade but dangerous?

The “97% consensus” is a pure fabrication, used to justify harmful and even lethal public policies.

Millions die worldwide every year because they do not have cheap, clean, continuous, low-tech, coal-fired electricity, to replace the wood, grass and animal dung fires they must use to cook their food and heat their homes. Given the growing and flagrant discrepancies between prediction and observation that we have revealed here for the first time, the moral case for defunding the profiteers of climate doom and redeploying the money to give coal-fired light and heat to the world’s poorest people is overwhelming.

We are killing millions of parents and children today, based on a scientifically baseless goal of saving thousands who are not at risk “the day after tomorrow.”

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Christopher Monckton was an expert reviewer for the Fifth Assessment Report (2013) of the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC. Willie Soon is a solar physicist and climate scientist in Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. David Legates, PhD, CCM, is a Professor of Climatology at the University of Delaware in Newark, Delaware.