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by Alex Newman
30 September 2013
from
TheNewAmerican Website
Spanish version
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Alex Newman is a correspondent for
The New
American, covering economics, politics, and more.
He can be reached
at
anewman@thenewamerican.com.
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Moments after the United Nations
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UN IPCC) released a
summary of its latest global-warming report
on September 27, top climate scientists and experts were already
reading through it and trashing the methods, findings, claims, and
more.
In fact, based on leaked drafts of the controversial report,
critics had been debunking and ridiculing the UN’s climate claims
for weeks prior to the official release.
Once the summary report was
officially released in Stockholm, the deluge of criticism
accelerated, with more than a few top scientists calling for the UN IPCC to be disbanded entirely.
The latest climate document
claimed that despite more than 16 years of essentially no
increase in global temperatures in defiance of UN theories and
predictions, politically selected IPCC experts were more certain
than ever that humans were to blame for global warming - 95 percent
sure, to be precise.
While it is not entirely clear how the IPCC
calculated the "percent" certainty, the claim has confused some of
the world’s most respected climate scientists.
"How they can justify this is
beyond me,"
noted Professor Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and
Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
"It makes no sense that the IPCC was claiming that its confidence in
its forecasts and conclusions has increased," Dr. Curry was also
quoted as saying in news reports.
"This is incomprehensible to me;
the IPCC projections are overconfident, especially given the
report’s admitted areas of doubt.
The consensus-seeking process used
by the IPCC creates and amplifies biases in the science. It should
be abandoned in favor of a more traditional review that presents
arguments for and against - which would better support scientific
progress, and be more useful for policy makers."
Indeed, aside from attempting to downplay the
lack of warming, the
UN has essentially boxed itself into a corner with its latest
climate report.
"IPCC has thrown down the gauntlet
- if the pause
continues beyond 15 years (well it already has), they are toast,"
Professor Curry
noted on her climate website in an analysis offering her initial
thoughts about the UN’s Fifth Assessment Report (AR5).
"Even though
they still use the word ‘most’ in the attribution statement, they go
all out and pretty much say [the temperature increase] is all AGW
[anthropogenic, or man-made, global warming]."
In
another commentary about the report, Dr.
Judith Curry said it was time
to shut down the whole IPCC.
"The diagnosis of paradigm paralysis
seems fatal in the case of the IPCC, given the widespread nature of
the infection and intrinsic motivated reasoning," she explained.
"We
need to put down the IPCC as soon as possible - not to protect the
patient who seems to be thriving in its own little cocoon, but for
the sake of the rest of us whom it is trying to infect with its
disease.
Fortunately much of the population seems to be immune, but
some governments seem highly susceptible to the disease. However,
the precautionary principle demands that we not take any risks here,
and hence the IPCC should be put down."
Numerous other prominent scientists
- even many who have worked with
the IPCC and accept some of its global-warming theories - have been
equally critical.
Meteorology Professor Richard Lindzen at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who served as a lead author
with the third IPCC report, for example,
told Climate Depot that he thought the UN body had
"truly sunk
to a level of hilarious incoherence" with its latest assessment.
"They are proclaiming increased confidence in their models as the
discrepancies between their models and observations increase," added
Dr. Lindzen, who has published hundreds of scientific papers.
The UN-promoted theory about the missing warming being hidden
somewhere in the ocean, Lindzen continued, is really an admission
that its climate models do not accurately simulate natural internal
variability in the system.
Because the claim that human activity is
responsible for global warming depends on the models being able to
do just that, the IPCC is essentially admitting, "somewhat
obscurely," that its crucial assumption is unjustified, the MIT
expert explained.
"Finally, in attributing warming to man, they fail to point out that
the warming has been small, and totally consistent with there being
nothing to be alarmed about," the scientist and professor concluded.
"It is quite amazing to see the contortions the IPCC
has to go through in order to keep the international climate
agenda going."
Meanwhile, climate experts Patrick Michaels and
Paul "Chip" Knappenberger with the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato
Institute were
calling for the UN report to be,
"torn up and tossed out" along
with, "the entire IPCC process which produced such a misleading (and
potentially dangerous) document."
In analyses of the report
published in various media outlets and on Cato’s website, the two
experts lambasted the report with extremely harsh comments, blasting
it as "an embarrassment of internal inconsistency," "beyond
misleading," "entirely self-serving," and more.
"The Humpty Dumpty-esque report once claiming to represent the
‘consensus of scientists’ has fallen from its exalted wall and
cracked to pieces under the burdensome weight of its own cumbersome
and self-serving processes, which is why all the governments’
scientists and all the governments’ men cannot put the IPCC report
together again," they wrote, saying the IPCC’s climate models needed
fixing as evidenced by the fact that the UN could not even track the
Earth’s average temperature for the last 10 to 20 years.
The IPCC
report, the two experts continued, was not only,
"obsolete on its release, but
completely useless as a basis to form opinions (or policy)
related to human energy choices and their influence on the
climate."
Dr. Benny Peiser with the Global Warming Policy Foundation had harsh
words for the latest IPCC report, too, saying it was based on flawed
models that cannot accurately predict future temperature changes.
"The IPCC are gambling that temperatures will rise soon. My own
reading of the report is it's more a political message than a
scientific one," he
explained.
"They ignore the fact that their
models have a problem, and they are unable to say when the
temperature will start rising again. That is a gamble."
In media comments, Dr. Peiser blasted the leaked version of the
report as a,
"staggering concoction of confusion, speculation and
sheer ignorance."
He said the IPCC appeared to have run out of
answers to explain away the "widening gap" between its predictions
and reality - a fact that even most of the establishment media have
started to notice.
In the last 16 years, there has been essentially
no increase in temperature, he explained, and before 1980, the world
saw some three decades of cooling. Indeed, since 1950, there have
only been 20 years of warming, Dr. Peiser noted, adding that nobody
knows when temperatures will start rising again.
"If climate scientists were honest enough to acknowledge their
predictions were for excessive warming they would have to admit that
their climate models could be in serious trouble," he said.
"Around
the world, governments are wasting trillions of [British] pounds on
useless technology which have no effect on the climate but are
causing economic hardship and environmental damage.
The IPCC is doing a huge disservice
to proper science with such tactics and more and more people are
losing trust in their claims and predictions.
Unless global temperatures begin to
rise again in the next few years it is very likely going to
suffer an existential blow to its credibility."
Climatologist Dr. Roy Warren Spencer, who serves as principal
research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville and
formerly worked as a Senior Scientist for Climate Studies at NASA's
Marshall Space Flight Center, was equally critical of the latest UN
report.
Probably the,
"biggest omission of the report," he
said, "continues to be the almost total neglect of natural
forcing mechanisms of climate change."
Overall, Dr. Spencer said the IPCC summary report released last week,
"reveals a dogged attempt to
salvage the IPCC’s credibility amidst mounting evidence that it has
gone overboard in its attempts to scare the global public over
the last quarter century."
Other experts criticized a variety of major omissions in the report,
too.
Executive Vice President Ken Haapala with the Science and
Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), for example, compared and
contrasted the IPCC report with another major climate report that
takes a more realistic approach.
Produced by the Nongovernmental
International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), the "Climate
Change Reconsidered II - Physical Science and the Summary for
Policymakers" paints a very different picture using many of the
same studies cited by the UN.
Among other major concerns cited by Haapala and other experts is the
fact that the sensitivity of the climate to increases in carbon
dioxide is missing from the IPCC report.
"Yet, this is the entire
political issue," he noted. "Is the climate sensitive to human
emissions of CO2 or not? Does an increase in the
molecules of CO2 from 3 to 4 per 10,000 parts of air make
a difference in climate?"
The UN does not know.
"Further, the report glosses
over the fact that there has been no statistically significant
rise in surface temperatures for over 16 years," Haapala continued, echoing criticism worldwide about the UN
effort to downplay the elephant in the room.
"Instead, it asserts a
greater certainty in its work than prior reports. It reduced the
uncertainty from 10% to 5%, with no empirical basis...
The purpose
of a physical science is to describe nature, and to understand how
it works. It is becoming increasingly evident that IPCC science does
not describe nature.
Yet, the IPCC intensifies its
certainty in its work?"
As The New American has been
reporting, numerous independent scientists and organizations
have warned in recent years - and especially in the last few months
- that the Earth may be facing a period
of global cooling.
With sun
activity on the decline and ice growing at the poles, evidence for
the argument continues to grow. In the wake of the latest IPCC
report, meanwhile, more than a few critics have pointed out again
that the placement of temperature gauges near cities and other urban
areas
may be skewing the data cited by the UN to bolster its theories.
Climate scientist and accredited IPCC reviewer
Nic Lewis noted that
if 2001, 2002, or 2003 were used as a starting point, it would
suggest that the globe has actually been cooling by a statistically
insignificant 0.02° C to 0.05° C per decade.
Finally, scientists all over the world are now openly saying that
this IPCC report should be the last - even some who support its
theories and calls for a global carbon regime.
Professor Myles Allen
with Oxford University’s Climate Research Network, who has worked
extensively with the IPCC but has blasted many of the anti-carbon
schemes pursued by governments as a waste of time and money, said
the AR5 ought to be the final UN IPCC report.
"Its cumbersome
production process misrepresents how science works," he was quoted
as saying.
"The idea of producing a document of near-biblical
infallibility is a misrepresentation of how science works, and we
need to look very carefully about what the IPCC does in the future."
At this point, the number of independent experts calling for an end
to the largely discredited UN panel and its reports is growing fast.
Some prominent voices in the climate discussion have even been
calling for the "climate scamsters" to be prosecuted and jailed as a way to
deter future scientific fraud.
Much of the establishment media
continues to parrot UN climate scaremongering, but it appears
increasingly likely that,
unlike the growing polar bear population, the IPCC is standing
on thin ice.
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