IPCC Challenged to Recant Global Warming Position

MensNewsDaily.com ^ | April 19, 2008 | Roger F. Gay

[RogerFGay]

A group of scientists have challenged the IPCC to admit that there is no evidence that human activity drives climate change. Specifically, they sent a letter this month to the Chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change asking those associated with the panel to:

retract support from the current IPCC position and admit that there is no observational evidence in measured data going back 22,000 years or even millions of years that CO2 levels (whether from man or nature) have driven or are driving world temperatures or climate change.

And they issue this challenge: "If you believe there is evidence of the CO2 driver theory in the available data please present a graph of it."

The letter is signed by Hans Schreuder (Analytical Chemist), Piers Corbyn (Astrophysicist ), and Dr Don Parkes Svend Hendriksen (1988 Nobel Laureate), and a copy is available at a website operated by the International Climate Science Association. (here)

Evidence presented in the letter goes well beyond putting the “hockey stick” graph, made famous in Al Gore's movie, in doubt. The hockey stick presented exponentially increasing global temperature in the near future due to uncontrolled increases in CO2 – and got its name from the shape of the graph – an apparently long stable period with an upward increase in CO2 and temperature during the industrial age. The UN panel claimed that human activity was driving what Mr. Gore explained as a certain end to civilization as we know it, if extreme political and economic measures are not taken.

The scientists assembled a graph based on actual measurements and did not find evidence that CO2 was the main driving force behind temperature. In fact, temperature increases and decreases, showing little interest in CO2 level.

Graph below shows CO2 (green line) continues upwards while temperature (the other two lines) fluctuates, dropping recently; offering compelling evidence against the belief that CO2 drives global temperature.

The letter goes on to provide an urgent reason for renouncing the UN panel report.

IPCC policy is already leading to economic and unintended environmental damage. Specifically the policy of burning food – maize as biofuel – has contributed to sharp rises in food prices which are causing great hardship in many countries and is also now leading to increased deforestation in Brazil, Malaysia, Indonesia, Togo, Cambodia, Nigeria, Burundi, Sri Lanka, Benin and Uganda for cultivation of crops.

Given the economic devastation that is already happening and which is now widely recognised will continue to flow from this policy, what possible justification can there be for its retention?

The position taken by the scientists is not out of the ordinary from the steady stream of data, analysis and commentary from the scientific community. So too have economists and others challenged the global warming political agenda, which calls for unprecedented levels of taxation and government control based on the scariest projections of bad science. Nonetheless, the IPCC report provides a basis for international agreements such as the “Kyoto Protocol” agreement, which is an international start on the agenda. Both Democratic Party presidential candidates, as well as John McCain have spoken in favor of global warming related reform.

[RogerFGay]

There doesn’t even have to be a direct cause and effect. The relationship can be indirect or even coincidental. Like for example, higher temperatures lead to more plant growth which in the short run absorbs CO2, and then leads to greater release of CO2 eventually.

[RogerFGay]

It’s politics; not science.

[Straight Vermonter]

You realize the debate is over ONE degree celcius, right? The US is considered to have the highest quality system in the world and yet only 13% are within 1 degree of accuracy. So how in the world can anyone say we have gone up .2 degrees, or .6 degrees? It’s like measuring microns with a ruler.

[InterceptPoint]

I have a general question for anyone who has more background than I have on the man-made Global Warming issue.

I'm currently in a debate in another forum with a flaming lib who has challenged me to find any peer reviewed article in a reputable technical journal that disputes the supposedly settled science of Global Warming and in particular the dominance of the human impact on climate change. We are currently focused on the list of scientists that are discussed in Lawrence Soloman's book "The Deniers".

I do know that it has been stated that a recent survey did indeed show that there were ZERO articles published in peer reviewed technical journals that were skeptical of the man-made Global Warming thesis.

So I hoping someone can point me to some relevant sources or verify that there are none.

[InterceptPoint]

Bumping this to see if Delacon can answer my question in Post #64

[WOSG]

Of course there are plenty of peer-reviewed climate articles that pokes holes in the AGW thesis.

This statement: “I do know that it has been stated that a recent survey did indeed show that there were ZERO articles published in peer reviewed technical journals that were skeptical of the man-made Global Warming thesis.” ... is nonsense.

The #1 hole in the AGW thesis is the highly suspect use of positive feedback that magnifies the CO2 forcning by a factor of 4, due to ‘water vapor’ and ‘cloud cover’.
IPCC assessments themselves admit there is uncertainty around these models, yet these models drive the higher-range estimates for temperature change. Without them, all of Al Gore’s hyperbole would be wipde away.

Climate ‘skeptics’ like Lindzen of MIT and others are not really ‘deniers’, they believe there is a link. But they also believe that the effect is being exaggerated.

One guy who has greatly undercut the AGW estimates, by looking at the real impact of cloud cover and precipitation, is Roy Spencer:

http://www.weatherquestions.com/Roy-Spencer-on-global-warming.htm#research-update

“April 19, 2008 RESEARCH UPDATES:

(1) - Our latest article, “Potential Biases in Feedback Diagnosis from Observational Data: A Simple Model Description”, has been accepted for publication in Journal of Climate. It uses a simple climate model to show how daily noise in the Earth’s cloud cover amount can cause feedback estimates from observational data to be biased in the positive direction, making the climate system look more sensitive to manmade greenhouse gas emissions than it really is.

(2) - I have asked the editor of the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society to consider publishing a paper I have written entitled, “Evidence for Internal Radiative Forcing of Climate Change”. I believe that this paper addresses the single most important issue neglected by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change (IPCC): Natural climate variability generated within the climate system in the form of INTERNAL radiative forcing.
This paper is a generalization of our paper that has just been accepted for publication in Journal of Climate, and describes how mixing up of cause and effect when observing natural climate variability can lead to the mistaken conclusion that the climate system is more sensitive to greenhouse gas emissions than it really is. It also shows that a small change in cloud cover hypothesized to occur with the El Nino/La Nina and Pacific Decadal Oscillation modes of natural climate variability can explain most of the major features of global average temperature change in the last century, including 70% of the warming trend. While this does not prove that global warming is mostly natural, it provides a quantitative mechanism for the (minority) view that global warming is mostly a manifestation of natural internal climate variability. (This paper is sure to be controversial, and it will be interesting to see how difficult it will be to get published.)”

[WOSG]

you should also point your lib friend to the Wegman report:

http://www.climateaudit.org/pdf/others/07142006_Wegman_Report.pdf

A bad reconstruction of temperatures by Mann et al. MBH98 was used by the IPCC and indeed used by Al Gore himself. It’s the infamous “hockey stick” graph.

McIntyre and McKitrick in several papers investigated and found out that MBH98 improperly centered the proxy data when doing statistical reconstruction. The result was that it had the effect of turning *any* data into a hockey stick. This was a very controversial claim, Mann et al., fought back and basically used ad hominem and other dismissive attack

The Wegman Report was a report ordered by Congress to look into this, since the hockey stick was a key part of the AGW proof-points and since this was politicized.

Here is what Wegman said, vindicating the McIntyre critique and debunking Mann:

“In general, we found MBH98 and MBH99 to be somewhat obscure and incomplete and
the criticisms of MM03/05a/05b to be valid and compelling. We also comment that they
were attempting to draw attention to the discrepancies in MBH98 and MBH99, and not to
do paleoclimatic temperature reconstruction. Normally, one would try to select a
calibration dataset that is representative of the entire dataset. The 1902-1995 data is not
fully appropriate for calibration and leads to a misuse in principal component analysis.
However, the reasons for setting 1902-1995 as the calibration point presented in the
narrative of MBH98 sounds reasonable, and the error may be easily overlooked by
someone not trained in statistical methodology. We note that there is no evidence that Dr.
Mann or any of the other authors in paleoclimatology studies have had significant
interactions with mainstream statisticians.”

McINtyre runs “climate audit” blog and you can keep up with his latest work there. He’s done even more good work - exposing a year 200 error in temperature records, exposing flaws in temperature adjustments, and keeping the climate scientists honest in a way that is stopping the unhealthy hijacking of science by teh climate alarmists.
http://www.climateaudit.org/

[RogerFGay]

They’re exaggerating so much that the direction is wrong. It’s already getting cooler again.

[RogerFGay]

Challenge the lib to provide any credible data showing that CO2 drives temperature. He can’t. And I mean actually observations that are not just short term coincidence. Models don’t count because they only presume what he’s trying to prove. Real data over time based on actual measurements of CO2 and temperature do not show the Al Gore correlation. This is the creepy thing about this Big Lie political stuff pretending to be science. The claim is absurd enough that of course there aren’t a bunch of studies set up to prove it wrong. It’s absurd, so the burden of proof is on him, not you.

[RogerFGay]

Just don’t let him fool you into believing that the IPCC is a scientific institutions or that Al Gore’s rant has ever been peer reviewed by serious scientists. Al Gore claiming that all scientists agree with him is nonsense, and has absolutely nothing to do with serious debate on the subject. Al Gore is leader of a political movement, and that’s what you need to emphasize about the “lib” you are debating with and his position. It is not a scientific position that he takes. It is a political position supporting a political agenda. It is not science. It is not part of a serious scientific debate. It is politics. Al Gore is going down, and the person you are debating with and his position are going down with Al Gore.

[CedarDave]

BUMP!!