Have you noticed the kicking around that CFACT Advisor Lord Christopher Monckton’s been getting lately?

Add to the title “Viscount of Brenchley,” “whipping boy du jour.”  Seldom a recent day goes by without some new name calling or conspiracy theory attacking Lord Monckton echoing through the left-wing blogosphere.

Why is Chris Monckton the victim of a global warming attack campaign?  Effectiveness.  Few have been so brilliantly effective at debunking the global warming scare as this compellingly articulate British Lord.

Lord Monckton does his homework.  He scours the scientific literature.  He devours every word and graph.  He is in constant contact with a vast network of leading scientists throughout the world.  He wades past the executive summaries and masters the details.  He checks the math, checks the logic, and checks the consistency of what is claimed about our climate.  He synthesizes global warming science and policy raising vital questions that provoke thought in the mind of any expert or layman with an open mind.

Despite the nearly unimaginable sums available to the global warming folks – despite their command of the media, the politicians in their thrall and the carbon profiteers lining up at the taxpayer’s trough, Lord Monckton and his allies are winning.  Like the child who revealed that the Emperor had no clothes, Lord Monckton wakes the good sense of those who hear him.  The public has caught on.

The warming propaganda machine has lost its momentum and is desperate to get it back.  They want to silence Lord Monckton and remove him from the field.  To that end they’ll say anything.  They attack his title hoping we won’t notice that every British Viscount has a right and by long tradition is called “Lord.”   They attack his graphs and charts, hoping we won’t bother to learn that most of his data comes straight from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the sources it cites.  Lord Monckton had hoped that by using the IPCC’s data warming advocates would be forced to debate the merits.  Sadly, they continue to alternate between mocking the data and restating their conclusions as received wisdom.  Yet when granted a fair forum for debate, it is Monckton who triumphs.  Just weeks ago his team of experts were voted the winners in a warming debate at the Oxford Union – a treasured haven of free thought.

Last year Lord Monckton gave a presentation on global warming in St. Paul Minnesota that became a sensation on YouTube.  This inspired Prof. John Abraham of the University of St. Thomas to attack his presentation in a lengthy video.  Lord Monckton has refuted Prof. Abraham using his own medium.  The first of a series of videos setting the record straight are being released today and we invite you to view them.

As CFACT has said before , the chain of logic behind global warming claims does not hold up.  Lord Christopher Monckton will neither be silenced, nor ignored.  As Mahatma Gandhi told us, “first they ignore you, then they ridicule you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Monckton refutes Abraham

Click  to view

Here is Lord Monckton’s freshly issued, detailed written response to Prof. Abraham in PDF form.

When we watched Prof. Abraham’s video we were mainly struck by Prof. Abraham’s making much of Lord Monckton not always labeling his graphs with their source.  This was not a valid critique.  Lord Monckton was doing a power point presentation in which time or type size would not have made source labels legible to his audience.   Lord Monckton has always been completely willing, indeed eager to provide background information to his viewers and readers.  The graphs in question were mainly those most commonly used in the warming debate and were largely taken from the IPCC fourth assessment report.  They were familiar to those who follow the debate closely and we were surprised that they were not equally familiar to Prof. Abraham.  Former Vice President Al Gore often did not include source information when showing graphs during An Inconvenient Truth (not even when on a scissor lift) and unlike Lord Monckton hides from critics, avoids interviews and will not participate in open discussion.

Abraham’s other tactic is to go back to the IPCC’s sources and obtain emails from them stating their disagreement with Lord Monckton’s conclusions.  Lord Monckton faithfully presented the most commonlhy used graphs and makes his own interpretations relying on his discussions with climate scientists.  This data must be free for all to assess if sound science is to take place.  What did Abraham expect to get when he asked the warming folks for their interpretation and did not bother to contact anyone critical of their assessments including Lord Monckton?  Simply stating the conclusions of warming proponents as received wisdom no longer cuts it.  Too much propaganda has been exposed, too many scandals have rocked their foundations for anyone to take the warming argument on faith or authority again.

Lord Monckton raises essential questions that need to be raised.  His points should be fully debated.  Doubling down on the warming argument without substantive thought will not suffice.  Sorry Professor, time to move past worshiping your warming heroes and give your analytical training a go.  Do you really think the warming computer models will hold up?

The Daily Telegraph reports that thousands of pounds per day will be paid to compensate the wind  industry when the British national grid can not use the power.   The intermittent nature of wind power requires traditional efficient power generation to remain the mainstay of British power generation when the wind is light or not blowing at all resulting in too much power when the wind decides to blow.  Simply not accepting the unneeded power would cost wind investors to lose their subsidies.   We can’t imagine them welcoming that.

A recent report from the Danish Center for Political Studies  shows a similar problem for Denmark.  The Danes however have the good fortune of being able to dump their surplus wind energy into the power grids of their neighbors effectively using their neighboring countries as a storage battery for Danish wind.  This is greater fortune yet for Denmark’s neighboring countries as they receive the power inexpensively with Danish taxpayers and ratepayers  footing the bill.

In the United States Cape Cod homeowners still reeling from the prospect of the controversial Cape Wind project placing turbines in beautiful Nantucket sound were shocked to learn that Cape Wind’s electricity will cost more than twice what they are paying now.  They’ll certainly be shocked if the British idea of paying wind farms to sit idle catches on across the pond.

Alternative energy only makes sense if it produces reliable affordable power.  Wind profits should flow from power generation rather than grants and subsidies.  Until they do they will remain the totems of our times.

CHRISTOPHER MONCKTON of BRENCHLEY

ONE of the numerous propaganda artifices deployed by the now-retreating climate-extremist movement has been the careful avoidance of any debate with anyone on the skeptical side of the case who happens to know anything about climate science or economics.

As the extremists lose the argument and become more desperate, that is changing. John Abraham, a lecturer in fluid mechanics at a bible-college in Minnesota has recently issued – and widely disseminated – a hilariously mendacious 83-minute attempted rebuttal of a speech by me about the climate last October in St. Paul, Minnesota.

So unusual is this attempt to actually meet us in argument, and so venomously ad-hominem are Abraham’s artful puerilities, that climate-extremist bloggers everywhere have circulated them and praised them to the warming skies.

As usual, though, none of these shallow bloggers makes any attempt actually to verify whether what poor Abraham is saying actually has the slightest contact with reality.

One such is George Monbiot, a scribbler for the British Marxist daily propaganda sheet, The Guardian. What is Monbiot’s qualification to write about climate science? Well, like Abraham, he is a “scientist”. Trouble is, he’s a fourteenth-rate zoologist, so his specialization has even less to do with climate science than that of Abraham, who nevertheless presents himself as having scientific knowledge relevant “in the area”.

Here’s the thing. All of the sciences are becoming increasingly specialized. So most “scientists” –  Abraham and, a fortiori, the accident-prone Monbiot among them – have no more expertise in predicting or even understanding the strange behavior of the complex, non-linear, chaotic object that is the Earth’s climate than the man on the Clapham omnibus.

They pretend otherwise, of course. Almost four years ago, when I wrote a 2500-word article in the Sunday Telegraph pointing out that the notion of a very large climate warming attributable to future increases in CO2 concentration was scientifically ill-founded, Monbiot wrote a scathing 1800-word response in the Daily Kommissar, in which he made a dozen laughably elementary scientific errors.

Monbiot made the mistake of pretending that he understood the fundamental equation of radiative transfer, of which he had plainly not previously heard.

Here it was I who had the advantage: before writing the article in the Telegraph I had spent three months tracking the equation down, because – though it converts changes in the flow of radiation at a planetary surface to changes in temperature, and is therefore essential to discovering how much warming a given increase in CO2 concentration will deliver – the IPCC’s 2001 and 2007 climate assessment reports do not mention it once.

And why not? Well, put simply, the equation shows that at the temperatures prevailing on Earth you need a very large increase in radiative flux to achieve a pathetically small increase in temperature. That’s not the sort of thing the climate-extremists want known, so they carefully don’t mention it, which is one reason why puir wee Moonbat hadn’t heard of it.

Ever since I compelled the Daily Apparatchik to publish a letter from me correcting Monbiot’s invincible ignorance of elementary planetary physics and undergrad math, Monbiot has seized every chance to have a go at me whenever one of his climate-extremist Comrades asserted that I’d gotten something wrong.

And how he crows at the news of Abraham’s “evisceration” of my Minnesota speech.

Abraham’s approach is novel. He’s saying not that I got one thing wrong but that I got just about everything wrong. And how plausible is that? A couple of pointers. First, it’s now June 2010, and I spoke in October 2009, almost eight months ago. I’ve made a lot of speeches since. Why has it taken Abraham so long to cobble together his ramblings?

The answer – and, as I shall show, it is the right one – is that his deliberately dishonest personal attack on my integrity and reputation is an ingenious fiction, he knows it, and he has therefore had to go to some elaborate and time-consuming lengths to conceal the steps he has taken to hide the truth and make this nonsense look plausible.

Secondly, during the eight months of “investigation” (Abraham’s word) that he carried out, at no single point did he ever contact me to ask me to clarify one of the numerous references which, he said over and over again, were not clear in my slides.

That failure on his part to check with me when he could not find the sources of my data was clearly deliberate. He didn’t want to give me any advance notice that he was planning to launch a widely-disseminated attack on me, because otherwise I might have pointed out his errors to him in advance, and that would have made it a great deal more difficult for him to get away with publishing them.

In a short space I won’t have time to cover more than a representative selection of Abraham’s errors. Let’s begin, though, with the question of sources.

“Monckton’s data don’t even agree with themselves”

Abraham says I displayed two graphs, both citing NOAA as the source, showing the downward global mean surface temperature trend since 2001, but – by an elaborate point-by-point comparison – he shows that the two graphs are slightly different from one another. Why, he asks, can’t I even make sure that my own data agree with themselves? His implication is that presenting temperature data is something that laymen really can’t be expected to get right.

What Abraham has done, here as elsewhere, is to wrench my data deliberately out of the context in which I actually (and accurately) presented then, and then to lie about it.

The truth is that the first graph, plainly labeled “scienceandpublicpolicy.org”, is the SPPI’s well-known global-temperature index, compiled monthly from four separate global-temperature datasets, as Abraham well knew because I explained in my talk. It was not a NOAA graph, and was not labeled as such. Naturally, therefore, it differed at some points from the NOAA graph.

Abraham went on and on about how a graph shouldn’t have been labeled with the name of an institution such as “scienceandpublicpolicy.org” unless it was that institution that had compiled the graph. That, of course, as he could have discovered if he had bothered – or, rather, dared – to check, was indeed the institution that had compiled the graph, taking the arithmetic mean of the global-temperature anomalies from the HadCRUt, NCDC, RSS, and UAH datasets.

But – and this was the point I made, though Abraham was remarkably careful not to say so – I had showed the SPPI’s four-sources graph in testimony before Congress, to show that there had been global cooling for seven or eight years, and Tom Karl, the director of NOAA’s National Climatic Data Center, who had been present, had failed to admit after questioning from a leading Congressman that global temperatures had indeed been falling for the best part of a decade. He had wriggled and waffled.

So the Congressman had asked me to write proving my result, and I had done so by preparing the second graph, from Tom Karl’s own NCDC (it was labeled as such), which had also showed a pronounced downtrend in global temperatures.

Abraham knew this, because I had said so in my talk. But he also knew that practically no one watching his 83-minute presentation would go to the lengths of looking up what I had actually said. He knew he could get away with a flagrant and deliberate misrepresentation – provided that at all points he was careful never to consult me while planning and circulating his attack.

“Monckton’s data are not properly sourced”

Even when the source is in fact plainly stated on my slides, Abraham is prone to say I have not provided the source. I had shown a graph, which I had said was compiled by satellite, of temperatures at the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro, where there has been no warming for 30 years.

The graph was plainly labeled “UAH”, which – as a mere Bible-College lecturer in fluid mechanics might not know, but anyone with any real knowledge of climate science would of course know – is the University of Alabama at Huntsville, one of only two organizations producing regularly-published satellite-based global temperature records.

Another instance: Abraham said I had done a search because I was bored, and had found that between the beginning of 2004 and the beginning of 2007 just 539 papers containing the search phrase “global climate change” had been published, and that not one of them had provided any evidence for any catastrophic consequence of any anthropogenic warming anywhere. However, he had searched Google Scholar and had found 628,000 references, a few of which, he said, showed catastrophic consequences of “global warming”.

The truth is entirely different. First, I am never bored when I am present. What I actually said in my talk – and Abraham knows this, because he spent eight months trying to take it apart – was that “I’m boring that way – I check things”. And I had checked the climate-extremists’ claims of catastrophe by consulting a paper by Klaus-Martin Schulte, published in 2008. The extract from the paper was labeled “Schulte, 2008” on my slide, in quite large letters.

It was not I, but Schulte who had done the search, as I had said in my talk. It was not Google Scholar (most of whose sources are not peer-reviewed papers) but the ISI Web of Science database of peer-reviewed, learned journals that Schulte searched, as I had said in my talk. It was not the “containing all of the words” search option that Schulte had used, though that is the option Abraham used, but the “exact-phrase” option, which returned only 539 papers.

If Abraham had had the courtesy to check either with me or by looking up Mr. Schulte’s paper on the Web of Science database, to which his Bible College subscribes, he would have found that Mr. Schulte used this phrase because Naomi Oreskes, a science historian, had previously used the same phrase in researching climate papers up to the end of 2003. Schulte had carried her research forward to mid-February 2007, and his paper had been published in 2008.

Abraham then trots out various papers he found in his Google Scholar search, one of which says that the world is warming because of human activities: but that was not the point made in my slide. My point was that not a single one of the 539 papers searched by Schulte had provided evidence for catastrophe.

Abraham also mentions a paper he found that talks about extinctions that are predicted as a result of “global warming”. But – though he may perhaps not have understood this, for many of his political stamp do not – prediction is not the same thing as evidence. The fact is that most of the predictions of the climate-extremists and their overworked X-Box 360s and Playstation Vs have proven to be spectacular exaggerations.

“Gore was right and Monckton wrong about sea level”

The first slide of mine that Abraham criticizes is one in which I show the table of contributions to observed sea-level rise from various sources as published in the IPCC’s 2007 report, and draw from it the conclusion that the measured contribution of the Greenland and West Antarctic ice sheets to “global warming” is 6 cm/century, while Al Gore’s mawkish sci-fi comedy horror movie predicts 610 cm (20 feet) of imminent sea-level rise.

Abraham again artfully distorts or carefully omits what I actually said. First, he says that the IPCC predicts 20-50 cm of sea-level rise this century, not 6 cm. Well, yes it does, but the reason for the difference is that the IPCC’s figure (which still amounts to below 2 feet, not 20, and it’s actually rising at just 1 ft/century at present, if that) is for sea-level rise from all sources, chiefly thermosteric expansion, not just from ice-melt.

But Gore’s prediction of a 20 ft sea-level rise is, as his movie makes quite clear, based on ice-melt alone. Abraham says Gore was right to worry about a very large rise in sea level because the IPCC specifically excludes ice-melt from its calculations, saying it cannot yet be quantified. No, the IPCC specifically includes ice-melt in its calculations, as the table on my slide showed, but it does add that “dynamic” effects of unpredictable but theoretically-possible large-scale failure on the ice sheets are not taken into account.

Abraham says that if either Greenland or the West Antartic ice sheet were to melt sea level would indeed rise by around 20 feet, and that, he says, is where Gore got his figure.

Just two problems with that. First, the IPCC also says, on the very page quoted by Abraham, that even if there were a major collapse of the ice the Greenland ice sheet would not entirely disintegrate for millennia, a phrase that was also used in the IPCC’s 2001 report, where it was made plain that surface temperatures at least 2 Celsius degrees higher than today’s would have to persist for several millennia before either the Greenland or the West Antarctic Ice Sheet could melt away.

True, the British Antarctic Survey disagrees with the IPCC and maintains that the WAIS is in imminent danger of collapse, but so far even the IPCC has not bought that alarmist story.

Secondly, as I said in my talk, but as Abraham very carefully failed to point out in his, both sides of this particular argument have been carefully heard in the impartial forum of the British High Court. The British Government, unsuccessfully attempting to defend Gore on this point, had eventually been compelled – when confronted with what the IPCC actually says about several millennia – to concede that Gore’s 20 feet of sea-level rise was a flagrant exaggeration.

And the judge’s finding could not have been blunter: “The Armageddon scenario that he [Gore] depicts is not based on any scientific view.” And that quotation, too, was on one of my slides, but Abraham carefully failed to mention it, or to check with me to find out how it was that the judge had come to that conclusion.

Nor, of course, did Abraham mention the slide in which I showed a picture of the St. Regis Tower, San Francisco, with a map showing it to be just feet from the allegedly-rising ocean at Fisherman’s Wharf, and a statement that in 2005, the very year in which Gore was making up his alarmist movie, he had spent $4 million buying a condo there. Would he have bought that condo if he had seriously thought sea level would imminently rise by 20 feet? That, as my Latin Grammar would put it, is “a question expecting the answer ‘No’”.

Well, I could go on. And on and on. And on and on and on. Just about every one of the 115 slides presented by Abraham in his shoddy little piece of lavishly-funded venom contains serious, serial, material errors, exaggerations, or downright lies. All I have been able to do here is to give you some flavor of how unscientific, inaccurate, and deliberately mendacious Abraham’s video is.

Now you will understand why I have already initiated the process of having Abraham hauled up before whatever academic panel his Bible College can muster, to answer disciplinary charges of wilful academic dishonesty amounting to gross professional misconduct unbecoming a member of his profession.

Keep an eye out at www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org. There, in due course, will appear the letter I am now drafting to Abraham, asking him several hundred pertinent questions designed to make him and anyone who may think of relying upon him understand that academic dishonesty and deliberate lying on this scale and with this amount of public circulation is just not acceptable, and will not be tolerated.

Abe, baby, if you present yourself as “a scientist” – as you do throughout your talk – then it is as a scientist that you will be judged and found lamentably wanting. You may like to get your apology and retraction in early: for I am a Christian too, and will respond kindly to timely repentance.

Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley is a CFACT advisor.  He served as a science advisor to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and has been criss-crossing the globe challenging global warming orthodoxy.

Oxford Union Chooses Economic Growth Over Climate Change

Debate Win for CFACT Advisor Lord Christopher Monckton

Last week the Oxford Union, one of the world’s premier debate societies, chose economic growth over climate change by a vote of 133-110.  The vote by students at an elite U.K. university illustrates the continued shift of  public support away from the global warming scare.

The proponents of global warming policy always seem to lose whenever they encounter a fair forum where both sides receive equal time.  Key warmists such as Nobel Laureate Al Gore and the IPCC’s Rajendra Pachauri avoid debate at all costs.   Lord Monckton has repeatedly offered to debate Mr. Gore.  Mr. Gore if you truly want us all to agree to massive restrictions to our freedom and a lower standard of living it’s time you step up and debate.

The case in favor of the proposition, “This House would put economic growth before combating climate change” was argued by Lord Christopher Monckton, Lord Leach of Fairford, Lord Lawson of Blaby former Chancellor of the Exchequer and James Delingpole of the Daily Telegraph.  The opposition was argued by Rajesh Makwana of Share the World’s Resources, Lord Larry Whitty, former Under-Secretary of State of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, Mike Mason of Climate Care and Zara McGlone, Union Secretary.

The Science and Public Policy Institute gave the following account:

For what is believed to be the first time ever in England, an audience of university undergraduates has decisively rejected the notion that “global warming” is or could become a global crisis. The only previous defeat for climate extremism among an undergraduate audience was at St. Andrew’s University, Scotland, in the spring of 2009, when the climate extremists were defeated by three votes.

Last week, members of the historic Oxford Union Society, the world’s premier debating society, carried the motion “That this House would put economic growth before combating climate change” by 135 votes to 110. The debate was sponsored by the Science and Public Policy Institute, Washington DC.

Serious observers are interpreting this shock result as a sign that students are now impatiently rejecting the relentless extremist propaganda taught under the guise of compulsory environmental-studies classes in British schools, confirming opinion-poll findings that the voters are no longer frightened by “global warming” scare stories, if they ever were.

When the Union’s president, Laura Winwood, announced the result in the Victorian-Gothich Gladstone Room, three peers cheered with the undergraduates, and one peer drowned his sorrows in beer.

Lord Lawson of Blaby, Margaret Thatcher’s former finance minister, opened the case for the proposition by saying that the economic proposals put forward by the UN’s climate panel and its supporters did not add up. It would be better to wait and see whether the scientists had gotten it right. It was not sensible to make expensive spending commitments, particularly at a time of great economic hardship, when the effectiveness of the spending was gravely in doubt and when it might do more harm than good.

At one point, Lord Lawson was interrupted by a US student, who demanded to know what was his connection with the Science and Public Policy Institute, and what were the Institute’s sources of funding. Lord Lawson was cheered when he said he neither knew nor cared who funded the Institute.

Ms. Zara McGlone, Secretary of the Oxford Union, opposed the motion, saying that greenhouse gases had an effect [they do, but it is very small]; that the precautionary principle required immediate action, just in case and regardless of expense [but one must also bear in mind the cost of the precautions themselves, which can and often do easily exceed the cost of inaction]; that Bangladesh was sinking beneath the waves [a recent study by Prof. Niklas Moerner shows that sea level in Bangladesh has actually fallen]; that the majority of scientists believed “global warming” was a problem [she offered no evidence for this]; and that “irreversible natural destruction” would occur if we did nothing [but she did not offer any evidence].

Mr. James Delingpole, a blogger for the leading British conservative national newspaper The Daily Telegraph, seconded the proposition, saying that – politically speaking – the climate extremists had long since lost the argument. The general public simply did not buy the scare stories any more. The endless tales of Biblical disasters peddled by the alarmist faction were an unwelcome and now fortunately failed recrudescence of dull, gray Puritanism. Instead of hand-wringing and bed-wetting, we should celebrate the considerable achievements of the human race and start having fun.

Lord Whitty, a Labor peer from the trades union movement and, until recently, Labor’s Environment Minister in the Upper House, said that the world’s oil supplies were rapidly running out [in fact, record new finds have been made in the past five years]; that we needed to change our definition of economic growth to take into account the value lost when we damaged the environment [it is artificial accounting of this kind that has left Britain as bankrupt as Greece after 13 years of Labor government]; that green jobs created by governments would help to end unemployment [but Milton Friedman won his Nobel Prize for economics by demonstrating that every artificial job created at taxpayers’ expense destroys two real jobs in the wealth-producing private sector]; that humans were the cause of most of the past century’s warming [there is no evidence for that: the case is built on speculation by programmers of computer models]; that temperature today was at its highest in at least 40 million years [in fact, it was higher than today by at least 12.5 F° for most of the past 550 million years]; and that 95% of scientists believed our influence on the climate was catastrophic [no one has asked them].

Lord Monckton repeatedly interrupted Lord Whitty to ask him to give a reference in the scientific literature for his suggestion that 95% of scientists believed our influence on the climate was catastrophic. Lord Whitty was unable to provide the source for his figure, but said that everyone knew it was true. Under further pressure from Lord Monckton, Lord Whitty conceded that the figure should perhaps be 92%. Lord Monckton asked: “And your reference is?” Lord Whitty was unable to reply. Hon. Members began to join in, jeering “Your reference? Your reference?” Lord Whitty sat down looking baffled.

Lord Leach of Fairford, whom Margaret Thatcher appointed a Life Peer for his educational work, spoke third for the proposition. He said that we no longer knew whether or not there had been much “global warming” over the 20^th century, because the Climategate emails had exposed the terrestrial temperature records as defective. In any event, he said, throwing good money after bad on various alternative-energy boondoggles was unlikely to prove profitable in the long term and would ultimately do harm.

Mr. Rajesh Makwana, executive director of “Share The World’s Resources”, speaking third for the opposition, said that climate change was manmade [but he did not produce any evidence for that assertion]; that CO2 emissions were growing at 3% a year [but it is concentrations, not emissions, that may in theory affect climate, and concentrations are rising at a harmless 0.5% a year]; that the UN’s climate panel had forecast a 7 F° “global warming” for the 21^st century [it’s gotten off to a bad start, with a cooling of 0.2 F° so far]; and that the consequences of “global warming” would be dire [yet, in the audience, sat Mr. Klaus-Martin Schulte, whose landmark paper of 2008 had established that not one of 539 scientific papers on “global climate change” provided any evidence whatsoever that “global warming” would be catastrophic].

Lord Monckton, a former science advisor to Margaret Thatcher during her years as Prime Minister of the UK, concluded the case for the proposition. He drew immediate laughter and cheers when he described himself as “Christopher Walter, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, scholar, philanthropist, wit, man about town, and former chairman of the Wines and Spirits Committee of this honourable Society”. At that point his cummerbund came undone. He held it up to the audience and said, “If I asked this House how long this cummerbund is, you might telephone around all the manufacturers and ask them how many cummerbunds they made, and how long each type of cummerbund was, and put the data into a computer model run by a zitty teenager eating too many doughnuts, and the computer would make an expensive guess. Or you could take a tape-measure and” – glaring at the opposition across the despatch-box – “measure it!” [cheers].

Lord Monckton said that real-world measurements, as opposed to models, showed that the warming effect of CO2 was a tiny fraction of the estimates peddled by the UN’s climate panel. He said that he would take his lead from Lord Lawson, however, in concentrating on the economics rather than the science. He glared at the opposition again and demanded whether, since they had declared themselves to be so worried about “global warming”, they would care to tell him – to two places of decimals and one standard deviation – the UN’s central estimate of the “global warming” that might result from a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration. The opposition were unable to reply. Lord Monckton told them the answer was 3.26 plus or minus 0.69 Kelvin or Celsius degrees. An Hon. Member interrupted: “And your reference is?” Lord Monckton replied: “IPCC, 2007, chapter 10, box 10.2.” [cheers]. He concluded that shutting down the entire global economy for a whole year, with all the death, destruction, disaster, disease and distress that that would cause, would forestall just 4.7 ln(390/388) = 0.024 Kelvin or Celsius degrees of “global warming”, so that total economic shutdown for 41 years would prevent just 1 K of warming. Adaptation as and if necessary would be orders of magnitude cheaper and more cost-effective.

Mr. Mike Mason, founder and managing director of “Climate Care”, concluded for the opposition. He said that the proposition were peculiar people, and that Lord Monckton was more peculiar than most, in that he was not a real Lord. Lord Monckton, on a point of order, told Mr. Mason that the proposition had avoided personalities and that if Mr. Mason were unable to argue other than ad hominem he should “get out”. [cheers] Mr. Mason then said that we had to prepare for climate risks [yes, in both directions, towards cooler as well as warmer]; and that there was a “scientific consensus” [but he offered no evidence for the existence of any such consensus, still less for the notion that science is done by consensus].

The President thanked the speakers and expressed the Society’s gratitude to the Science and Public Policy Institute for sponsoring the debate. Hon. Members filed out of the Debating Chamber, built to resemble the interior of the House of Commons, and passed either side of the brass division-pole at the main door – Ayes to the right 135, Noes to the left 110. Motion carried.

Rather to my surprise, I bumped into Mother Earth at the Heartland Climate Conference in Chicago (May 17th).  There she was, large as life, in her green gown with a wreath of ivy in her hair (when I first saw the green gown I feared she might be a Warmist saboteur who had slipped past Security, but my worries were unfounded).  And she was selling (or strictly speaking, giving out) Carbon Indulgences (that’s the white rectangle in the photograph).  Fascinated, I read the text:

“This indulgence serves as a remittance of all carbon sins.  You are forgiven for *** Flying in airplanes *** Driving in cars *** Using electrical kit *** Taking hot showers *** Exhaling CO2 *** making things in factories *** Growing food with tractors *** Eating meat *** Running aircon *** Attending international Conferences”.

So I feel much better about that.  Back in the day job, Mother Earth is Christina Wilson, the Upper Midwest Director of “Collegians for a Constructive Tomorrow”, part of an organisation called CFACT.The photograph is in front of their exhibition stand and you can see most of their logo.  They are a conservative organisation dedicated to a rational approach to science and the environment.  You can see the Mother Earth story at http://www.cfact.org/a/1719/Carbon-sins-forgiven-in-Bonn, under the headline “Expose Global Warming Hype – ALL PAIN, NO GAIN” (don’t you just wish that they could stop sitting on the fence and take a clear position?).

I get a great buzz from going to the States.  I love the plethora of conservative organisations and dedicated people taking the message forward.  Of course we have some great conservative organisations here in the UK – The TaxPayers Alliance, The Bruges Group, The Freedom Association – but we have some way to go to match the scale and profile of our friends and colleagues across the pond.

On the left of the picture you can see a corner of the Pajamas Media stand (www.pajamasmedia.com).  They’re great guys too, but that’s a whole ‘nother story.

You can download Mother Earth’s carbon indulgences and CFACT’s International Carbon Credits here, print them out and share them with those in need of carbon forgiveness.

The Select Committee, in its letter inviting testimony for the present hearing, cites various scientific bodies as having concluded that
1. The global climate has warmed;
2. Human activities account for most of the warming since the mid-20th century;
3. Climate change is already causing a broad range of impacts in the United States;
4. The impacts of climate change are expected to grow in the coming decades.

The first statement requires heavy qualification and, since the second is wrong, the third and fourth are without foundation and must fall. The Select Committee has requested answers to the following questions:

1. What are the observed changes to the climate system?
Carbon dioxide concentration: In the Neoproterozoic Era, ~750 million years ago, dolomitic rocks, containing ~40% CO2 bonded not only with calcium ions but also with magnesium, were precipitated from the oceans worldwide by a reaction that could not have occurred unless the atmospheric concentration of CO2 had been ~300,000 parts per million by volume. Yet in that era equatorial glaciers came and went twice at sea level.

Today, the concentration is ~773 times less, at ~388 ppmv: yet there are no equatorial glaciers at sea level. If the warming effect of CO2 were anything like as great as the vested-interest groups now seek to maintain, then, even after allowing for greater surface albedo and 5% less solar radiation, those glaciers could not possibly have existed (personal communication from Professor Ian Plimer, confirmed by on-site inspection of dolomitic and tillite deposits at Arkaroola Northern Flinders Ranges, South Australia).

In the Cambrian Era, ~550 million years ago, limestones, containing some 44% CO2 bonded with calcium ions, were precipitated from the oceans. At that time, atmospheric CO2 concentration was ~7000 ppmv, or ~18 times today’s (IPCC, 2001): yet it was at that time that the calcite corals first achieved algal symbiosis. In the Jurassic era, ~175 million years ago, atmospheric CO2 concentration was ~6000 ppmv, or ~15 times today’s (IPCC, 2001): yet it was then that the delicate aragonite corals came into being.

Therefore, today’s CO2 concentration, though perhaps the highest in 20 million years, is by no means exceptional or damaging. Indeed, it has been argued that trees and plants have been part-starved of CO2 throughout that period (Senate testimony of Professor Will Happer, Princeton University, 2009). It is also known that a doubling of today’s CO2 concentration, projected to occur later this century (IPCC, 2007), would increase the yield of some staple crops by up to 40% (lecture by Dr. Leighton Steward, Parliament Chamber, Copenhagen, December 2009).

Global mean surface temperature: Throughout most of the past 550 million years, global temperatures were ~7 K (13 F) warmer than the present. In each of the past four interglacial warm periods over the past 650,000 years, temperatures were warmer than the present by several degrees (A.A. Gore, An Inconvenient Truth, 2006).

In the current or Holocene warm period, which began 11,400 years ago at the abrupt termination of the Younger Dryas cooling event, some 7500 years were warmer than the present (Cuffey & Clow, 1997), and, in particular, the medieval, Roman, Minoan, and Holocene Climate Optima were warmer than the present (Cuffey & Clow, 1997). The “global warming” that ceased late in 2001 (since when there has been a global cooling trend for eight full years) had begun in 1695, towards the end of the Maunder Minimum, a period of 70 years from 1645-1715 when the Sun was less active than at any time in the past 11,400 years (Hathaway, 2004). Solar activity increased with a rapidity unprecedented in the Holocene, reaching a Grand Solar Maximum during a period of 70 years from 1925-1995 when the Sun was very nearly as active as it had been at any time in the past 11,400 years (Hathaway, 2004; Usoskin, 2003; Solanki, 2005).

The first instrumental record of global temperatures was kept in Central England from 1659. From 1695-1735, a period of 40 years preceding the onset of the Industrial Revolution in 1750, temperatures in central England, which are a respectable proxy for global temperatures, rose by 2.2 K (4 F). Yet global temperatures have risen by only 0.65 K (1.2 F) since 1950, and 0.7 K (1.3 F) in the whole of the 20th century. Throughout the 21st century, global temperatures have followed a declining trend.

Accordingly, neither global mean surface temperature nor its rates of change in recent decades have been exceptional, unusual, inexplicable, or unprecedented.

Ocean “acidification”: It has been suggested that the oceans have “acidified” – or, more correctly, become less alkaline – by 0.1 acid-base units in recent decades. However, the fact of a movement towards neutrality in ocean chemistry, if such a movement has occurred, tells us nothing of the cause, which cannot be attributed to increases in CO2 concentration. There is 70 times as much CO2 dissolved in the oceans as there is in the atmosphere, and some 30% of any CO2 we add to the atmosphere will eventually dissolve into the oceans. Accordingly, a doubling of CO2 concentration, expected later this century, would raise the oceanic partial pressure of CO2 by 30% of one-seventieth of what is already there. And that is an increase of 0.4% at most. Even
this minuscule and chemically-irrelevant perturbation is probably overstated, since any “global warming” that resulted from the doubling of CO2 concentration would warm the oceans and cause them to outgas CO2, reducing the oceanic partial pressure.

Seawater is a highly buffered solution – it can take up a huge amount of dissolved inorganic carbon without significant effect on pH. There is not the slightest possibility that the oceans could approach the neutral pH of pure water (pH 7.0), even if all the fossil fuel reserves in the world were burned. A change in pH of 0.2 units this century, from its present 8.2 to 8.0, even if it were possible, would leave the sea containing no more than 10% of the “acidic” positively-charged hydrogen ions that occur in pure water. If ocean “acidification” is happening, then CO2 is not and will not be the culprit.

2. What evidence provides attribution of these changes to human activities?

In the global instrumental record, which commenced in 1850, the three supradecadal periods of most rapid warming were 1860-1880, 1910-1940, and 1975-2001. Warming rates in all three periods were identical at ~0.16 K (0.3 F) per decade. During the first two of these three periods, observations were insufficient to establish the causes of the warming: however, the principal cause cannot have been atmospheric CO2 enrichment, because, on any view, mankind’s emissions of CO2 had not increased enough to cause any measurable warming on a global scale during those short periods.

In fact, the third period of rapid global warming, 1975-2001, was the only period of warming since 1950. From 1950-1975, and again from 2001-2010, global temperatures fell slightly (HadCRUTv3, cited in IPCC, 2007). What, then, caused the third period of warming? Most of that third and most recent
period of rapid warming fell within the satellite era, and the satellites confirmed measurements from ground stations showing a considerable, and naturally-occurring, global brightening from 1983-2001 (Pinker et al., 2005).

Allowing for the fact that Dr. Pinker’s result depended in part on the datasets of outgoing radiative flux from the ERBE satellite that had not been corrected at that time for orbital decay, it is possible to infer a net increase in surface radiative flux amounting to 0.106 Wm2year over the period, compared with the 0.16 W m-2 year-1 found by Dr. Pinker. Elementary radiative-transfer calculations demonstrate that a natural surface global brightening amounting to ~1.9 W m-2 over the 18-year period of study would be expected – using the IPCC’s own methodology – to have caused a transient warming of 1K (1.8 F). To put this naturally-occurring global brightening into perspective, the IPCC’s estimated total of all the anthropogenic influences on climate combined in the 256 years 1750-2005 is only 1.6 W m-2. Taking into account a further projected warming, using IPCC methods, of ~0.5 K (0.9F) from CO2 and other anthropogenic sources, projected warming of 1.5 K (2.7 F) should have occurred.

However, only a quarter of this projected warming was observed, suggesting the possibility that the IPCC may have overestimated the warming effect of greenhouse gases fourfold. This result is in line with similar result obtained by other methods: for instance, Lindzen & Choi (2009, 2010 submitted) find that the warming rate to be expected as a result of anthropogenic activities is one-quarter to one-fifth of the IPCC’s central estimate. There is no consensus on how much warming a given increase in CO2 will cause.

3. Assuming ad argumentum that the IPCC’s projections of future warming are correct, what policy measures should be taken?
Warming at the very much reduced rate that measured (as opposed to merely modeled) results suggest would be 0.7-0.8 K (1.3-1.4 F) at CO2 doubling. That would be harmless and beneficial – a doubling of CO2 concentration would increase yields of some staple crops by 40%. Therefore, one need not anticipate any significant adverse impact from CO2-induced “global warming”. “Global warming” is a non-problem, and the correct policy response to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.

However, ad argumentum, let us assume that the IPCC is correct in finding that a warming of 3.26 plus/minus 0.69 K (5.9 plus/minus 1.2 F: IPCC, 2007, ch.10, box 10.2) might occur at CO2 doubling. We generalize this central prediction, deriving a simple equation to tell us how much warming the IPCC would predict for any given change in CO2 concentration – ΔTS ≈ (8.5 ± 1.8) ln(C/Co) F.

Thus, the change in surface temperature in Fahrenheit degrees, as predicted by the IPCC, would be 6.7 to 10.3 (with a central estimate of 8.5) times the logarithm of the proportionate increase in CO2 concentration. We check the equation by using it to work out the warming the IPCC would predict at CO2 doubling: 8.5 ln 2 ≈ 5.9 F. Using this equation, we can determine just how much “global warming” would be forestalled if the entire world were to shut down its economies and emit no carbon dioxide at all for an entire year. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 is 388 parts per million by volume. Our emissions of 30 bn tons of CO2 a year are causing this concentration to rise at 2 ppmv/year, and this ratio of 15 bn tons of emissions to each additional ppmv of CO2 concentration has remained constant for 30 years.

Then the “global warming” that we might forestall if we shut down the entire global carbon economy for a full year would be 8.5 ln[(388+2)/388] = 0.044 F. At that rate, almost a quarter of a century of global zero-carbon activity would be needed in order to forestall just one Fahrenheit degree of “global warming”. Two conclusions ineluctably follow. First, it would be orders of magnitude more cost effective to adapt to any “global warming” that might occur than to try to prevent it from occurring by trying to tax or regulate emissions of carbon dioxide in any way.

Secondly, there is no hurry. Even after 23 years doing nothing to address the imagined problem, and even if the IPCC has not exaggerated CO2’s warming effect fourfold, the world will be just 1 F warmer than it is today. If the IPCC has exaggerated fourfold, the world can do nothing for almost a century before global temperature rises by 1 F. There are many urgent priorities that need the attention of Congress, and it is not for me as an invited guest in your country to say what they are. Yet I can say this much: on any view, “global warming” is not one of them.

Christopher Monckton

3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

May 6, 2010

Lord Christopher Monckton, who advised Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher on scientific matters, is a CFACT Advisor.

The Daily Telegraph editorializes today that CRU scientists got off too “lightly” in the review of their role in the Climategate scandal.  Like Der Spiegel before it, the Telegraph is rediscovering that every debate has two sides.  The voices of the climate realists are penetrating the climate fog at last.  The Telegraph reminds its readers that on climate, “there is another view, for which evidence can also be adduced, even if it seems to conflict with the received wisdom. The findings of the Oxburgh inquiry are not an excuse for again closing down the climate-change debate to the exclusion of those who take a sceptical attitude to what is arguably the most important issue facing the world.”

Polls show people turning their backs on climate propaganda.  The prospect of fair media treatment causes a shiver of fear down the necks of warming campaigners.  Their jeopardy is real.  Sunlight is a good disinfectant.

Scientific evidence continues to mount against the IPCC’s climate report, however, the media establishment usually ignores it.  What a surprise to read from the BBC that, “for the last 11 years we have not observed any increase in global temperatures.  And our climate models did not forecast it, even though man-made carbon dioxide, the gas thought to be responsible for warming our planet, has continued to rise.” 

Suddenly we have acknowledgment from the BBC that climate and weather are governed by many natural causes including solar activity and ocean currents.  They almost seem ready to acknowledge that computer models are no substitute for real world observation.

What happened to the science is settled, debate is over, to question is to betray our children’s future?  Shall we now begin true scientific discourse in which all facts, questions and hypotheses are welcome?  Shall we now endeavour to think before we act?

Has the climate bubble burst?