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When misinformed politicians fool with energy systems, the costs are enormous--globally, trillions of dollars of scarce resources have been squandered, economies have been severely damaged, and innocent people have needlessly suffered and died

The UN's IPCC Has No Credibility On Global Warming



In 2002 the PEGG, the journal of the Association of Professional Engineers and Geoscientists of Alberta (APEGA) solicited the following debate on the now-defunct Kyoto Accord (Kyoto Protocol) between the Pembina Institute, which supported the Kyoto Accord and relied upon the position of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and Dr. Sallie Baliunas, Harvard Astrophysicist, Dr. Tim Patterson, Carleton Paleoclimatologist, and Allan MacRae, P.Eng., who opposed Kyoto based on scientific statements in their PEGG article and rebuttal. After 13 years, it is instructive to look back at our opposing positions and see how they have fared.

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One's predictive track record is an objective measure of one's technical competence. All the IPCC's scary projections of humanmade climate change, catastrophic global warming, and extreme weather have failed to materialize, despite significant increases in atmospheric CO2, the alleged cause of climate change. The IPCC has a negative predictive track record, and therefore has NEGATIVE credibility. One would have been more correct if one had assumed the opposite of the IPCC's scary climate projections. Pembina in 2002 quoted the IPCC's Third Assessment Report (TAR, 2001) Summary for Policymakers:
"In the light of new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations... ... The globally averaged surface temperature is projected [in business-as-usual scenarios] to increase by 1.4 to 5.8º C over the period 1990 to 2100."
However, global temperatures in the Lower Troposphere (LT) have NOT warmed in more than 18 years, according to the most accurate data measured by satellites, despite increases in CO2.
Figure 1. The RSS satellite anomaly data set shows no global warming for 18 years 8 months. Pembina in 2002 further stated:
"The IPCC, however, finds good agreement between model simulations and observed temperature over the past 140 years, including the temperature increase up to 1940, if the simulations include solar variation and volcanic activity along with emissions of GHGs and particulates."
In fact, the models quoted by the IPCC have greatly over-predicted the amount of global warming.
Figure 2. Near-term projections of warming made with "substantial confidence" in IPCC FAR (1990) vs. observed anomalies, taken as the mean of the RSS and UAH v.5.6 satellite LT temperature anomalies.
Figure 3. Predicted temperature change in IPCC AR5 (2013) vs. the near-zero observed anomalies, taken as the mean of the RSS and UAH v. 5.6 satellite LT temperature anomalies, 2005 to 2015. The IPCC's models were corrupted by fabricated aerosol data that was used to justify an excessively high Climate Sensitivity to atmospheric CO2. This false aerosol data is contradicted by actual data, as evidenced by Dr. Douglas V. Hoyt's comments. The climate has been remarkably stable despite substantial increases in atmospheric CO2. On November 29, 2012, 134 climate scientists signed an open letter to the UN Secretary-General:
"The U.K. Met Office recently released data showing that there has been no statistically significant global warming for almost 16 years. During this period, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), carbon dioxide (CO2) concentrations rose by nearly 9% to now constitute 0.039% of the atmosphere. Global warming that has not occurred cannot have caused the extreme weather of the past few years. Whether, when and how atmospheric warming will resume is unknown. The science is unclear. Some scientists point out that near-term natural cooling, linked to variations in solar output, is also a distinct possibility. The "even larger climate shocks" you have mentioned would be worse if the world cooled than if it warmed. Climate changes naturally all the time, sometimes dramatically. The hypothesis that our emissions of CO2 have caused, or will cause, dangerous warming is not supported by the evidence. The incidence and severity of extreme weather has not increased. There is little evidence that dangerous weather-related events will occur more often in the future. The U.N.'s own Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says in its Special Report on Extreme Weather (2012) that there is "an absence of an attributable climate change signal" in trends in extreme weather losses to date. There is no sound reason for the costly, restrictive public policy decisions proposed at the U.N. climate conference in Qatar. Rigorous analysis of unbiased observational data does not support the projections of future global warming predicted by computer models now proven to exaggerate warming and its effects. The NOAA "State of the Climate in 2008" report asserted that 15 years or more without any statistically-significant warming would indicate a discrepancy between observation and prediction. Sixteen years without warming have therefore now proven that the models are wrong by their creators' own criterion."
The IPCC's supporters responded by falsifying the Surface Temperature (ST) record to overstate global warming. Some of the evidence of this falsifying of ST data is recorded here:
"As can be seen from Figure 4, there is a strong correlation between carbon dioxide increases and adjustments to the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) temperature record and these adjustments to the surface data in turn result in large divergences between surface data sets and satellite data sets.
In the post with April data, the following questions were asked in the conclusion:
"Why are the new satellite and ground data sets going in opposite directions? Is there any reason that you can think of where both could simultaneously be correct?"
Figure 4. Strong correlation between carbon dioxide increases and adjustments to the United States Historical Climatology Network (USHCN) temperature record. Professor Robert Brown of Duke University had an excellent response to this question here.
The two data sets should not be diverging, period, unless everything we understand about atmospheric thermal dynamics is wrong. That is, I will add my "opinion" to Werner's [Brozek] and point out that it is based on simple atmospheric physics taught in any relevant textbook. This does not mean that they cannot and are not systematically differing; it just means that the growing difference is strong evidence of bias in the computation of the surface record. This bias is not really surprising, given that every new version of HadCRUT and GISS has had the overall effect of cooling the past and/or warming the present! This is as unlikely as flipping a coin (at this point) ten or twelve times each, and having it come up heads every time for both products. In fact, if one formulates the null hypothesis "the global surface temperature anomaly corrections are unbiased", the p-value of this hypothesis is less than 0.01, let alone 0.05. If one considers both of the major products collectively, it is less than 0.001. IMO, there is absolutely no question that [Surface Temperature ST data sets] GISS and HadCRUT, at least, are at this point hopelessly corrupted."
Summarizing the IPCC's track record: The IPCC has fabricated false projections of catastrophic global warming and extreme weather that have not materialized. The IPCC's false claims are contradicted by two decades of credible data. The IPCC has negative credibility. In contrast, the eight predictions we made on our 2002 PEGG rebuttal remain credible: 1. "Climate science does not support the theory of catastrophic human-made global warming - the alleged warming crisis does not exist." NO net global warming has occurred for more than 18 years despite increasing atmospheric CO2. 2. "Kyoto focuses primarily on reducing CO2, a relatively harmless gas, and does nothing to control real air pollution like NOx, SO2, and particulates, or serious pollutants in water and soil."
Note the extreme pollution of air, water and soil that still occurs in China and the Former Soviet Union. 3. "Kyoto wastes enormous resources that are urgently needed to solve real environmental and social problems that exist today. For example, the money spent on Kyoto in one year would provide clean drinking water and sanitation for all the people of the developing world in perpetuity." Since the start of global warming mania, about 50 million children below the age of five have died from contaminated water. 4. "Kyoto will destroy hundreds of thousands of jobs and damage the Canadian economy - the U.S., Canada's biggest trading partner, will not ratify Kyoto, and developing countries are exempt." Canada signed Kyoto but then most provinces wisely ignored it--the exception being now-depressed Ontario, where government adopted ineffective "green energy" schemes and drove up energy costs. 5. "Kyoto will actually hurt the global environment - it will cause energy-intensive industries to move to exempted developing countries that do not control even the worst forms of pollution." Note the huge manufacturing growth and extremely polluted air in the industrial regions of China. 6. "Kyoto's CO2 credit trading scheme punishes the most energy efficient countries and rewards the most wasteful. Due to the strange rules of Kyoto, Canada will pay the Former Soviet Union billions of dollars per year for CO2 credits." Our government did not pay the FSU, but other governments did, bribing them to sign Kyoto. 7. "Kyoto will be ineffective - even assuming the overstated pro-Kyoto science is correct, Kyoto will reduce projected warming insignificantly, and it would take as many as 40 such treaties to stop alleged global warming." IF one believed the false climate models, one would conclude that we must stop using fossil fuels. 8. "The ultimate agenda of pro-Kyoto advocates is to eliminate fossil fuels, but this would result in a catastrophic shortfall in global energy supply - the wasteful, inefficient energy solutions proposed by Kyoto advocates simply cannot replace fossil fuels." Governments that adopted "green energy" schemes such as wind and solar power are finding these schemes are not green and produce little useful energy. Their energy costs are soaring and these governments are in retreat, dropping their green energy subsidies as fast as they politically can. IN SUMMARY: All the above predictions that we made in 2002 have proven correct in those states that fully adopted the Kyoto Accord, whereas none of the IPCC's scary climate projections have materialized. So what happens next? Will we see catastrophic humanmade global warming? No, we predicted in 2002 that Earth will soon cool and that prediction is increasingly probable. My paleoclimatologist colleague and I predicted the commencement of global cooling by 2020 to 2030 in an article I wrote in 2002. This prediction is gaining credibility as solar activity in current Solar Cycle 24 (SC 24) has crashed. This prediction is still less than certain, but SC25 is also projected to be very weak, so we will probably experience two consecutive very-weak Solar Cycles in SC24 and SC25. IF the Sun does indeed primarily drive global temperature, as I believe, then successive governments in Britain and continental Europe have brewed the perfect storm. They have crippled their energy systems with excessive reliance on ineffective grid-connected wind and solar power schemes. Global cooling will probably happen within the next decade or sooner, and Europe and the world will get colder, possibly much colder. Winter deaths will increase as cooling progresses, especially harming the elderly and the poor. Excess Winter Mortality rates will provide an estimate of this unfolding tragedy. Timing is difficult to estimate, but I now expect natural global cooling to be evident by 2020 or sooner. The Alberta Climate Change initiative seeks to reduce the use of fossil fuels and increase the use of green energy. In Europe, where green energy schemes have been widely implemented, the result is higher energy costs that are unaffordable for the elderly and the poor, and increased winter deaths. The problem with green energy schemes is they are not green and they produce little useful energy, primarily because they are too intermittent and require almost 100% fossil-fueled or other backup. Due to this need for almost 100% back-up from conventional energy systems, green energy schemes do not even significantly reduce humanmade emissions of CO2. To date, green energy schemes have been costly fiascos which require huge life-of-project subsidies that are paid by consumers. European politicians are retreating from highly-subsidized green energy schemes that have damaged their industrial competitiveness and harmed their people, and they are gradually reverting to fossil fuels. It appears they would do so more quickly, except they are embarrassed by their foolish acceptance of global warming mania and are trying to save face. The Sun, a UK newspaper, recently quoted British Prime Minister David Cameron as saying: "We have got to get rid of all this green crap." Mr. Cameron's candid statement reflects the fact that the UK has created its own energy crisis due to excess investment in worthless, over-hyped green energy schemes and must quickly find a solution. The lessons for Alberta are clear: When misinformed politicians fool with energy systems, the costs are enormous--globally, trillions of dollars of scarce resources have been squandered, economies have been severely damaged, and innocent people have needlessly suffered and died.


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Allan MacRae -- Bio and Archives

<em>Allan MacRae is an Alberta Professional Engineer with engineering degrees from Queen’s and the University of Alberta.  He is an energy expert with a track record of significant accomplishment on six continents. <em>


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