Loading...
HomeMy WebLinkAbout5ALateDocument11iii Preface Before facing major surgery, wouldn’t you want a second opinion? When a nation faces an important decision that risks its economic future, or perhaps the fate of the ecology, it should do the same. It is a time-honored tradition in science to set up a “Team B,” which examines the same original evidence but may reach a different conclusion. The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) was set up to examine the same climate data used by the United Nations-sponsored Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In 2007, the IPCC released to the public its threevolume Fourth Assessment Report titled Climate Change 2007 (IPCC-AR4, 2007). Its constituent documents were said by the IPCC to comprise “the most comprehensive and up-to-date reports available on the subject,” and to constitute “the standard reference for all concerned with climate change in academia, government and industry worldwide.” But are these characterizations correct? On the most important issue, the IPCC’s c?laim that “most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations [emphasis in the original],” NIPCC reaches the opposite conclusion— namely, that natural causes are very likely to be the dominant cause. Note: We do not say anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHG) cannot produce some warming or has not in the past. Our conclusion is that the evidence shows they are not playing a substantial role. Almost as importantly, on the question of what effects the present and future warming might have on human health and the natural environment, the IPCC says global warming will “increase the number of people suffering from death, disease and injury from heatwaves, floods, storms, fires and droughts.” The NIPCC again reaches the opposite conclusion: A warmer world will be a safer and healthier world for humans and wildlife alike. Once again, we do not say global warming won’t occur or have any effects (positive or negative) on human health and wildlife. Rather, our conclusion is that the evidence shows the net effect of continued warming and rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere will be beneficial to humans, plants, and wildlife. We have reviewed the materials presented in the first two volumes of the Fourth Assessment—The Physical Science Basis and Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability—and we find them to be highly selective and controversial with regard to making future projections of climate change and discerning a significant human-induced influence on current and past climatic trends. Although the IPCC claims to be unbiased and to have based AR4 on the best available science, such is not the case. In many instances conclusions have been seriously exaggerated, relevant facts have been distorted, and key scientific studies have been omitted or ignored. We present support for this thesis in the body of this volume, where we describe and reference thousands of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles that document scientific or historical facts that contradict the IPCC’s central claims, that global warming is man-made and that its effects will be catastrophic. Some of this research became available after the AR4’s self-imposed deadline of May 2006, but much of it was in the scientific record that was available to, and should have been familiar to, the IPCC’s editors. Below, we first sketch the history of the IPCC and NIPCC, which helps explain why two scientific bodies could study the same data and come to very different conclusions. We then explain the list of 31,478 American scientists that appears in Appendix 4, and end by expressing what we hoped to achieve by producing this report. A Brief History of the IPCC The rise in environmental consciousness since the 1970s has focused on a succession of ‘calamities’: cancer epidemics from chemicals, extinction of birds and other species by pesticides, the depletion of the Climate Change Reconsidered iv ozone layer by supersonic transports and later by freons, the death of forests (‘Waldsterben’) because of acid rain, and finally, global warming, the “mother of all environmental scares” (according to the late Aaron Wildavsky). The IPCC can trace its roots to World Earth Day in 1970, the Stockholm Conference in 1971-72, and the Villach Conferences in 1980 and 1985. In July 1986, the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as an organ of the United Nations. The IPCC’s key personnel and lead authors were appointed by governments, and its Summaries for Policymakers (SPM) have been subject to approval by member governments of the UN. The scientists involved with the IPCC are almost all supported by government contracts, which pay not only for their research but for their IPCC activities. Most travel to and hotel accommodations at exotic locations for the drafting authors is paid with government funds. The history of the IPCC has been described in several publications. What is not emphasized, however, is the fact that it was an activist enterprise from the very beginning. Its agenda was to justify control of the emission of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. Consequently, its scientific reports have focused solely on evidence that might point toward human-induced climate change. The role of the IPCC “is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the latest scientific, technical and socio-economic literature produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change, its observed and projected impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation” [emphasis added] (IPCC 2008). The IPCC’s three chief ideologues have been (the late) Professor Bert Bolin, a meteorologist at Stockholm University; Dr. Robert Watson, an atmospheric chemist at NASA, later at the World Bank, and now chief scientist at the UK Department of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; and Dr. John Houghton, an atmospheric radiation physicist at Oxford University, later head of the UK Met Office as Sir John Houghton. Watson had chaired a self-appointed group to find evidence for a human effect on stratospheric ozone and was instrumental in pushing for the 1987 Montreal Protocol to control the emission of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Using the blueprint of the Montreal Protocol, environmental lawyer David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council then laid out a plan to achieve the same kind of control mechanism for greenhouse gases, a plan that eventually was adopted as the Kyoto Protocol. From the very beginning, the IPCC was a political rather than scientific entity, with its leading scientists reflecting the positions of their governments or seeking to induce their governments to adopt the IPCC position. In particular, a small group of activists wrote the all-important Summary for Policymakers (SPM) for each of the four IPCC reports (McKitrick et al., 2007). While we are often told about the thousands of scientists on whose work the Assessment reports are based, the vast majority of these scientists had no direct influence on the conclusions expressed by the IPCC. Those policy summaries were produced by an inner core of scientists, and the SPMs were revised and agreed to, line-by-line, by representatives of member governments. This obviously is not how real scientific research is reviewed and published. These SPMs turn out, in all cases, to be highly selective summaries of the voluminous science reports—typically 800 or more pages, with no indexes (except, finally, the Fourth Assessment Report released in 2007), and essentially unreadable except by dedicated scientists. The IPCC’s First Assessment Report (IPCC-FAR, 1990) concluded that the observed temperature changes were “broadly consistent” with greenhouse models. Without much analysis, it gave the “climate sensitivity” of a 1.5 to 4.5º C rise for a doubling of greenhouse gases. The IPCC-FAR led to the adoption of the Global Climate Treaty at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro. The FAR drew a critical response (SEPP, 1992). FAR and the IPCC’s style of work also were criticized in two editorials in Nature (Anonymous, 1994, Maddox, 1991). The IPCC’s Second Assessment Report (IPCCSAR, 1995) was completed in 1995 and published in 1996. Its SPM contained the memorable conclusion, “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” The SAR was again heavily criticized, this time for having undergone significant changes in the body of the report to make it ‘conform’ to the SPM—after it was finally approved by the scientists involved in writing the report. Not only was the report altered, but a key graph was also doctored to suggest a human Preface v influence. The evidence presented to support the SPM conclusion turned out to be completely spurious. There is voluminous material available about these text changes, including a Wall Street Journal editorial article by Dr. Frederick Seitz (Seitz, 1996). This led to heated discussions between supporters of the IPCC and those who were aware of the altered text and graph, including an exchange of letters in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society (Singer et al., 1997). SAR also provoked the 1996 publication of the Leipzig Declaration by SEPP, which was signed by some 100 climate scientists. A booklet titled The Scientific Case Against the Global Climate Treaty followed in September 1997 and was translated into several languages. (SEPP, 1997. All these are available online at www.sepp.org.) In spite of its obvious shortcomings, the IPCC report provided the underpinning for the Kyoto Protocol, which was adopted in December 1997. The background is described in detail in the booklet Climate Policy— From Rio to Kyoto, published by the Hoover Institution (Singer, 2000). The Third Assessment Report of the IPCC (IPCC-TAR 2001) was noteworthy for its use of spurious scientific papers to back up its SPM claim of “new and stronger evidence” of anthropogenic global warming. One of these was the so-called “hockeystick” paper, an analysis of proxy data, which claimed the twentieth century was the warmest in the past 1,000 years. The paper was later found to contain basic errors in its statistical analysis (McIntyre and McKitrick, 2003, 2005; Wegman et al., 2006). The IPCC also supported a paper that claimed pre-1940 warming was of human origin and caused by greenhouse gases. This work, too, contained fundamental errors in its statistical analysis. The SEPP response to TAR was a 2002 booklet, The Kyoto Protocol is Not Backed by Science (SEPP, 2002). The Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC (IPCC-AR4 2007) was published in 2007; the SPM of Working Group I was released in February; and the full report from this Working Group was released in May—after it had been changed, once again, to “conform” to the Summary. It is significant that AR4 no longer makes use of the hockey-stick paper or the paper claiming pre-1940 human-caused warming. Once again controversy ensued, however, this time when the IPCC refused to publicly share comments submitted by peer-reviewers, then sent all the reviewers’ comments in hard copy to a library that was closed for renovation, and then finally, but only under pressure, posted them online. Inspection of those comments revealed that the authors had rejected more than half of all the reviewers’ comments in the crucial chapter attributing recent warming to human activities. AR4 concluded that “most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations” (emphasis in the original). However, as the present report will show, it ignored available evidence against a human contribution to current warming and the substantial research of the past few years on the effects of solar activity on climate change. Why have IPCC reports been marred by controversy and so frequently contradicted by subsequent research? Certainly its agenda to find evidence of a human role in climate change is a major reason; its organization as a government entity beholden to political agendas is another major reason; and the large professional and financial rewards that go to scientists and bureaucrats who are willing to bend scientific facts to match those agendas is yet a third major reason. Another reason for the IPCC’s unreliability is the naive acceptance by policymakers of “peer-reviewed” literature as necessarily authoritative. It has become the case that refereeing standards for many climatechange papers are inadequate, often because of the use of an “invisible college” of reviewers of like inclination to a paper’s authors (Wegman et al., 2006). Policy should be set upon a background of demonstrable science, not upon simple (and often mistaken) assertions that, because a paper was refereed, its conclusions must be accepted. Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) When new errors and outright falsehoods were observed in the initial drafts of AR4, SEPP set up a “Team B” to produce an independent evaluation of the available scientific evidence. While the initial organization took place at a meeting in Milan in 2003, Team B was activated after the AR4 SPM appeared in February 2007. It changed its name to the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) and organized an international climate workshop in Vienna in April 2007. Climate Change Reconsidered vi The present report stems from the Vienna workshop and subsequent research and contributions by a larger group of international scholars. For a list of those contributors, see page ii. Craig Idso then made a major contribution to the report by tapping the extensive collection of reviews of scientific research he helped collect and write, which is available on the Web site of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change (www.CO2science.org). A Summary for Policymakers, edited by S. Fred Singer, was published by The Heartland Institute in 2008 under the title Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Planet (Singer, 2008). Since the summary was completed prior to a major expansion and completion of the full NIPCC report, the two documents now stand on their own as independent scholarly works and substantially agree. What was our motivation? It wasn’t financial self-interest: Except for a foundation grant late in the process to enable Craig Idso to devote the many hours necessary to assemble and help edit the final product, no grants or contributions were provided or promised in return for producing this report. It wasn’t political: No government agency commissioned or authorized our efforts, and we do not advise or support the candidacies of any politicians or candidates for public office. We donated our time and best efforts to produce this report out of concern that the IPCC was provoking an irrational fear of anthropogenic global warming based on incomplete and faulty science. Global warming hype has led to demands for unrealistic efficiency standards for cars, the construction of uneconomic wind and solar energy stations, the establishment of large production facilities for uneconomic biofuels such as ethanol from corn, requirements that electric companies purchase expensive power from so-called “renewable” energy sources, and plans to sequester, at considerable expense, carbon dioxide emitted from power plants. While there is nothing wrong with initiatives to increase energy efficiency or diversify energy sources, they cannot be justified as a realistic means to control climate. Neither does science justify policies that try to hide the huge cost of greenhouse gas controls, such as cap and trade, a “clean development mechanism,” carbon offsets, and similar schemes that enrich a few at the expense of the rest of us. Seeing science clearly misused to shape public policies that have the potential to inflict severe economic harm, particularly on low-income groups, we choose to speak up for science at a time when too few people outside the scientific community know what is happening, and too few scientists who know the truth have the will or the platforms to speak out against the IPCC. NIPCC is what its name suggests: an international panel of nongovernment scientists and scholars who have come together to understand the causes and consequences of climate change. Because we are not predisposed to believe climate change is caused by human greenhouse gas emissions, we are able to look at evidence the IPCC ignores. Because we do not work for any governments, we are not biased toward the assumption that greater government activity is necessary. The Petition Project Attached as Appendix 4 to this report is a description of “The Petition Project” and a directory of the 31,478 American scientists who have signed the following statement: We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth. This is a remarkably strong statement of dissent from the perspective advanced by the IPCC, and it is similar to the perspective represented by the NIPCC and the current report. The fact that more than ten times as many scientists have signed it as are alleged to have “participated” in some way or another in the research, writing, and review of IPCC AR4 is very significant. These scientists, who include among their number 9,029 individuals with Ph.D.s, actually endorse the statement that appears above. By contrast, fewer than 100 of the scientists (and nonscientists) who are listed in the appendices to the IPCC AR4 Preface vii actually participated in the writing of the allimportant Summary for Policymakers or the editing of the final report to comply with the summary, and therefore could be said to endorse the main findings of that report. Consequently, we cannot say for sure whether more than 100 scientists in the entire world actually endorse the most important claims that appear in the IPCC AR4 report. We will not make the same mistake as the IPCC. We do not claim the 31,478 scientists whose names appear at the end of this report endorse all of the findings and conclusions of this report. As the authors of the petition say (in an introduction to the directory of signers in Appendix 4), “signatories to the petition have signed just the petition—which speaks for itself.” We append the list of their names to this report with the permission of the persons who maintain the list to demonstrate unequivocally the broad support within the scientific community for the general perspective expressed in this report, and to highlight one of the most telling differences between the NIPCC and the IPCC. For more information about The Petition Project, including the text of the letter endorsing it written by the late Dr. Frederick Seitz, past president of the National Academy of Sciences and president emeritus of Rockefeller University, please turn to Appendix 4 or visit the project’s Web site at www.petitionproject.org. Looking Ahead The public’s fear of anthropogenic global warming, despite almost hysterical coverage of the issue by the mainstream media, seems to have hit a ceiling and is falling. Only 34 percent of Americans polled (Rasmussen Reports, 2009) believe humans are causing global warming. A declining number even believe the Earth is experiencing a warming trend (Pew Research Center, 2008). A poll of 12,000 people in 11 countries, commissioned by the financial institution HSBC and environmental advocacy groups, found only one in five respondents—20 percent—said they would be willing to spend any extra money to reduce climate change, down from 28 percent a year earlier (O’Neil, 2008). While the present report makes it clear that the scientific debate is tilting away from global warming alarmism, we are pleased to see the political debate also is not over. Global warming “skeptics” in the policy arena include Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic and 2009 president of the Council of the European Union; Helmut Schmidt, former German chancellor; and Lord Nigel Lawson, former United Kingdom chancellor of the exchequer. There is some evidence that policymakers world-wide are reconsidering the wisdom of efforts to legislate reductions in greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions. We regret that many advocates in the debate have chosen to give up debating the science and focus almost exclusively on questioning the motives of “skeptics,” name-calling, and ad hominem attacks. We view this as a sign of desperation on their part, and a sign that the debate has shifted toward climate realism. We hope the present study will help bring reason reason and balance back into the debate over climate change, and by doing so perhaps save the peoples of the world from the burden of paying for wasteful, unnecessary energy and environmental policies. We stand ready to defend the analysis and conclusion in the study that follows, and to give further advice to policymakers who are open-minded on this most important topic. S. Fred Singer, Ph.D. President, Science and Environmental Policy Project Professor Emeritus of Environmental Science, University of Virginia www.sepp.org Craig D. Idso, Ph.D. Chairman, Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change www.co2science.org Acknowledgments: The editors thank Joseph and Diane Bast of The Heartland Institute for their editorial skill and R. Warren Anderson for his technical assistance. www.heartland.org Climate Change Reconsidered viii References Anonymous 1994. IPCC’s ritual on global warming. Nature 371: 269. IPCC-AR4 2007. Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press. IPCC-FAR 1990. Scientific Assessment of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group I to the First Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press. IPCC-SAR 1996. Climate Change 1995: The Science of Climate Change. Contribution of Working Group I to the Second Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Cambridge University Press. IPCC-TAR 2001. Climate Change 2001: The Scientific Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Third Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Cambridge University Press. Maddox J. 1991. Making global warming public property. Nature 349: 189. McIntyre, S. and McKitrick, R. 2003. Corrections to Mann et al. (1998) proxy data base and northern hemisphere average temperature series. Energy & Environment 14: 751-777. McIntyre, S. and McKitrick, R. 2005. Hockey sticks, principal components and spurious significance. Geophysical Research Letters 32 L03710. McKitrick, R. 2007. Independent Summary for Policymakers IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. Ed. Fraser Institute. Vancouver, BC. O’Neil, P. 2008. Efforts to support global climate-change falls: Poll. Canwest News Service, 27 Nov. Pew Research Center 2008. A deeper partisan divide over global warming, summary of findings. 8 May. http://people-press.org Rasmussen Reports 2009. Energy Update. April 17. http://www.rasmussenreports.com/Seitz, F. 1996. A major deception on global warming. The Wall Street Journal, 12 June. SEPP 1992. The Greenhouse Debate Continued: An Analysis and Critique of the IPCC Climate Assessment. ICS Press, San Francisco, CA. SEPP 1997. The Scientific Case Against the Global Climate Treaty. www.sepp.org/publications/GWbooklet GW.html [Also available in German, French, and Spanish]. Singer, S.F. 1997, 1999. Hot Talk Cold Science. The Independent Institute, Oakland CA. Singer, S.F. 2008. Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate. The Heartland Institute, Chicago, IL. Wegman, E., Scott, D.W. and Said, Y. 2006. Ad Hoc Committee Report to Chairman of the House Committee on Energy & Commerce and to the Chairman of the House sub-committee on Oversight & Investigations on the Hockey-stick Global Climate Reconstructions. US House of Representatives, Washington DC.