Friday 14 December 2007

"No consensus" says scientists' letter to UN head

An open letter to the UN Secretary General from nearly a hundred scientists and at least a dozen economists says the UN/IPCC climate conference taking place in Bali is "taking the world in entirely the wrong direction."

"It is not possible to stop climate change, a natural phenomenon that has affected humanity through the ages," say the signatories. "We therefore need to equip nations to become resilient to the full range of these natural phenomena by promoting economic growth and wealth generation."

The signatories say the IPCC's "increasingly alarming conclusions about the climatic influences of human-produced carbon dioxide [are] entirely unjustified," and further that it is not even established, as the IPCC's Bali delegates simply assume, "that it is possible to significantly alter global climate through cuts in human greenhouse gas emissions."

The Summary Reports produced by the IPCC are the basis on which the world's industrial country's are to be shackled in an attempt to significantly alter global climate, yet contrary to the impression left by the IPCC, the Summary Reports "cannot properly be represented as a consensus view among experts."  Nor, say signatories, can they be considered an accurate characterisation of the science on which the Summaries are based.

Contrary to the impression left by the IPCC Summary reports:
- Recent observations of phenomena such as glacial retreats, sea-level rise and the migration of temperature-sensitive species are not evidence for abnormal climate change, for none of these changes has been shown to lie outside the bounds of known natural variability.
- The average rate of warming of 0.1 to 0. 2 degrees Celsius per decade recorded by satellites during the late 20th century falls within known natural rates of warming and cooling over the last 10,000 years.
- Leading scientists, including some senior IPCC representatives, acknowledge that today's computer models cannot predict climate.
--Consistent with this, and despite computer projections of temperature rises, there has been no net global warming since 1998. That the current temperature plateau follows a late 20th-century period of warming is consistent with the continuation today of natural multi-decadal or millennial climate cycling.

The science is not settled, they say, and the path down which the IPCC conference in Bali is heading ignores the lessons apparent from "the failure of the Kyoto Protocol, the chaotic nature of the European CO2 trading market, and the ineffectiveness of other costly initiatives to curb greenhouse gas emissions."

The letter and the list of signatories is here.

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9 comments:

Anonymous said...

Falling on deaf ears. They will bulldoze on because the last thing they want to do is appear foolish.

KG said...

Too late.

Anonymous said...

It is good to see Professor Geoff Austin, (Astrophysics & Geophysics) from University of Auckland, Department of Physics as one of the scientist in the signatories. I didn't take any of his papers, but I knew him when I was at varsity, doing Physics. Thank God, there are still some sane scientists at Auckland University. There is still the only a lone voice from the Geography Department, Prof. Chris de Freitas, even it has been mentioned in the media, that most of his colleagues at his Department don't endorse his view but they don't need to nor try to muzzle his views. That's good that they allow him to air his views without being censored.

Prof. Austin had an excellent article in the NZ Herald perspective in 2006 about how he'd seen all these climate alarmists switching from Global cooling in the 1970s to become Global warming proponents of today. It is a must read:

Clouded thinking hampers science

The usual dismissal coming from warmists, as saying members of the NZ Climate Science (NZCS) are fringe scientists. This is an attack to discredit them. Prof. Austin is not a member of the NZCS as far as I know, but he can't be labeled a fringe scientist, since his work (numerous peer review publications), speaks for itself.

Rebel Radius said...

Galelio versus the church.

Anonymous said...

Every discipline has its contrarians.

The thing to look for is when some key part of the argument is challenged. I'm just sitting on the sidelines watching the game but my assessment so far is that the "ayes" have it.

Anonymous said...

I would just add that many intelligent people believe the God made the world in 7 days.

I think a lot of this is about behaviour as much as science.

ZenTiger said...

I thought he did it in six?

Anonymous said...

Yeah, and on the 7th he changed the climate.

LGM

Anonymous said...

have I got this right?

anonymous thinks people who believe the world was made in seven days are often intelligent?

.. that says it all. Case closed.