"A major person working in the area of climate change and global
warming sent me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of
the Medieval Warm Period.' "

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/main.jhtml?xml=/news/2006/11/05/nosplit/nwarm05.xml&DCMP...

Climate chaos? Don't believe it

By Christopher Monckton, Sunday Telegraph

Last Updated: 12:14am GMT 05/11/2006

Download Christopher Monckton's references and detailed calculations
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/graphics/2006/11/05/warm-refs.pdf

The Stern report last week predicted dire economic and social effects of
unchecked global warming. In what many will see as a highly controversial
polemic, Christopher Monckton disputes the 'facts' of this impending
apocalypse and accuses the UN and its scientists of distorting the truth

Biblical droughts, floods, plagues and extinctions?

Last week, Gordon Brown and his chief economist both said global warming
was the worst "market failure" ever. That loaded soundbite suggests that
the "climate-change" scare is less about saving the planet than, in
Jacques Chirac's chilling phrase, "creating world government". This week
and next, I'll reveal how politicians, scientists and bureaucrats
contrived a threat of Biblical floods, droughts, plagues, and extinctions
worthier of St John the Divine than of science.

Sir Nicholas Stern's report on the economics of climate change, which
was published last week, says that the debate is over. It isn't. There are
more greenhouse gases in the air than there were, so the world should warm
a bit, but that's as far as the "consensus" goes. After the recent
hysteria, you may not find the truth easy to believe. So you can find all
my references and detailed calculations here.

The Royal Society says there's a worldwide scientific consensus. It
brands Apocalypse-deniers as paid lackeys of coal and oil corporations. I
declare my interest: I once took the taxpayer's shilling and advised
Margaret Thatcher, FRS, on scientific scams and scares. Alas, not a red
cent from Exxon.

In 1988, James Hansen, a climatologist, told the US Congress that
temperature would rise 0.3C by the end of the century (it rose 0.1C), and
that sea level would rise several feet (no, one inch). The UN set up a
transnational bureaucracy, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC). The UK taxpayer unwittingly meets the entire cost of its
scientific team, which, in 2001, produced the Third Assessment Report, a
Bible-length document presenting apocalyptic conclusions well beyond
previous reports.

This week, I'll show how the UN undervalued the sun's effects on
historical and contemporary climate, slashed the natural greenhouse
effect, overstated the past century's temperature increase, repealed a
fundamental law of physics and tripled the man-made greenhouse effect.

Next week, I'll demonstrate the atrocious economic, political and
environmental cost of the high-tax, zero-freedom, bureaucratic centralism
implicit in Stern's report; I'll compare the global-warming scare with
previous sci-fi alarums; and I'll show how the environmentalists'
"precautionary principle" (get the state to interfere now, just in case)
is killing people.

So to the scare. First, the UN implies that carbon dioxide ended the
last four ice ages. It displays two 450,000-year graphs: a sawtooth curve
of temperature and a sawtooth of airborne CO2 that's scaled to look
similar. Usually, similar curves are superimposed for comparison. The UN
didn't do that. If it had, the truth would have shown: the changes in
temperature preceded the changes in CO2 levels.

Next, the UN abolished the medieval warm period (the global warming at
the end of the First Millennium AD). In 1995, David Deming, a geoscientist
at the University of Oklahoma, had written an article reconstructing 150
years of North American temperatures from borehole data. He later wrote:
"With the publication of the article in Science, I gained significant
credibility in the community of scientists working on climate change. They
thought I was one of them, someone who would pervert science in the
service of social and political causes. One of them let his guard down. A
major person working in the area of climate change and global warming sent
me an astonishing email that said: 'We have to get rid of the Medieval
Warm Period.' "

So they did. The UN's second assessment report, in 1996, showed a
1,000-year graph demonstrating that temperature in the Middle Ages was
warmer than today. But the 2001 report contained a new graph showing no
medieval warm period. It wrongly concluded that the 20th century was the
warmest for 1,000 years. The graph looked like an ice hockey-stick. The
wrongly flat AD1000-AD1900 temperature line was the shaft: the uptick from
1900 to 2000 was the blade. Here's how they did it:

* They gave one technique for reconstructing pre-thermometer temperature
390 times more weight than any other (but didn't say so).

* The technique they overweighted was one which the UN's 1996 report had
said was unsafe: measurement of tree-rings from bristlecone pines.
Tree-rings are wider in warmer years, but pine-rings are also wider when
there's more carbon dioxide in the air: it's plant food. This carbon
dioxide fertilisation distorts the calculations.

* They said they had included 24 data sets going back to 1400. Without
saying so, they left out the set showing the medieval warm period, tucking
it into a folder marked "Censored Data".

* They used a computer model to draw the graph from the data, but
scientists later found that the model almost always drew hockey-sticks
even if they fed in random, electronic "red noise".

The large, full-colour "hockey-stick" was the key graph in the UN's 2001
report, and the only one to appear six times. The Canadian Government
copied it to every household. Four years passed before a leading
scientific journal would publish the truth about the graph. Did the UN or
the Canadian government apologise? Of course not. The UN still uses the
graph in its publications.

Even after the "hockey stick" graph was exposed, scientific papers
apparently confirming its abolition of the medieval warm period appeared.
The US Senate asked independent statisticians to investigate. They found
that the graph was meretricious, and that known associates of the
scientists who had compiled it had written many of the papers supporting
its conclusion.

The UN, echoed by Stern, says the graph isn't important. It is. Scores
of scientific papers show that the medieval warm period was real, global
and up to 3C warmer than now. Then, there were no glaciers in the tropical
Andes: today they're there. There were Viking farms in Greenland: now
they're under permafrost. There was little ice at the North Pole: a
Chinese naval squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found
none.

The Antarctic, which holds 90 per cent of the world's ice and nearly all
its 160,000 glaciers, has cooled and gained ice-mass in the past 30 years,
reversing a 6,000-year melting trend. Data from 6,000 boreholes worldwide
show global temperatures were higher in the Middle Ages than now. And the
snows of Kilimanjaro are vanishing not because summit temperature is
rising (it isn't) but because post-colonial deforestation has dried the
air. Al Gore please note.

In some places it was also warmer than now in the Bronze Age and in
Roman times. It wasn't CO2 that caused those warm periods. It was the sun.
So the UN adjusted the maths and all but extinguished the sun's role in
today's warming. Here's how:

* The UN dated its list of "forcings" (influences on temperature) from
1750, when the sun, and consequently air temperature, was almost as warm
as now. But its start-date for the increase in world temperature was 1900,
when the sun, and temperature, were much cooler.

* Every "forcing" produces "climate feedbacks" making temperature rise
faster. For instance, as temperature rises in response to a forcing, the
air carries more water vapour, the most important greenhouse gas; and
polar ice melts, increasing heat absorption. Up goes the temperature
again. The UN more than doubled the base forcings from greenhouse gases to
allow for climate feedbacks. It didn't do the same for the base solar
forcing.

Two centuries ago, the astronomer William Herschel was reading Adam
Smith's Wealth of Nations when he noticed that quoted grain prices fell
when the number of sunspots rose. Gales of laughter ensued, but he was
right. At solar maxima, when the sun was at its hottest and sunspots
showed, temperature was warmer, grain grew faster and prices fell. Such
observations show that even small solar changes affect climate detectably.
But recent solar changes have been big.

Sami Solanki, a solar physicist, says that in the past half-century the
sun has been warmer, for longer, than at any time in at least the past
11,400 years, contributing a base forcing equivalent to a quarter of the
past century's warming. That's before adding climate feedbacks.

The UN expresses its heat-energy forcings in watts per square metre per
second. It estimates that the sun caused just 0.3 watts of forcing since
1750. Begin in 1900 to match the temperature start-date, and the base
solar forcing more than doubles to 0.7 watts. Multiply by 2.7, which the
Royal Society suggests is the UN's current factor for climate feedbacks,
and you get 1.9 watts - more than six times the UN's figure.

The entire 20th-century warming from all sources was below 2 watts. The
sun could have caused just about all of it.

Next, the UN slashed the natural greenhouse effect by 40 per cent from
33C in the climate-physics textbooks to 20C, making the man-made additions
appear bigger.

Then the UN chose the biggest 20th-century temperature increase it could
find. Stern says: "As anticipated by scientists, global mean surface
temperatures have risen over the past century." As anticipated? Only 30
years ago, scientists were anticipating a new Ice Age and writing books
called The Cooling.

In the US, where weather records have been more reliable than elsewhere,
20th-century temperature went up by only 0.3C. AccuWeather, a worldwide
meteorological service, reckons world temperature rose by 0.45C. The US
National Climate Data Centre says 0.5C. Any advance on 0.5? The UN went
for 0.6C, probably distorted by urban growth near many of the world's
fast-disappearing temperature stations.

The number of temperature stations round the world peaked at 6,000 in
1970. It's fallen by two-thirds to 2,000 now: a real "hockey-stick" curve,
and an instance of the UN's growing reliance on computer guesswork rather
than facts.

Even a 0.6C temperature rise wasn't enough. So the UN repealed a
fundamental physical law. Buried in a sub-chapter in its 2001 report is a
short but revealing section discussing "lambda": the crucial factor
converting forcings to temperature. The UN said its climate models had
found lambda near-invariant at 0.5C per watt of forcing.

You don't need computer models to "find" lambda. Its value is given by a
century-old law, derived experimentally by a Slovenian professor and
proved by his Austrian student (who later committed suicide when his
scientific compatriots refused to believe in atoms). The Stefan-Boltzmann
law, not mentioned once in the UN's 2001 report, is as central to the
thermodynamics of climate as Einstein's later equation is to astrophysics.
Like Einstein's, it relates energy to the square of the speed of light,
but by reference to temperature rather than mass.

The bigger the value of lambda, the bigger the temperature increase the
UN could predict. Using poor Ludwig Boltzmann's law, lambda's true value
is just 0.22-0.3C per watt. In 2001, the UN effectively repealed the law,
doubling lambda to 0.5C per watt. A recent paper by James Hansen says
lambda should be 0.67, 0.75 or 1C: take your pick. Sir John Houghton, who
chaired the UN's scientific assessment working group until recently, tells
me it now puts lambda at 0.8C: that's 3C for a 3.7-watt doubling of
airborne CO2. Most of the UN's computer models have used 1C. Stern implies
1.9C.

On the UN's figures, the entire greenhouse-gas forcing in the 20th
century was 2 watts. Multiplying by the correct value of lambda gives a
temperature increase of 0.44 to 0.6C, in line with observation. But using
Stern's 1.9C per watt gives 3.8C. Where did 85 per cent of his imagined
20th-century warming go? As Professor Dick Lindzen of MIT pointed out in
The Sunday Telegraph last week, the UK's Hadley Centre had the same
problem, and solved it by dividing its modelled output by three to
"predict" 20th-century temperature correctly.

A spate of recent scientific papers, gearing up for the UN's fourth
report next year, gives a different reason for the failure of reality to
keep up with prediction. The oceans, we're now told, are acting as a giant
heat-sink. In these papers the well-known, central flaw (not mentioned by
Stern) is that the computer models' "predictions" of past ocean
temperature changes only approach reality if they are averaged over a
depth of at least a mile and a quarter.

Deep-ocean temperature hasn't changed at all, it's barely above
freezing. The models tend to over-predict the warming of the
climate-relevant surface layer up to threefold. A recent paper by John
Lyman, of the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association, reports
that the oceans have cooled sharply in the past two years. The computers
didn't predict this. Sea level is scarcely rising faster today than a
century ago: an inch every 15 years. Hansen now says that the oceanic
"flywheel effect" gives us extra time to act, so Stern's alarmism is
misplaced.

Finally, the UN's predictions are founded not only on an exaggerated
forcing-to-temperature conversion factor justified neither by observation
nor by physical law, but also on an excessive rate of increase in airborne
carbon dioxide. The true rate is 0.38 per cent year on year since records
began in 1958. The models assume 1 per cent per annum, more than two and a
half times too high. In 2001, the UN used these and other adjustments to
predict a 21st-century temperature increase of 1.5 to 6C. Stern suggests
up to 10C.

Dick Lindzen emailed me last week to say that constant repetition of
wrong numbers doesn't make them right. Removing the UN's solecisms, and
using reasonable data and assumptions, a simple global model shows that
temperature will rise by just 0.1 to 1.4C in the coming century, with a
best estimate of 0.6C, well within the medieval temperature range and only
a fifth of the UN's new, central projection.

Why haven't air or sea temperatures turned out as the UN's models
predicted? Because the science is bad, the "consensus" is wrong, and Herr
Professor Ludwig Boltzmann, FRS, was as right about energy-to-temperature
as he was about atoms.

--
SOME writers have so confounded society with government, as to
leave little or no distinction between them; whereas they are not
only different, but have different origins. Society is produced by
our wants, and government by our wickedness; the former promotes our
happiness POSITIVELY by uniting our affections, the latter NEGATIVELY by
restraining our vices. The one encourages intercourse, the other creates
distinctions. The first is a patron, the last a punisher.

Society in every state is a blessing, but Government, even in its best
state, is but a necessary evil; in its worst state an intolerable one:
for when we suffer, or are exposed to the same miseries BY A GOVERNMENT,
which we might expect in a country WITHOUT GOVERNMENT, our calamity
is heightened by reflecting that we furnish the means by which we
suffer. Government, like dress, is the badge of lost innocence; the
palaces of kings are built upon the ruins of the bowers of paradise. For
were the impulses of conscience clear, uniform and irresistibly obeyed,
man would need no other lawgiver; but that not being the case, he finds it
necessary to surrender up a part of his property to furnish means for the
protection of the rest; and this he is induced to do by the same prudence
which in every other case advises him, out of two evils to choose the
least. Wherefore, security being the true design and end of government,
it unanswerably follows that whatever form thereof appears most likely
to ensure it to us, with the least expense and greatest benefit, is
preferable to all others.

- Thomas Paine, "Common Sense"