Jul 21

Written by: Steve Erbach
Monday, July 21, 2008 5:05 PM

Read it for yourself.  Here are the high points:

• The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change models have most decidedly not predicted the climate events of the past 50 years
• Those models do not account for the high solar activity in the past 7 decades, higher than at any time in the past 110 centuries
• The models did not account for the cooling that has taken place since 1998

The conclusion of the paper is a doozy.  I've reformated it:

1. Even if temperature had risen above natural variability, the recent solar Grand Maximum may have been chiefly responsible.
2. Even if the sun were not chiefly to blame for the past half-century’s warming, the IPCC has not demonstrated that, since CO₂ occupies only one-ten-thousandth part more of the atmosphere that it did in 1750, it has contributed more than a small fraction of the warming.
3. Even if carbon dioxide were chiefly responsible for the warming that ceased in 1998 and may not resume until 2015, the distinctive, projected fingerprint of anthropogenic “greenhouse-gas” warming is entirely absent from the observed record.
4. Even if the fingerprint were present, computer models are long proven to be inherently incapable of providing projections of the future state of the climate that are sound enough for policymaking.
5. Even if per impossibilethe models could ever become reliable, the present paper demonstrates that it is not at all likely that the world will warm as much as the IPCC imagines.
6. Even if the world were to warm that much, the overwhelming majority of the scientific, peer-reviewed literature does not predict that catastrophe would ensue.
7. Even if catastrophe might ensue, even the most drastic proposals to mitigate future climate change by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide would make very little difference to the climate.
8. Even if mitigation were likely to be effective, it would do more harm than good: already millions face starvation as the dash for biofuels takes agricultural land out of essential food production: a warning that taking precautions, “just in case”, can do untold harm unless there is a sound, scientific basis for them.
9. Finally, even if mitigation might do more good than harm, adaptation as (and if) necessary would be far more cost-effective and less likely to be harmful.

Doesn't that just make all sorts of sense? Erstwhile Vice President Al Gore can't even get within sniffing distance of making that much sense.

Tags: