SPPI ORIGINAL PAPER ♦ September 28, 2009

“GLOBAL WARMING” A DEBATE AT LAST

by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

LET COOLER HEADS PREVAIL ....................................................................... 7 The relationship between CO2 and temperature over time ...................... 8 The UN’s projections for CO2 concentration ............................................. 12 Climate sensitivity to CO2 ............................................................................ 14 What caused the warming from 1975-1998? ............................................... 19 Hurricanes ..................................................................................................... 20 Sea-level rise ................................................................................................. 22 The cryosphere ............................................................................................. 23 Loss of species .............................................................................................. 23 Conclusion ..................................................................................................... 24 References .................................................................................................... 25

DR. DLUGOLECKI’S LETTER TO THE JOURNAL OF THE CHARTERED INSURANCE INSTITUTE ...................................... 27

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Process .......... 28 Factual Errors in the article Let Cooler Heads Prevail ................................ 32 Inadequate scientific theory ....................................................................... 35 Biased presentation of evidence ................................................................ 37 False Conclusions ......................................................................................... 42

LET COOL HEADS PREVAIL

Commentary and rebuttal by Andrew Dlugolecki, with Lord Monckton’s refutation of the rebuttal ..................................... 47

DRAFT LETTER TO THE JOURNAL OF THE CHARTERED INSURANCE INSTITUTE ...................................... 96

TABLE OF CONTENTS

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“GLOBAL WARMING”: A DEBATE AT LAST

by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley | September 24, 2009

AUTHOR'S NOTE

HY is true debate about the science behind “global warming” and the extent (if any) of the manmade threat to the planet so very rare? Late in 2006, the Institute for Public

Policy Research, a Socialist think-tank in the UK, proposed that the Left should in future merely assert that there was no scientific dissent, the debate was over, and the Earth doomed – unless, of course, the economies of the free West were shut down as completely and as rapidly as possible. Of all the elaborate lies that feed the climate scare, this was the most successful. Ever since it was first circulated, Leftist academics, scientists, politicians, bureaucrats, and journalists worldwide were relieved that they no longer had to argue against the mounting body of scientific evidence and data pointing to the fact that the influence of greenhouse gases on temperature is far smaller than the UN’s climate panel admits. They simply refused to debate the issue. However, on rare occasions one of the true-believers in the New Religion is so appalled when the scientific truth is unexpectedly published that he becomes drawn into – horror of horrors – a real debate about the credibility of the science behind the scare. In the April/May 2009 Journal of the Chartered Insurance Institute of London, Paul Maynard and I published an article entitled Let Cool Heads Prevail, expressing grave scientific doubt about the supposed magnitude of the anthropogenic effect on global temperature, and providing substantial evidence from the published data and from the peer-reviewed literature. Our article caught the insurance industry by surprise. Lloyds of London had publicly issued blood-curdling warnings of the climatic terrors allegedly to come. The Prince of Wales had established Climate Wise, a group of leading figures in the insurance market committed, in effect, to peddling and promulgating the scare, and to silencing all dissent. The market was sewn up. How, then, could no less an organ of academic opinion than the Journal have allowed two heretics – one of them a very senior and widely-respected

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figure in the insurance world – to publish a substantial and well-referenced paper demonstrating that the scare was scientifically baseless? The first instinct of the true-believers was to try to prevent our paper from being published. However, the last vestiges of belief in free speech prevented an outright ban. Instead, a clumsy attempt was made to censor the paper, reducing its length substantially and cutting out its central scientific argument to the effect that the UN’s climate panel had prodigiously exaggerated the actually-minuscule effect of changes in atmospheric greenhouse-gas concentrations on global mean surface temperature. My co-author, Paul Maynard, and I decided not to accept censorship. We made it clear that if our paper were not published in full, at the agreed length, we should arrange for publication elsewhere, with an additional paragraph pointing out that certain parties had wanted to censor the paper when it had been due to appear in the Journal. Free speech prevailed. Our paper was published in full. This is what happened next: The leading firm of insurance brokers where Paul Maynard works was

contacted and was pointedly asked whether it still adhered to the Climate Wise principles. The firm replied, splendidly, that it was also committed to free speech and to serious academic debate about the extent of the imagined threat to the climate.

The Journal received, and printed in its next edition, a letter from the Chairman of Climate Wise comparing my co-author and me to flat-earthers who believed that the Earth was a disk carried on the back of a giant tortoise. The letter did not make any attempt to rebut even one of the scientific data or arguments we had presented.

The Journal received, but did not print in its next edition, a very large number of letters supporting our paper’s conclusions.

When we protested that the overwhelming majority of the letters in response to our paper had been supportive, but that all of these letters had been suppressed, the Journal printed a single letter congratulating the Journal for publishing our paper and condemning the chairman of Climate Wise for insulting the readers’ intelligence by treating us as flat-earth freaks: “Instead of rebutting the claims made by the authors, Maynard and Monckton, he makes childish references to flat plates and a giant tortoise. If this is the level of response to a very detailed and expertly-argued counter to the widely-held view that the release of

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carbon by human activity is causing global warming, what value should we place on Climate Wise?”

The Journal also received a long letter from Dr. Andrew Dlugolecki, a contributor to the UN’s climate reports, strongly criticizing the science in our paper and attaching a 10-page commentary which – mirabile dictu – actually debated what we had written.

We produced a 40-page response to Dr. Dlugolecki’s letter and commentary, answering each of his points in turn and in detail. We suggested that the Journal should print his letter and a letter of reply from us, with a weblink to his commentary and to our detailed response.

The Journal at first told us it would print Dr. Dlugolecki’s letter, with a weblink to his commentary, but would not print any letter from us, and would not provide a weblink to our response to his commentary.

I pointed out that Dr. Dlugolecki’s letter and commentary were libelous if unanswered by us, in that he had falsely accused us of having deliberately misrepresented the science.

The Journal told us it would print neither Dr. Dlugolecki’s material nor ours.

In the interest of fairness and open debate, therefore, the Science and Public Policy Institute has agreed to publish our original Journal article, Dr. Dlugolecki’s letter, our draft letter of reply, his commentary on our article, and our detailed response to that commentary. I hope that readers will find this document fascinating. Precisely because supporters of the climate scare nearly always refuse to debate the issue, this is one of the very rare instances where the arguments for and against the apocalyptic view of “global warming” appear side by side. Readers may like to ask themselves the following questions as they read it – 1. Which side of the debate has best argued ad rem rather than ad hominem

ad rem – discussing the subject at hand rather than merely inveighing against the opponent?

2. Which side has best avoided the temptation to set up straw men, stating and then attacking a point of view that the opponent has not in fact expressed?

3. Which side has been best able to produce reasoned, detailed, quantitative arguments in support of its position?

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4. Which side relies most heavily on the peer-reviewed literature, and which on polemical websites?

5. Which side seems more confident in its presentation of and reliance upon real-world scientific observations and data?

At the end of the day, the central question is this. Which side in this scientific debate is most likely to be right and true? Much turns upon the answer to this central question. If there is in fact no “climate crisis”, then the world is about to spend not billions but trillions on a Sisyphean attempt to find non-solutions to a non-problem. Every cent spent on the non-problem of “global warming” is a cent not spent on the world’s real environmental problems, not the least of which is the abject and needless poverty in which far too many are condemned to struggle. Also, the repeated and often furtive attempts by powerfully-placed true-believers to stifle, suppress, and silence debate – attempts which were repeatedly made in the present case – raise serious questions about the degree to which the freedom of speech on which the West once prided itself still survives. Without freedom of speech, and without the academic freedom of thought that is its handmaid, there is a clear and present danger that the West will drift silently and miserably from the Age of Reason and Enlightenment into a new Dark Age. MONCKTON OF BRENCHLEY Rannoch, Scotland August 2009

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Article in Journal of the Chartered Insurance Institute, April/May 2009

LET COOLER HEADS PREVAIL by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley and Paul Maynard

The CII’s latest report, Coping with Climate Change: Risks and Opportunities for Insurers, says we are changing the climate, the science is settled, and there is overwhelming evidence for anthropogenic “global warming” caused by rising atmospheric CO2 concentration (CII, 2009).

The worldwide obsession with CO2 as the chief driver of climate is scientifically unfounded: yet Western governments are outbidding one another to make drastic cuts in carbon emissions, and CO2 is demonized as a dangerous pollutant. James Hansen, an activist who nominally works for NASA, decries railway coal-trucks as “death wagons”, incites civil disobedience against power stations, and predicts – absurdly – that sea level will rise 246 feet (Hansen, 2009).

The flimsy, pseudo-scientific basis for official alarm has long been definitively contradicted not only by theory but also by observational and experimental evidence. Yet the UN’s climate panel (which reached its conclusion not by scientific analysis but by a mere show of hands on the part of its political representatives) claims greater than 90% confidence that CO2 emissions have caused most of the warming of the past half-century (IPCC, 2007, Summary for Policymakers). As we shall conclusively demonstrate, there is in fact no anthropogenic signal whatsoever in the temperature record.

Much of the UN’s alarmism is based upon computer models of the climate. Yet its 2001 climate assessment admits that the climate is “a complex, non-linear, chaotic object” whose long-run evolution cannot be predicted “by any method” (Lorenz, 1963; Giorgi, 2005) because it is in practice impossible for us to know, to a sufficient precision, the initial state of the millions of parameters that define the climate.

Even a small perturbation in just one of these parameters can radically change the future, so that there is no way at all to predict the sudden, natural, radical changes that mathematicians call “phase-transitions” and environmentalists call “tipping-points”.

Climate models cannot be more than expensive guesswork. They have been proven incapable of predicting actual climate even a few weeks ahead. The Met Office predicted a hot, dry summer in 2007, just weeks before the coldest, wettest summer on record. It predicted a mild winter in 2008, just weeks before the coldest winter in 20 years. These failed forecasts were just for one region of the planet.

In this article we focus on actual, real-world observations to demonstrate that recent climate change is comfortably within natural variability. Our impact on the climate is small, harmless and beneficial, and cannot lead to the catastrophes predicted by the alarmists.

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Indeed, a peer-reviewed survey (Schulte, 2008) of 539 scientific papers mentioning “global climate change” and published since January 2004 – the true scientific “consensus” – found not a single paper that offered a shred of evidence for even one of the disasters, catastrophes, cataclysms and apocalypses so luridly imagined by politicians looking for an issue, academics looking for grants, journalists looking for headlines, and insurers looking for profits.

CO2 occupies just 0.039% of the atmosphere, compared with 0.028% in pre-industrial times. There are 39 molecules of CO2 for every 100,000 in the atmosphere. There is 70 times more CO2 dissolved in the oceans than there is in the atmosphere.

CO2 is a bit-part player. It occupies only one-ten-thousandth more of the atmosphere than it did 250 years ago. Will Happer (2009), an eminent Princeton scientist, recently testified before the Environment and Public Works Committee of the US Senate that the world is currently starved of CO2 compared with its concentration in geological time.

The most important greenhouse gas is water vapor, responsible via its sheer abundance for two-thirds of the greenhouse effect (Kiehl & Trenberth, 1997).

The question is not whether CO2 enrichment of the atmosphere causes warming, but how much warming it causes. As we shall show, the answer is “very little”.

Even the UN’s climate panel accepts that the direct effect of increased CO2 on warming is limited. Estimates, with a huge margin of error, range around 1 C of temperature increase in response to a doubling of CO2 concentration (Manabe & Wetherald, 1975; Hansen et al., 1984, 1988; IPCC, 2001, ch.6.1).

The UN says that this 1 C warming becomes 3.26 ± 0.69 C in response to positive temperature feedbacks that amplify the initial warming effect, though, as we shall show, a growing body of scientific literature demonstrates this multiple to be a substantial exaggeration.

The most important of the feedbacks is the water vapor feedback. One of the few proven results in climatology is the Clausius-Clapeyron relation. This demonstrates that as the atmosphere warms it is capable of carrying near-exponentially more water vapor.

Thus according to the UN, more CO2 equals more warming equals more water vapor and hence amplified warming.

THE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN CO2 AND TEMPERATURE OVER TIME

If CO2 is an important greenhouse gas, as the UN and its supporters argue, its impact should appear in the temperature record. Here we look at four periods going back 600 million years.

In the Cambrian and again in the Triassic era, CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was at least 18 times today’s. Yet the planet did not fry, and the ocean did not acidify. The calcite corals emerged in the Cambrian and the delicate aragonite corals evolved in the Triassic.

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Figure 1, from the authoritative Monthly CO2 Report (SPPI, 2009), shows that, on all measures, global temperature for the past seven years has been falling at a rate equivalent to >2 C°/century –

Figure 1 Seven years’ global cooling at 2 C°/century

Seven years’ global cooling: The arithmetic mean of the Hadley and NCDC monthly terrestrial global-temperature datasets and the RSS and UAH satellite lower-troposphere datasets shows a (largely-unreported) cooling for seven years at a rate equivalent to 2.1 C°/century. The pink region shows the UN’s projected range of warming rates: the pale pink region is 1 standard deviation either side of the UN’s central estimate that global temperature will rise 3.9 C° to 2100.

This fall was largely unreported: yet the decline in global temperatures is of great significance, for the UN’s current methodology cannot explain it. Over the past seven years, CO2 concentration has risen from about 370ppmv to 386ppmv. The UN deems the contribution of natural forcings (non-anthropogenic influences that have a positive or negative impact on warming such as incoming solar radiation) to be minuscule. Therefore, warming should have resulted from the increased CO2.

Though seven years is too short a period to allow anyone to claim that further warming cannot occur, it is a long enough period to cast considerable doubt upon the magnitude of anthropogenic warming as imagined by the UN, because not one of the models upon which it relies had predicted so long or so large a cooling.

Lord Hunt, recently answering a Parliamentary Question by Lord Leach of Fairfield, valiantly but vainly tried to attribute the past seven years’ rapid cooling to natural variability in the climate. If the past seven years’ cooling – enough to reverse one-third of the warming of the

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previous quarter-century – is natural, then, by the same token, the previous warming may also be attributed chiefly, if not exclusively, to natural variability. Indeed, Scafetta & West (2008) attribute 69% of the 1975-1998 warming to the Sun, leaving only 31% for other natural processes and for CO2.

Some say that “global warming” is on hold because the oceans are accumulating heat from the atmosphere. However, sea surface temperatures have shown a slight decline over the past five years, based upon high-quality data from the 3175 automated Argo bathythermograph buoys that were deployed throughout the world’s oceans in 2003. The media have largely failed to report either the seven-year global cooling of the atmosphere or the five-year cooling of the oceans (see also Lyman et al., 2006; Gouretski & Koltermann, 2007).

Plainly, a longer perspective is desirable. Let us look at the record for 150 years in Figure 2, an official UN graph, to which we have added three parallel magenta lines –

Figure 2 No anthropogenic signal in the recent temperature record

Identical warming rates: The global warming rate from 1975-1998 was identical to that from 1860-1880 and from 1910-1940 (magenta lines). There is no anthropogenic signal in the global-temperature record.

From 1860-1880, temperatures rose. From 1880-1910 they fell despite an increase of 15ppm in CO2 concentration. From 1910-1940 there was another 15ppm increase in CO2, whilst temperatures increased by about 0.3 C°. From 1940-1975, temperatures declined whilst CO2 increased. From 1975-1998 temperatures increased, as did CO2. However, the warming over this last period was no greater than the warming rate from 1860-1880, or that from 1910-1940. During the two earlier periods, humankind cannot have had much influence on temperature.

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Therefore – and this cannot be stressed too firmly – there is no discernible anthropogenic influence on global temperature whatsoever. Indeed, that was the explicit finding of the scientists who submitted the final draft of the UN’s 1995 climate assessment report. They stated as much in five places. However, the UN’s bureaucrats did not find the mere scientific facts acceptable, and removed all five statements, substituting a directly-contradictory statement to the effect that there was a discernible human influence on temperature. And that – regardless of the science and data – has been the official line ever since. Politics, not science, has prevailed.

Let us take a still longer view. Figure 3 is the record from the Vostok ice cores in Antarctica used by Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth –

Figure 3 650,000 years’ methane, temperature and CO2 data

Which came first? Methane concentration (red), temperature proxy (black) and CO2 concentration (blue) from the present (left) to 650,000 years before present (right). Data source: Vostok ice-core data.

Gore said that when CO2 concentration increased the world got warmer. However, analyses that were available at the time when Gore made his movie demonstrate that CO2 lagged temperature change in the early climate by 800-2800 years (Petit et al., 1999, Indermuhle, 2000; Monnin et al., 2001, etc., etc.).

The High Court in London, ordering the Department of Education to issue corrective guidance before allowing Gore’s movie to be shown in schools, found that the palaeoclimate record did not demonstrate what Gore had said it demonstrated.

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Finally, in Figure 4, we come to the record reaching back 600 million years – one-seventh of the age of the Earth. For most of that period, global temperatures are thought to have been 7 C warmer than the present. Yet CO2 concentration fluctuated up to 7000 parts per million–

Figure 4 600 million years’ CO2 and temperature data

No correlation: CO2 concentration (black) and temperature (blue) for 600 million years. There is no correlation between the two graphs, and CO2 concentration today is very close to its least value.

Why is there so little correlation between CO2 and temperature in this geological timespan, when there is a close, temperature-driven correlation over the past million years or so?

The reason is that, throughout most of the past 600 million years, though not in the past million years, CO2 concentration was above 915 parts per million.

Beyond that threshold, adding further CO2 to the atmosphere makes very little difference to temperature, and vice versa.

THE UN’S PROJECTIONS FOR CO2 CONCENTRATION

We now turn to the UN’s projected CO2 concentration. Here, it is important to draw the distinction between the increase in CO2 emissions, which has recently been at the high end of the UN’s projections because China and India are growing fast, and the corresponding increase in CO2 concentration, which has recently been very near linear.

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The year-on-year increase in CO2 concentration has been running well below the least of the exponential rates of increase projected by the UN, as shown in Figure 5 –

Figure 5

CO2 concentration is rising, but still well below IPCC predictions

Observed and predicted CO2 concentration, 2000-2100: The pale-blue region, bounded by exponential curves, is the UN’s predicted path for CO2 concentration over the present century. The observed, deseasonalized CO2 concentration change calculated by NOAA from January 2000 to November 2008 (dark blue) is near-coincident with the least-squares linear-regression trend, (solid, light-blue line) on the data: in short, CO2 concentration is no longer rising ever more rapidly, but is rising only in a straight line, even though CO2 emissions are rising ever more rapidly.

On the current, linear observed trend, CO2 concentration in 2100 will be just 575 ppmv compared to the UN’s central estimate of 836 ppmv (IPCC, 2007, p. 790). There are two reasons for this. The UN admits that it cannot add up its global “carbon budget” – the balance between emitted CO2, CO2 residing in the atmosphere and CO2 fixed by the biosphere and hydrosphere – to within a factor of two of the right answer.

CO2 emissions, at their current record levels, ought to be adding some 4.1 ppmv/year to the atmosphere, yet the observed increase is only 2 ppmv/year, as displayed in the chart above, which uses data from the NOAA. Ever since CO2 concentration has been measured by modern methods, it has increased at less than half the expected rate.

This single consideration requires that the UN’s central projection of CO2-induced temperature increase to 2100 must be halved from 3.9 C° to a harmless 1.9 C°.

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CLIMATE SENSITIVITY TO CO2

The central question in the climate debate is this. How much warming will a given proportionate increase in CO2 concentration cause? This “climate sensitivity” question is central because if – as we shall show – the warming is very small, then there cannot be and will not be any “climate crisis”, none of the disasters imagined in official circles will occur, and the childishly Messianic millenarianism of the more excitable and less scientifically-literate politicians and journalists will have proven to be without foundation.

Arrhenius (1906) estimated 1.6 C° of warming at CO2 doubling; Hansen (1988) 4.2 C°; IPCC (1995) 3.8 C°; IPCC (2001) 3.5 C°; and IPCC (2007) 3.26 ± 0.69 C°. Plainly, the “consensus” does not agree with itself. Apart from the improbable precision of the UN’s most recent value, we may immediately draw two conclusions.

First, there is no “consensus” as to the magnitude of the effect of CO2 on temperature, and if there is no consensus on that question then there can be no consensus on anything else. Secondly, the UN’s “official” estimates of climate sensitivity – the temperature response to doubling CO2 concentration – are inexorably falling. How much further must they fall before they start to conform both to scientific theory and to observed reality?

The UN calculates greenhouse-enrichment-induced temperature change over time as the product of four parameters – the radiative forcing, which is the extra energy at the top of the atmosphere caused by atmospheric enrichment with a greenhouse gas such as CO2; the Planck parameter, which converts the tropopausal radiative forcing to surface temperature change in the absence of feedbacks; the temperature-feedback multiplier; and the natural logarithm of the proportionate increase in CO2 concentration.

The relation is logarithmic because each additional CO2 molecule has less effect on temperature than its predecessors, and – beyond 915 ppmv – it has practically no effect on temperature at all (Myrhe et al., 1998, hold that the logarithmic formula fails at this point).

It is at once apparent that even a very small exaggeration in the value of each of these four parameters will cause a very large exaggeration when the four parameters are multiplied together to give the UN’s projection of anthropogenic temperature change over time. For instance, even if each of the four parameters is exaggerated by as little as one-third, once the four parameters are multiplied together the projected temperature change will appear to be more than thrice what it should be.

However, as we shall demonstrate, the UN has, on average, approximately doubled the value of each of the four parameters. Thus, when they are multiplied together, the UN’s projection of temperature increase to 2100 becomes approximately 16 times too big.

Yet the vast majority of the scientists who wrote and reviewed the UN’s climate reports are unaware of these exaggerations, and unaware that it is the multiplication together of four separate exaggerations that causes the absurd overestimates of anthropogenic temperature change over the coming century without which the UN’s entire case for alarm about our effect on the climate falls away.

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Most scientists are unaware because the UN’s treatment of the central question of climate sensitivity is obscurantist in the extreme. Consideration of the four key parameters is scattered untidily through several separate chapters of each report: yet the chapters are written and reviewed by different groups of scientists.

At no point are the four parameters and the relationships between them drawn explicitly and clearly together. This is why no one has noticed the large – and possibly accidental – exaggeration that has demonstrably resulted from the UN’s methodology.

As we have already seen, the UN’s projection of the rate at which CO2 accumulates in the atmosphere leads to an unwarrantable doubling of its estimate of temperature increase over the present century. The three other parameters we have mentioned – radiative forcing, the Planck parameter and the feedback factor – are similarly exaggerated, as we shall now show.

First, the UN predicts a distinctive fingerprint of anthropogenic greenhouse warming – a “hot-spot” in the tropical upper troposphere (IPCC, 2007: Figure 6) –

Figure 6 Temperature fingerprints of five forcings

Modeled zonal mean atmospheric temperature change (Cº/century, 1890-1999) from five distinct forcings (a-e), and from all forcings combined (f). Altitude is in hPa (left scale) and km (right scale) vs. latitude (abscissa). Source: IPCC (2007).

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All of the models on which the UN relies predict that most of the atmospheric warming that arises from greenhouse-gas enrichment of the atmosphere will occur about six miles up in the tropical upper troposphere.

At that altitude, the warming rate is predicted to be 2-3 times that observed at the tropical surface (Lee et al., 2007: Figure 7) –

Figure 7 Fingerprints of anthropogenic warming projected by four models

Zonal mean equilibrium temperature change (°C) at CO2 doubling (2x CO2 – control), as a function of latitude and pressure (hPa) for 4 general-circulation models. All show the projected fingerprint of anthropogenic greenhouse-gas warming: the tropical mid-troposphere “hot-spot” is projected to warm at twice or even thrice the surface rate. Source: Lee et al. (2007).

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The predictions of four such models are shown in Figure 7. However, this tropical upper-troposphere “hot-spot” does not occur in reality, as Figure 8 shows. It has not been observed in 50 years of radiosonde and drop-sonde measurements. It has not been observed in 30 years of satellite observations. It has not been observed at all. It is not there (HadAT, 2006; Figure 8) –

Figure 8 The absent fingerprint of anthropogenic greenhouse warming

Altitude-vs.-latitude plot of observed relative warming rates in the satellite era. The greater rate of warming in the tropical mid-troposphere that is projected by general-circulation models is absent in this and all other observational datasets, whether satellite or radiosonde. Altitude units are hPa (left) and km (right). Source: Hadley Centre for Forecasting (HadAT, 2006).

In a lecture given in 2008, Dr. Richard Lindzen, Professor of Meteorology at MIT, has concluded from the absence of the “hot-spot” that –

“... A doubling of CO2 leads to surface warming of from about 1.5-3.5 C. By contrast, the observed warming over the past century or so amounts to only about 0.6-0.8 C (not all of which need be due to increased greenhouse gases). ... Using basic theory, modelling results and observations, we can reasonably bound the anthropogenic contributions to surface warming since 1979 to a third of the observed warming, leading to a climate sensitivity too small to offer any significant measure of alarm ...”.

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In short, the absence of the model-predicted “hot-spot” requires us to divide the UN’s climate-sensitivity estimates by at least 3. Lindzen’s result is in line with that of Scafetta & West (2008, op. cit.), who attribute more than two-thirds of the past half-century’s “global warming” to the Sun.

The UN also exaggerates the Planck parameter by at least one-third, because it incorrectly takes temperature and radiant-energy values from planetary emitting surfaces six miles apart, thereby repealing the fundamental equation of radiative transfer.

Also, the UN fails to make any allowance for diurnal and latitudinal variations.

Finally, the UN exaggerates the feedback multiplier. It assumes that feedbacks, which we explained earlier, amplify the original forcing more than threefold.

However, it underestimates the cooling effect of evaporation in calculating the water-vapor feedback (Wentz et al., 2007); it fails to notice that relative humidity in the upper troposphere is low, greatly reducing the water-vapor feedback and possibly rendering it negative (Paltridge et al., 2009), and it regards the cloud feedback as strongly positive when it should be net-negative (Spencer, 2007).

These three considerations alone suggest that the UN has at least doubled the true value of the feedback multiplier. If the UN’s stated maximum values for temperature feedbacks were right, the Earth would suffer from a “runaway greenhouse effect” that has self-evidently not occurred.

Correcting for the UN’s exaggerations of each of the four key parameters reduces climate sensitivity from 3.26 C to little more than 0.25 C by 2100, and near-certainly less than 1 C (Chylek, 2008; Lindzen, 2007; Monckton, 2008; Schwartz, 2007; etc., etc.). It is probably fair to say that the majority of the tiny fraction of papers on the climate that take the trouble to focus on this central question of climate sensitivity find it to be very substantially below the UN’s wide but prodigiously-exaggerated range of estimates.

There are two further reasons for doubting the UN’s climate-sensitivity analysis. First, in 1600 pages the UN – extraordinarily – neglects to describe any of the laboratory experiments on the basis of which it wishes us to believe that CO2 will in future have an effect on temperature far larger than that which it is visibly exerting today, still less how such experiments can be reliably translated from the ordered laboratory to the chaotic atmospheric column.

We are expected to take the UN’s stated climate-sensitivity values on faith – and that is what too many careless scientists have done.

Secondly, the UN does not mention whether the outgoing infrared radiation from the Earth’s surface, as measured by satellites, has declined as fast as its models have predicted.

As Professor Lindzen has pointed out, has been established in several papers over the past 20 years that the observed decline in outgoing long-wave radiation over time, as measured by satellites looking down at the Earth, has been one-seventh to one-tenth what the UN’s models had predicted (see e.g. Covey, 1995).

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This confirms empirically our own calculation that climate sensitivity is one-seventh to one-tenth of the UN’s estimates (Figure 9) –

Figure 9

Outgoing long-wave radiation is not trapped as predicted

The smoking gun: 14 years’ model-predicted (black) and ERBE satellite-observed (red) change in outgoing long-wave radiation from the Earth’s surface. Seven times as much long-wave radiation as the models predict continues to escape to space, demonstrating conclusively that the greenhouse effect has only one-seventh the effect on global temperature that the UN’s models predict. Source: Professor Richard Lindzen.

Combined with the UN’s self-confessed failure to add up the carbon budget correctly, its overstatement of climate sensitivity leads to a near-sixteenfold exaggeration of the anthropogenic temperature increase to 2100.

Divide the UN’s temperature predictions by 16 to restore them from the realm of computer-game fantasy to that of satellite-observed reality, and the supposed “climate crisis” vanishes into thin air.

WHAT CAUSED THE WARMING FROM 1975-1998?

Though recent temperature changes have been well within natural variability and there is no need to posit any external forcing as the reason for those changes, there is compelling evidence that much of the warming from 1975-1998 was caused by an exceptional increase in solar activity. During the 70 years 1645-1715, known as the Maunder Minimum or Grand Minimum, the Sun was less active than in 10,000 years.

Thereafter, solar activity inexorably and rapidly increased for almost 300 years until, during the years 1925-1995, peaking in 1960, the Grand Maximum, the Sun was at least as active as at any time in the previous 11,400 years. Hathaway et al. (2004) illustrate this recently-

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unprecedented increase in solar activity by reference to the 11-year cycles of sunspot numbers depicted in Figure 10 –

Figure 10

Grand Minimum to Grand Maximum: the Sun’s activity grows

It’s the Sun, stupid! The 11-year cycle of sunspot activity shows an inexorable increase over the past 300 years, offering a possible explanation for the corresponding increase in global temperatures over the same period. Source: Hathaway, 2004.

Most solar physicists accord a far greater role to the Sun than the counter-consensual UN finds it expedient to allow.

The 2004 Symposium of the International Astronomical Union concluded that the Sun had been responsible for the warming of the past 300 years; that solar activity was now likely to decline; and that global cooling, not warming, was likely. In the four years since then, they have been proven right –

Solar activity has declined sharply; The magnetic convection currents beneath the surface of both solar hemispheres have slowed

to a rate never before observed, implying a possible long-term decline in solar activity; There were 266 days without sunspots in 2008, the second-least solar activity in more than a

century; and Global temperatures have duly fallen at a rate equivalent to 6 C°/century. Note that the cooling

rate is accelerating.

If the past four years’ very rapid rate of cooling were to persist, there would be an Ice Age by 2050.

HURRICANES

The apparent rise in hurricane frequency and damage is often cited as a consequence of anthropogenic “global warming”. Pielke and Landsea 2008, demonstrated that although hurricane losses in financial terms, even after adjustment for inflation, have been rising (Figure 11), the losses do not allow for the massive growth in population and property in the region over the past century. Once adjustments are made for these factors, losses have shown no growth in a century (Figure 12).

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Figure 11 Total annual losses from Atlantic tropical cyclones

Losses in billions of 2005 dollars, 11-year centered average. Source: Pielke & Landsea, (2008).

Figure 12

Population-normalized (PL05) annual losses from Atlantic tropical cyclones

Population-normalized losses (in 2005 $bn), 11-year centered average. Source: Pielke & Landsea, (2008).

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For instance, the worst hurricane event in the US, the 1926 Florida “Great Blow”, if it happened today, would result in insured and uninsured losses in excess of $200 billion. The High Court justifiably condemned Al Gore’s movie for inappropriately linking hurricane activity to “global warming” in the face of explicit statements by the UN, in its 2001 report, that no such link with individual extreme-weather events is supportable.

Many peer-reviewed studies show only a weak correlation between hurricanes and sea surface temperatures. Most importantly, the Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index, a running two-year sum of the frequency and intensity of all hurricanes, typhoons and tropical cyclones, now stands at its lowest-ever value (Figure 13) –

Figure 13

Global tropical cyclone energy at its lowest for 33 years

Hurricanes hardly happen: The Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index is now at its least value in a third of a century, indicating that “global warming” over the same period has not led to the increase in severe tropical storms that had been widely but baselessly predicted.

SEA-LEVEL RISE

Sea-level rise is often cited as the most severe consequence of “global warming”. If some of the more alarmist predictions were true, then the threat to insurers would be self-evident. For example, sea-level rise is cited as increasing the storm-surge threat to south-east England. In reality, sea level is rising at a mere 8-12 in/century, about one-fifth of the mean centennial rate of rise of 4ft/century over the past 10,000 years. There is little sign of acceleration in this rate: indeed, in the past three years there has been no statistically-significant rise in sea level at all (JASON satellite data, 2009). Nor is there a shred of evidence that sea level will imminently rise by 20 ft, as suggested by Al Gore in 2005. Gore cannot have believed his own prediction: that year he bought a $4 million apartment in the St. Regis Tower, San Francisco, just feet from the ocean at Fisherman’s Wharf. As the High Court bluntly found in 2007, “The Armageddon scenario that he depicts is not based on any scientific view.”

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A fortiori, James Hansen’s recent statements that “global warming” will raise sea level by 246 feet may be dismissed as mere rent-seeking rodomontade, tinged with hysteria at the continuing failure of his apocalyptic predictions. Professor Nils-Axel Moerner, who has written 520 papers on sea-level rise in his 35-year career, told a recent debate on “global warming” at the University of St. Andrews that “sea level is not an issue”. The undergraduates duly rejected a motion that “global warming is a global crisis”. Moerner (2004) projects a sea-level rise of just 8 inches to 2100.

The Maldives and Tuvalu are often cited as examples of sea-level rise. Yet many of their problems are to do with subsiding land and extraction of fresh water. There has been no sea-level rise in Tuvalu (or in most other Pacific atolls) for a quarter of a century, and Professor Moerner, after a meticulous and continuing survey, has demonstrated that there has been no sea-level rise in the Maldives in 1250 years. In any event, corals are capable of growing towards the light at ten times the most rapid rate of sea-level rise, which is why it is no mere coincidence that many coral atolls are only a few feet above sea level.

THE CRYOSPHERE

Sea ice in the Arctic has been melting a little, particularly in the summer, but its winter extent is much as it was 30 years ago when the satellites first looked. Sea ice in the Antarctic reached a record high (but largely-unreported) extent in October 2007, almost at the same moment as Arctic sea-ice reached a 30-year minimum (that was widely reported). There has been little trend in global sea-ice extent in 30 years. Land ice in Antarctica (90% of the world’s total) and in Greenland (5%) has been accumulating throughout the period (Doran et al., 2002; Johannessen et al., 2005). Mountain glaciers had begun to recede in 1820-1880, long before human influence could have been significant, and there has been no increase in the rate of recession during the past 30 years, when we might have had some influence.

Kilimanjaro’s glacier had lost half its ice by 1936, when Hemingway wrote The Snows of Kilimanjaro. Yet the glacier is not melting. It is ablating (passing from its solid to its gaseous phase without an intervening liquid phase) because of atmospheric desiccation caused not by “global warming” but by regional cooling (Molg et al., 2003). Northern-hemisphere snow cover, on which 40% of the world’s population depends for its water supply reached a record high extent in 2007/8, bids fair to do so again in 2008/9, and shows no trend in 30 years (Rutgers University Snow & Ice Lab).

LOSS OF SPECIES

Though some extravagant claims for widespread species loss have been made, most of the world’s life-forms thrive in the tropics (where it is warm), not at the Poles (where it is cold). Warmer weather facilitates speciation, not extinction. The warming of the 20th century, like that of the 19th and 18th centuries, was around 0.75 C°: not enough to cause harm.

There is little reason to suppose that the warming of the present century (if and when it begins) will be any more severe than that. Recent statements by a Potsdam-based pressure-group to the effect that 6 billion of the world’s 7 billion people are threatened with extinction by “global warming” are mere petulant pusillanimity. It is not known, even to within several orders of magnitude, how many species exist, how many have already

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become extinct (though approximately 99% of all species that ever walked the Earth became extinct before Man first stood upright), or how many are coming into being. Nor are the UN and its fellow-travellers able to tell us what is the optimum temperature for life on Earth today. Should it be higher? Lower? By how much, if at all? No one can say. The Voltairean notion that today’s temperature is the best of all possible temperatures in the best of all possible worlds has no plausible scientific foundation.

CONCLUSION

The climate has always changed. Only 15,000 years ago, a mile or two of ice covered much of what is now the contiguous USA. As recently as 9000 years ago, natural global warming as the Earth’s temperature recovered after the last Ice Age caused the last glaciers to recede from Yorkshire and Derbyshire.

During all but the last 30 of the recent 300 years’ planetary warming, we cannot have been to blame. There have of course been more warm years at the end of the 300 years’ warming than at the beginning, but the fact of that warming does not necessarily imply that any (still less all) of it was anthropogenic.

Global temperatures were 7 C° warmer than the present throughout most of the past half-billion years; 5 C° warmer in each of the past four interglacial periods; 3 C° warmer throughout most of the past 10,000 years; and, notwithstanding a clumsy attempt by the UN in 2001 to abolish the mediaeval warm period, 1-3 C° warmer then than today.

As just one indication of the absence of the claimed scientific “consensus” in support of the UN’s often-fantastic propositions, it is possible to cite papers written in the past 25 years by 670 scientists from 391 institutions in 40 countries, establishing by careful measurement and analysis – rather than by mere X-Box 360 computer games – that, in line with the UN’s 1990 climate report and contrary to its 2001 report, the mediaeval warm period was real, global, and appreciably warmer than the present.

We conclude that the notion of catastrophic, anthropogenic “global warming” is a fantasy; that insurers, for their own legal protection, should be very careful to avoid explicit endorsement of the current official documents on “global warming”, which are inspired more by politics than by science and are materially, serially, seriously, blatantly deficient in ways such as those we have outlined; and that there is no case for spending a single penny more of taxpayers’ money on “global warming” unless and until mean global surface temperatures shall have risen by at least 1 C° above those prevailing in the year 2000. If we are right, that threshold will not be crossed for at least a century, if then.

The slight warming we are now experiencing is benign. It is the return of an ice age that we have to fear. Alarmism over “global warming” has the potential to enrich insurers unscrupulous enough to take advantage of it, but only at the risk of damaging and alienating their consumer and commercial clients. Our clients rightly expect us to do some proper due diligence before we leap greedily upon the “global warming” bandwagon just as the wheels are falling off.

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Dr. Dlugolecki’s letter to the Journal of the Chartered Insurance Institute

Dr. Dlugolecki’s comments are in Roman face, and in black. My responses are in bold face, and in green.

27 April 2009

Dear Sir, - I am writing to bring to your attention the many errors and misrepresentations contained in the article “Let Cool Heads Prevail” which you published in the April/May edition of The Journal. It is right that an important issue like climate change should be open for debate: however, the piece by Maynard and Monckton fell well below the standard that one might expect in a professional journal. Their analysis and conclusions were demonstrably wrong.

Our analysis and conclusions are demonstrably right. The article was rooted in the data and in the peer-reviewed literature, and is well referenced.

This letter addresses the main faults, and refutes them by reference to factual information and peer-reviewed literature. I have identified the page and paragraph in the original article, Let Cooler Heads Prevail. There were so many errors that it requires 10 pages to rebut them. The Annex to this letter gives a detailed analysis of the article, paragraph by paragraph, so that anyone can understand how misleading the article was – I trust you will make that commentary available to your readership.

There were so many errors in Dr. Dlugolecki’s commentary that it requires 40 pages to refute them, paragraph by paragraph, so that anyone can understand how misleading the commentary was. I am making Dr. Dlugolecki’s commentary and my reply available to a wider readership.

It is hard to see how such intelligent authors could have misrepresented the work of climate scientists and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. If it is a misunderstanding it is an embarrassing one; if not then the misdirection is of deep concern to the insurance profession.

We reported our findings and cited our references, as is normal in academic circles. Dr. Dlugolecki is wrong to suggest any deliberate misdirection on our part: such accusations are not normal in academic circles. We shall refrain from making similar allegations against Dr. Dlugolecki. Readers of the present paper may decide for themselves who is trying to tell the truth and who is trying to misdirect his audience.

Climate scientists are clear on the central issue – human activity is causing climate change. There are still some uncertainties about the mechanisms, and the actual path that the future climate will take, and CII members can follow such issues on helpful websites such as www.realclimate.org and www.skepticalscience.com.

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The central issue is not whether humankind is causing “global warming”, but how much “global warming” we are causing, and whether that warming will prove beneficial or dangerous. Climate scientists are very far from clear on this central issue: opinion is clearly divided. “RealClimate” is not a reliable website: it has attracted considerable criticism for its ad-hominem attacks on those who do not share its extreme and often scientifically-baseless opinions. We recommend www.scienceandpublic policy.org for a more balanced approach.

It is important that the CII should address the real issues on climate change - unfamiliar weather patterns, and new government policies to reduce greenhouse gases - so that its members can be well-informed, rather than futilely attempting to question the scientific consensus with a melange of errors and sophistry.

There are no real issues that require to be addressed. There are no “unfamiliar weather patterns”: the recent behaviour of the climate is well within natural variability. Here and elsewhere, we shall overlook Dr. Dlugolecki’s ad-hominem remarks.

THE INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE (IPCC) PROCESS Maynard and Monckton assert that the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) is a political document, which is controlled by the environmentalist lobby and represents faulty science. Nothing could be further from the truth. The policymakers represent sovereign nations, they are not ‘chosen’ by IPCC. The nations include some that are sceptical or even hostile to the science of climate change, and the SPM must be agreed unanimously line by line by the policymakers face-to-face, so it is impossible for environmentalists to control the final wording. Those are the rules, and I know they apply because I have attended such a meeting. If anything, this process results in a conservative statement of the science, since there is ample opportunity to emphasise the uncertainties and inconsistent evidence.

We did not state or imply that the political representatives who voted by show of hands that, with 90% confidence, most of the past half-century’s warming was anthropogenic were chosen by the IPCC. Nor did we state or imply that the Summary for Policymakers is “controlled by the environmentalist lobby”. We merely pointed out that the Summary was not written or decided upon by scientists but by the political representatives of the states parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. On the evidence we presented in our article, the IPCC process is by no means conservative: instead, it has resulted in a very substantial exaggeration of the effect of changes in the concentration of CO2 and other greenhouse gases on temperature.

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Maynard and Monckton assert that the IPCC projections of temperature have varied greatly over successive reports.

We did not state or imply that “the IPCC projections of temperature have varied greatly”. We merely stated, accurately, the central estimate of temperature change at CO2 doubling in each of three successive IPCC climate assessments, and pointed out, accurately, that each successive estimate was lower than its predecessor.

In fact the estimates provided by IPCC have been remarkably consistent, as Maynard and Monckton’s own figures show.

In fact, the first of the IPCC’s three estimates is one-sixth higher than the IPCC’s current estimate. And all of the IPCC’s estimates are at least double that of Arrhenius (1906), and many times higher than current data and papers mentioned in our article would imply.

Maynard and Monckton state repeatedly that IPCC bases its conclusions on faulty or ‘pseudo-science’, and that IPCC ignores large numbers of contradictory findings.

Let us illustrate our point with a temperature graph taken from the 2007 climate assessment report of the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC. The graph falsely purports to show that the warming rate has been inexorably increasing throughout the past 150 years –

The IPCC’s 2007 report, cited with approval in a science lecture by Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC’s science working group, and also about to be cited with approval in a “Technical Support Document” in justification of the EPA’s imminent finding that CO2 and five other gases are jointly or severally “dangerous” in terms of the Clean Air Act, contains the above graph purporting to show that the rate at which the world is warming is inexorably increasing. The graph is an egregious instance of the endpoint fallacy, a dishonest abuse of statistics by which false trends are demonstrated by careful selection of endpoints or (in the present instance) startpoints when evaluating data trends.

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Removal of the IPCC’s false trend-lines reveals the true position –

The world warmed at the same rate from 1860-1880 and from 1910-1940 as it did from 1975-1998. The former two periods occurred before humankind can possibly have had any significant influence on temperature. Therefore there is no anthropogenic signal in the global temperature record, and no basis for the IPCC’s assertion that the warming rate is accelerating.

Beginning in 1993 (top left) and advancing the start-date successively by 4 years at a time, the IPCC’s own data show the world heading for an Ice Age. Using the same data as the IPCC, we reach a diametrically opposite (and equally unjustifiable) conclusion, proving the IPCC’s abuse of statistical method.

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To demonstrate why the endpoint fallacy is a shoddy statistical abuse, we have used the IPCC’s own global temperature data to deliver a result precisely the opposite of that which the IPCC tries to draw.

No reliance can be placed upon purported temperature trends that depend arbitrarily upon a careful selection of start-dates and end-dates. The IPCC, Dr. Pachauri, and the EPA were wrong, to rely upon the endpoint fallacy as the basis for their erroneous conclusion that warming rates that are far from unprecedented are accelerating when they are doing nothing of the kind. The IPCC’s graph purporting to show an accelerating warming rate is just one demonstration of the propagandizing pseudo-science that pervades the IPCC’s documents.

It is clear from the sections on errors and outdated science below that the opposite is true. Maynard and Monckton base much of their analysis on a few findings that have been refuted in the scientific literature. Maynard and Monckton report a paper which reviewed recent findings in climate science, (Schulte, 2008), but they did not mention that Schulte recorded that just 6% of the papers in the survey rejected the concept of manmade climate change.

We ourselves do not “reject the concept of manmade climate change”. The issue is not whether humankind is altering the climate, but whether we are altering it sufficiently to be dangerous. The consensus in the literature, as demonstrated by Schulte’s paper, does not bear out the notion that our effect on the climate will be catastrophic.

On one important issue, the feedback effect from clouds, Maynard and Monckton repeatedly and falsely claim that IPCC believes it to be strongly positive, whereas IPCC states unequivocally that this effect is still not understood, and is a source of great uncertainty.

In fact, the IPCC’s published list of climate-relevant temperature feedbacks states that cloud albedo feedback is +0.69 W m–2 K–1: in other words, that it is strongly positive. Our statement was true.

Maynard and Monckton maintain that the IPCC erred when it dismissed the Medieval Warm Period, that it was wrong to say that current warming is unprecedented in the last 1000 years, and that it did this on the basis of ‘mere computer games’. It is significant that Maynard and Monckton omit any reference to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007). The IPCC’s findings on the medieval warm period were based on careful measurement and analysis of past data – a large range of measurements from boreholes, pollen, lake deposits, tree rings and other techniques. This can be easily checked by consulting the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, Working group I, Chapter 6 (2007). It carefully considers the issues, including the many criticisms of the IPCC position raised

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after the Third Assessment Report (2001) (the so-called ‘hockey-stick debate’), and it concludes that “some regions may have experienced even warmer conditions than those that prevailed throughout the 20th century”, but the evidence did not support a global medieval warm period that exceeded current global temperatures.

The clear evidence in the scientific literature, established by papers authored by more than 700 scientists from 400 institutions in 40 countries over 20 years, is that the medieval warm period was real, was global, and was warmer than the present. The IPCC chooses to ignore the vast preponderance of these papers in favor of a small number of papers authored by computer modelers, and based on elementary and long-discredited statistical mistakes. For instance, if the defective bristlecone-pine temperature proxies are removed from the dataset, then all other proxies combined show that the medieval warm period was present. Also, the IPCC’s 2001 graph purporting to abolish the medieval warm period overstated the observed warming over the 20th century by a staggering 50%.

Maynard and Monckton state that IPCC has greatly overestimated the future growth in carbon dioxide concentrations. In fact Maynard and Monckton have ignored the published IPCC projections and calculated their own trend line, which they call IPCC. This is not acceptable.

In fact, we have faithfully reproduced the IPCC’s own graph, showing an exponential increase in CO2 concentration from 368 ppmv in 2000 to 836 [730, 1020] ppmv in 2100. However, CO2 concentration is in fact rising linearly towards just 575 ppmv in 2100.

In fact the observations of carbon dioxide follow a trend that is consistent with the IPCC’s expectations that were published in 2001.

In fact, though CO2 emissions are following the IPCC’s predicted trend, concentrations are well below the IPCC’s trend, and it is concentrations, not emissions, that influence “global warming”.

FACTUAL ERRORS IN THE ARTICLE LET COOLER HEADS PREVAIL Maynard and Monckton make numerous serious errors in their ‘facts’ about sealevel rise and glaciers, snow cover and sea-ice and IPCC projections of CO2. Analysis and data shows quite clearly that sea level rise is accelerating, and is a serious problem for tropical islands like Tuvalu. Maynard and Monckton have based their assertions on the work of Professor Moerner, whose research has now been decisively refuted as detailed in the Annex to this letter.

Professor Moerner, who has written 520 papers on sea-level rise, is proving more accurate than the excitable predictions of the IPCC. Contrary to the

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IPCC’s predictions, sea level has scarcely risen at all in the past four years, and was only rising at 1 ft/century before that.

Regarding glaciers, snow cover and sea-ice, the data do not bear out Maynard and Monckton’s claims about recent trends. It is quite clear that they are seriously wrong when they claim that sea-ice is still stable, that snow covers an area that is historically large, and that mountain glaciers are not retreating more quickly. When such basic errors are made, can one have any faith in any claims by these authors?

On sea ice, readers may judge for themselves whether the regular “heartbeat” of global sea-ice extent over the 30 years since reliable satellite measurements have been available has recently altered to any appreciable degree –

A planetary “cardiogram” shows global sea-ice area (millions of km2). There has been a very slight decline in the trend (red) of global sea-ice extent over the decades, chiefly attributable to loss of sea ice in the Arctic during the summer, which was well below the mean in 2007, with some recovery in 2008. However, the 2008 peak sea-ice extent was on the 1979-2000 mean. Current sea-ice extent is very close to it. The decline in summer sea-ice extent in the Arctic, reflected in the global sea-ice anomalies over most of the past eight years, runs counter to the pronounced global atmospheric cooling trend over the same period, suggesting that the cause of the regional sea-ice loss cannot have been “global warming”. Seabed volcanic activity recently reported in the Greenland/Iceland gap, with seabed temperatures of up to 574 °F, may have contributed to the loss of Arctic sea-ice. Source: University of Illinois, August 2009.

On snow cover, readers may judge for themselves whether the vital Eurasian winter snow on which a quarter of the world’s population rely for their water supplies has recently altered to any appreciable degree –

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No trend in Eurasian snow cover for 42 years. The monthly snow cover in each of the five vital winter months has not changed throughout the period.

On mountain glaciers, we provided evidence both that their recession had begun about a century before humankind could have had any appreciable influence on the climate, and that the recession was in some instances (such as Kilimanjaro) known to have arisen from natural and not anthropogenic causes.

We could also have mentioned that, according to a communication from Professor M.I. Bhat of the Indian Geological Survey, the pattern of advance and retreat of the 9575 glaciers that debouch from the Himalayas into India has shown no unusual change in the 200 years since the British Raj first began keeping records. Or we could have mentioned that the recent retreat of various Alpine glaciers has revealed medieval mountain passes, forests, and even an entire silver mine, demonstrating that the glaciers had advanced considerably since the medieval warm period and are now retreating again, as part of a natural cycle.

On all three points, therefore, our article was correct.

As noted above, Maynard and Monckton have fabricated figures on trends in the concentration of carbon dioxide which they call IPCC’s. The actual values are publicly available and are clearly different from what Maynard and Monckton claim.

The figures we cite and display are indeed those of the IPCC. The actual values and data curves are clearly identical.

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INADEQUATE SCIENTIFIC THEORY Maynard and Monckton misunderstand the way that carbon dioxide causes warming. Maynard and Monckton base their views on carbon dioxide on an early assessment of its absorption effect by Angstrom in 1900. This has been superseded by much more detailed analysis, as detailed extensively at www.realclimate.org.

The website repeatedly mentioned by Dr. Dlugolecki is not peer reviewed and is written by people with a strong vested financial and political interest in fostering an exaggerated view of the human influence on the climate. We did not mention Angstrom’s work, nor was our article in any way dependent upon it. Our understanding of the manner in which greenhouse gases hinder the outward long-wave radiation is entirely orthodox and up to date.

In brief, the Earth’s temperature is regulated by the thin upper layers whence radiation escapes into space. These layers contain very little carbon dioxide as yet, so there is still a lot of absorptive capacity.

In fact, CO2 is what scientists call a “well-mixed” greenhouse gas: it occurs in approximately the same proportion throughout the troposphere.

This is a new way of looking at the atmosphere — not as a single slab, as Angstrom did, but as a set of interacting layers. It is now clear that additional carbon dioxide has an incremental effect at even very high levels of concentration (as is the case on the planet Venus).

In fact, our paper expressly considered different layers of the atmosphere. We addressed the predicted (but, in observed reality, absent) anomalous behavior of the tropical upper troposphere. It is also now clear, directly contrary to what Dr. Dlugolecki states, that each additional molecule of carbon dioxide has less effect on outgoing radiation and hence on temperature than its predecessors, until approximately 915 ppmv, after which its additional effect is insignificant. Venus is much closer to the Sun than the Earth is.

Maynard and Monckton make very complicated, erroneous assertions about the sensitivity of the climate system and conclude that IPCC overestimates the sensitivity by a factor of 16. The overall conclusion is clearly wrong, since such a low sensitivity as Maynard and Monckton postulate would mean that the Earth’s climate would not be prone to Ice Ages.

In fact, we conclude that the IPCC has overstated climate sensitivity by a factor of 8. Startling confirmation that this estimate is broadly correct has recently become available in a paper by Lindzen and Choi (2009), in which it is demonstrated that the ratio of the rate of increase in global mean surface

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temperature to the rate of decrease in outgoing radiation from the Earth to space is approximately one-seventh of what the models relied upon by the IPCC predict. Dr. Dlugolecki is wrong to state that a low climate sensitivity to greenhouse-gas enrichment would make ice ages impossible. It is clear from ice cores covering the last five ice ages and the last four interglacial warm periods that CO2 concentration changed after temperature changed. Therefore we know that it was not CO2 concentration that caused the ice ages. It is generally thought that variations in the Earth’s orbital cycles, combined with variations in solar output, are the real reason why ice ages come and go.

The small number of individual papers cited by Maynard and Monckton have been rebutted, as detailed in the Annex to this letter. In particular, observations of the atmosphere are consistent with the presence of the predicted ‘tropical hotspot’ which Maynard and Monckton claim to be absent.

In fact, we cited some 30 papers in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, as well as the (non-peer-reviewed) assessment reports of the IPCC. All radiosonde, drop-sonde and satellite temperature records confirm that the rate of warming in the tropical upper troposphere is near-identical with that at the tropical surface, and not thrice the surface rate, as the models relied upon by the IPCC predict. It is only by noting that the uncertainties in measurement of temperatures at altitude are substantial that it is possible to claim, as Dr. Dlugolecki does, that the IPCC’s prediction falls (just) within the very high-end extreme of the probability interval. However, since our article was published it has become clearer not only that the tropical upper troposphere is not warming as predicted, because outgoing radiation is escaping to space faster than the IPCC had expected (Lindzen & Choi, 2009, op. cit.), but also why the tropical upper troposphere is not warming as predicted. Paltridge et al. (2009) have explained that subsidence drying is removing the extra water vapor that theory predicts will accumulate at altitude, and hence removing the main reason why the IPCC expects the tropical upper-troposphere “hot-spot” to be present.

The IPCC based its most recent assessment (2007) of climate sensitivity on over 80 peer-reviewed papers, using a number of techniques, with comparable numbers in its earlier reports.

In fact, some of the papers cited by the IPCC, and others that it chose not to cite, agree with our own evaluation. Also, considerable work has been done since the IPCC’s last report, and it is clear that the next IPCC report will have to reduce the central estimate of climate sensitivity still further.

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Maynard and Monckton maintain the argument that variations in solar radiation are responsible for most of the recent warming.

In fact, we do not maintain any such argument: we merely report it, with citations from the peer-reviewed literature. We also make it explicit that neither a solar nor an anthropogenic explanation for the warming that began 300 years ago and ended in 1998 is required, since the climatic changes observed over the period fall well within the natural variability of the climate.

It is true that in the initial IPCC reports, solar influence was not given much attention, but the 2007 IPCC Report considered it fully, and concluded that solar influence could not be the main reason for recent warming. In fact the sun is currently at a very low level of activity, yet temperatures remain historically high. A very recent analysis (2008) concludes: “... solar forcing contributed negligible long-term warming in the past 25 years and 10% of the warming in the past 100 years.”

In fact, Scafetta & West (2008) concluded – as we reported – that some 69% of the “global warming” over the past 50 years was of solar origin. Also, since our article was published, a major research paper by Svensmark et al. (2009) has demonstrated that the Sun’s radiative influence (which is itself probably understated by the IPCC) is very greatly amplified by the rapid disappearance of cloud cover when the Sun is more active. Though the solar theory is not essential to our argument, it can no longer be as lightly dismissed as the IPCC and Dr. Dlugolecki have sought to dismiss it.

For a user-friendly review that shows that the sun is not the cause of recent global warming see “Solar activity & climate: is the sun causing global warming?” at www.skeptical science.com.

Once again, Dr. Dlugolecki refers not to the scientific literature but to a politicized, non-peer-reviewed website. Our own analysis was and is confined to the scientific literature and data.

BIASED PRESENTATION OF EVIDENCE Maynard and Monckton repeatedly present calculations in a misleading way so that the reader is led to a wrong conclusion. Examples of this relate to the quantity of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, recent trends in temperature, recent storminess, the analysis of climate sensitivity, and the rate of sea level rise.

Dr. Dlugolecki here repeats himself. The only item he has not previously mentioned is recent trends in temperature, which will be addressed shortly.

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In the case of atmospheric carbon dioxide and the number of scientific papers on climate sensitivity, Maynard and Monckton compare a large number to a much larger number to imply that the former is negligible.

In fact, we do no such thing. We state, accurately, that the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere remains very small. Likewise, Schulte (2008) reviewed all 539 papers published on the ISI Web of Science database between January 2004 and mid-February 2007. Not one of these papers provided any evidence whatsoever that “global warming” caused by anthropogenic emissions of CO2 would prove catastrophic: indeed, only one even mentioned the possibility.

In the case of recent temperatures, storminess and sea-level rise, Maynard and Monckton use the inevitable transient ups and downs in a time series of observations to imply that a major change has taken place in long-term trends.

On temperatures, as I have pointed out earlier, it is the IPCC that should be taken to task for a flagrant statistical abuse in its careful selection of start-dates for temperature trends. It is we who examined, in detail, four separate timescales ranging from seven years to 600 million years, to demonstrate that no major change has taken place in long-term trends recently. That conclusion is the precise opposite of the conclusion Dr. Dlugolecki says we reached.

Maynard and Monckton further compound this for sea-level rise by including the effect of the huge melting at the end of the last Ice Age in one of their comparisons with recent observations, without revealing that it is included.

On sea-level rise, we explicitly drew attention to the fact that “Only 15,000 years ago, a mile or two of ice covered much of what is now the contiguous USA. As recently as 9000 years ago, natural global warming as the Earth’s temperature recovered after the last Ice Age caused the last glaciers to recede from Yorkshire and Derbyshire.” We also pointed out, accurately, that in the 20th century sea level rose by just 8 inches, one-fifth of the mean centennial rate of sea-level rise in the past 10,000 years. It is, of course, common knowledge that the last Ice Age ended 10,000 years ago. However, if we had not been constrained by the inevitable limitations of space in the Journal, we should have been happy to point out that, precisely because almost all of the vast land-based ice-masses of the last Ice Age have long since melted away into the oceans, the probability that we shall ever again see sea-level rise of even 4 ft/century is zero.

Maynard and Monckton omit to mention important factors when presenting issues e.g. the behaviour of global temperatures before 1975; the cumulative effect of greenhouse gas emissions; the numerous positive feedback effects that could increase the quantity of

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greenhouse gases; the effect of a warming of 1.9 degrees; the inertia in the climate system; the cooling of the stratosphere; and threats to coral.

Subject to the constraints of space, we presented a fair and accurate analysis of each of the issues mentioned.

The IPCC has demonstrated that the rise in global temperatures was suppressed during the period 1940-75, because of large emissions of sulphates and other cooling agents. The sudden rise from 1975 onwards was partly due to ‘clean air’ policies which reduced these pollutants.

In fact, since our article was published a paper by Myrhe et al. (2009) has established that, precisely because the IPCC had overvalued the supposed cooling influence of anthropogenic particulate aerosols in its assessment reports, the IPCC had correspondingly overestimated the sensitivity of the climate to increases in greenhouse-gas concentrations. Also, though Dr. Dlugolecki implies that the effect of anthropogenic aerosol pollution on temperatures is settled science “demonstrated” by the IPCC, there is no reason to suppose that the global quantum of particulate matter emitted by human industry has declined at all. Indeed, the only artifact of humankind that is visible from space is the Asian “brown cloud” – a vast haze of particulate matter from the rapidly-growing and poorly-controlled industries of Russia, China, India and Indonesia. These and other third-world nations do not have “clean air” policies like those of the West.

Maynard and Monckton compare the annual rate of emissions with recent temperature trends, when the important issue is the total amount of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.

In fact, the “important issue” is the proportionate increase in the concentration, not the annual rate of emissions or the absolute quantity, of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. In the IPCC’s methodology, temperature change is a function of change in the logarithm of the proportionate increase in CO2 concentration. We correctly represented it and analyzed it as such.

When considering the impact of greenhouse gases, Maynard and Monckton do not mention that the IPCC is concerned that manmade emissions may be compounded by feedback from a number of changes in natural systems such as forests and tundra.

Since the IPCC is a political rather than a scientific entity, and since its documents are not peer-reviewed in the accepted sense, its “concerns” are of no scientific interest. However, by now it is obvious that the feedback from the biosphere is negative. As CO2 concentration rises, plants grow more rapidly, taking up more CO2 than previously. This is one reason why

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the IPCC, in its 2001 report, admits it is unable to add up the total “carbon budget” to within a factor of two of the right answer.

Two simple observations demonstrate that the thawing of permafrost and the consequent emission of methane from the tundra is a non-problem. First, the presence of numerous fossil specimens of woolly mammoths and other species in the permafrost tells us that it was not always permafrost, and yet the planet survived. Secondly, the atmospheric concentration of methane, which had been rising until 2000, has scarcely risen since then.

Maynard and Monckton also state that a rise of 1.9 degrees would be ‘safe’, when in fact millions of people would be disadvantaged, and they suggest that we wait until temperatures rise by 1 degree anyway to be sure there is a problem, but do not mention that there would then be a commitment to considerable further warming, as well as an inevitable delay in implementing measures to avoid further emissions, with even more warming.

In fact, the IPCC itself says that below a warming of some 2 Celsius degrees crop yields will increase and little harm will come to anyone. It is cold, not warmth, that would really disadvantage people. It is also simple to calculate from the IPCC’s own figures that the warming “in the pipeline” if we wait until there has been 1 Celsius degree of “global warming” compared with the year 2000. The argument proceeds a fortiori. The equilibrium warming that the IPCC expects to occur by 2100, in response to an increase from 368 to 836 ppmv, is –

∆T = 3.26 ln(836/368) = 3.9 C° ____________________________________________________

ln 2

However, the transient warming between 2000 and 2100 on the “business-as-usual” emissions scenario A2 is given by the IPCC as 3.4 C°. Therefore, the warming in the pipeline is the difference between the equilibrium and the transient warming – just 0.5 C°. Accordingly, a transient warming of just 1 C° would entail less than 0.2 C° warming in the pipeline, and only that much if – per impossibile – the IPCC’s assumption of an unrealistically high climate sensitivity were correct.

This simple quantitative analysis has demonstrated that waiting to see whether temperatures rise by as much as 1 C° before spending billions on pointless mitigation measures cannot cause dangerous delay.

Maynard and Monckton ignore a major success of the climate models; the prediction that the stratosphere would cool, which has now been observed. That phenomenon would not be produced by variations in solar radiation.

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Stratospheric temperatures are measured directly by satellites. The models do not “predict” stratospheric cooling: they merely take into account what has been observed. However, stratospheric cooling ceased altogether in 1994, notwithstanding continuing increases in atmospheric CO2 concentration. Volcanic activity and changes in stratospheric ozone concentration may also have contributed to the stratospheric cooling, to which changes in CO2 concentration appear to have contributed very little. Other factors, including changes in ozone concentration, appear to have more to do with it.

Finally, when considering threats to coral, Maynard and Monckton do not mention a major problem related to climate change – that warmer water kills the reef-building organisms.

The calcite corals evolved in the Cambrian era, when atmospheric CO2 concentration approached 20 times today’s. If the IPCC’s theory is correct, the greater CO2 concentration would have caused a considerable increase in global mean surface temperature compared to today. Yet the corals first achieved algal symbiosis during that era, suggesting that ocean temperatures did not inhibit their development in the manner adumbrated by Dr. Dlugolecki. Likewise, the more delicate aragonite corals first appeared in the Triassic era, when, again, CO2 concentration was some 20 times today’s –

CO2 concentration in the early climate was very much greater than today’s: yet corals have survived the considerable fluctuations in temperature over the past 500 million years. Source: IPCC (2001).

Furthermore, ocean temperature has not risen at all during the five years in which we have been able to measure it accurately. The 3300 automated bathythermograph buoys of the Argo project have demonstrated that, contrary to the IPCC’s theory that some 80-90% of the heat retained in the Earth/troposphere system as a result of greenhouse-gas enrichment must accumulate in the top 400 fathoms of the ocean, the oceans have been cooling –

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The oceans have not warmed since the Argo buoys were deployed in 2003.

Much has been said about the alleged damage caused by “global warming” to the delicate coral ecosystem of the Great Barrier Reef. All of it is baseless: the ocean has not warmed in the vicinity of the reef for a quarter of a century –

There has been no trend in ocean temperatures around the Great Barrier Reef in the past 25 years. Source: Great Barrier Reef Marine Park (2007).

FALSE CONCLUSIONS Maynard and Monckton conclude that the risk of catastrophic climate change is grossly exaggerated. They cite some of the errors that Al Gore committed as evidence of this.

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In October 2007, just two days before Al Gore was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for his slide-show on “global warming”, a High Court Judge in London listed nine “errors” in Al Gore’s movie. All of these errors either invent problems that do not exist or exaggerate problems that do exist. The errors identified by the judge are as follows – Scientists: Greenland and Antarctica will add 2.5in to sea-level rise in

100 years. Gore: 20ft. Scientists: Pacific sea level has hardly changed. Gore: Whole populations have been evacuated. Scientists: The thermohaline circulation may slow. Gore: It will stop. Scientists: In past climate, temperature rose before CO2. Gore: CO2 changed first. Scientists: Long-term climate shifts and deforestation are melting

the snows of Kilimanjaro. Gore: “Global warming”. Scientists: Over-extraction of water and new farming methods dried

Lake Chad. Gore: “Global warming”. Scientists: One-off events like Katrina cannot be attributed to

“global warming”. Gore: “Global warming”. Scientists: High winds killed four polar bears where sea ice is

growing. Gore: They died swimming to find ice. Scientists: An exceptional El Nino bleached corals in 1998. Gore: “Global warming”.

As if this were not bad enough, Gore also falsely says or implies – The effect of CO2 on temperature will be ten times the consensus value. “Global warming” caused a south Atlantic hurricane. And the 2003 European heatwave. And additional Thames Barrier closures. And weather-related insurance losses. And malaria.

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And other diseases. And West Nile virus in the US. And bigger weather-related insurance losses. And more Japanese typhoons. And tornadoes. And stronger hurricanes. And Mumbai floods. The sun heats the ocean directly. The Arctic is warmer than 50 years ago. Greenland may soon melt. And West Antarctica. Himalayan meltwaters are failing. Peruvian glaciers are unprecedentedly disappearing. And mountain glaciers worldwide. And Antarctic ice shelves. And Larsen B. The Sahara is drying. CO2 is “pollution”. Pied flycatchers cannot feed caterpillars to their young. Flycatchers are terns. Caterpillars are fish. Footage of an advancing glacier calving is evidence of “global warming”. CO2 concentration will reach 600 ppmv by 2050.

Al Gore is not a climate scientist, but in fact the possibility of dangerous climate change is a major concern of mainstream climate scientists. It was confirmed in the report ‘Abrupt Climate Change’ by the US National Academy of Sciences (2002), and the findings of a major conference at the Hadley Centre ‘Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change’ in February 2005, and many other sources, including the International Congress on Climate Change held by the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU) at Copenhagen in March 2009. More than 2,000 participants were registered. The Congress received almost 1,600 scientific contributions from researchers from more than 70 countries. Its conclusions included the statement that ‘Rapid, sustained, and effective mitigation based on coordinated global and regional action is required to avoid "dangerous climate change" regardless of how it is defined.’

I have already cited Schulte (2008), which found that in 539 peer-reviewed papers containing the words “global climate change” not a single “mainstream climate scientist” offered even a single piece of evidence that anthropogenic “global warming” might prove catastrophic. What scientists say at conferences intended to extract more research funding from governments, and what they say in peer-reviewed papers, are not always the same thing. If, as our own calculations and numerous observations and peer-reviewed papers demonstrate, climate sensitivity to greenhouse-gas enrichment of the

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atmosphere is low, it follows that there is no scientific basis for assuming that “global warming” will prove to be catastrophic, or for taking any action in mitigation.

It is rather ironic that in their paper directed at insurers, Maynard and Monckton should recommend that risk management of such a major issue is not required, particularly given that the inevitable inertia in key factors like the climate system and technological innovation would make countermeasures very difficult.

Where there is no risk, risk management is not required. Since global temperatures are currently 2-3 Celsius degrees below their mean level over the past 10,000 years, there is no case for taking any costly action unless and until global mean surface temperature rises by at least 1 C° above its level in the year 2000.

Maynard and Monckton suggest there is a danger that insurers could alienate clients by acting to take account of climate change.

We suggested no such thing. We wrote that exaggerating the actually non-existent risks of “global warming” might alienate clients. Since the climate is changing all the time, and since the risks associated with extreme weather have long been a staple of the insurance industry, we could not credibly have suggested that insurers should not take account of climate change.

It is clear that tackling climate change means abandoning business-as-usual. Insurers will need to explain why they are acting. Insurers need to plan for a continuous progressive campaign of reviewing climatic risks, and also investment strategies to allow for climate change. Not to do that will betray future policyholders when risks become uninsurable, and savers when fossil-fuel investments and coastal real estate lose value.

Of course insurers must regularly review climate risks, just as they must review any other forms of risk. But there is no credible scientific basis for Dr. Dlugolecki’s assertion that risks will become uninsurable, or that coastal real estate will lose its value. Al Gore’s purchase of a $4 million condominium in the St. Regis Tower, San Francisco, just feet from the ocean at Fisherman’s Wharf,, in the very year when he made his prediction of an imminent 20-ft sea-level rise, shows how little is the risk that ocean-front properties will trade at a discount. Baseless scaremongering is always unscientific: if insurers do it, and profit thereby, it may also be a criminal offense.

Maynard and Monckton conclude by appealing to the facts to support their case. As shown here, Maynard and Monckton have gravely distorted the truth by presenting false data, using findings which have been rebutted, and omitting relevant information.

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I am content that any open-minded and unprejudiced reader will be able to make up his own mind on whether we or Dr. Dlugolecki have distorted the truth.

I attach to this letter a detailed paragraph by paragraph commentary and rebuttal of the article by Maynard and Monckton, which I trust you will make available to your readers on the CII website so that they can learn the truth for themselves.

Once we had submitted to the Journal our refutation of Dr. Dlugolecki’s remarks about our article, the Journal did not make either his remarks or our response available to its readers. In the interests of fairness and truth, therefore, I have decided to make these documents available in the present paper. There was not, is not, and will not be any global inconvenience, disaster, debacle, catastrophe, cataclysm, Armageddon or Apocalypse arising from any anthropogenic influence on the Earth’s climate.

Yours faithfully, Dr. Andrew Dlugolecki Chairman, CII study “Coping with Climate Change” Attached: Let cool heads prevail: Commentary and rebuttal by Andrew Dlugolecki.

The commentary and rebuttal, together with my detailed refutation, is well worth studying. I leave it to readers to discern who is arguing ad rem and who ad hominem, who is setting up straw men and knocking them down, who is getting his science from tendentious websites and who from the peer-reviewed journals, who is fairly presenting and interpreting the data and who is merely reciting a pre-conceived, politicized position, who is truthful and who false.

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LET COOL HEADS PREVAIL Commentary and rebuttal by Andrew Dlugolecki,

with Lord Monckton’s refutation of the rebuttal.

Dr. Dlugolecki’s comments are in Roman face, and in black. Lord Monckton’s responses are in bold face, and in green.

Introduction: This commentary is a rebuttal of the many errors and misleading arguments in the article “Let cool heads prevail” by Maynard and Monckton published in the CII Journal April/May 2009 edition.

This refutation answers Dr. Dlugolecki’s points seriatim. Page 21 para 1. There are 3 misrepresentations here – 1. It refers to an article “The Sword of Damocles” in the Observer 15 February 2009 by

James Hansen , the Director of NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, and describes him merely as ‘an activist’.

There is no inaccuracy. The article in The Observer provides strong evidence corroborating our opinion, to which – if we are in a free country – we are entitled. In the article, Hansen refers to coal as “the single greatest threat to civilization and all life on our planet”. He describes coal trains as “death trains”. These and numerous other instances of rodomontade in the article are the language not of science but of political activism.

2. It implies that in the article he calls for civil disobedience – this is untrue.

A statement by Greenpeace, issued in February 2009, reads as follows: “It’s time to take a stand on global warming. Dr. James Hansen, an internationally-recognized climate scientist, calls for Americans to take part in the Capitol Climate Action on March 2 at the Capitol power plant in Washington DC — expected to be the largest display of civil disobedience [our emphasis] against global warming in US history. ... For more info visit capitolclimate-action.org.” The cited website also repeatedly refers to “civil disobedience”.

3. It also implies that he ‘predicts absurdly’ that sea level will rise 75 metres or 246 feet. In

fact Hansen says this would happen if all the available coal is burned, and this is what reputable scientists such as the Royal Society, the National Academy of Sciences and IPCC all fear.

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The argument advanced by Dr. Dr. Dlugolecki, even if it were true, is an instance of the Aristotelian logical fallacy known as the argumentum ad verecundiam – the fallacy of reputation. Two words demonstrate this fallacy for what it is: Bernie Madoff. Even if the “reputable” pressure-groups mentioned by Dr. Dlugolecki subscribed to the opinion of Hansen as to the danger of a 246-ft sea-level rise, that opinion would still be absurd, and their repute, such as it is, would heighten rather than diminishing the absurdity. However, the facts are not as Dr. Dlugolecki states. The Royal Society in the UK and the National Academy of Sciences in the US are among several national scientific societies whose councils (in every instance without consulting their members in any universal referendum or other suchlike general consultative process) jointly announced some years ago that on the matter of climate they were deferring to the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as the “expert” body on the question of “global warming”. The 2007 quinquennial climate assessment of that “expert” body states, in terms, that a global temperature elevated by at least 2 Celsius degrees for several millennia would be needed before even half of the Greenland ice sheet melted (and that would raise sea level by 10 feet, not 246 feet). As for Antarctica, there is no expectation that the 8850 feet of ice at the South Pole will disintegrate anytime soon: it is at a higher altitude and latitude than the Greenland ice sheet. Hansen’s goes extravagantly beyond the explicit findings of the IPCC and, by implication, of the other two bodies mentioned by Dr. Dlugolecki, which have publicly announced their deference to it.

Page 21 para 2. There are 3 serious misrepresentations here. 1. It states that IPCC is factually wrong, (based on the later analysis in pages 21-26 no

doubt). More of this later.

There are indeed numerous serious errors of fact in the IPCC’s documents. A few of very many examples we could cite – a) A table of figures inserted by the IPCC’s bureaucracy into the 2007 report

after the scientists’ final draft had been submitted, and without further consultation with all of the scientists who had contributed to that draft, did not add up to within a factor of 2 of the correct answer. I pointed out to four IPCC officials, on the day of publication, that not one but four values in that belatedly-inserted graph had each been multiplied by ten, so as falsely to imply that the contribution of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to observed sea-level rise was ten times what was actually observed. Because the graph had been inserted by the IPCC’s bureaucrats, it had not been peer-reviewed, raising the legitimate

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question how much else in the IPCC’s reports is the work of the bureaucrats and not of the scientists.

b) The IPCC, which purports fairly to reflect the balance of opinion in the peer-reviewed scientific literature, maintains in its 2007 climate assessment its decision, taken in 2001, to state that the mediaeval warm period was neither global nor warmer than the present. However, Dr. Craig Idso has established that the overwhelming majority of peer-reviewed papers in the literature on the subject over the past 20 years – written by some 700 scientists from 400 institutions in 40 countries – provides evidence that the medieval warm period was real, was global, and was appreciably warmer than the present.

c) The IPCC’s 2007 graph showing the medieval warm period is a “spaghetti graph” – an overlay of half a dozen stochastic temperature-reconstruction graphs from different papers. One of those graphs, however, has been truncated so that no data before 1500 appear. The full 20,000-year dataset provided by Huang et al., the authors of that truncated graph, reveals Bayesian probabilities that the mediaeval warm period was warmer than the present.

d) The IPCC’s implicit value k = 0.3125 for the Planck parameter that converts

radiative forcings in Watts per square metre to temperature change in Kelvin or Celsius degrees – a value that should have been but was not explicitly stated – is greater than the highest in the published literature, save only for a single paper which contains a known error. This IPCC overstatement, combined with the IPCC’s failure to allow for latitudinal and diurnal variation, leads to at least a 30% exaggeration of climate sensitivity to atmospheric CO2 enrichment.

e) The sum of the maxima of the temperature feedbacks listed by the IPCC

in 2007 as significant equals the value at the point of instability in the Bode feedback-amplification equation – evidence that the IPCC’s individual feedback values, many of which have been compellingly challenged as overstatements in the learned literature, have been deliberately tuned to take the highest values that are theoretically possible.

2. It implies there was no scientific analysis to support the IPCC conclusions. This is

ridiculous. One could highlight uncertainties in the science, but to say there was no basis is fatuous.

Whatever basis the IPCC may have had for those of its conclusions which are proving erroneous in reality, it cannot have been a scientific basis. We give one central example – evidence of deliberate, political interference in the

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IPCC’s decision, in its 1995 report, to attribute the “global warming” that ceased in 1998 to anthropogenic influences. The scientists’ final draft of the 1995 IPCC report contained five clear statements to the effect that humankind’s influence on global temperature was not yet discernible. They are as follows –

“None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] change to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases.” “No study to date has positively identified all or part [of observed climate change] to anthropogenic causes.” “While none of these studies has specifically considered the attribution issue, they often draw some attribution conclusions, for which there is little justification.” “Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced.” “When will the anthropogenic effect on climate be identified? It is not surprising that the best answer to this question is, ‘We do not know.’”

However, the IPCC bureaucracy did not find the scientists’ repeatedly-stated conclusion acceptable. Without reference back to all of the scientists who had collaborated in producing that final draft, the bureaucracy invited an accommodating scientist to excise these five conclusions, to make numerous other alterations, and to replace the deleted conclusions with the following:

“The body of ... evidence now points to a discernible influence on global climate.”

And that has been the official position of the UN’s climate panel ever since. On any view, the process by which the conclusions of the scientists who drafted the IPCC’s 1995 report were tampered with after the scientists had finalized it, and without reference back to all of the scientists, was not a scientific process. In preparing for our own article, we consulted widely among the scientific community. There are in fact three schools of thought: the “official” position, stated in the altered conclusion of the IPCC’s 1995 report; the opinion that the climatic changes of the 20th century were well within the natural variability of the climate; and the opinion that the rapid increase in

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solar activity between the 70-year Maunder or Grand Minimum of 1645-1715 and the 70-year Grand Maximum of 1925-1995, during which the Sun was more active than at almost any time in the past 11,400 years, was the principal cause of the warming of 0.74 Celsius degrees that occurred in the 20th century. For instance, Scafetta & West (2008) attribute 69% of the 20th century’s warming to the Sun, and they are by no means alone in this conclusion: the communiqué of the symposium of the International Astronomical Union in 2004 concluded that it was the Sun that had been chiefly responsible for “global warming”; that the Sun would shortly enter a prolonged period of comparative inactivity, and that global cooling would result. In the four years since that prediction, global temperatures have been falling at a rate equivalent to 5.5 Celsius degrees per century. Given the substantial literature supporting the alternative theories to account for the “global warming” of the past 50 years, we made two further enquiries. First, we carefully examined the temperature record for the past 150 years as published by the IPCC, and we determined first by visual examination of the IPCC’s own graph and then by reference to the underlying monthly global-temperature anomaly data that the warming rate between 1975 and 1998, when humankind might, in theory, have had some influence on global temperature, was identical to the warming rates from 1860-1880 and from 1910-1940, when – on any view – the human influence on climate was negligible. One of us confirmed the fact that the warming rates of all three periods were identical by arranging for a Parliamentary Question to be asked in the House of Lords. The reply confirmed our result, showing that there is indeed no discernible anthropogenic influence yet apparent in the global temperature record. Secondly, we made some enquiries to discover how the IPCC had come to assign a 90% confidence interval to its statement that, notwithstanding the absence of any anthropogenic signal in the temperature data and the considerable dissent evident in the peer-reviewed literature, humankind was responsible for most of the warming of the past 50 years (during which there was in fact warming only between 1975 and 1998). Properly speaking, confidence intervals of this kind should only be applied to mathematically-calculated probabilities, not to statements of opinion; and the statistical community would normally use a 95% confidence interval, representing 2 standard deviations. We discovered that the IPCC’s political representatives had taken several decisions, apparently including this one, by a process no more scientific than a mere show of hands: there was no quantitative basis for it whatsoever. We also discovered that the political representatives had indeed wanted to demand 95% compromise, but that China, in particular, had refused to agree, so that a 90% confidence interval was agreed upon. By no

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stretch of the most fevered imagination could this process be legitimately described as “scientific”. We concluded from our research that the IPCC’s attempt in 2007 to assign a 90% certainty to its central conclusion that more than half of the past half-century’s warming to anthropogenic influence on the climate had been arrived at by a political rather than a scientific process, did not fairly reflect the scientific literature offering alternative explanations for the warming, and accordingly lacked a scientific basis.

3. It implies that IPCC somehow controls ‘its’ political representatives , when the Summary

for Policymakers (SPM) is drawn up. Nothing could be further from the truth. The policymakers represent sovereign nations, they are not ‘chosen’ by IPCC. The nations include some that are sceptical or even hostile to the science of climate change, and the SPM must be agreed unanimously line by line, so it is impossible for environmentalists to control the final wording. Those are the rules, and I know they apply because I have attended such a meeting as one of the scientists to explain any queries on the proposed text.

We did not imply that the IPCC controls the political representatives of governments. The problem is that the political representatives, not the scientists, control the IPCC. It is the political representatives, not the scientists, who agree the Summaries for Policymakers “unanimously line by line”. It ought not to matter whether “nations” are or are not “sceptical”: what matters is that the IPCC ought to – but, according to our research, does not – fairly represent the many legitimate strands of scientific opinion, particularly on the central question of whether and to what extent the entirely unremarkable “global warming” that ended in 1998 can legitimately be attributed to the industries and enterprises of humankind. In our research, we also came across clear evidence that the IPCC’s bureaucracy had tampered with its member-nations’ choice of scientific participants in the drafting of the 2007 climate assessment report in a manner calculated to exclude scientists whom it knew to be unsupportive of the political viewpoint that it had adopted in 1995. For instance, Professor Paul Reiter, the world’s foremost expert on the epidemiology of vector-borne infections such as malaria, recently testified before a Committee of the House of Lords that he had been nominated by the US and had sent copies of his nomination papers by recorded delivery to four separate IPCC officials; that the IPCC had not allowed him to participate; that when he challenged its rejection of his nomination he was told his nomination papers had not been received; and that the IPCC appointed two environmental campaigners to write the sub-chapter on malaria, with only one published paper on the subject between them.

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Furthermore, the IPCC’s officials, during the drafting sessions, have been reported as applying undue pressure on participating but sceptical scientists to agree – to take one example – that, contrary to the very clear evidence in the peer-reviewed literature that reliable, long-term climate projections cannot be made “by any method”, computer modelling is an acceptable basis for the IPCC’s principal conclusions. Professor Richard Lindzen testified to this effect before the US Senate some years ago. We could cite many other such instances illustrating the attempted and often successful control by the IPCC of the selection and functioning of participating scientists.

Page 21 paras 3 and 4. This is a feeble critique of models. It is quite possible to model the pattern of events, without being able to ‘forecast’ or ‘predict’ what exactly will happen. Catastrophe modellers do it all the time for insurers!

We accept that in a couple of paragraphs one cannot set out a complete critique of the IPCC’s use of computer models. We were not criticizing the use of models per se – one of us, after all, has constructed, coded and used models successfully throughout his professional life and at the highest level in government. We do, however, criticize the persistent attempts by the IPCC to make very long-term climate projections in the face of definitive proof, available in the scientific literature, that the reliable, long-term prediction of the evolution of a complex, non-linear, chaotic object such as the climate is not available by any method. Rather than trying to explain the impossibility of this task in another couple of paragraphs, we refer readers to Edward Lorenz’s landmark paper of 1963 that founded chaos theory on a simple climate model demonstrating that successful long-run prediction is not possible unless one knows the initial values of the millions of variables that define the climate object to a degree of precision that is not in practice attainable.

Page 21 para 5. This refers to a paper by Schulte. The paper reports that only 6% of the papers surveyed rejected the climate change hypothesis. It is rather self-serving not to mention this!!

We did not cite Schulte (2008) as evidence for or against the “official” climate-change theory (it is not a hypothesis, stricto sensu, because it is not properly defined so as to be testable). We cited him as evidence for the fact that not a single one of the 539 papers he surveyed offered any evidence for any catastrophic consequence of any anthropogenic influence on the climate.

Page 21 para 6. This is classic misdirection. There are 2 major issues.

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1. CO2 is a tiny fraction of the atmosphere. But, it is a very powerful greenhouse gas (ghg). The relatively small quantity does not mean it is harmless (in fact there are billions of tonnes of CO2 in the atmosphere). The quantities of CFC’s in the atmosphere were far smaller, and yet they created the ozone hole.

Here, as elsewhere, we shall ignore ad hominem comments such as the mention of “classic misdirection”, which have no place in scientific discussion. Carbon dioxide now occupies only one-ten-thousandth more of the atmosphere than it did in 1750. We legitimately reported that fact. However, to say that it is a “very powerful greenhouse gas”, implying that its effect on global temperature is as large as the IPCC imagines, is to perpetrate the Aristotelian fallacy of petitio principii. The central question in the climate debate is not whether anthropogenic enrichment of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide causes warming, for a very simple manipulation of the fundamental equation of radiative transfer demonstrates that it does. The question is whether – in the real atmosphere, rather than in the laboratory – the very small observed increase in the proportion of the atmosphere occupied by carbon dioxide can have a substantial effect on global temperature. On that central question, as Dr. Garth Paltridge will state in a forthcoming book, there is no scientific consensus whatsoever. It is now known that the early papers that led to the worldwide ban on chlorofluorocarbons had overestimated their effect on stratospheric ozone by a denary order of magnitude – i.e. tenfold. Also, the ban on CFCs has had little effect on the size of the ozone hole, which waxes and wanes over time in a manner and for reasons that are not yet understood.

2. There are other even more powerful ghg’s that are not even mentioned here, such as

methane.

Methane, in the laboratory, is 23 times more potent as a greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. However, in an article inevitably constrained as to length, we had to exclude factors with a very limited effect on the climate. In deciding not to include methane in our discussion, we studied the trends in the atmospheric concentration of methane and found that since 2000 it has scarcely risen at all, suggesting that – at least at present – human activities cannot be having a significant impact.

Page 21 paras 7 & 8 . No serious issues. Page 22 para 1. No serious issue.

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Page 22 para 2. Given the difficulties of measuring past climates hundreds of millions of years ago, it is impossible to be confident about events then. The atmosphere, biosphere and even the continents were completely different, and one cannot extrapolate from then to now with any confidence.

Palaeoclimatology ought not to be dismissed out of hand. It is possible to make some remarkably accurate deductions about pre-instrumental climates. For instance, we can reconstruct past atmospheric temperature by measuring the ratios of the oxygen isotopes 16O and 18O in air trapped in Antarctic ice-cores. The IPCC itself, in 2001, carried a table showing that in the Cambrian era, 550 million years ago, and again in the Triassic era, 175 million years ago, the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide was approximately 20 times that of today: yet the planet did not fry. Many other instances could be given.

Page 22 paras 3 -7. There is a major flaw in this presentation. No climate scientist has ever said that temperatures will rise steadily- there will always be fluctuations. What Maynard and Monckton do is compare a high spot with a recent low spot to ‘prove’ that temperatures are falling. It is clear from their Figure 1, that up till 2007 the observations were exactly in line with IPCC, and all that has happened is that 2008 was a coolish year.

We produced the graph of global mean surface temperatures since the phase-transition in the record in late 2001 because, remarkably, it is available almost nowhere else. The temperature record is indeed stochastic – there will be periods of varying lengths during which temperatures will trend in one direction or another at various rates in an unpredictable fashion. That is natural climate variability. If it is natural variability that has caused the recent cooling, then it may also be natural variability that has caused most – or even very nearly all – of the previous, and unexceptional, “global warming”. Since late 2001, global atmospheric temperatures have indeed been falling, and falling rapidly. This fall has been followed by a fall – or at least a stasis – in ocean temperatures as measured worldwide by the ARGO bathythermograph network. We did not and do not state that merely because the linear-regression trend in global temperature has been sharply downward for more than seven years it will continue downward, or that, therefore, there can be no anthropogenic effect on temperature. However, it is legitimate to infer from the fact that there has been no statistically-significant “global warming” for more than 14 years that climate sensitivity to the carbon-dioxide concentration increases that have occurred throughout the period may be substantially less than the IPCC had imagined.

In fact it is statistical chicanery of the worst kind. If they had selected the years 2000 and 2008 to compare, their method would produce the completely opposite result – a very rapid increase in temperature!

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Once again, we ignore the ad-hominem “statistical chicanery”. We reproduce the suggested graph below, indicating that, if one includes the appreciable but short-lived warming between 2000 and 2001 the cooling at a rate of 2 Celsius degrees/century would become a warming at 0.5 Celsius degrees/century. On any view, this is not a “very rapid” increase – it is precisely in line with the observed or inferred centennial rate of increase over the past 300 years (Akasofu, 2008), nicely illustrating our point that no anthropogenic signal is yet discernible in the temperature record.

Page 22 para 6. I will hold over discussion of solar influence until pages 23-24. Page 22 paras 8-9. There are 4 major flaws here.

1. Maynard and Monckton do not mention the ‘consensus’ reason for temperature

reduction between 1940 and 1975: i.e. the rise in atmospheric pollution, specifically sulphates and aerosols from fossil fuel combustion – see the IPCC’s Assessment Reports for details of this.

Naturally it is not possible to include every point in a short article. Had we discussed the aerosol-cooling notion, we should have pointed out that there are as many problems with quantifying climate sensitivity to aerosols as there are with quantifying climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide; that if aerosols have as powerful a cooling effect as is claimed for them then the cheapest way to cool the planet would be to emit more of them; and that, in any event, science is not done by “consensus”: to appeal to “consensus” is to perpetrate the Aristotelian logical fallacy of the argumentum ad populum, which has no place in scientific discourse.

2. They persistently link temperature during a period to emissions in that same period. Yet

it is fundamental that temperature is responding to the cumulative greenhouse gases currently present in the air, not just recent emissions, which are much smaller.

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According to the IPCC, temperature change over a given period is a function of the proportionate change in carbon dioxide concentration over that period. We correctly represented it as such.

3. Furthermore, there is a considerable delay in translating cumulative emissions into a

global temperature rise , due to the huge thermal inertia of the oceans.

Fortunately, we are now in a position to test this proposition. The global cooling that began in late 2001 has been followed by an oceanic cooling – or at least a stasis – in the five years since the Argo bathythermographs were first deployed throughout the world’s oceans in 2003. It is becoming increasingly apparent – as one would expect from the second law of thermodynamics – that changes in temperature in the surface layer of the atmosphere are rapidly followed (or, during El Nino/La Nina events, preceded) by changes in temperature in the mixed layer of the oceans. We have also tested this proposition quantitatively, by calculating the difference between the transient temperature increase over the 21st century on the IPCC’s A2 “business-as-usual” scenario (a published value of 3.4 Celsius degrees) and the implicit equilibrium temperature increase as a result of anthropogenic forcing over the same period, which is as follows – ΔTs,equ = 4.7 ln(C/C0) = 4.7 ln(836/368) = 3.9 C°.

The warming “in the pipeline” even after a further century of atmospheric CO2 enrichment, and on the assumption that CO2 concentration is stabilized by the year 2100, is accordingly just 0.5 Celsius degrees, suggesting a very small temperature effect even after the delay of as many hundreds or thousands of years as are necessary to reach equilibrium. From this calculation, we infer that most of the temperature increase imagined by the IPCC in response to past atmospheric enrichment would by now be evident. We have submitted this result to peer-review, and one of the reviewers – an eminent professor of physics with a long record of publication in climatology – has commented that it is consistent with a recent paper by Hansen, who found a radiative imbalance in the surface-troposphere system of approximately 0.85 W m–2.

4. Maynard and Monckton imply that only recent human activity can have changed the

climate. "Plows, Plagues, and Petroleum: How Humans Took Control of Climate", by William F. Ruddiman (2006) indicates that large scale preindustrial farming had a major climatic effect.

We are not aware that Ruddiman’s result has been subjected to peer review. We are of course aware that environmentalists from time to time indicate that the human influence on climate has been considerable for thousands of years. We have even seen a suggestion that the “global warming” that

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brought the last ice age to an end was caused by agriculture. However, such opinions are not well supported in the literature. Once again, we have sought to examine this proposition quantitatively. It is clear from the IPCC’s reports that carbon-dioxide emission is thought to be the primary anthropogenic influence on climate: indeed, a simple calculation based on the IPCC’s table of anthropogenic forcings indicates that all other anthropogenic influences (methane, other long-lived greenhouse gases, aerosols, etc.) are in aggregate slightly net-negative. We calculate the anthropogenic influence on temperature from CO2 thus –

1750-1975:225 years:4.7 ln(330/278) = 0.7 C° 1975-2009: 34 years:4.7 ln(386/330) = 0.7 C°.

This simple calculation, using the IPCC’s own methodology, demonstrates that in the last one-third of a century humankind’s influence on temperature was as great as it was in the whole of the previous two and a quarter centuries. We were accordingly justified in concluding that, in comparison with recent times, before 1975 the anthropogenic influence on climate was minimal.

Page 22 para 10. There are 2 misrepresentations here. 1. As stated already, the ultimate arbiters of what is stated in the SPM of any IPCC report

are NOT the scientists, nor the bureaucrats, but the policymakers!

As stated already, that is one of the chief problems with the IPCC process. It is ultimately political, not scientific, just as we said.

2. To imply that the only reason that the IPCC has continually strengthened its statements

is simply political influence is unfounded allegation. The scientific evidence has grown stronger, as shown in the detailed IPCC reports, and as the policymakers have accepted in the SPM’s.

We have already described above how the IPCC’s bureaucracy arranged for the scientists’ five-times-stated conclusions in their final draft of the 1995 climate assessment that there was no discernible human influence on climate to be deleted and replaced with a precisely contrary conclusion. Yet again, we shall address the issue quantitatively. We had certainly not wished to imply that the IPCC “has continually strengthened its statements”. On the contrary, as global temperatures continue to fail to rise in line with the IPCC’s predictions (or, in the past 14 years, at all), the IPCC has been compelled – for the sake of retaining what little credibility it has left – to

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weaken its central estimate of the temperature response to a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration –

1995 report:“global warming” of 3.80 Celsius degrees 2001 report: “global warming” of 3.50 Celsius degrees 2007 report: “global warming” of 3.26 Celsius degrees.

How much further will the IPCC have to reduce its predictions before they begin to conform to observed reality?

Page 22 paras 11-12 (continued on page 23) Maynard and Monckton are correct in their challenge to Al Gore. However, Al Gore is not a leading climate scientist, and does not represent IPCC.

On any view, there was no error here. Al Gore is not any kind of scientist, but the Nobel Prize Committee nevertheless bracketed him with the IPCC in awarding him the Peace Prize for his sci-fi comedy horror movie, and the inaccurate table of figures inserted in the IPCC’s 2007 report, and referred to earlier, lent temporary credence to Gore’s exaggeration of predicted sea-level rise. Gore had said sea level might imminently rise by 20 feet. However, in 2005, the year he made that prediction, he bought a $4 million apartment in the St. Regis Tower, San Francisco, just feet from the ocean at Fisherman’s Wharf, powerfully suggesting that he did not believe his own prediction. And Mr. Justice Burton, in the High Court, found that “the Armageddon scenario that he depicts is not based on any scientific view”.

Page 23 para 1-2. This is misdirection. 1. There are enormous differences between the geological past and today’s climate and

planet.

Yes, there are. Nevertheless, geology and palaeoclimatology are respectable and respected sciences, and results from these sciences are heavily relied upon by the IPCC. There is no reason, therefore, why we should not rely upon them too.

2. Maynard and Monckton use an early erroneous assessment of the absorption effect of

CO2 to conclude that 915 ppm is the upper limit of effective absorption. [Angstrom, 1900. "Über die Bedeutung des Wasserdampfes und der Kohlensaüres bei der Absorption der Erdatmosphäre." Annalen der Physik 4(3): 720-32. published online 308(12): 720-32 (2006)]. This has been superseded by much more detailed analysis, as detailed extensively at www.realclimate.org. In brief, the greenhouse effect will operate even if the absorption of radiation were totally saturated in the lower atmosphere.

In a short article, we did not have the space to detail the theology of CO2 absorption at any length. However, the 915 ppmv limit is made explicit in the

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papers relied upon by the IPCC itself in its quantification of climate sensitivity, and – once again – what is sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander. www.realclimate.org is a tendentious blog run by two of the authors of the now-utterly-discredited graph purporting to abolish the mediaeval warm period, and is certainly not a reliable or peer-reviewed source. The greenhouse effect will of course continue to operate if all outgoing radiation is absorbed by the atmosphere: but, from that point onwards, there will be little or no further increase in global temperature.

The Earth’s temperature is regulated by the thin upper layers where radiation does escape easily into space. Adding more greenhouse gas there will change the balance. Even a 1% change in that delicate balance would make a serious difference in the planet’s surface temperature. It takes a new way of looking at the atmosphere — not as a single slab, as Angstrom did, but as a set of interacting layers. It is now clear that additional CO2 has an incremental effect at even very high ppm levels (as witnessed on the planet Venus).

Al Gore frequently cites the planet Venus as “Earth’s sister planet”. However, we know from the IPCC’s own documents that in the Cambrian and Triassic eras concentrations of CO2 were approximately 20 times higher than today’s, and without the runaway effects that occur (for well-understood reasons) on Venus, which is much closer to the Sun than the Earth is, and has far more carbon dioxide in its atmosphere, but do not occur (for equally well-understood reasons) on Earth. We therefore have empirical evidence from the history of our own planet’s atmosphere, as described by the IPCC, to the effect that even a 2000% increase in CO2 concentration has not unduly perturbed the atmosphere. And it is also inherent in the IPCC’s formula for CO2 concentration that, even if the papers relied upon by the IPCC did not explicitly state that the formula ceases to apply at 915 ppmv, its effect would be much attenuated. Let us add 10 ppmv (about 5 years) of CO2 concentration increase to today’s atmosphere, and to the atmosphere with 915 ppmv –

Today: 4.7 ln(396/386) = 0.12 Celsius degrees Future:4.7 ln(925/915) = 0.05 Celsius degrees

Accordingly, the effect of each additional CO2 molecule on temperature at 915 ppmv would be less than half of the effect of each additional molecule today.

3. Thus if we ever do reach 915 ppm of CO2 we will be in big trouble, since that is equivalent to nearly 3.5 times the natural level of CO2 in recent eons, and implies a huge increase in temperature.

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For most of the past 600 million years, CO2 concentration has been above 1000 ppmv, with no ill effects on the planet. On the IPCC’s very high climate-sensitivity estimates, which our own reviewed calculations and independent observations of outgoing long-wave radiation by satellites confirm to be exaggerated by approximately an order of magnitude, the increase in temperature between today and 915 ppmv would be –

4.7 ln(915/386) = 4 Celsius degrees. For most of the past half-billion years, global temperature has been considerably warmer than 4 Celsius degrees above today’s temperature.

Page 23 paras 3-5. There are 4 issues here. 1. Choosing individual years one can find anomalies, as was done earlier for temperature

rise.

As we have pointed out before, that argument cuts both ways.

2. IPCC make it clear that there are significant feedback mechanisms that are not factored into their predictions, and which will likely become material as the temperature rises eg ocean acidification, methane release from tundra/taiga and rainforest dieback. These would all increase the ghg level considerably.

Equally, there are significant negative feedback mechanisms, not the least of which is the rapid increase in rates of plant growth observable by satellites in response to the CO2 fertilization that is now occurring. This increase in plant growth is one of the reasons why the concentration of CO2 remaining in the atmosphere is less than half what the IPCC predicts it should be – a very substantial discrepancy that the IPCC itself admits it cannot explain. As for the IPCC’s imagined feedbacks, they are by no means universally accepted as real. Rainforests, for example, are more likely to grow if more CO2 is available: as Dr. Will Happer of Princeton University testified before the Senate recently, the planet is currently starved of CO2 compared with the concentrations which even the IPCC admits were present in geological time.

3. Even if ghg levels in the atmosphere were less than expected by IPCC, that would NOT

halve the temperature rise in 2100, since there is a considerable lag in the temperature response.

As we have already pointed out, the difference between transient and equilibrium temperature response, using the IPCC’s own published estimates and formulae, is so small that the lag in the temperature response must be insignificant.

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4. A rise of 1.9 degrees is not ‘harmless’. It is just within the tolerable level adopted by EU, and many people in developing countries would be disadvantaged. Aiming for 1.9 degrees also leaves no margin for uncertainty!

Global temperature has been at least 2 Celsius degrees above today’s level for much of the past 10,000 years (see, e.g., Cuffey & Clow, 1997). In each of the past four interglacial periods, global temperature was up to 6 Celsius degrees above today’s level. Accordingly, it is not credible to maintain that 2 Celsius degrees of warming would be harmful.

Page 23 paras 6. One can query the language and the focus on extreme views of climate change.

Since the “extreme views” are neither explicitly identified nor criticized, there is nothing for us to answer here.

Page 23 paras 7-8 . There are 2 points here. 1. It is natural that views should alter over a period of research.

Yes: but it is nonetheless significant that the IPCC’s estimates of the impact of carbon dioxide on temperature are falling with each successive report, as its predictions are demonstrably not coming to pass in the real climate.

2. The range of temperature rise expected by IPCC has remained remarkably steady: The

changes in the central figure are minor.

Let us examine that proposition quantitatively. In 1995, the IPCC said a doubling of CO2 concentration would lead to 3.8 Celsius degrees of warming, implying that the temperature increase is 5.5 times the natural logarithm of the proportionate increase in CO2 concentration. In 2007, the IPCC says 3.26 Celsius degrees, implying 4.7 times. On these two estimates, the temperature increase over the 21st century would be –

1995 report: 5.5 ln(836/368) = 4.5 Celsius degrees 2007 report: 4.7 ln(836/368) = 3.9 Celsius degrees

The 1995 estimate is thus 15% higher than the 2007 estimate – and this substantial discrepancy arises in the central variable in the entire debate – climate sensitivity to atmospheric carbon-dioxide enrichment.

Page 23 paras 9-11 and page 24 paras 2-10. This very involved attack on the IPCC’s methodology for climate sensitivity can be rebutted easily, as below. I shall comment in more detail on individual paragraphs.

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Study of natural ice ages (not in the far distant geological ages, but over the past glacial maximum, about 21,000 years ago, which is much better measured) indicates that the “uncertainty range for climate sensitivity, constrained by paleo-data, is 1.2–4.3 degrees C and thus almost identical to the IPCC estimate. When additionally accounting for potential structural uncertainties inferred from other models the upper limit increases by about 1 C.” Schneider, von Deimling et al. (2005), Climate sensitivity estimated from ensemble simulations of glacial climate, published in Climate Dynamics.

One can of course cite papers in support of various climate sensitivities. We cited several in support of our own estimate.

Page 23 paras 9-11 and page 24 paras 1-2. There are 2 issues. 1. It is true that the effect of CO2 diminishes with increasing concentration. However, as

discussed above concerning Page 23 paras 1-2, since the earth’s atmosphere is kilometres deep, this does not happen in practice. A level of 915 ppmv would be approaching 4 times the natural level, and so very dangerous.

As discussed above, because the effect of carbon dioxide on temperature is logarithmic, four times the concentration would only cause twice the warming.

2. Scientists cross-check their work by looking at what actually has occurred in natural climate change eg ice ages. (see Schneider von Deimling et al, 2006 above). They do not simply build theoretical models.

As we pointed out in our article, there are numerous and severe discrepancies between the models and observed reality, particularly in the tropical upper troposphere, and in the quantum of outgoing long-wave radiation escaping to space. We legitimately infer from these discrepancies that the models have not been brought sufficiently into line with observation.

Page 24 para 1: The assertion that climate sensitivity is 16 times smaller than the IPCC’s value would surely mean that Ice Ages would not occur!! As noted earlier, analysis of the most recent Ice Age concludes that temperature sensitivity is within the IPCC range (Schneider von Deimling et al, 2006). Maynard and Monckton are over-eager in their attempts to reject IPCC.

This statement is an instance of the Aristotelian logical fallacy of relevance known as the non sequitur. It does not follow that a low climate sensitivity to CO2 would make ice ages impossible, for it is not known that changes in CO2 concentration cause ice ages. This is one of the elementary errors made by Al Gore in his silly film. The paleoclimate record of changes in CO2 and in temperature, as inferred from ice-cores, shows clearly that temperature changes preceded CO2 concentration changes at glacial/interglacial terminations, by 800-2800 years. On any view, the latter cannot have caused the former.

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It is possible (though we cannot say for certain) that the Ice Ages are caused by the Milankovich cycles – secular changes in the orbital eccentricity, obliquity of the Earth’s axis, and precession of the equinoxes. There is a very considerable literature on this subject.

Page 24 para 3: This is a repeat of page 23 paras 3-5. As noted, the time period is too short to make meaningful conclusions about the rate of accumulation of CO2, and even if correct, the assertion would not result in a halving of the temperature increase.

Let us demonstrate our conclusion quantitatively. The IPCC assumes, as the central estimate in its A2 “business-as-usual” scenario, a CO2 concentration of 836 ppmv in 2100, derived from the BERN climate model. Currently, CO2 concentration is rising not exponentially, as predicted by the IPCC, but linearly in the direction of 575 ppmv by 2100. We now compare the effects on temperature of the IPCC’s prediction and of observed reality –

IPCC: 4.7 ln(836/368) = 3.9 Celsius degrees of warming Observation: 4.7 ln(575/368) = 2.1 Celsius degrees of warming.

From this result our conclusion follows directly. Page 24 paras 4-7. There are 3 issues here. 1. The tropical hotspot is typical of ANY warming, not just AGW (i.e. manmade warming).

We have consulted the 2007 document of the IPCC, which reproduces the graph below –

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It will be seen that the “hot-spot” – i.e. a warming-rate in the tropical upper troposphere that is thrice the surface warming-rate – is characteristic of anthropogenic greenhouse-gas forcing only, and is so dominant that it still shows clearly even when that forcing is combined with four other forcings, two natural and two anthropogenic.

2. The hotspot has been difficult to observe. The latest analysis is Consistency of modelled

and observed temperature trends in the tropical troposphere. Santer et al., 2008 in the International Journal of Climatology. It reports –

“A recent report of the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) identified a ‘potentially serious inconsistency’ between modelled and observed trends in tropical lapse rates (Karl et al., 2006). Early versions of satellite and radiosonde datasets suggested that the tropical surface had warmed more than the troposphere, while climate models consistently showed tropospheric amplification of surface warming in response to human-caused increases in well-mixed greenhouse gases (GHGs). We revisit such comparisons here using new observational estimates of surface and tropospheric temperature changes. We find that there is no longer a serious discrepancy between modelled and observed trends in tropical lapse rates. “This emerging reconciliation of models and observations has two primary explanations. First, because of changes in the treatment of buoy and satellite information, new surface temperature datasets yield slightly reduced tropical warming relative to earlier versions. Second, recently developed satellite and radiosonde datasets show larger warming of the tropical lower troposphere. In the case of a new satellite dataset from Remote Sensing Systems (RSS), enhanced warming is due to an improved procedure of adjusting for inter-satellite biases. When the RSS-derived tropospheric temperature trend is compared with four different observed estimates of surface temperature change, the surface warming is invariably amplified in the tropical troposphere, consistent with model results. Even if we use data from a second satellite dataset with smaller tropospheric warming than in RSS, observed tropical lapse rate trends are not significantly different from those in all other model simulations. “Our results contradict a recent claim that all simulated temperature trends in the tropical troposphere and in tropical lapse rates are inconsistent with observations. This claim was based on use of older radiosonde and satellite datasets, and on two methodological errors: the neglect of observational trend uncertainties introduced by interannual climate variability, and application of an inappropriate statistical ‘consistency test’.”

We have consulted the authors of the papers that have repeatedly made plain the absence of the predicted tropical upper-troposphere “hot-spot”, and are informed that there are two papers in preparation that will compellingly refute the paper cited here. The lead author of the paper cited here, at the instigation of the IPCC’s bureaucracy, was responsible for tampering with the scientists’ final draft of the 1995 IPCC report so as to

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replace its conclusion that human influence on climate was not discernible with an opposite conclusion. We are not entirely content, therefore, that he is reliable.

3. A more significant observation, which is ONLY found from AGW, not solar warming, is

that the stratosphere has been cooling. It is telling that Maynard and Monckton do not mention this.

We have consulted three temperature records for the stratosphere, and we find that, notwithstanding continuing increases in CO2 concentration, there has been no stratospheric cooling since 1993 –

In any event, a NOAA paper of two years ago demonstrated a remarkably close correlation between stratospheric ozone and stratospheric temperature –

There is no reason to suppose that stratospheric temperature influences the concentration of stratospheric ozone. There is no reason to suppose that any diminution in outgoing long-wave radiation caused by the greenhouse effect influences the concentration of stratospheric ozone. Besides, the diminution in outgoing long-wave radiation is only one-tenth of what the IPCC imagines it to be (Covey, 1995, etc., etc.). It is possible, therefore, that it is the changing concentration of stratospheric ozone that has influenced the change in stratospheric temperature.

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It is also self-evident that the correlation between atmospheric CO2 enrichment and stratospheric cooling, even during the period when such cooling was evident, is very poor. For these reasons, the stratospheric cooling that ceased in 1995 cannot safely be regarded as a bell-wether of anthropogenic “global warming”.

Page 24 para 8: The solar hypothesis was considered by IPCC, and conclusively dismissed. See the discussion at page 24, para 12.

We shall cross that bridge when we come to it, contenting ourselves at this point with the observation that we place no automatic reliance upon the IPCC, particularly to the extent that its analyses and findings do not adequately reflect the range and balance of opinions in the peer-reviewed literature.

Page 24 para 9: This is a rather technical issue that I have not had time to investigate. It is irrelevant, because the overall finding from the study of natural climate change is that the IPCC range of climate sensitivity is correct, as stated earlier.

On a question as important as climate sensitivity, it is not appropriate to rely upon a single paper for verification, particularly since the lead author of the paper in question is on record as having publicly declared, “We have to offer up scary scenarios.” It would certainly not be reasonable to reject our analysis without having investigated it.

Page 24 para 10: There is a general point, and then there are issues on the 3 specific papers cited. 1. Maynard and Monckton ignore many of the positive feedback effects that IPCC is

concerned about, such as e.g. ocean acidification, methane release from tundra/taiga, rainforest dieback, and changes in the reflective properties .of the Earth’s surface (albedo).

We have explicitly included all of the temperature feedbacks that the IPCC has actually quantified. Our analysis was – and is – unashamedly quantitative: we are dealing with mathematics and physics, not politics. We are not prepared to quantify feedbacks many of which are speculative and some of which are non-existent, especially when the IPCC itself does not quantify them. It is of course possible to imagine all manner of “scary scenarios”, to use Dr. Schneider’s term: however, it is much easier to imagine “scary scenarios” that result from cooling than from warming. If our central calculation of climate sensitivity is correct – and it is borne out not only by paper after paper in the reviewed literature, including papers by one of us – then none of the more exotic feedbacks imagined by the IPCC can

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come to pass: or, rather, if it does, it will not do so through any action or inaction of humankind. As for “ocean acidification”, it is a chimera. The biochemistry of bicarbonate ions rules it out. And we can also make some geological inferences. For instance, the calcite corals first achieved algal symbiosis in the Cambrian era, when CO2 concentration in the atmosphere was 20 times today’s. The aragonite corals first came into existence, also by algal symbiosis, in the Triassic ear, when CO2 concentration was at similarly high levels (IPCC, 2001). Numerous homoeostatic mechanisms exist within the oceans to maintain the acid-base balance firmly in the alkaline zone.

Maynard and MONCKTON are guilty of gross exaggeration in saying that IPCC’s feedback value would generate a runaway greenhouse effect. It is obviously not true, as they state, and therefore they need to re-examine their own calculations.

Once again, we note with regret the ad-hominem tone of the phrase “gross exaggeration”. It is of course true that, in the real world, temperature feedbacks have not generated a runaway greenhouse effect. And it is precisely because we know they have not generated a runaway greenhouse effect that we know there must be something wrong with the IPCC’s ranges of values for the feedbacks that, for the first time, it quantifies in its 2007 assessment report. Once again, we must be quantitative. The maximal values for the temperature feedbacks quantified by the IPCC are set forth infra -

Water vapor feedback 1.80 W m–2 K–1 Lapse rate feedback –0.58 W m–2 K–1 Surface albedo feedback 0.34 W m–2 K–1 Cloud albedo feedback 1.07 W m–2 K–1 CO2 feedback 0.57 W m–2 K–1 Total feedbacks b 3.20 W m–2 K–1

We now consider the Planck parameter κ – the variable by which a given radiative forcing (in Watts per square metre) is multiplied to yield consequent temperature change (in Kelvin or Celsius degrees) in the absence of any temperature feedbacks (or on the assumption that they sum to zero). The Planck or “no-feedbacks” climate sensitivity parameter κ, where ΔTκ is the response of TS to radiative forcings ignoring temperature feedbacks, ΔTλ is the response of TS to temperature feedbacks as well as forcings, and b is the sum in W m–2 °K–1 of all individual temperature feedbacks, is –

κ = ΔTκ / ΔF2x °K W–1 m2, by definition; = ΔTλ / (ΔF2x + bΔTλ) °K W–1 m2.

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ΔTκ, estimated by Hansen (1984) and IPCC (2007) as 1.2-1.3 °K at CO2 doubling, is the change in surface temperature in response to a tropopausal forcing ΔF2x, ignoring any feedbacks. ΔTκ is not directly mensurable in the atmosphere because feedbacks as well as forcings are present. Instruments cannot distinguish between them. However, κ may also be expressed (Monckton, 2008) in terms of ΔTλ, which is mensurable, albeit with difficulty and subject to great uncertainty (McKitrick, 2007). IPCC (2007) does not mention κ and, therefore, provides neither error-bars nor a “Level of Scientific Understanding” (the IPCC’s subjective measure of the extent to which enough is known about a variable to render it useful in quantifying climate sensitivity). However, its implicit value κ ≈ 0.313 °K W–1 m2, may be derived from the following passage in IPCC (2007). It is the reciprocal of the estimated “uniform-temperature” radiative cooling response – “Under these simplifying assumptions the amplification [f] of the global warming from a feedback parameter [b] (in W m–2 °C–1) with no other feedbacks operating is 1 / (1 – [bκ –1]), where [–κ –1] is the ‘uniform temperature’ radiative cooling response (of value approximately –3.2 W m–2 °C–1; Bony et al., 2006). If n independent feedbacks operate, [b] is replaced by (λ1 + λ 2+ ... λ n).” (IPCC, 2007: ch.8, footnote). Thus –

κ ≈ 3.2–1 ≈ 0.313 °K W–1 m2.

The feedback multiplier f is a unitless variable by which the no-feedbacks temperature response is multiplied to take account of mutually-amplified temperature feedbacks. A “temperature feedback” is a change in TS that occurs precisely because TS has already changed in response to a forcing or combination of forcings. An instance: as the atmosphere warms in response to a forcing, the carrying capacity of the space occupied by the atmosphere for water vapor increases near-exponentially in accordance with the Clausius-Clapeyron relation. Since water vapor is the most important greenhouse gas, the growth in its concentration caused by atmospheric warming exerts an additional forcing, causing temperature to rise further. This is the “water-vapor feedback”. Some 20 temperature feedbacks have been described, though none can be directly measured. Most have little impact on temperature. The value of each feedback, the interactions between feedbacks and forcings, and the interactions between feedbacks and other feedbacks, are subject to very large uncertainties.

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Each feedback, having been triggered by a change in atmospheric temperature, itself causes a temperature change. Consequently, temperature feedbacks amplify one another. IPCC (2007: ch.8) defines f in terms of a form of the feedback-amplification function for electronic circuits given in Bode (1945), where b is the sum of all individual feedbacks before they are mutually amplified –

f = (1 – bκ)–1= ΔTλ / ΔTκ Note the dependence of f not only upon the feedback-sum b but also upon κ –

ΔTλ = (ΔF + bΔTλ)κ ==> ΔTλ (1 – bκ) = ΔFκ ==> ΔTλ = ΔFκ(1 – bκ)–1 ==> ΔTλ / ΔF = λ = κ(1 – bκ)–1 = κf ==> f = (1 – bκ)–1 ≈ (1 – b / 3.2)–1 ==> κ ≈ 3.2–1 ≈ 0.313 °K W–1 m2. We now recall that the feedback-sum b that we calculated earlier from the IPCC’s maximal values for each of the feedbacks it quantifies is precisely 3.2 W m–2 K–1. However, since the Bode equation [f = (1 – bκ)–1] → ∞ as b → [κ–1 = 3.2 W m–2 K–1], the feedback-sum b cannot approach 3.2 W m–2 K–1 without inducing an instability - in fact, a runaway greenhouse effect. Since no such effect has been observed or inferred in more than half a billion years of climate, since the concentration of CO2 in the Cambrian atmosphere approached 20 times today’s concentration, with an inferred mean global surface temperature no more than 7 °K above today’s (Figure 7), and since a feedback-induced runaway greenhouse effect would occur even in today’s climate where b >= 3.2 W m–2 K–1 but has not occurred, the IPCC’s high-end estimates of the magnitude of individual temperature feedbacks are very likely to be excessive, implying that its central estimates are also likely to be excessive. We regret that, owing to limitations of space, it was not possible for us to include this quantitative analysis in our article. All we had space for was the conclusion, which is that the IPCC’s chosen feedback maxima would generate a runaway greenhouse effect. As it is, even the sum of the IPCC’s central values for the temperature feedbacks that it quantifies is too close to the Bode instability for comfort: if those feedback values were correct, the climate would be likely to exhibit far less stability than it does.

2. Wentz et al 2007: This was thrown into doubt as follows in Interdecadal Variability of

Rainfall on a Warming Planet (Eos, Vol. 89, No. 21, 20 May 2008), by M. Previdi and B. Liepert:

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“We present evidence for large interdecadal variability in the global precipitation response to temperature changes, implying that the observed response during any given 20-year period may be unrepresentative of longer-term precipitation changes with global warming. Further, we suggest that the rapid increase in global precipitation observed during 1987–2006 occurred because decreases in atmospheric aerosol loading accompanied increases in greenhouse gases. These decreases in natural and anthropogenic aerosol concentrations should have contributed to an increase in global rainfall that is in addition to the increase caused by rising greenhouse gas amounts.”

It is precisely because there is so much uncertainty in relation to the quantification of temperature feedbacks that, in adjusting the value of the water-vapor feedback for purposes of calculation, we adopted an extremely cautious approach. Having satisfied ourselves that there were numerous papers casting doubt on the magnitude of the feedbacks cited in IPCC (2007), we derived our value for the temperature-feedback multiplier f from IPCC (2001), where a more conservative and less exaggerated approach had been adopted.

3. Paltridge et al 2009: The significance of this paper is dubious. A decrease in relative

humidity does not imply a decrease in specific humidity (which is what you would need for a negative feedback). Also, the result is based on one set of data only, and has not been confirmed in any other data analysis (ERA40, MERRA etc.), nor in satellite measurements (particular HIRS). It is most likely due to as yet unrecognized problems in the data, as happened when a few years ago when it was wrongly claimed that satellite data ‘proved’ that land-based temperature data was incorrect.

Our comment on the previous paragraph applies here too.

4. Spencer 2007 The comment that IPCC sees cloud feedback as strongly positive is false, as

the following extracts show.

IPCC 2007 WG1 Ch1 section 1.5.2: “..the amplitude and even the sign of cloud feedbacks was noted in the Third Assessment Report as highly uncertain, and this uncertainty was cited as one of the key factors explaining the spread in model simulations of future climate, for a given emissions scenario. ... Existing data have not yet brought about any reduction in the existing range of simulated cloud feedbacks.” IPCC 2007 WG1 ch 8 section 8.6.3.2.2: “... models exhibit a large range of global cloud feedbacks, with roughly half of the climate models predicting a more negative CRF (cloud radiative forcing) in response to global warming, and half predicting the opposite.”

Once again, we answer quantitatively, so as to settle the matter decisively. It is precisely because the IPCC, in the cited passages, explains very clearly the very large uncertainties in the cloud-albedo feedback that it is so puzzling

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that the IPCC’s own explicit quantification of the cloud-albedo feedback is so very strongly positive. We repeat the table of the IPCC’s feedback maxima –

Water vapor feedback 1.80 W m–2 K–1 Lapse rate feedback –0.58 W m–2 K–1 Surface albedo feedback 0.34 W m–2 K–1 Cloud albedo feedback 1.07 W m–2 K–1 CO2 feedback 0.57 W m–2 K–1 Total feedbacks b 3.20 W m–2 K–1

It will be seen that the cloud-albedo feedback is indeed strongly positive, as we correctly stated, and is second only to the water vapor feedback in magnitude.

Page 24 para 11. There are 4 issues here, 1 on misdirection, 1 concerning wrongful statements and 2 on outdated science. 1. There is a ‘tiny fraction’ of papers that examine climate sensitivity, because there are so

many other issues that need to be explored. In fact the number of papers on the issue is large, because it is an important issue. The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007) contained substantial sections in Chapters 8, 9 and 10 on climate sensitivity with over 80 different references, mostly subsequent to the Third Assessment Report, which itself contained many references to earlier work on climate sensitivity, as did the earlier IPCC Assessment Reports in turn.

It is agreed that we were right to say that the proportion of papers that examine climate sensitivity is tiny. Since the total number of published papers on the “global warming” question is obviously large (>20,000), it follows that even a small fraction of that total number will itself be a large number. However, until the question of climate sensitivity is better settled than at present, and until the anomalies, discrepancies and inconsistencies with real-world data just a few of which we outlined in our article are ironed out, strictly speaking there is no scientific basis for any of the papers on “global-warming” topics other than that of climate sensitivity: for it is upon climate sensitivity – the central question – that all other considerations depend.

2. The majority of papers certainly do NOT contradict the IPCC. I have cited one above

(Schneider von Deimling et al (2005)), the IPCC cite many others in their 4 major reports (1990, 1995, 2001, 2007), as well as in other reports. As noted already, IPCC used over 80 different papers in its most recent survey of climate sensitivity.

However, the IPCC cites only one paper in support of its central estimate of the CO2 radiative forcing (without providing any laboratory evidence to explain the value chosen, which is merely stated to have been reduced by 15% compared with the IPCC’s previous estimate to allow for overlaps against other forcings); two papers in support of its implicit quantification of the

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Planck parameter (neither of which gave values as high as that chosen by the IPCC, which is higher than any in the mainstream literature); and just one paper in support of its quantification of all temperature feedbacks (and that paper was written by the lead author of the IPCC chapter in question). Some of the difficulties with the IPCC’s chosen values, all of which appear to be considerable exaggerations, are explained in outline in our article, and in more detail in Monckton (2008). In short, the IPCC’s values for some – if not all – of the three parameters whose product is climate sensitivity are either close to or above the high end of the range encompassed in the literature.

3. Chylek 2008. This has been rebutted as follows in Comment on “Aerosol radiative forcing

and climate sensitivity deduced from the Last Glacial Maximum to Holocene transition”, by P. Chylek and U. Lohmann, Geophys. Res. Lett., 2008 by Hargreaves and Annan, Clim. Past Discuss., 4, 1319–1326, 2008:

“In a recent paper, Chylek and Lohmann (2008) used data from the Vostok ice core together with simple energy balance arguments to simultaneously estimate both the dust radiative forcing effect and the climate sensitivity, generating surprisingly high and low values for these respective parameters. However, their results depend critically on their selection of single unrepresentative data points from time series which exhibit a large amount of short-term variability, and are highly unstable with respect to other arbitrarily selected data points. When temporal averages are used in accordance with accepted norms within the paleoclimate community, the results obtained are entirely unremarkable and in line with previous analyses.”

In the highly contentious field of climate sensitivity, every paper that is published tends to be swiftly followed by another paper producing contrary results, demonstrating the numerous continuing uncertainties in providing reliable quantification. The IPCC’s method of evaluating climate sensitivity as the product of three variables is highly sensitive even to small exaggerations. Our analysis shows that there are good reasons to suppose that quite large exaggerations have been made. There is considerable, and continuing, support for our conclusions within the climatological community worldwide. There would very probably be more support still were it not almost a sacking offence in many universities to dare to question any of the conclusions of the IPCC. Also, many journals have adopted an editorial policy of refusing to publish any paper – however well founded – that questions any aspect of the imagined “consensus” about “global warming”.

4. Schwartz 2007. This paper was rebutted as follows in Comment on “Heat capacity, time

constant, and sensitivity of Earth’s climate system by S.E. Schwartz”, by Foster et al., Journal of Geophysical Research 113, 2008:

“6. Conclusions: Schwartz 2007 (S07) has proposed an analysis method based on approximating the climate system as a linear trend plus an autoregressive process of order 1, forced by random noise. There are strong physical arguments why this

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approach is likely to be an oversimplification, and as we have shown, the data contradict this hypothesis. The S07 analysis method generates strongly biased results when applied to a climate model of known sensitivity, and even when applied to the simple energy balance model S07 invokes to justify the approach. In fact the S07 method for estimating the time scale of an AR(1) process is strongly biased for realistic parameter values, and we have provided a simple demonstration and explanation of this effect. We suggest that such credibility checks, which are not difficult to perform, should be considered a first step when a novel analysis technique such as that presented by S07 generates results that are inconsistent with previous work. Previous research indicates that, when correctly analyzed, the 20th century trends do not strongly constrain climate sensitivity other than to rule out low values [e.g., Gregory et al., 2002; Forest et al., 2006]. The belief that climate sensitivity is likely to lie in the range 2–4.5 C and very unlikely less than 1.5 C [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, 2007] is supported by numerous diverse analyses of the climate system [e.g., Annan and Hargreaves, 2006; Hegerl et al., 2006] and we conclude that S07 presents no substantive basis to challenge this view.”

Our comment on the previous citation is relevant here too.

Page 24 para 12 (continued on page 25). There are 3 issues here. 1. Recent global temperatures have been exceptional within the last millennium, despite

persistent attempts by sceptics to deny this. In Europe, there have been several seasons since 2000 where truly exceptionally high temperatures have been recorded, e.g. the summer of 2003, and also much of 2006.

This statement is at odds with the peer-reviewed literature, in which papers written by more than 700 scientists from 400 institutions in 40 countries, using a variety of proxies for instrumental temperature, have demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that the mediaeval warm period was real, was global, and was warmer than the present. The IPCC’s own 1990 report reproduces a graph showing the mediaeval warm period as being appreciably warmer than the present. By 2001, however, the IPCC had abolished the mediaeval warm period, on the basis of a single highly dubious graph that has subsequently been destroyed in the peer-reviewed literature. To argue that high temperatures in two recent European summers indicate that the world is warmer now than at any time in the past 1000 years is an instance of the Aristotelian fallacy of converse accident – inappropriate argument from the particular to the general.

2. As noted earlier, the question of warming since 1975 should really be rephrased as

cooling from 1940-75. IPCC has shown that the pause in temperature rise was due to excessive air pollution (sulphates and aerosols).

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The more the warming from 1975-1998 (when it ceased) is attributed to a rebound from previous aerosol-driven cooling, the less that warming can be attributed to atmospheric CO2 enrichment, in which event the anthropogenic signal is even more obviously absent than if all of the warming of that period had been attributed to CO2. The implication is that climate sensitivity to CO2 is even less than it would otherwise be. However, it is not possible to separate out the causes of small internal fluctuations in the climate over relatively short periods, particularly when those fluctuations fall well within the natural variability of the climate, ruling out the need to attribute the fluctuations to any external cause. The IPCC, therefore, cannot “show” that the fall in temperature from 1940-1975 was attributable to sulphates and aerosols, though they no doubt made some contribution in one direction or another.

3. It is true that in the initial IPCC reports, solar influence was not given much attention, but

the 2007 IPCC Report considered it fully, and concluded that solar influence could not be the main reason for recent warming. The most recent analysis [Lean and Rind (2008), How natural and anthropogenic influences alter global and regional surface temperatures: 1889 to 2006, Geophys. Res. Lett., 35] concludes:

“According to this analysis, solar forcing contributed negligible long-term warming in the past 25 years and 10% of the warming in the past 100 years, not 69% as claimed by Scafetta and West [2008] (who assumed larger solar irradiance changes and enhanced climate response on longer time scales).”

For a user-friendly review that shows that the sun is not the cause of recent global warming see “Solar activity & climate: is the sun causing global warming?” at www.skeptical science.com

We do not rely upon websites for our science, and we certainly do not rely upon politicized websites which, as this one does, avowedly take only one side in the debate. We get our science either from the peer-reviewed literature and published data or directly from the ranking experts in particular subject areas. However, once again we are doubtful about the impartiality of the cited author. Judith Lean was the researcher brought in by the IPCC to produce arguments reducing the apparent influence of the Sun over the climate. Yet Hathaway et al. (2004) show a graph in which solar activity increased quite steadily and quite rapidly between the end of the Maunder or Grand Minimum in 1715 and the peak of the Grand Maximum in the 1950s-1960s. We know from historical accounts that the rivers Thames and Hudson froze over during the winter in the Grand Minimum, and have not done so since. If the solar influence on climate were limited solely to the changes in total irradiance over

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time, simple calculations demonstrate that such radical shifts in the climate could not have occurred, in which event we must conclude either that the coincidence of the Maunder Minimum and the freezing of the great rivers was just that, or that one or more factors tend to amplify the effect of changes in solar irradiance on climate, and perhaps to amplify them considerably. Two recently-published theories, for instance, hold that solar activity influences cloud formation, so that when there is less insolation there are more clouds, and vice versa. The more global temperatures fall, the more closely the overall global temperature trend returns to correspondence with trends in solar activity. The scientific literature contains many papers suggesting a larger role for the Sun than the IPCC finds it expedient to allow. Svensmark et al., supported by Nir Shaviv and other authors, have demonstrated a possible amplification of changes in solar activity caused by displacement of cosmic rays by the solar wind, so that when solar activity is high the cosmic rays are deflected and less cloud-nucleation occurs, amplifying the warming. An unsatisfactory attempt by Lockwood and Froehlich to rebut Svensmark’s argument was easily refuted by Svensmark and his co-author Friis-Christensen.

Page 25 paras 1 and 2: It is natural to expect solar physicists to be more interested in solar influence than other effects on climate change. However, it is significant that the International Astronomical Union does not reject anthropogenic global warming.

We do not “reject” anthropogenic “global warming” either. Like the International Astronomical Union and perhaps the majority of solar physicists, we consider that most, though not necessarily all, of the warming of the past half-century is natural.

Page 25 para 3: This is a variation on the statistical chicanery put forward on page 22 para 3. The year 2008 was somewhat cooler than preceding years. However, if Maynard and Monckton had compared 2008 with the year 2000, they would have produced the opposite result. Such an unstable method is not professionally acceptable. (It is notable that the first quarter of 2009 is warmer than 2008, and considerably warmer than the same period in 2000 for example, but I would not use that as a ‘proof’ of AGW).

We overlook the ad-hominem use of the phrase “statistical chicanery”. We have already explained that the global cooling of the past seven years, at a rate equivalent to 2 Celsius degrees/century, is significant in that, taken together with the previous warming, it restores the temperature trend to the long-run, 300-year rate, cancelling any trace of an anthropogenic impact on temperature increase worldwide.

Page 25 paras 4-5: This is fair comment. However, Maynard and Monckton do not cite the only study of global weather losses, which found a weak upward trend (S. Miller, R. Muir-

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Wood, A. Boissonade (Risk Management Solutions). (2008) Global Catalogue of Normalized Weather-Related Catastrophe Losses, in H.F. Diaz and R.J. Murnane (eds.), /Climate Extremes and Society/, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

The upward trend is sufficiently small to fall well within the natural variability that one would expect even in the total absence of any external climate forcing applied to the data. It would be irresponsible to suggest that the small uptrend found by Miller et al. was statistically significant, still more to suggest that the uptrend was caused by anthropogenic rather than natural factors.

Page 25 para 6: Al Gore is not a climate scientist, and showing that he made some errors does not invalidate the IPCC’s work.

The IPCC is not the only source, or even the primary or most reliable source, of information about the climate. We have already drawn attention to numerous serious defects in its analysis and in its procedures – defects which raise serious questions about the credibility and reliability of its findings, which are also daily contradicted in the real climate. We have shown how on more than one occasion the IPCC’s bureaucrats have rewritten the principal conclusions of its scientists so as to reverse the scientific findings. We have also shown how on various topics the IPCC’s conclusions do not, as claimed, reflect the consensus in the scientific literature. In many respects, therefore, the IPCC’s conclusions are as unsatisfactory and as invalid (if not quite as extreme) as those of Al Gore, and for a similar reason – like him, the IPCC is a rent-seeker that only enriches itself by maintaining that there is a problem where there is no problem, and exaggerating every result that lends support to its theory that there is a problem, while minimizing or even suppressing every result to the contrary.

Page 25 para 7. This paragraph is accurate but selective. The question of hurricane strength and climate change is still unresolved, but Maynard and Monckton do not mention that there are strong reasons to believe that hurricane intensity will increase with climate change, as found in Knutson and Tuleya, 2004, Impact of CO2-induced warming on simulated hurricane intensity and precipitation: Sensitivity to the choice of climate model and convective parameterization. J. Clim. 17, 3477-3495).

It was Kerry Emanuel on whom the IPCC had initially relied for its contention that the intensity of hurricanes might increase. However, he has recently recanted his opinion to a considerable degree. It is settled science that, outside the tropics, the reduction in the difference between extremes of heat and cold reported by the IPCC will tend to reduce storms and other extreme-weather events driven in large part not by the magnitude of absolute temperature but by temperature differentials.

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In the tropics, we suffer from one of the besetting problems of climatology at present – a shortage of long-time-series data. The data for tropical cyclones, including typhoons and hurricanes, are only comprehensive for the past 30 years, since satellites have been able to provide reasonably reliable global coverage. However, those data are not without interest. Though total tropical-storm activity has increased somewhat (but not by enough to raise serious doubts about whether the increase in activity falls out with the natural variability of the climate), the frequency of intense tropical cyclones, and separately the frequency of intense typhoons, has fallen throughout the 30-year period of satellite observation, and data from NOAA, shown to one of us by the director-general of the National Climatic Data Center at a Congressional hearing before which he and one of us testified recently, shows that there has been no trend in landfalling Atlantic hurricanes for 150 years. This record, unlike the accumulated cyclone-energy index, is reasonably reliable for the period 30-150 years ago, because the United States was able to keep a count of landfalling hurricanes even without the aid of satellites.

Secondly, Figure 11 does indeed record a record low at present, but the general relationship is clearly an increase with time, which Maynard and Monckton do not mention.

We did not demonstrate the linear-regression trend, which indeed does show an increase, but – as previously noted – the increase is small, unremarkable, and well within the natural variability of the climate. Also, the increase is to a very large extent an artefact of the start-point of the data.

Page 25 para 8. There are 4 points here. 3 are serious misrepresentation, and 1 is irrelevancy. 1. The increase in sealevel referred to here over 10,000 years includes the melting of ice-

sheets at the end of the last Ice Age!! It is highly misleading to compare that with very recent rates of sea level rise (SLR).

We overlook the ad-hominem remark about “serious misrepresentation”. It is not misleading accurately to state the facts, which is what we did. Indeed, it is instructive to state the facts. Precisely because very nearly all land-based ice that had existed during the last ice age has long since melted (the last glaciers having receded from Yorkshire in the “global warming” 9000 years ago, for instance), very little remains to melt, except at latitudes and altitudes so high that, as the IPCC itself states, several degrees of global temperature increase persisting for several millennia would be necessary to cause any further significant ice-melt. The only caveat entered by the IPCC concerns what it calls “dynamical ice flow”. However, examination by Moerner and by Ollier of the Greenland ice sheet shows that its weight has compressed the rock beneath, locking it into a bowl-shaped depression ringed with mountains. Glaciers flow up and over mountain passes to reach the sea. Given this geography, regrettably not mentioned either by the IPCC

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or by its co-laureate Al Gore, “dynamical ice flow” is most unlikely to occur in modern conditions, even after several degrees of further warming, if and when it occurs (Prof. Cliff Ollier, private communication to the authors).

2. The statement about sealevel rise (SLR) being static over the last 3 years is another

example of statistical manipulation. As with every natural phenomenon, SLR progresses unevenly. Over a long period the ‘wobbles’ disappear, but over a short period it is possible to find later observations that appear to reverse the longterm trend.

The extract and Figure below from the official Australian website on sealevel shows this clearly. (Source http://www.cmar.csiro.au/sealevel/index.html)

“HISTORICAL SEA LEVEL CHANGES – Last two decades: High quality measurements of (near)-global sea level have been made since late 1992 by satellite altimeters, in particular, TOPEX/Poseidon (launched August, 1992) and Jason-1 (launched December, 2001). This data has shown a more-or-less steady increase in Global Mean Sea Level (GMSL) of around 3.3 ± 0.4 mm/year over that period. This is more than 50% larger than the average value over the 20th century.”

The above graph clearly confirms that, as we said in our article, sea level as pleasured by the TOPEX and, more recently, JASON satellites has been rising at approximately 1 ft/century, not the 20 ft imagined by Al Gore (and criticised by a High Court Judge as an “Armageddon scenario ... not based on

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any scientific view”), and still less the 246 ft recently imagined by James Hansen. The graph also shows that in the past three years there has been little if any sea-level rise. Since we made both statements, and both are accurate, and the former puts the latter into perspective, there was no “misrepresentation”, whether serious or other.

3. It is false to say there is no sign of an acceleration in SLR. For example:

“A reconstruction of global sea level using tide-gauge data from 1950 to 2000 indicates a larger rate of rise after 1993 and other periods of rapid sea-level rise but no significant acceleration over this period. Here, we extend the reconstruction of global mean sea level back to 1870 and find a sea-level rise from January 1870 to December 2004 of 195 mm, a 20th century rate of sea-level rise of 1.7 ± 0.3 mm yr_1 and a significant acceleration of sea-level rise of 0.013 ± 0.006 mm yr_2. This acceleration is an important confirmation of climate change simulations which show an acceleration not previously observed. If this acceleration remained constant then the 1990 to 2100 rise would range from 280 to 340 mm, consistent with projections in the IPCC TAR.” Church, J. A., and N. J. White (2006), A 20th century acceleration in global sea-level rise, Geophys. Res. Lett. 33. L01602, doi:10.1029/2005GL024826.

In the cited passage, a sea-level rise of 0.013 mm/yr is claimed as “significant”, when, statistically speaking, it is near-vanishingly insignificant, falling well within the 0.3mm/yr error-bars. Also, as the graph in the previous point shows, it was in 1993 that satellites began measuring sea-level rise that had previously been indicated by tide-gauges. We have consulted Professor Niklas Moerner, who has published 520 papers on sea-level rise in his 40-year career and also chaired the INQUA commission. He is currently conducting a very detailed analysis of sea-level rise in the Maldives, whose preliminary report (Moerner, 2004) indicates no sea-level rise at all there compared with 1250 years ago. While it would not be appropriate to argue from this result that no sea level rise has occurred globally, Professor Moerner’s opinion is that the apparent increase in the rate of sea-level rise from 8 inches in the 20th century to 1 ft/century since 1993 is largely an artefact of the change in the method of mensuration.

4. It is true that Al Gore exaggerated the likely speed of sea rise. As previously noted, he is NOT a climate scientist, and does not represent IPCC. The High Court judge who reviewed his film “An Inconvenient Truth” considered that it was substantially correct, and allowed it to be released for educational purposes after nine errors were corrected.

One of the nine errors which the Judge insisted should be corrected was Al Gore’s flagrantly-exaggerated sea-level rise. On any view, there is neither misrepresentation nor irrelevancy here.

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Page 25 para 9. There are 3 points here. 2 are incorrect, and 1 is irrelevant. 1. As noted earlier Hansen’s ‘prediction’ was a conditional one, relating to the excessive

combustion of fossil fuels, and is shared by many other reputable scientists.

Hansen’s prediction, made on the IPCC’s A2 “business-as-usual” scenario, was a flagrant exaggeration entirely out of line with the IPCC’s estimates of future sea-level rise. We know of no reputable scientist who believes sea level will rise by 246 feet if we continue to burn fossil fuels at the present rate. There is neither error nor irrelevancy in what we said.

2. A debate of undergraduates in one university is hardly the basis for deciding the science

of SLR.

One should not dismiss the opinions of the young merely because they are young. And we cited the debate in this context because Professor Moerner was one of the speakers.

3. Moerner’s work has been extensively rebutted in Comment on “Estimating future sea

level change from past records” by Nils-Axel Mörner by R.S. Nerem et al. in Global and Planetary Change 55 (2007) 358–360. as follows:

‘We feel compelled to respond to the recent article by Mörner (2004) because he makes several major errors in his analysis, and as a result completely misinterprets the record of sea level change from the TOPEX/Poseidon (T/P) satellite altimeter mission. One major criticism we have with the paper is that Mörner does not include a single reference to any altimeter study, all of which refute his claim that there is no apparent change in global mean sea level (GMSL) [see Cazenave and Nerem, (2004) for a summary]. The consensus of all other researchers looking at the T/P and Jason data is that GMSL has been rising at a rate of 3.0 mm/year (Fig. 1) over the last 13 years (3.3 mm/year when corrected for the effects of glacial isostatic adjustment (Tamisiea et al., 2005)). ‘.. the statement by Mörner that “This means that this data set does not record any general trend (rising or falling) in sea level, just variability around zero plus the temporary ENSO perturbations” is completely false and is based on his erroneous data processing. Mörner’s paper completely misrepresents the results from the T/P mission, and does discredit to the tremendous amount of work that has been expended by the Science Working Team to create a precise, validated, and calibrated sea level data set suitable for studies of climate variations. Finally, Mörner ignores substantial other oceanographic (e.g. Levitus et al., 2001; Antonov et al., 2002; Munk, 2003; Willis et al., 2004) and cryospheric (e.g. Dyurgerov and Meier, 2000; Rignot et al., 2003; Krabill et al., 2004; Thomas et al., 2004) evidence of sea level rise which corroborate the altimeter observations.” Moerner is totally at odds with satellite data, as shown in the Figure relating to the comments on Page 25 para 8.

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We have consulted Professor Moerner, who tells us that he was surprised when he saw the published data from the TOPEX mission. Therefore he approached those who had gathered the data and asked them to explain how they had processed and adjusted the raw data, which appeared to him to show no increase in sea level above the rate previously inferred by tide-gauges. Their reply was, “If we had not adjusted the data as we did, it would have been evident that there has been no acceleration in the rate of sea-level rise.”

Page 25 para 10 (continued on page 26). There are 2 serious errors here. 1. Moerner’s work is seriously flawed. It was rebutted in Sea level rise at tropical Pacific and

Indian Ocean Islands by Church, White and Hunter (2006) in the journal Global and Planetary Change as follows:

“In the Indian Ocean, the tide-gauge records at the Maldives indicate large rates of relative sea-level rise in agreement with Singh et al. (2001) and Woodworth (2005), and in disagreement with Morner et al. (2004). ...

“For the Maldives themselves, the estimated rate of sea-level rise over the 52 year period is close to 1 mm/yr and, in contrast to Morner et al. (2004), we find that there is no indication of a fall in sea-level of 20 to 30 cm at any time in the last 30 yrs (which would imply a rate of fall of between 7 and 10 mm/yr over 30 yrs, and double that over the "1970s to early 1980s" specified by Morner et al. (2004)). This drop in sea-level has also been shown to be inconsistent with geological data (Woodroffe, 2005; Kench et al., 2005).”

We have consulted Professor Moerner, who tells us that his team’s examination of sea-level rise in the Maldives, using a multitude of methods, is one of the most thorough-going that has ever been conducted. He also told us that a 40-year-old tree just feet from the ocean had not been destroyed by the supposedly “rising” sea levels during that period, and that, when a team of Australian environmentalists had seen it standing there as a mute witness to the failure of sea level to rise, they had uprooted it. He had come upon it lying on the ground, still in leaf, and had enquired locally to find out who had destroyed it.

2. The assertion that coral always grows faster than the sea can rise is wrong, as shown in

the paper Rapid sea-level rise and reef back-stepping at the close of the last interglacial highstand by Blanchon et al, Nature 458, 881-884, 16 April 2009, and in any case ignores the fact that another major problem for coral is higher sea temperature. There have been extensive incidents of coral bleaching due to that factor in recent years.

An extensive review of the literature by Dr. Craig Idso provides several papers stating that corals are more than capable of growing towards the light at a rate well in excess of sea-level rise. Otherwise, after 10,000 years of very rapid sea-level rise, it would be truly an astonishing coincidence that so

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many coral atolls are only a fraction above sea level, and very few are a fraction below it. As for temperature, the calcite corals first existed in the Cambrian era, and the aragonite corals in the Triassic era, when there was approximately 20 times as much carbon dioxide in the atmosphere than today, and global temperatures are thought to have been about 7 Celsius degrees warmer than today. The coral bleaching that occurred in 1998 was the result of the Great El Nino Southern Oscillation of that year. Studies of older corals have shown that in the two previous Great El Ninos of the past 300 years similar bleaching occurred: this is a natural defence mechanism, which does the corals no long-term harm.

Page 26 para 1. There are 5 points here. 1. Arctic winter ice in 2008/9 was well below the extent in 1979, 30 years ago. Further its

depth is also much reduced, so the volume is well down, contrary to what Maynard and Monckton imply.

A direct comparison of the satellite images of Arctic sea-ice extent in the winter shows a small diminution that is, on any view, well within natural climate variability. As to the thickness of the ice, this is highly variable, and the notion that it has become thinner depends chiefly upon incomplete and not always accurate observations made by US submarines in the decades before satellite observation commenced. The sea-ice extent in late April 2009 in the Arctic set a nine-year record high, according to IARC/JAXA. A recent paper has also found that the thickness of the Arctic sea ice is currently considerably greater than had been thought. Once again, we are at the mercy of incomplete observations: but the observations that we do have do not show a serious problem.

2. It is true that global polar sea ice is roughly the same as it was in 1979. However, the

balance between Arctic and Antarctic is quite different, and when the depth is accounted for, the volume is well down. The differences in geographical distribution and overall mass are bound to affect the climate system.

Our article provided enough evidence to allow readers to conclude that, while summer sea-ice extent in the Arctic in 2007/8 was appreciably down on the long-term trend (a factor that cannot of course be attributed to “global warming”, since the event in question had been preceded by six years’ global cooling), sea-ice extent in the Antarctic had increased. No reliable estimate of the total volume of sea ice has been obtained, owing to problems of mensuration. Also, on any view, it is not possible to blame a probably-

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temporary change in the distribution of sea ice as between the Arctic and the Antarctic on “global warming”.

3. Maynard and Monckton cite two papers to support their assertion that land ice in

Greenland and Antarctica has been accumulating. The first paper (Doran et al., 2002) relates to temperature in Antarctica, not ice volume, and in any case its assertion that temperature has been falling there is now overturned by Steig et al Warming of the Antarctic ice-sheet surface since the 1957 International Geophysical Year in Nature 22 January 2009, 457, pp459-462.

The paper by Steig et al. has been examined in detail and has been widely and justifiably criticized for its use of numerous dubious statistical techniques, not the least of which is the invention of temperature data at points where, for obvious reasons, properly-gridded data are extremely sparse. The conclusion of the paper directly conflicts with the gradual increase in the mean extent of Antarctic sea ice that has been observed throughout the 30 years of the satellite era. It is not intuitively obvious how a warming Antarctic could lead to more rather than less sea ice. Are we to infer from this that the decrease in Arctic summer sea ice points to a cooling there? It is also evident that one of the authors of the Stieg paper was the author of the biased and discredited “hockey-stick” graph that had purported to fly in the face of a quarter of a century of detailed worldwide proxy temperature records by falsely abolishing or diminishing the mediaeval warm period.

4. The second paper Johannessen et al, 2005 related to an increase in ice volume in

Greenland. It has now been reversed by Recent Sea-Level Contributions of the Antarctic and Greenland Ice Sheets by Shepherd and Wingham in Science 16 March 2007: Vol. 315. no. 5818, pp. 1529 – 1532 as follows:

“After a century of polar exploration, the past decade of satellite measurements has painted an altogether new picture of how Earth's ice sheets are changing. As global temperatures have risen, so have rates of snowfall, ice melting, and glacier flow. Although the balance between these opposing processes has varied considerably on a regional scale, data show that Antarctica and Greenland are each losing mass overall. Our best estimate of their combined imbalance is about 125 gigatons per year of ice, enough to raise sea level by 0.35 millimeters per year. This is only a modest contribution to the present rate of sea-level rise of 3.0 millimeters per year. However, much of the loss from Antarctica and Greenland is the result of the flow of ice to the ocean from ice streams and glaciers, which has accelerated over the past decade. In both continents, there are suspected triggers for the accelerated ice discharge—surface and ocean warming, respectively—and, over the course of the 21st century, these processes could rapidly counteract the snowfall gains predicted by present coupled climate models.”

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The methodology used by Johannessen et al. – satellite interferometry – is well established and robustly calibrated. The same cannot yet be said of the gravitational-anomaly methodology chiefly relied upon by Shepherd and Wingham. Problems in calibrating satellite gravitational-anomaly measurements go well beyond the mere novelty of the technique. All satellite measurements depend upon a reference geoid: however, the gravitational-anomaly method is particularly sensitive to, and is easily rendered inaccurate by, tectonic and isostatic processes within the Earth’s crust, which cause some regions of the Earth’s surface to rise and others to fall. For instance, despite repeated predictions that Bangladesh might lose much of its low-lying land-mass to the sea as it rose, it is in fact the land that has risen, partly through tectonic adjustment and partly through sedimentation, adding some 70,000 km2 to the land area of Bangladesh over the past 30 years. In order to resolve the conflict between the well-tried satellite-altimetry method and the more problematic gravitational-anomaly method when applied to the Greenland ice sheet, we obtained the now-declassified station data for the US DEW-line DYE early-warning radar stations. The photographs of two of the stations, standing proud of the ice during their operational life and now surrounded by a rapid and continuing accumulation of snow and firn, are worth more than 1000 graphs.

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5. Mountain glaciers- Maynard and Monckton falsely state that there has been no acceleration in the rate of glacier recession in the last 30 years. In fact the situation is correctly reported in Global Glacier Changes: Facts and Figures by the World Glacier Monitoring Service (2008) as follows:

“Early measurements indicate strong ice losses as early as the 1940s and 1950s, followed by a moderate ice loss between 1966 and 1985, and accelerating ice losses until present. The global average annual mass loss of more than half a metre during the decade of 1996 to 2005 represents twice the ice loss of the previous decade (1986–95) and over four times the rate of the decade from 1976 to 1985. “In 2006, a new record annual mass loss was measured on the reference glaciers under long-term observation. The average annual melting rate of mountain glaciers appears to have doubled after the turn of the millennium, in comparison with the already accelerated melting rates observed in the two decades before. The previous record loss in the year 1998 has already been exceeded three times, i.e., in the years 2003, 2004 and 2006, with the losses in 2004 and 2006 being almost twice as high as the previous 1998 record loss.”

The report noted that within the overall retreat there were some localised temporary advances:

“Prominent periods of regional mass gains are found in the Alps in the late 1970s and early 1980s and in coastal Scandinavia and New Zealand in the 1990s.”

We consulted Professor M.I. Bhat, of the Indian Geological Survey, who has available to him one of the longest and most substantial datasets for mountain-glaciers – the 200-year record of advances and retreats among reference glaciers in the 9,575 glaciers that debouch from the Himalayas into India. In the Professor’s opinion, the changes in glacial advance and retreat in recent decades are not untypical in the 200-year context. Professor Syun-Ichi Akasofu, in a private communication to one of us in 2008, also pointed out that glacial recession had begun in the late 19th century, and had continued at a near-uniform rate thereafter. For instance, half of the “snows of Kilimanjaro” – the Furtwängler glacier at the summit - had already ablated before 1936, when Hemingway wrote his book of that name. It does not seem reasonable that we should be taken to task on the one hand for having presented a seven-year record of global temperatures, and on the other for having not given prominence to a similarly short record of glacier retreat. It also seems somewhat counter-intuitive that a recent recession in glaciers can be implicitly blamed on “global warming”, after seven years of global cooling.

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Furthermore, intensive studies of Alpine glaciers have shown that in the mediaeval warm period many currently-existing glaciers did not exist, and others that have recently receded had similarly receded in that period. Recent Alpine glacial recessions have revealed mediaeval mountain passes, forests, and even an entire silver mine whose existence had not been suspected because they had disappeared under advancing ice as the mediaeval warm period gave place to the Little Ice Age. Also, the vast majority of the world’s 160,000+ mountain glaciers are in Antarctica, where (pace Stieg et al.) half a century of global cooling has done little to cause them to retreat.

Page 26 para 2. There are 2 points here. One is an irrelevance, and the other is a serious falsehood.

1. It is accepted by all serious scientists including IPCC, that the decline of the glaciers on Kilimanjaro is not due to AGW. This is due to local factors. The widespread decline of glaciers is due to AGW.

Al Gore, however, has repeatedly ascribed the ablation of the Furtwängler glacier to “global warming”: reasonably, therefore, we corrected this error because it is widely believed.

2. The Rutgers database referred to by Maynard and Monckton shows clearly that

Northern hemisphere snowcover did not reach record levels in the winter 2007/8, and fell considerably in winter 2008/9. In all other three seasons of the year, snow cover is reducing very rapidly (see Figures below).

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We did not say that the Rutgers’ snow-cover database showed 2007/8 as a record year for northern-hemisphere snow cover. We did, however, say that 2007/8 was a record year, as it was on some measures, and as it very nearly was on the Rutgers’ graph, which shows no trend over the period of record. Furthermore, we mentioned that 40% of the world’s population depended upon northern-hemisphere snow cover [specifically, Eurasian snow cover] for their water supplies. Here is the relevant Rutgers’ graph –

Page 26 para 3: There is one significant mis-statement, and one misdirection. 1. Maynard and Monckton assert that there can only have been 30 years of AGW. In fact ,

since it is the cumulative emissions that matter, the effect has been present for much longer. IPCC reported that AGW was masked by aerosols and sulphates from around

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1940 to 1975. Recent research even suggests that pre-industrial agricultural activity created an unrecognised AGW thousands of years ago (Ruddiman, 2006), though the IPCC has not commented on this, as it appeared too late for the Fourth Assessment Report to review properly.

This point has already been extensively addressed above. We repeat that the IPCC’s own formula demonstrates that the warming effect of CO2 enrichment over the 34 years since 1975 was as great as its warming effect over the 225 years between the onset of the industrial revolution in 1750 and 1975.

2. It is true that the mere fact of warming does not mean that it is AGW. However, the facts

that the atmosphere has changed, and that the warming is in accordance with models of AGW are conclusive, and led IPCC to declare that AGW is occurring.

It is true, as we stated in our article, that one-ten-thousandth more of the atmosphere is occupied by CO2 today than in 1750; though there was 20 times more CO2 in the atmosphere in the Cambrian and Triassic eras. To assume that merely because we have altered the composition of the atmosphere and that there has subsequently been warming the former must have caused the latter is the elementary Aristotelian fallacy of post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc – the “after, therefore because” fallacy. As previously discussed, there has been no acceleration in the warming rate over the past 300 years. Specifically, the rapid warming between 1975 and 1998 was at precisely the same rate as that from 1860-1880 and from 1910-1940, so there is no anthropogenic signal in the record at all. If, all other things being equal, there would have been no warming over the 150 years of the instrumental record, then one would have expected a rising warming rate to take into account the very rapid rise in CO2 concentration over the past half-century. This is what the models predict. It has not occurred. Furthermore, the IPCC has not merely “declared that anthropogenic global warming is occurring” – it has declared that with 90% confidence more than half of the warming of the past 50 years (in practice, more than half of the warming of the period 1975-1998, for either side of that period there was cooling) is attributable to humankind. As previously demonstrated by careful quantitative analysis, there is no scientific basis for that assertion, which was arrived at by political representatives after a show of hands.

Page 26 para 4. There are 1 omission, and 2 serious errors here. 1. Maynard and Monckton refer to a ‘clumsy attempt by IPCC in 2001 to abolish the

Medieval Warm period’. It is significant that they omit any reference to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report (2007), which after careful analysis, including the prominent sceptical papers, reaffirmed that the medieval warm period did not exist.

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The IPCC’s refusal to admit its mistake in abolishing the medieval warm period is one of the chief reasons why it no longer retains any real scientific credibility. As previously noted, some 700 scientists from more than 400 institutions in 40 countries have produced evidence in the peer-reviewed literature to the effect that the mediaeval warm period was real, was global, and was appreciably warmer than the present. The US National Research Council recently issued a graph demonstrating temperatures over the past 1000 years. This graph, combining results from half a dozen sources, restores the mediaeval warm period, though it continues to pretend – contrary to the overwhelming evidence of the peer-reviewed literature and of history – that the mediaeval warm period was a little cooler than the present, rather than appreciably warmer –

In studying this graph, we noticed that – contrary to the convention that paler colours are superimposed on darker colours for clarity – the pale blue exponential curve truncated before 1500 had been placed beneath the other curves, which, unlike it, are stochastic. We investigated. We found that the pale blue curve was from a paper by Huang et al., who had assembled temperature proxy data from more than 6000 boreholes worldwide, allowing them to provide a temperature record for the past 20,000 years. Naturally, we wondered why the National Research Council had chosen to truncate this data, so that the first 19,500 years were discarded. We found that McIntyre and McKitrick (2005) had applied Bayesian probabilities to Huang’s data for the past 1000 years (see the monochrome lower panel), whereupon the mediaeval warm period at once becomes evident.

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2. No source or details are given for the statement that 670 scientists have found the medieval warm period to be probably warmer than present. It is certainly true to say that there was a period in medieval times when temperatures were as warm as the mid-20th century, but those conditions did not prevail globally at one period.

References to all the relevant papers, with a brief description of each paper, will be found on the mediaeval-warm-period database at www.co2 science.org. Each cited paper is fully referenced on that website. Given uncertainties in the data, it is not possible to say that the mediaeval warming was not global. The overwhelming evidence from the data is to the effect that it was.

3. The IPCC’s findings on the medieval warm period are based on careful measurement and

analysis of past data, not ‘mere computer games’. They are based on a large range of measurements from boreholes, pollen, lake deposits, tree rings and other techniques. This can be easily checked by consulting the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, Working group I, Chapter 6 (2007). It carefully considers the issues, including the many criticisms of the IPCC position raised after the Third Assessment Report (2001) (the so-called ‘hockey-stick debate’), and it concludes that “some regions may have experienced even warmer conditions than those that prevailed throughout the 20th century”, but the evidence did not support a global medieval warm period that exceeded current global temperatures.

Unfortunately, the IPCC did not consider the vast majority of the peer-reviewed literature that is available on this subject. Therefore it had no basis for its conclusion that some but not all regions were warmer than the present.

Page 26 para 5. There are 4 issues here. 1. Maynard and Monckton conclude that catastrophic climate change is gross

exaggeration. This is based on seriously flawed analysis as discussed above, and runs contrary to mainstream science as reported in ‘Abrupt Climate Change’ by the US National Academy of Sciences (2002), and the findings of a major conference at the Hadley Centre ‘Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change’ in February 2005, and many other sources, including the International Congress on Climate Change held by the International Alliance of Research Universities (IARU) at Copenhagen in March 2009. More than 2,000 participants were registered. The congress received almost 1,600 scientific contributions from researchers from more than 70 countries. Its conclusions included the statement that ‘Rapid, sustained, and effective mitigation based on coordinated global and regional action is required to avoid "dangerous climate change" regardless of how it is defined.’

Our conclusion that there is no justification whatsoever for the notion that a relatively small enrichment of the atmosphere with carbon dioxide could cause “catastrophic” climate change is based solely upon our own

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calculations and upon the peer-reviewed literature as studied by Schulte (2008), who found that not one of 539 papers on “global climate change” published since 2004 had provided any evidence whatsoever of any catastrophic consequence of any kind arising from any anthropogenic influence on the climate. That, as we have said above, is the true “consensus”: though, of course, science is not done by consensus, which is why we also made our own careful calculations and verified them against satellite observations, confirming that the influence of CO2 concentration on temperature will be small, harmless, and generally beneficial.

2. Maynard and Monckton maintain that IPCC is driven by politics (presumably the

environmentalist/anti-capitalist lobbies). As indicated earlier, IPCC is controlled by politicians, not the other way round. Furthermore, in every country , the Environment Ministry is weak compared to its counterparts like Treasury, Industry, Home Affairs, and Labour, with their greater influence on financial flows and their vested interests in the status quo.

In this necessarily lengthy and detailed refutation of the attempted rebuttal of our short article, we have provided detailed evidence of the politicization of the IPCC process. We did not and do not presume to blame the politicization on any particular faction, for our article was entirely scientific, not political. Though there is no doubt that anti-capitalists and environmentalists have done their best to penetrate and influence the IPCC, and though it is evident from analyses of the authorship of the IPCC’s chapters that a surprising number of non-scientists and environmentalists were among the authors, it is also possible that the IPCC – like any other bureaucracy – is first and foremost concerned with ensuring its own survival. In short, like many of the other scientific bodies that have clambered aboard the rickety “global-warming” bandwagon just as the wheels are falling off, the IPCC may be a mere rent-seeker. Or not, as the case may be. Our article was not concerned with such matters. It was concerned with the manifestly dubious science behind the “global warming” scare. We are content that readers of the Journal should read the attempted rebuttal of our article, and this refutation of that attempted rebuttal, and should decide for themselves whether and to what extent it is justifiable to shut down five-sixths of the West’s economic activity in the name of Saving The Planet.

3. Maynard and Monckton maintain that the IPCC science is deficient. In fact, I have

demonstrated repeatedly that their own arguments are gravely in error or highly selective.

And we have demonstrated, in great detail, that our arguments are sound, are quantitatively verifiable, and are also verifiable by reference to the published data and to the peer-reviewed literature.

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4. Maynard and Monckton argue for no action until temperature has risen by 1 degree. Given the inertia in the climate system, it would be very foolish to follow that advice. By that time the latent warming and disruption to natural systems could be very dangerous, and unstoppable.

We have demonstrated quantitatively that the “inertia” in the climate system – properly speaking, the difference between the transient and equilibrium temperature responses to a given external perturbation or “forcing” – is small, even on the IPCC’s greatly exaggerated estimates of the effect of greenhouse-gas enrichment on temperature. Therefore, the responsible policy is to wait and see whether global mean surface temperatures start to rise at a rate appreciably greater than that which has been measured or inferred over the past 300 years. So far, that has not begun to happen, and, as we have shown, on all measures global temperature has not risen in a statistically-significant sense in the 14 years since 1995, and has been falling rapidly for seven and a half years since late 2001.

Page 26 para 6. There are 5 issues here. 1. Maynard and Monckton state that the current slight warming is benign. This is true for

some people, but there are many others who are disadvantaged, through no fault of their own, particularly in developing countries. More importantly, the path we are on will not simply remain at current temperatures, but will accelerate to dangerous levels soon.

It is settled science that a little warming is generally beneficial. Indeed, an interesting study by the World Wide Fund for Nature shows that polar bear populations have grown fastest where Arctic warming has been fastest, have declined where Arctic temperature has declined, and have otherwise remained stable. Even the polar bears, it seems prefer warmer weather to colder, which is perhaps why so many of them – after the two very cold recent winters – have been observed coming closer to human habitations in search of food. Much was made of the European heatwave of August 2003, which killed 35,000 people across the continent. However, not long beforehand a single cold snap had killed almost as many in the UK alone. It is cold that is dangerous: a little warming, by contrast, is – as we have said – generally beneficial. Naturally, the warming will not necessarily be even, and some regions will be affected in ways different to others: but the notion that the small warming, well within natural variability, that has occurred over the past 300 years is somehow uniquely dangerous is simply nonsense. It is the equivalent of saying that the temperature in, say, 1975 was the best of temperatures in the best of all possible worlds – a Candidean rodomontade that has only to be stated to be seen as entirely lacking in any scientific basis.

2. The longterm return of an ice age is indeed an issue, but we have thousands of years to

prepare for that, and only perhaps a decade to avert dangerous AGW.

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The notion that we have “only perhaps a decade to avert dangerous anthropogenic global warming” is a mere political slogan. The IPCC first made that statement in 1989, rapidly echoed by Al Gore. Two decades later, the world still has “a decade to avert dangerous anthropogenic global warming”. It is easy to prove that the world has longer than that. First, there has been a 14-year period without any warming, and, in the past seven and a half years, there has been cooling. That cooling must be reversed before our ten-year clock even begins to tick. But, more importantly, we know from the paleoclimatological record that most of the past 10,000 years were warmer than the present: yet here we all are, and the planet did not fry. We hope that our article will have helped to restore some sense of proportion in the minds of those of the Journal’s readers who have been exposed to the scientifically-unwarrantable and exaggerated apocalypticism of the IPCC and its adherents. Nor should we consider that we have “thousands of years” to plan for the next Ice Age. Each of the last four interglacial warm periods persisted for only 5000 years at temperatures at least as high as the present. The current interglacial warm period has already persisted for more than twice that length of time, though nobody knows why. It is also plainly evident from the ice-core temperature reconstructions that the termination of the last Ice Age, at the end of the Younger Dryas cooling event, occurred in as little as three years. There is no reason to suppose that the very small perturbation of the climate that we may have caused could be significant enough to cause a very substantial uptick in global temperatures in so very short a period: but it is entirely possible that an Ice Age could commence very quickly.

3. Maynard and Monckton argue that action is detrimental (presumably referring to

measures to reduce the use of fossil fuel). In fact there are many co-benefits associated with cleaner, efficient energy- for example energy security, clean air, jobs.

There are many real and pressing environmental problems, such as deforestation, pollution, resource depletion, and the encroachment of growing human settlements on fragile habitats. In order to address these real problems, it is vital that scarce financial resources should not be wasted on attempting to address non-problems such as “global warming”. Of course cleaner, cheaper, more efficient energy is a good thing. So is motherhood and apple pie. But none of these things justifies the deployment of bogus, exaggerated pseudo-science in the promotion of what is no more than a global scare perpetrated by a tiny, scientific-technological elite and perpetuated by a cloud of useful idiots in politics, academe, the media and commerce.

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4. Yes there is a danger that insurers could alienate clients by acting to take account of climate change IF they do not explain why they are acting. Insurers need to plan for a continuous progressive campaign of reviewing climatic risks, and also investment strategies to allow for climate change. Not to do that will betray future policyholders when risks become uninsurable, and savers when fossil-fuel investments and coastal real estate lose value.

Allowing for climate change – in whatever direction it may occur – has always been a province of the insurance market. However, once the continuing failure of global temperatures to rise in accordance with the absurd predictions of the IPCC and its supporters has demonstrated that our not particularly difficult or contentious calculations are correct, clients who have been inveigled into paying additional premiums on the excuse of the “global warming” scare will decide to sue insurers who have profited by exploiting that scare as a pretext for hiking premiums baselessly. It is important, therefore, that the insurance market should not be too enthusiastic in its public endorsement of the politicized fatuities of the IPCC.

5. Maynard and Monckton conclude by appealing to the facts. As shown here, they have

gravely distorted the truth.

We have carefully researched the “global warming” chimera. We have read hundreds of scientific papers. We have consulted many leading spokesmen for all sides in the scientific discussion that rages worldwide on the subject. One of us has presented dozens of university lectures and high-level physics-faculty seminars. We have diligently performed our own calculations, seeking to verify the UN’s results. And, after these careful researches, we have told the truth as best we can. If that truth is inconvenient to some, so be it. But our results are readily verifiable. Like Dr. Arata Kochi, announcing on 15 September 2006 the end of the 40-year-long ban on the use of DDT against malaria that the entire global political establishment had endorsed (with the consequent loss of the lives of 40 million people, most of them children), we find that “In this field, politics usually predominates, but now it is time to take a stand on the science and the data.” Amen to that!

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Draft letter to the Journal of the Chartered Insurance Institute, May 2009

CLIMATE FOOLISH Sir,

Thank you for allowing us the traditional academic courtesy of replying to the letters from Dr. Andrew Dlugolecki, the author of the CII’s Coping with Client Change report, and from Andrew Torrance, the chairman of “Climate Wise”, about our recent article in the Journal saying that “global warming” is not a global crisis. Since Dr. Dlugolecki has commented on our article in detail, we have produced a comprehensive response that has been posted on www.scienceandpublicpolicy.org. Mr. Torrance makes a regrettable ad-hominem attack, comparing us indirectly to flat-earthers. He offers no evidence for his assertion that those who regard the “official” estimates of the anthropogenic effect on the climate as exaggerated are “a tiny minority in comparison to the wide consensus among climate scientists right round the world”. Even if science were done by “consensus” – and it was Aristotle who first pointed out that the argument from “consensus” is what we now call the argumentum ad populum, the egregious logical fallacy of argument from head-counting – the largest-ever survey of world scientific opinion, among scientists holding B.Sc, Ph.D or equivalent degrees found that more than 31,000 disagreed with the supposed “consensus”. There are two reasons why these scientists are not more vocal. First, many institutions are run by people who have decided, on the basis of no credible evidence, that “global warming” – now known as “climate change” – is dangerous and that it is our fault. They brook no argument and are intolerant of contrary research. Secondly, there is now a worldwide funding gravy-train that is spending US$5 billion annually on so-called “climate research”. A scientist wishing to gain access to this cornucopia of cash must look for a “global warming” connection, no matter how tenuous, and must bury any doubts. On just one aspect of the science – whether today’s temperatures are “unprecedented in the past 1000 years”, some 700 scientists from more than 400 institutions in 40 countries have published papers in the past two decades, providing evidence for the fact, denied by the IPCC and its climate-foolish adherents, that the mediaeval warm period was real, was global, and was appreciably warmer than the present. Similar dissent is evident in all other crucial aspects of the official “global warming” theory. Readers of The Journal should be left in absolutely no doubt that there is no need whatsoever to combat “climate change”. The climate has always changed, and always will, but the human influence is now proven to be small, harmless, and generally beneficial, as our comprehensive refutation of Dr. Dlugolecki’s attempted rebuttal of our article demonstrates in compelling detail. For readers who find the depth of analysis challenging, let us remember some key facts:

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The “rapid and accelerating” warming claimed by alarmists and the mainstream media simply does not appear in the temperature records since the 1950s. The changes are well within the limits of natural variation, as a recent Parliamentary answer by Lord Hunt made clear.

CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but it is present in trace quantities and its warming effects are dwarfed by water vapor, clouds, oceans, and non-radiative transfers, notably the dynamics of the heat transfer process from the equator to the Poles.

Man-made CO2 is around 5% or less of the annual flux of CO2 within the Earth-troposphere system. The sea contains at least 50 times more CO2 than the atmosphere.

There has been no statistically-significant “global warming” for 14 years, and there has been rapid global cooling for more than seven years.

All of the alarmists’ projections of impending doom are based upon computer climate models that have little skill in actually forecasting the climate. They are based upon the assumptions that CO2 is a significant climate forcing and that our understanding of climate processes can be resolved in these models. By the IPCC’s own admission, cloud formation and precipitation cannot yet be modeled (we do not even know the sign of the influence from clouds). Yet modellers have the arrogance to make projections about climate 100 years hence. Kyoto was a political gesture that even warmists accept will make no discernible impact on the climate. To understand the real impact of the bidding war to reduce CO2 emissions by ever greater amounts, read Keith Rattie’s speech at www.wattsupwiththat.com. We cannot think of a single challenge facing humanity that less urgently requires our attention than “global warming”. The suggestion that “global warming” is the greatest threat to humanity is cruel nonsense that overlooks the sufferings of the millions of poor people in the third world who die each year as a result of malaria, foul water, AIDS, smoke from wood fires and all the other by-products of poverty. Yours faithfully, Christopher Monckton of Brenchley Paul Maynard, FCII

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