Lord Christopher Walter Monckton on Climate Change |
|
OurBlook interview with the Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
VMB: Since it appeared implausible that a higher percentage of those polled believed that anthropogenic “global warming” posed a “very great danger” than believed its occurrence had been substantiated, I obtained a report of the survey results. Only 41 percent of the geophysicists and meteorologists surveyed said they were involved in any aspect of global climate science. Also, 72 percent of those surveyed said they had never or almost never published any papers on the subject. Furthermore, 64 percent said they regarded Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth as “somewhat reliable” or “very reliable." However, only six months before the survey was conducted, a High Court Judge found nine “errors” in the movie so grave that he required 77 pages of corrective guidance to be issued to every school in England before the movie could be shown to schoolchildren. On Gore’s central prediction that “global warming” would imminently cause sea level to rise by 20 feet, the Judge bluntly said: “The Armageddon scenario that he depicts is not based on any scientific view.” The fact that so few of those surveyed were involved in climate sciences, that so many had seldom or never published on the subject, and that nearly two-thirds thought that a serially-inaccurate movie that the Judge had characterized as political propaganda casts considerable doubt upon the value of the survey as a true indicator of scientific opinion in climate-relevant fields. As to the question whether anthropogenic “global warming” might prove catastrophic, 44 percent thought it was likely to be “moderately dangerous” and 41 percent thought it was “likely to be near-catastrophic." The fact that 85 percent thought anthropogenic “global warming” might be at least “moderately dangerous” and that only 74 percent thought current scientific evidence suggested it was even occurring casts further doubt on the reliability or usefulness of the survey, some of whose respondents cannot have treated it seriously. In any event, science is not a belief system, and no true scientist would say that he “believed” a scientific proposition unless he had verified it. With this background, my own answer, based on my research, is that humankind causes some warming, but that the warming we cause is and will remain small, harmless and generally beneficial, for the IPCC has prodigiously exaggerated the warming effect of increasing CO2 concentration in the air. My reason for this answer is as follows. Temperature change in response to anthropogenic “global warming” is defined by the IPCC as the product of four key parameters: The Naperian logarithm of the proportionate increase in CO2 concentration; A coefficient to represent the magnitude of the CO2-induced radiative forcing; The Planck parameter that converts the forcing to temperature change in the absence of any temperature feedbacks, or where they sum to zero; and The feedback multiplier, which is a function of the Planck parameter and also of the sum of all amplifying or countervailing temperature feedbacks. I now demonstrate that the IPCC has exaggerated each of these four parameters substantially, so that their product is an extremely large exaggeration. Increase in CO2 concentration: On the A2 “business-as-usual” scenario, which most closely matches today’s actual emissions of CO2 by humankind, the IPCC’s central estimate is that by 2100 CO2 concentration will have risen exponentially to 836 parts per million by volume. However, in at least the past decade CO2 concentration has shown a merely linear increase by 2 ppmv/year, suggesting that it will reach just 570 ppmv by 2100 compared with 368 ppmv (NOAA global value) in 2000. The current trend, therefore, leads to an exaggeration factor of 1.8. CO2 radiative-forcing coefficient: The IPCC gave this coefficient as 6.4 in its 1995 report, but reduced this by more than 16 percent to 5.35 in its 2001 report, citing a single paper (Myrhe et al., 1998). Gunnar Myrhe, however, has published a subsequent paper (Myrhe et al., 2009), in which he suggests that the coefficient must be reduced still further. He is right, for the following reason. It is settled science that at or near the Earth’s surface the concentration of CO2 is now sufficient, and its overlap with water vapor and other greenhouse gases so great, that very little warming could arise. It is only at altitude, and then only in or near the tropics, that there could be any significant warming (Santer et al., 2003, cited in IPCC, 2007; and see also Lee et al., 2007). However, it seems to me that these and similar papers take insufficient account of the very rapid attenuation of atmospheric density with altitude (American Standard Atmosphere, 1972), which greatly reduces the likelihood that CO2 molecules will interrupt the optical path of outgoing long-wave radiation anywhere above the lower troposphere. Sure enough, Douglass et al. (2008) find that the tripling of tropical surface warming in the upper troposphere that Santer, the IPCC, and the models mentioned in Lee predict has not been found in half a century of radiosonde, drop-sonde and satellite observations. Here, the IPCC is plainly at odds with observed reality. A recent paper (Santer, 2008) suggesting that the model-predicted tropical upper-troposphere “hot-spot” has been detected is defective in that it cites a single dataset that was rejected by Douglass et al. as defective, and overlooks all other datasets. Lindzen, in a 2007 lecture, said that the absence of the predicted “hot-spot” required the warming effect of CO2 to be divided by at least three: however, a subsequent paper by him did not uphold this value. Nevertheless, it is clear that nearly all of the radiative forcing from CO2 that the IPCC predicts is predicted to occur at altitude in the tropics, where in fact the warming rate is identical to that at the tropical surface. Therefore, I assign to the CO2 radiative forcing coefficient a modest exaggeration factor of 1.5. The Planck parameter: The IPCC defines radiative forcing as the change in net radiative flux at the tropopause. Following this definition, it chooses a value for the Planck parameter that is applicable in the upper troposphere, somewhat above the characteristic-emission altitude. However, as Kimoto (2009) has mentioned, it is the flux at the Earth’s surface that determines temperature at the surface. Since we know the surface temperature by direct measurement, we can use the fundamental equation of radiative transfer to calculate the radiative flux at the surface, and we can then differentiate the equation to derive the Planck parameter, which is 0.1846 Kelvin per Watt per square meter, not the IPCC’s imagined 0.3125. Since the Planck parameter occurs twice in the determination of climate sensitivity, the exaggeration factor here is the square of the ratio of the latter quantity to the former: say, 2.9. Kimoto implies 4.3, but we shall cautiously take the lesser value. The feedback multiplier: No temperature feedback can be directly measured. However, it is clear for various reasons that the IPCC has exaggerated the value of the water-vapor feedback, and has found the cloud-albedo feedback to be very strongly positive when it is in fact strongly negative. For these reasons, the feedback-sum – implicitly 2.06 Watts per square meter per Kelvin – cannot reasonably be held to exceed 1.5. Therefore, the feedback multiplier, implicitly 2.81 in IPCC (2007), is approximately 1.38, giving an exaggeration factor of 2.0. I conclude that the IPCC has exaggerated the temperature change to be expected in response to a given increase in CO2 concentration by (1.5 x 2.9 x 2.0) = 8.7 times. Furthermore, it has exaggerated the rate of increase in CO2 concentration 1.8 times. Therefore, its predicted equilibrium temperature change to 2100 has been exaggerated (8.7 x 1.8) = 15.7 times. Instead of the IPCC’s predicted 3.9 Kelvin, the total anthropogenic warming to be expected in this century will be a harmless 0.25 Kelvin. Why do you believe that such radically different opinions exist regarding an issue that should ideally be gauged by scientific data? VMB: This question is a matter of belief, and not of science. Therefore, I answer it with some caution. It will be evident from my previous answer that most of the quantities in the real atmosphere whose values we need to know in order to calculate the temperature change in response to a given proportionate increase in CO2 concentration cannot be directly measured. For this reason, the IPCC’s methodology is largely expensive guesswork, based on modeling rather than on observation, and is often directly counter to observation. However, as Lorenz (1963) proved, because the climate is a chaotic object in mathematical terms, its very-long-run evolution (i.e. beyond a few weeks ahead) cannot be reliably predicted by any method because we cannot know the initial state of the object’s millions of defining parameters at any chosen moment to a precision sufficient to allow us to foretell the timing, onset, duration, magnitude, or even sign of any of the bifurcations (known to propagandists as “tipping-points”) that are inherent in any chaotic 0bject. However, it is possible to gain some notion of the sensitivity of the climate to radiative forcings by measurement of those forcings – whether natural or anthropogenic – that are susceptible of measurement. Unfortunately, our capacity to make such measurements remains limited, and is effectively confined to the period from 1983 to the present, when sufficient satellites to make the necessary observations first became available. The IPCC, however, concludes that there is no “consensus” as to these observations, and prefers modeling instead. This approach was and is bound to engender conflict within the scientific community as to the extent to which the IPCC has been able to overcome the Lorenz constraint on the efficacy of modeling, and the extent to which it ought to have ignored real-world observations that run counter to its models. There has been record-breaking cold weather across the northern half of the earth so far in 2010. Do you see greater scientific skepticism toward the global warming concept, greater support building, or about the same? VMB: This, too, is not a question of science. In fact, I expect the January 2010 monthly global-temperature anomaly to be one of the highest in the instrumental record, because the cold in some parts of the Northern Hemisphere was compensated by warmer weather than usual in other parts, and by very strong warming in the Southern-Hemisphere summer. No true scientist would regard a single cold winter, or even three cold winters in a row, as evidence that anthropogenic “global warming” was or was not a problem. Scientific skepticism about the exaggerated magnitude of anthropogenic “global warming” is certainly on the increase, but that is chiefly because more scientists are beginning to familiarize themselves with the defects in the IPCC’s methodology that I have outlined, and because it is becoming apparent that the predicted rate of warming has at no point occurred even in the recent instrumental temperature record. Indeed, there has been no statistically-significant “global warming” – whether anthropogenic or natural – for 15 years, and there has been rapid global cooling for nine years. These trends are long enough to be taken seriously, not as indicators that “global warming” does not or cannot occur at all, but as evidence that the rate of warming predicted by the IPCC is indeed excessive. What are your views of the U.S. participating in a multilateral agreement with other countries? VMB: I am not a citizen of the U.S. and reply with hesitation. However, some general principles can be enunciated. First, the U.S. is a radically-democratic country whose elected Congress is sovereign, except to the extent that the Senate, by at least a two-thirds majority, ratifies a foreign treaty, in which event, under the Vienna Convention on the Interpretation of Treaties, the treaty prevails over the Constitution. For this reason, it is essential that any multilateral agreement on how to deal with the climate problem should be governed by a democratic process. It is not sufficient to appoint what may in effect become a world government – any such entity must be elected by the peoples of the world, and must be subject to regular recall. However, for the reasons that I have outlined, the imagined climate problem is in fact imaginary, and the correct policy to deal with a non-problem is to do nothing, and to concentrate on real problems instead. Do you believe human activity is a more important factor or less important factor than natural geophysical activity in determining the temperature of our atmosphere? VMB: It does not matter what I believe. What matters is what is objectively true. We start by observing that until 1983 there was insufficient instrumentation to answer this question credibly. It is also important to study only those periods during which there was a sufficiently significant upward or downward movement in global mean surface temperature to overcome distortions caused by statistical noise. The only period that qualifies is 1983-2001, during which temperature rose by 0.45 Kelvin. During those 19 years, observation by at least two independent methods –the International Satellite Cloud Climatology Project: Pinker et al., 2005) and the Earth Radiation Budget Experiment Satellite) – established that the radiative forcing from a sustained decline in cloud cover was 0.16 Watts per square meter per year, or about 3.05 Watts per square meter over the entire period. The maximum credible value of the anthropogenic influences on climate over the same period was just 0.8 Watts per square meter. Therefore, the measured natural influence was almost four times as great as the anthropogenic influence. For this reason, the principal conclusion of IPCC’s 2001 and 2007 reports that most of the warming since 1950 (nearly all of which occurred in the 1980s and 1990s) was anthropogenic is inexplicable. If you do not believe climate change, do you believe that humans have any impact on the environment? Additionally, do you believe that green efforts are necessary or a waste of time? VMB: The climate has changed for 4.5 billion years since the Earth came into existence, and will continue to do so. However, it is self-evident that all creatures, including humans, have an impact on the environment. Efforts to mitigate imagined anthropogenic “global warming” are of course futile and doomed to fail. I demonstrate this proposition by assuming, solum ad argumentum, that the IPCC’s absurdly-exaggerated central estimate of the warming effect of CO2 is correct. I shall also assume, contrary to the near-unanimous scientific literature, that even if we were to cease all CO2 emissions, the IPCC is right in imagining that the CO2 already in the atmosphere would remain there for at least half a century, and probably longer. Standing these two assumptions, we now evaluate the impact of the Copenhagen Accord. Once again, we make a generous but improbable assumption that all nations will honor their obligations under the Accord (Kyoto was supposed to reduce emissions to their 1990 levels by 2012, but emissions are now 40 percent above 1990). In that event, Western nations will commit themselves to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions over the next 10 years by some 30 percent, starting at once and making deeper cuts each year. Therefore the average reduction in CO2 emissions in each of the next ten years will be 15 percent of total Western emissions, or some 7.5 percent of world emissions. If we were to continue to burn fossil fuels as at present, CO2 concentration would continue to rise at 2 ppmv/year for ten years, a total of 20 ppmv. If, however, we reduced world emissions by an average of 7.5 percent over the period, the pre-existing CO2 in the atmosphere would linger, but over the period CO2 concentration would rise by 18.5 ppmv, not 20. This tiny reduction in CO2 emissions would forestall warming of just 0.02 Celsius, at a cost of trillions, illustrating the futility of trying to address the supposed climate problem by cutting emissions. Adaptation to the effects of “global warming”, if and when it resumes, and if and when it becomes serious enough to matter, would be orders of magnitude more cost-effective than attempting to reduce emissions. Instead of wasting trillions to achieve so tiny a reduction in imagined future warming, we should address real environmental problems, such as tropical deforestation, overfishing of the world’s oceans, and the encroachment of humankind on the fragile habitats of our fellow creatures. Some experts argue that climate change will hit developing countries the hardest. Regardless of your current opinion, do you believe that first world nations have a responsibility to help those countries? VMB: We should not assist nations whose principal problems stem from bad and nearly-always undemocratic government. Except in dire emergencies, we should not assist nations that are not democracies. And we should not assist any nation to build up defenses against the non-problem that is “global warming”: instead, we should assist democratic but poor nations to solve their real problems: clean water supply, safe sewage disposal, proper health care, etc. As Herr Ziegler, the UN’s Right-t0-Food rapporteur has rightly said, “When millions are starving, the diversion of food to biofuels is a crime against humanity.” The dash for biofuels would not have occurred were it not for the self-serving belief of the world’s governing class in the false notion that anthropogenic “global warming” is a problem. We must get the science right or we shall get the policy wrong. If we get the policy wrong, the mass starvation and food riots that have occurred in the past two years in a dozen major regions of the world will become still worse, and millions more will die, not because of “global warming” – for there has been none for 15 years – but because of the absurd exaggeration of the supposed effects of imagined warming. Nothing could be more cruel to the poorest of our fell0w-men than to continue to peddle the false notion of dangerous anthropogenic “global warming”. Do you believe companies have a responsibility to protect the environment? Do you believe laws should be implemented to ensure this? VMB: In democratic nations, it is the will of the people that answers such questions, not the rigors of science. In most Western nations, laws are already implemented to ensure that not only corporations but also other persons are obliged to comply with often-tight environmental regulation, which is why the most significant pollution that now occurs is in third-world countries that cannot afford the luxury of laws to protect the environment. Anything else you want to add? VMB: By theoretical means, we have established that the UN has exaggerated the sensitivity of the climate to the radiative forcing from CO2 some 8.7 times. By empirical methods we now test this theoretical conclusion using Pinker’s result. The warming from 1983-2001 was 0.45 Kelvin. The natural forcing from the diminution in cloud cover over the period was 3.05 Watts per square meter, and the natural forcings were 0.8, giving total forcings of 3.85 Watts per square meter. Therefore the climate sensitivity over this 19-year period – long enough to produce a reasonably reliable result – was (0.45 / 3.85) = 0.12 Kelvin per Watt per square meter. However, the IPCC’s implicit value is (3.26 / 3.71) = 0.88 Kelvin per Watt per square meter, an exaggeration of 7.3 times. This is remarkably close to our theoretical result. Even if we assume that the IPCC has not exaggerated the CO2 radiative forcing, a doubling of CO2 concentration will cause not 3.26 Kelvin of warming, as imagined by the IPCC, but just (0.12 x 3.71) = 0.43 Kelvin. On any view, so little warming is not a problem. Indeed, a doubling of CO2 concentration would increase the yield of some staple crops by more than 40 percent, thereby helping to alleviate the starvation that the false and selfish belief of the world’s governing class in the imagined problem of anthropogenic “global warming” has caused. (Christopher Walter Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, has degrees from Cambridge and University College, Cardiff. Among his many achievements, he has been chief leader writer for the Evening Standard and a special adviser on economic matters for the British government. He is known internationally as a critic of global warming/climate change theories, and according to wiki he is also noted as the creator of the Eternity puzzle ... a geometric puzzle which involved tiling a dodecagon with 209 irregularly shaped polygons called Polydrafters. A one-million pound prize was won after 18 months by two Cambridge mathematicians. By that time, 500,000 puzzles had been sold.)
Set as favorite
Bookmark
Email this
Hits: 1004 Trackback(0)
Comments (4)
  written by Trista, July 03, 2010
We are reading the first verse of the first chapter of a book whose pages are infinite…
written by Scott, May 07, 2010
I'm sure you probably believe all kinds of other things you've read or been told by other people whose credentials don't "match" the topic.
written by Dr. West Gurley, April 22, 2010
I cannot help noticing that Lord Monckton has no credentials relevant to the question of global climate change. He does seem to know something about money and puzzle-solving. I'll be sure to look up what he has to say on those issues when I need to know something about them.
written by Robert D Ponder, April 08, 2010
Lord Monkington is one of the people who watched the start of the Global Warming scam begin. Lord Monkington, who used to serve as the science advisor to Priminister Margaret Thatcher and has been a noted science displinarian through out his career, was present when a man by the name of Maurice Strong was given the green light to start the "green movement" to save the world. This meant "at all cost”, reason, this would be the largest tax ever levied on the free world. A tax that would be over seen by characters like Maurice Strong and George Soros, of which both are complicit in many IMF horrors surrounding the globe. Not to mention the "Food for Oil" scam that ultimately got Strong to resign his position at the UN, and now resides in China free from indictment from the West and the ICC in particular. Based on this information, prior to learning about the East Anglican University and the Himalayan glacier fraud, not to mention 20 other individual fraudulent cases of scientific fraud, the IPCC was planning, after the Copenhagen treaty was signed, to delegate all enforcement and collection of taxes to the IMF and World Bank, both of which are noted human rights violators in every region of the world. So if the world had truly been on the brink, the idea that either of these international banking institutions would be in charge is completely asinine to logic.
In addition, Lord Monkington, found where preindustrialized or emerging countries would be under heavier CO2 restrictions that would ultimately lead them into an even deeper poverty. Except for the nations that the west has puppeteer, for instance, the countries like Paraguay, Nicaragua, El Salvador, Peru and many other emerging countries that did and will not sign the Copenhagen accord. These are all countries that are currently under NAFTA and GATT making them free to continue the neo-liberal globalization theory that is only a cover for western exploitation. In closing, all of these global warming theories exclude two of the most evident players. The first is geothermal activity, these events are responsible for over 90% of the CO2 in the atmosphere and the human population is thought to only be responsible for a total net of 4% (NASA and IPCC agree) of the net total. In addition, 10 super tankers make more CO2 than all the conbined domestic traffic excluding heavy equipment in the US annually. These are conveniant truths that seem to be lacking in every sense of the reports pre-EAU events. Now, they are rather common.
Write comment
|
In 2007, 489 members of the American Meteorological Society and the American Geophysical Union were surveyed for the Statistical Assessment Service at George Mason University. About 84 percent said that they personally believed human-induced warming is occurring and it poses a very great or moderate danger, 74 percent believed that currently available scientific evidence substantiates its occurrence. Do you agree with the views of these scientists? Why or why not?
TrackBack URI for this entry
