Klimaatgekte: Einde aan het IPCC ?

[Dr. Marc-Alexander Fluks]

REPLY TO: D66 at nic.surfnet.nl

Bron:   Business Times
Datum:  7 april 2010
Auteur: Fred Singer
URL:    http://www.businesstimes.com.sg/sub/views/story/0,4574,380103,00.html


End of the IPCC: one mistake too many
-------------------------------------
'Climategate' suggests a conspiracy to commit fraud by a small
gang of influential UN panel scientists

The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) has acknowledged they made a mistake in their projection
of 2035 as the date when all the Himalayan glaciers would melt.
But the Himalayan blunder is not a one-off mistake; it is only
the latest of a long list of errors that have dogged the IPCC
over the past 10 years. And by now, after the 'Climategate'
flap of last November, 'Glaciergate' seems to have opened the
floodgates with reports on 'Amazongate', 'Natural-disaster-
gate', and many more.

In their 2001 report, the IPCC had claimed that the 20th
century was 'unusual' and blamed it on human-released greenhouse
gases. Their infamous temperature graph shown there, shaped like
a hockey stick, did away with the well-established Medieval Warm
Period (around 1000AD, when Vikings were able to settle in
southern Greenland and grow crops there) and the following Little
Ice Age (around 1400 to 1800AD). Two Canadians exposed the bad
data used by the IPCC and the statistical errors in their analysis.

Since then, the litany of IPCC errors continues to grow.

In mid-August 2009, after repeated requests for such data under
the Freedom of Information Act, the Climate Research Unit at the
University of East Anglia (CRU), one of the three international
centres that publish global temperatures, announced that it
discarded the raw data used to calculate global surface
temperatures. The CRU action renders independent review and
verification of the temperature trends published by the CRU
impossible - a clear violation of principles of science.

In October, at the 2009 annual meeting of the Geological Society
of America, Dr Don Easterbrook presented graphs demonstrating
how tree-ring data from Russia showing a cooling after 1961 was
disguised in IPCC publications. The artful deceit so exposed
indicates that the IPCC Assessment Report-4 (AR4) of 2007
contains deceptions rendering its conclusion that global
warming is anthropogenic (human-caused) scientifically
questionable.

In November, emails from the CRU were leaked to the public,
creating what became known as 'Climategate'. These emails
reveal efforts to suppress independent studies that are
contrary to IPCC conclusions of AGW (anthropogenic global
warming). Thus, the IPCC scientific review process has a
systematic bias of an unknowable magnitude in favour of
human-induced warming.

In mid-December, the Russian Institute of Economic Analysis
(IEA) reported that the Hadley Centre for Climate Change of
the British Meteorological Office (Met Office) had probably
tampered with Russian climate data and that the Russian
meteorological station data does not support human-caused
global warming. Thus the reported global surface temperature
trends are unreliable and probably have a strong warming
bias of an unknown magnitude.

In January this year, American researchers Joe D'Aleo and E
Michael Smith reported that the US-National Climatic Data
Center (NOAA-NCDC) and the National Aeronautics and Space
Administration's Goddard Institute of Space Studies (NASA-
GISS) dropped many meteorological stations from their
databases in recent years. The dropped stations, many of
which continue to make appropriate reports, are generally in
colder climates. Thus, all global surface temperatures and
temperature trends announced by the three international
reporting organisations probably have a warming bias of an
unknown magnitude - rendering their announced temperature
trends scientifically unreliable.

On Jan 23 this year, the Sunday Times (London) reported that
the AR4 wrongly linked natural disasters to global warming.
The published report upon which this claim was based actually
stated: 'We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical
relationship between global temperature increase and
catastrophic losses.'

In January also, Dr Murari Lal, the coordinating lead author
of the AR4's chapter on Asia, stated that the IPCC deliberately
exaggerated the possible melt of the Himalayan glaciers. 'We
thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policymakers
and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.'
This admission demonstrates that the AR4 is a political document
and not a scientific one.

More recently, additional reports reveal that the IPCC's claims
that warming will cause extensive adverse effects in the Amazon
rainforests and on coral reefs came not from science studies but
from publications by environmental advocacy groups, such as the
World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace. More scandalous even, the
IPCC based their lurid predictions on anecdotal, non-peer-
reviewed sources - not at all in accord with its solemnly
announced principles and scientific standards.

These events show not only a general sloppiness of IPCC
procedures but also an extreme ideological bias - quite
inappropriate to a supposedly impartial scientific survey. Yet
all of these missteps pale in comparison to 'Climategate', which
calls into question the very temperature data used by the IPCC's
main policy result. In my opinion, Climategate is a much more
serious issue than simply sloppiness and ideological distortion;
Climategate suggests a conspiracy to commit fraud by a small
gang of influential IPCC scientists.

In this enterprise, the group was aided not only by environmental
zealots, anti-technology Luddites, utopian one-worlders and
population control fanatics, but also by bureaucrats, businesses,
brokers and bankers, who had learned how to game the system and
profit from government grants and subsidies for exotic schemes
to produce 'carbon-free' energy and from the trading of carbon
permits. Hundreds of billions have already been wasted - most of
this in transfers of tax revenues to a favoured few.

These sums pale, however, in comparison to the trillions that
would have been spent in future if some of the mitigation schemes
had come to fruition. Fortunately for the world economy, these
schemes all collapsed at the Copenhagen conference last December.
Clearly, developing nations did not want to take on the sacrifices
and restrictions on growth. There was little concern expressed
about climate; Copenhagen was mostly about transfer of money.

The 'climate establishment', with a vested interest in maintaining
climate scares and fanning fears, is desperately trying to save
the IPCC and the AGW myth. A number of 'investigations' have been
started, mostly trying to excuse IPCC errors and 'whitewash' the
frauds committed. The latest such effort involves national science
academies, called on by UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon. But it's
too late: the public no longer trusts the UN, the IPCC, and its
prophets of doom.

--------
The writer - an atmospheric physicist, professor emeritus at the
University of Virginia and former director of the US Weather
Satellite Service - is the organiser of the NIPCC (Non-governmental
International Panel on Climate Change) and co-author of its reports,
'Nature, not Human Activity, Rules the Climate' (2008) and 'Climate
Change'

--------
(c) 2010 Business Times

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