Climate chaos? Don’t believe it

From the Telegraph: Climate chaos? Don't believe it by Christopher Monckton (HT Acton PowerBlog)

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

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

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and contemporary climate, slashed the natural greenhouse effect, overstated the past century's temperature increase, repealed a fundamental law of physics and tripled the man-made greenhouse effect.

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

This article exposes the false presentation of the "hockey stick effect" used in the Stern report and Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth movie. (See my review here.) The report uses tree rings to estimate past temperatures. Tree rings are supposedly wider when temperatures are warmer. However, CO2 also causes tree rings to expand, and the hockey stick effect is most likely measuring the change in CO2 over the past century, not rising temperature. This procedure is the same procedure the UN ruled as a highly questionable measure in their 1996 report! Here is a graph showing temperature change with the discredited tree ring data (top) versus readings from other sources (bottom):

A pdf article by Monckton called Apocalypse Canceled has his calculations and references. In his report, he writes:

All ten of the propositions listed below must be proven true if the climate-change “consensus” is to be proven true. The first article considers the first six of the listed propositions and draws the conclusions shown. The second article will consider the remaining four propositions.

1. That the debate is over and all credible climate scientists are agreed. False
2. That temperature has risen above millennial variability and is exceptional. Very unlikely
3. That changes in solar irradiance are an insignificant forcing mechanism. False
4. That the last century’s increases in temperature are correctly measured. Unlikely
5. That greenhouse-gas increase is the main forcing agent of temperature. Not proven
6. That temperature will rise far enough to do more harm than good. Very unlikely
7. That continuing greenhouse-gas emissions will be very harmful to life. Unlikely
8. That proposed carbon-emission limits would make a definite difference. Very unlikely
9. That the environmental benefits of remediation will be cost-effective. Very unlikely
10. That taking precautions, just in case, would be the responsible course. False

He deals with the first six in this article and the last four in his next article. I will link the next Telegraph article when it comes out.

We must be responsible stewards of natural and human environments. To me, that means not surrendering to exploitive plundering or apocalyptic alarmism. We need to act on truth as best we can discern it.