‘Limiting The Scope To Human Induced Climate Change Is Undesirable’

Dutch Government Critices IPCC & Calls For Reforms

The IPCC needs to adjust its principles. We believe that limiting the scope of the IPCC to human induced climate change is undesirable, especially because natural climate change is a crucial part of the total understanding of the climate system, including human-induced climate change. The Netherlands is also of the opinion that the word ‘comprehensive’ may have to be deleted, because producing comprehensive assessments becomes virtually impossible with the ever expanding body of knowledge and IPCC may be more relevant by producing more special reports on topics that are new and controversial.—Submission by The Netherlands on the future of the IPCC, June 2013

Governments around the world have been asked by Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to think about the future of the IPCC. The Netherlands now sent their submission to the IPCC and made it available on the website of KNMI. I would say Holland is fairly critical about how IPCC is operating right now. In general I am very happy with the advise and I am convinced that the IPCC would greatly improve if all these points will be brought into practice. The only thing I am really missing is the explicit advise to involve skeptics in the process. This was actually the main advise in my book: add two skeptics to each lead author team to keep the mainstream scientists honest. This simple advise is the only way IPCC can ever become more balanced and objective. However, congratulations to the Dutch government for taking this critical stance.—Marcel Crok, De Staat van het Klimaat, 5 July 2013 A Canadian economist has an idea to tackle global warming so simple, it’s stunning no one has thought of it before. Ross McKitrick, Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph in Ontario, an IPCC expert reviewer and one of its leading critics, proposes a carbon tax with the rate tied to climate response. He explained the idea at the House of Lords yesterday before an audience that included the architect of the UK’s Climate Change Act. The idea of an evidence-based tax alarmed some in the audience. And it was fascinating to see who was most alarmed by it.—Andrew Orlowski, The Register, 4 July 2013

Lord Lawson acknowledged the political challenge facing anyone introducing a carbon tax. Yet it wasn’t impossible to imagine politicians seizing on the idea as a face-saving way out of suicidal green taxes and regulations, when the planet isn’t warming on the scale predicted.—Andrew Orlowski, The Register, 4 July 2013 A temperature-linked carbon tax could be the most cost-effective way to reduce carbon dioxide emissions and slow the pace of climate change. But getting one in place could be an enormous challenge, not least because of political conflicts, says a leading proponent of the taxes. Ross McKitrick, professor of economics at the University of Guelph in Canada, proposes a tax that would start at a low rate, then rise or fall with the temperature of the earth’s atmosphere. Such a system would help investors and potentially politicians understand how the climate – and tax rates – would change in the future, and create clear incentives for action.—Erin Berger, Reuters, 4 July 2013 The Government will be forced to abandon its renewable energy programme unless it is more honest with consumers about the soaring cost, the owner of British Gas has warned. If consumers are not prepared to pay higher energy bills to tackle climate change, a backlash could result when the escalating costs become apparent. This could force the government of the day to retrospectively scrap the subsidies as Spain has done in recent years. The move has destroyed investor confidence in the Spanish energy sector, a prospect already unnerving energy companies in the UK. Tony Hayward, the former BP boss, argued that, faced with the rising costs of the green agenda, politicians will eventually have to drop ambitious targets to reduce carbon emissions. “Pragmatism will overrule political desire to decarbonise. That is where we are heading already.”—Tim Webb, The Times, 3 July 2013



The increase in mean global temperature over the past 150 years is generally ascribed to human activities, in particular the rises in the atmospheric mixing ratios of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases since the Industrial Revolution began. Here it is shown that the precession of perihelion occurring over a century substantially affects the intra-annual variation of solar radiation influx at different locations, especially higher latitudes, with northern and southern hemispheres being subject to contrasting insolation changes. This mechanism represents a supplementary – natural – contribution to climate change in the present epoch and may even be the dominant fundamental cause of global warming, although anthropogenic effects surely play a role too.—Duncan Steel, Journal of Cosmology, June 2013

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