Guest opinion; Dr. Tim Ball

Mae West famously said,

“I’ve been rich, and I’ve been poor. Believe me, rich is better.

As a historical climatologist, I can paraphrase that to say about climate,

“It’s been warm, and it’s been cold. Believe me, warm is better.”

I think the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) claim that human CO2 is causing warming is wrong. They created the result they wanted, which wasn’t designed to deal with warming but to stop economic development and reduce the population. They selected the data and mechanisms necessary to prove their hypothesis and manipulated the data where necessary, including rewriting climate history. The wider evidence, which is only examined when you move outside their limited definition of climate change, is that the world is cooling.

The major rewrite of history involved elimination of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP). One of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) gang told David Deming in an email that it was necessary to get rid of the MWP. The reason, although not expressed in the email, was because they were telling people that the latter part of the 20th century was the warmest ever. It wasn’t by any measure, from the warm of the MWP to the prolonged warmer period of the Holocene Optimum. The MWP was the most immediate threat to their narrative because it was within a time period people could grasp. They could relate to the idea that Vikings sailed in Arctic waters that are permanent pack-ice today. There was also the graph (Figure 7c) in the first IPCC Report in 1990 that contradicted their claim – it had to go.

A measure of the threat they saw is reflected in the viciousness of the attack on the historical evidence of the existence of the MWP produced in 2003 by Soon and Baliunas in “Proxy climatic and environmental changes of the past 1,000 years.” A couple of examples illustrate the existence of the MWP but also the benefits of a warmer world.

Scottish historians identify the 12th century as the golden age. As one historian explains

During the reign of David I (1124 – 1153) many Normans came to live in Scotland. Dioceses were organised for bishops and new monasteries were founded. Government was reformed. Moreover, in the 12th century many towns or burghs were founded in Scotland and trade flourished. David I was the first Scottish king to found mints and issue his own coins.

The main reason for the growth was increased food production due to warmer weather. Warmer conditions began in the 10th century and began to cool by the 13th century. The impact of the cooling on limits to agriculture indicate what was lost. Martin Parry, who later became a central figure in the IPCC, studied the impact of cooling on different agricultural regions when that was the concern in the1970s. Figure 1 shows the probability of harvest failure in southeast Scotland (Parry 1976). Vertical change in the limits to agriculture seems small, but the horizontal gradient means large areas are lost as illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 1

Figure 2 shows the extent of the land cultivated before 1300 AD and the amount lost at the onset of the Little Ice Age (LIA).

Figure 2

You can look around the world at societies that blossomed into civilizations during the Medieval Warm Period. As Jean Grove said in the introduction to her thorough and detailed book “The Little Ice Age.”

For several hundred years’ climatic conditions in Europe had been kind; there were few poor harvests and famines were infrequent.” “Grain was grown in Iceland and even in Greenland; the northern fisheries flourished and in mainland Europe vineyards were in production 500 km north of their present limits.”

An important point to remember is that Polar Bears, the animal Al Gore and his alarmist gang chose as the canary in the Arctic, survived the entire MWP.

The IPCC set out to prove human CO2 was causing global warming. They achieved this by manipulation and deception, but it meant nothing if they didn’t also ‘prove’ that warming is a potential disaster. The IPCC structure involved four stages. Working Group (WG) I, II, III and the Summary for Policymakers (SPM) were all carefully designed to blend predetermined science with the threat it posed to the planet and humanity.

WG I, the Physical Science Basis Report, provides the proof that human CO2 is causing warming. That became the unchallenged assumption for WG II, the Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability Report. This Report became the source of the almost endless stories of the negative impacts of warming. In fact, it was a cost/benefits study without consideration of the benefits. It became the basis for WG III’s Mitigation of Climate Change Report that identified the costs and policies politicians needed to exact from the citizens. Then, ostensibly to make it easier for politicians, they produced the Summary for Policymakers. In fact, it made it more difficult because the IPCC released the SPM to the public and the media with all its exaggerations. The public pressure fuelled by the media left politicians with no option. As official IPCC reviewer, David Wojick said,

Glaring omissions are only glaring to experts, so the “policymakers”—including the press and the public—who read the SPM will not realize they are being told only one side of a story. But the scientists who drafted the SPM know the truth, as revealed by the sometimes artful way they conceal it.

What is systematically omitted from the SPM are precisely the uncertainties and positive counter evidence that might negate the human interference theory. Instead of assessing these objections, the Summary confidently asserts just those findings that support its case. In short, this is advocacy, not assessment.

The IPCC also guaranteed the prediction of increasing CO2 and its negative impact using economic models deliberately constructed for a predetermined outcome, just like the climate models.

Castles and Henderson critiqued the first economic model.

About two years ago Ian Castles became interested in the statistical techniques which had been used to predict the course of CO2 emissions for the next century and he was later joined by David Henderson who was curious to find out why the IPCC’s procedures had imparted an upward bias to the projections of output and emissions of developing countries.

These two economists have shown that the calculations carried out by the IPCC concerning per capita income, economic growth, and greenhouse gas emissions in different regions are fundamentally flawed, and substantially overstate the likely growth in developing countries. The results are therefore unsuitable as a starting point for the next IPCC assessment report, which is due to be published in 2007. Unfortunately, this is precisely how the IPCC now intends to use its emissions projections.

It appears the Castles and Henderson critique created a problem, so an alternative was produced called Representative Concentration Pathways (RCP). In 2011, Judith Curry provided a sound overview of the RCPs scheduled to be used in IPCC Assessment Report 5. Curry concludes that

Or, to boil it right down, the IPCC is telling us that the solution to climate change is economic growth and low-carbon energy generation.

I would modify that because the IPCC want to reduce the economic growth of developed nations and make them pay for the economic growth of developing nations. More importantly, this is all based on the deliberately created claim that CO2 is causing warming. The RCPs simply continue the falsifications and errors of the earlier emissions scenarios. As one commentator explained

These RCP’s are used by policymakers to decide what actions are required to sustain a safe climate for our own and future generations. The information they are using, presented by the IPCC, is nothing more than science fiction.

The IPCC determined to prove that human CO2 from industrial activity caused disastrous global warming for a controlling political agenda. To do that they convinced the world that warming promised nothing but catastrophe. The historical evidence shows exactly the opposite is the case; a warmer world offers many more benefits to more flora and fauna than a cold one. It is certainly more beneficial to the human condition. Evidence of the IPCC’s distorted thinking is in the claim that more people would die with a warmer world. The evidence shows that cold kills more people every year than heat.

40 years ago, in his 1976 book The Cooling, Lowell Ponte enunciated the threat of cooling in a similar way to the current threat of warming.

It is cold fact: the global cooling presents humankind with the most important social, political, and adaptive challenge we have had to deal with for ten thousand years. Your stake in the decisions we make concerning it is of ultimate importance; the survival of ourselves, our children, our species.

It is no surprise that in an endorsement of Ponte’s book, Stephen Schneider, who was later eulogized by the IPCC for his work on global warming, wrote

The dramatic importance of climate changes to the worlds future has been dangerously underestimated by many, often because we have been lulled by modern technology into thinking we have conquered nature. But this well-written book points out in clear language that the climatic threat could be as awesome as any we might face, and that massive world-wide actions to hedge against that threat deserve immediate consideration. At a minimum, public awareness of the possibilities must commence, and Lowell Ponte’s provocative work is a good place to start.

This is the same Schneider quoted in Discovery magazine in 1989 as follows.

On the one hand we are ethically bound to the scientific method, in effect promising to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but, which means that we must include all the doubts, caveats, ifs and buts. On the other hand, we are not just scientists, but human beings as well. And like most people, we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change. To do that we have to get some broad-based support, to capture the publics imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of any doubts we might have. This double ethical bind which we frequently find ourselves in cannot be solved by any formula. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest. I hope that means being both.

Sorry Mr. Schneider, there is no “right balance,” there must only be honesty. The ‘group think’ mentality that developed among those promoting global warming is reflected in the IPCC eulogy; “He (Schneider) never overstated his case.” Two features of group think are

Belief in inherent morality – Members believe in the rightness of their cause and therefore ignore the ethical or moral consequences of their decisions.

Self-appointed ‘mindguards’ – Members protect the group and the leader from information that is problematic or contradictory to the group’s cohesiveness, view, and/or decisions.

Which brings us back to Mae West who also said,

“I only have ‘yes’ men around me. Who needs ’no’ men?”

From experience with the IPCC I can paraphrase and update that and say they achieved their goal because,

“The IPCC only has ‘yes’ people around them. They don’t want ‘no’ people.”

The trouble is, it isn’t science without ‘no’ people.

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