What if climate-change doubters are right?

What if climate-change doubters are right?

Exclusive: Lord Monckton declares, 'Thermageddon isn't happening as ordered'

Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, high priest of climate skepticism, advised Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, wrote leaders for the Yorkshire Post, was editor of the Catholic paper The Universe, managing editor of the Telegraph Sunday Magazine, assistant editor of Today, and consulting editor of the Evening Standard. He invented the million-selling "Eternity Puzzles," "Sudoku X" and a promising treatment for infections. See the Science & Public Policy Institute.

Justin Gillis, in the Feb. 12 edition of the New York Times, asks what the media should call those of us who “deny that Earth is actually warming” and question what he calls the “durable consensus” about the likely magnitude of future global warming. He gets off to an unpromising start by calling us “people who reject the findings of climate science” and “reject the evidence.” He labels us as “dissenting scientists” and “contrarian scientists” (twice), contrasting us with “mainstream scientists” (twice).

He calls us “opponents of climate science” who “vigorously denounce” and “cast doubt on the science.” When we “testify before Congress,” we “make statements inconsistent with the vast bulk of the scientific evidence” that “the fate of the planet may hang in the balance.”
He imagines that “the evidence of risk has become overwhelming,” and, to us dwellers in “an alternate reality,” the evidence “just doesn’t matter anymore.”
For good measure, he calls us “a certain faction of the political right” who oppose the “extensive government intervention in the market” that apocalypticists demand. He says the cash to spread our writings “comes from companies that profit from fossil fuels.”
Phew. He doesn’t like us, does he? But, though he’s long on insults, he’s short on facts.
The evidence does not support him. The authors of the largest peer-reviewed study of scientific opinion, published almost two years ago, found that of 11,944 climate papers in learned journals over the 21 years 1991-2011 only 64, or just 0.5 percent, said most of the 0.8 degree Celsius global warming since 1950 (a warming well within natural variability) was manmade.
Significantly, the researchers didn’t even ask whether the papers talked of global warming as potentially dangerous. Few did. So much for the “durable consensus.”
According to the RSS satellite data, there has been no global warming for 18 years, two months. That result is within statistical shouting distance of the other temperature datasets. All show the warming rate is half what the U.N.’s climate panel predicted with “substantial confidence” 25 years ago.
Though Mr. Gillis says “billions of tons of land ice all over the planet” have melted, he fails to say the melting began in 1880, long before we could have had much to do with it. Besides, he does not say how many billions of tons have melted. Nor does he say since when. His assertion is not quantitative and is, thus, not scientific.
Suppose 300 billion tons had melted. That figure appears in a paper on ice loss in Greenland from 2005-2012. By how much would sea levels have risen? Do the math, Mr. Gillis. The answer: just 0.7 millimeters. And another paper on Greenland showed that from 1993-2004, four times as much ice had accumulated on Greenland’s high plateau as had been lost from 2005-2012.
Mr. Gillis is culpably silent on the news that the global extent of sea ice reached a satellite-era maximum just a few months back. He also fails to point out that on two satellite-based measures – ENVISAT and GRACE – sea level has not been rising much this decade. Most supposed sea-level rise actually comes from a “glacial isostatic adjustment” – one of many fudge factors, such as the repeated tampering with terrestrial temperature records, going back 100 years to make the 20^th-century rate of global warming seem steeper than it was.
Not only has the Earth failed to warm at anything like the predicted rate, but none of the predicted disasters has materialized. Why should they? Back in the Neoproterozoic era, 750 million years ago, the planet failed to fry even though there was at least 30 percent CO2 in the air. Now, to the nearest tenth of one percent, there is none.
A recent paper shows the land area of the Earth under drought has declined for 30 years. Over the same period, the Sahara’s fringes have actually been greening.
Even the U.N.’s climate panel, in whose holy books the “durable consensus” is enshrined, says there is little or no evidence of worse or more frequent floods, hurricanes, typhoons, tropical cyclones or extra-tropical storms.
Thermageddon isn’t happening as ordered.
But suppose Mr. Gillis is right. Suppose – in the teeth of the evidence – that it’s going to happen. How much should we spend on making global warming that isn’t happening at even half the predicted rate go away?
The answer: not a single red cent. A paper by me in the Annual Proceedings of the World Federation of Scientists’ planetary-emergencies seminars a few years back did what no one else had done: It combined the official equations predicting global warming with the standard economic techniques of inter-temporal investment appraisal. The devastating conclusion: The cost of trying to forestall global warming today is 10-100 times that of simply adapting to its predicted consequences the day after tomorrow.
Having disposed of the science and economics, let us turn to Mr. Gillis’ smears about the politics and funding of climate skeptics.
Three years ago, I visited the Institute of Advanced Study at Princeton to meet Dr. Freeman Dyson, arguably the world’s most distinguished physicist. After my talk at Princeton, he came up to me and said he hoped I realized that even socialists like him were opposed to global-warming alarmism.
True, the totalitarian left – the New York Times has a long and disfiguring history of fawning upon the Hitlers and Stalins of this world – is robotically near-unanimous in hyping the climate scam for the sake of ending capitalism by what Ms. Christiana Figueres, the head of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change secretariat, recently called an unprecedented reordering of the entire global economy.
However, on the center-left and at all rightward points on the spectrum, there continues to be intelligent discussion of the science and economics of climate – a discussion that the New York Times has relentlessly denied to its own readers by taking a prejudiced, one-sided and anti-scientific stance throughout.
The Old Gray Lady was wrong in her adulation of Hitler’s National Socialist Workers’ Party of Germany, and wrong in her sycophantic, 20-year cover-up of the mass murders of the Stalin regime in Communist Russia. She is at least consistent today in wrongly advocating the “extensive governmental intervention in the market” for which Mr. Gillis slavers.
As for funding, Joanne Nova recently calculated that the money promoting the Thermageddon cult is about 5,000 times more than what is available to those of us who beg leave not to subscribe to the New Religion.
Yet, because we skeptics are interested in seeking the objective truth wherever it rests, the believers are losing the argument – which, after all, is the real reason Gillis is whining.

Read more at http://www.wnd.com/2015/02/what-if-climate-change-doubters-are-right/#kU6oXPGm02XzbhS1.99