Articles Tagged "Ross McKitrick"

Climate realists testify before the Canadian Senate



International Climate Science Coalition, www.climatescienceinternational.org, has uploaded the December 15, 2011 climate science hearing before the Senate Standing Committee on Energy, Environment and Natural Resources.

Uploaded by TomHarrisICSC on 20 Dec 2011

LONDON, 9 March 2010 - In the few short months since its launch last November, the GWPF has already been able to make a considerable impact on the climate debate. As a result of growing interest and support, the GWPF can announce today that it is expanding its Academic Advisory Council with the addition of seven eminent scientists and economists from Europe, North America and Asia. This brings the total membership of the Council to 22.

Dr Benny Peiser, the director of the GWPF said: "The GWPF has already established itself as a voice of reason and moderation in what I hope is the start of an emerging international organisation. While climate science and climate policy face a crisis of credibility, we are attracting more and more backing from level-headed researchers from around the world.

Our aim is to become the most trustworthy source for those who wish to be informed of the most reliable and authoritative analysis of both the claims of climate campaigners and the policies currently in place or being discussed."

Nigel Lawson, the GWPF chairman said: "I warmly welcome our new Academic Advisory Council members, who embrace a variety of viewpoints, and whose advice will be invaluable as we develop our activities, as we intend to do, over the coming year."

Abstract

Physical, mathematical and observational grounds are employed to show that there is no physically meaningful global temperature for the Earth in the context of the issue of global warming.

While it is always possible to construct statistics for any given set of local temperature data, an infinite range of such statistics is mathematically permissible if physical principles provide no explicit basis for choosing among them. Distinct and equally valid statistical rules can and do show opposite trends when applied to the results of computations from physical models and real data in the atmosphere.

A given temperature field can be interpreted as both “warming” and “cooling” simultaneously, making the concept of warming in the context of the issue of global warming physically ill-posed.

Click source to download PDF file

Only by playing with data can scientists come up with the infamous ‘hockey stick’ graph of global warming

Beginning in 2003, I worked with Stephen McIntyre to replicate a famous result in paleoclimatology known as the Hockey Stick graph. Developed by a U.S. climatologist named Michael Mann, it was a statistical compilation of tree ring data supposedly proving that air temperatures had been stable for 900 years, then soared off the charts in the 20th century. Prior to the publication of the Hockey Stick, scientists had held that the medieval-era was warmer than the present, making the scale of 20th century global warming seem relatively unimportant. The dramatic revision to this view occasioned by the Hockey Stick’s publication made it the poster child of the global warming movement. It was featured prominently in a 2001 report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as well as government websites and countless review reports.

Steve and I showed that the mathematics behind the Mann Hockey Stick were badly flawed, such that its shape was determined by suspect bristlecone tree ring data. Controversies quickly piled up: Two expert panels involving the U.S. National Academy of Sciences were asked to investigate, the U.S. Congress held a hearing, and the media followed the story around the world.

Computer models utterly fail to predict climate changes in regions.

A few years ago a biologist I know looked at how climate change might affect the spread of a particular invasive insect species. He obtained climate-model projections for North America under standard greenhouse-gas scenarios from two modelling labs, and then tried to characterize how the insect habitat might change. To his surprise, he found very different results depending on which model was used. Even though both models were using the same input data, they made opposite predictions about regional climate patterns in North America.

This reminded me of a presentation I’d seen years earlier about predicted changes in U.S. rainfall patterns under global warming. The two models being used for a government report again made diametrically opposite predictions. In region after region, if one model predicted a tendency toward more flooding, the other tended to predict drying.

Just how good are climate models at predicting regional patterns of climate change? I had occasion to survey this literature as part of a recently completed research project on the subject. The simple summary is that, with few exceptions, climate models not only fail to do better than random numbers, in some cases they are actually worse.

There are two reasons why this is important. First, it tells us something about our lack of understanding of the climate. There are various different theories to explain the rising trend in the global average temperature over the past century. Climate models embed one such theory, based on a relatively high sensitivity to greenhouse gases and strong amplifying effects from a positive water-vapour feedback, and relative insensitivity to other things. In this setup, the only way to get a climate model to mimic the 20th-century average warming is to feed in the observed increase in greenhouse gases. Therefore, the argument goes, greenhouse gases are to blame.

Prominent economist opposed to global warming doomsaying publishes a damning rebuke on climate consensus claims comparing scientists to economists.

In his latest paper,’ Conflict resolution in Climate Science: Some Preliminary Thoughts from an Outsider’ published as a news item (February 7, 2011) on his website, Professor Ross McKitrick uses an analogy whereby he compares a supposed consensus on global economic ideas to discredit the so-called ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming.

McKitrick presented his paper for discussion at the recent Workshop on “Reconciliation in the Climate Change Debate” held at the Institute for the Protection and Security of the Citizen, European Commission, Lisbon, Portugal. The event was held between January 26—28, 2011.

Canadian Claims Public Incredulous on Climate Catastrophism

The Canadian professor holds strong views on this hot topic having written frequent op-eds, a book, journal articles and think-tank reports. He concludes, “The public has acquired a dim view of the credibility of climate science, and based on what I have seen, the public is right.”

There is too much conflict of interest built into the report-writing process

After the Climategate emails scandal of last winter, and discoveries of some embarrassing errors in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, asked the Inter-Academy Council (IAC) to review IPCC procedures. The IAC is a little-known branch of the Inter-Academy Panel, itself a little-known committee that connects national academic societies. It was a safe choice for Pachauri. The last IAC report was a glowing tribute to alternative energy schemes, coauthored by Pachauri himself, along with current Obama administration appointee Stephen Chu and a group of others. So I do not expect much independence of mind or hard-headed objectivity from the IAC. But with the report due out on Aug. 30, I guess we shall soon see.

I was one of hundreds of people asked to respond to a set of inquiry questions. The questions, and my replies, are available on my Web page (rossmckitrick.weebly.com). Here is a summary of some of my input.

IPCC policies, such as the requirement for an “objective, open and transparent” review process, sound impressive, but my experience is that the written policies are not always followed, and there do not appear to be any consequences when they are breached.

For many years, attempts to encourage debate on global warming science or policy have run into the obstacle that the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued definitive statements, and therefore-the reasoning goes-the era of debate is over. The IPCC is made up of thousands of the world's top scientists, it has one of the most rigorous and exhaustive review processes in the history of science, and the oversight by 195 member governments ensures balance, transparency and accountability. Or so we are told.

These claims about the IPCC are not true, but until relatively recently few were willing to question what they were told. Things began to change in 2009 with the leak of the Climategate emails, which prompted some observers to begin questioning their assumptions about the IPCC. Then this fall, Canadian investigative journalist Donna Laframboise released her book The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World's Top Climate Expert, a superb exposé of the IPCC that shows convincingly that the IPCC has evolved into an activist organization bearing little resemblance to the picture of scientific probity painted by its promoters and activist allies.

On Monday, news emerged of another release of thousands of new Climategate emails, with early indications that some of them add to concerns about the IPCC that arose from the 2009 disclosures.

I am pleased to announce the publication of a report I have written that provides systematic detail on the procedures of the IPCC and makes the case for reforming them. My study, called What is Wrong With the IPCC? A Proposal for Radical Reform, was published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation in the U.K., and includes a foreword by the Hon. John Howard, former prime minister of Australia.

I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity.

Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. Getting children out of menial labour and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading.

Development and provision of modern health care without electricity is absolutely impossible. The expansion of our food supply, and the promotion of hygiene and nutrition, depended on being able to irrigate fields, cook and refrigerate foods, and have a steady indoor supply of hot water. Many of the world’s poor suffer brutal environmental conditions in their own homes because of the necessity of cooking over indoor fires that burn twigs and dung. This causes local deforestation and the proliferation of smoke- and parasite-related lung diseases. Anyone who wants to see local conditions improve in the third world should realize the importance of access to cheap electricity from fossil-fuel based power generating stations. After all, that’s how the west developed.

NASHVILLE, Tenn. (BP)--The world's leading climate change evaluation panel does a poor job of taking into account multiple scientific perspectives, including evidence against human-induced global warming, according to a recent report by the InterAcademy Council.

"The [IAC] criticisms ... all point in the same direction, which is that the IPCC [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] is one-sided," Ross McKitrick, professor of environmental economics at the University of Guelph in Canada, told Baptist Press.

"They don't do a good job of handling multiple points of view. They have a weak review process so that when they pick lead authors, the lead authors really have a free hand to push their own point of view," McKitrick said.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, established by the United Nations in 1988, has become the most influential scientific body studying climate change, consistently warning about the presumed dangers of greenhouse gases produced by humans.

The InterAcademy Council, created in 2000 by the world's science academies, provides "high quality advice" to international bodies such as the United Nations and World Bank, according to the IAC's website.

In 2009, a large body of IPCC e-mails and files released on the Internet pointed to major flaws in its research process. So a series of investigations were launched, including one by the IAC, which released its report Aug. 30.