olegt
Posts: 1405 Joined: Dec. 2006
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Card-carrying member of the APS here.
Lord Monckton, whose opinion article appeared in the July issue of the APS Forum on Physics & Society is neither a physicist, nor an APS member, so his letter doesn't signify any change in the APS stance on the matter. By printing his letter the APS simply shows that it isn't afraid of debating the issue on scientific terms (it is a scientific organization, not a political one).
Monckton's letter is quite revealing. He throws in a bunch of equations to undermine the conclusions of the IPCC. But science doesn't matter much to him. Read his concluding remarks to see what it is all about. Quote | Even if temperature had risen above natural variability, the recent solar Grand Maximum may have been chiefly responsible. Even if the sun were not chiefly to blame for the past half-century’s warming, the IPCC has not demonstrated that, since CO2 occupies only one-ten-thousandth part more of the atmosphere that it did in 1750, it has contributed more than a small fraction of the warming. Even if carbon dioxide were chiefly responsible for the warming that ceased in 1998 and may not resume until 2015, the distinctive, projected fingerprint of anthropogenic “greenhouse-gas” warming is entirely absent from the observed record. Even if the fingerprint were present, computer models are long proven to be inherently incapable of providing projections of the future state of the climate that are sound enough for policymaking. Even if per impossibilethe models could ever become reliable, the present paper demonstrates that it is not at all likely that the world will warm as much as the IPCC imagines. Even if the world were to warm that much, the overwhelming majority of the scientific, peer-reviewed literature does not predict that catastrophe would ensue. Even if catastrophe might ensue, even the most drastic proposals to mitigate future climate change by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide would make very little difference to the climate. Even if mitigation were likely to be effective, it would do more harm than good: already millions face starvation as the dash for biofuels takes agricultural land out of essential food production: a warning that taking precautions, “just in case”, can do untold harm unless there is a sound, scientific basis for them. Finally, even if mitigation might do more good than harm, adaptation as (and if) necessary would be far more cost-effective and less likely to be harmful.
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See, he starts with a full denial of the warming trend, a position abandoned even by the most hardened GW skeptics, and then presents a dozen fallback positions that leave no doubt where he is coming from.
And in fact, he isn't even sure his equations work! Quote | In short, we must get the science right, or we shall get the policy wrong. If the concluding equation in this analysis (Eqn. 30) is correct, the IPCC’s estimates of climate sensitivity must have been very much exaggerated. There may, therefore, be a good reason why, contrary to the projections of the models on which the IPCC relies, temperatures have not risen for a decade and have been falling since the phase-transition in global temperature trends that occurred in late 2001. Perhaps real-world climate sensitivity is very much below the IPCC’s estimates. Perhaps, therefore, there is no “climate crisis” at all. At present, then, in policy terms there is no case for doing anything. The correct policy approach to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing. |
What else would one expect from Maggie Thatcher's policy advisor?
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