Climate Depot Editorial
Dr. Kevin Trenberth — head of the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, in Boulder CO and a UN IPCC lead author, claimed dissenting scientists were ignorant of the science behind man-made global warming. Trenberth also declared the debate over and wrote ‘the IPCC has spoken.”
“I have found that the only scientists who disagree with the IPCC report are those who have not read it and are poorly informed,” Trenberth, declared in an October 10, 2009 written debate with Hurricane guru Dr. Bill Gray, Professor Emeritus of Atmospheric Science at Colorado State University. See: Another climate debate: Dr. William Gray vs. UN IPCC’s Dr. Kevin Trenberth – October 10, 2009
The ‘IPCC HAS SPOKEN”
Trenberth appealed to authority in order to convince readers that man-made climate change was a threat to mankind.
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has spoken: ‘Warming of the climate system is unequivocal’ and it is ‘very likely’ due to human activities,” Trenberth asserted.
Trenberth also claimed that the “IPCC process is very open.” Trenberth also added his own policy prescriptions to address global warming. “There is much that can be done, and America should lead. If done in the right way, benefits to the climate through reduced emissions save energy and promote the economy, while increasing sustainability,” he expalained.
Back in 2007, Trenberth surprised many with his candid comments about climate models. He admitted that the climate models touted by former Vice President Al Gore, the UN, the media and scientists are not predictions, but merely “story lines.”Climate Depot Response to Trenberth’s claim that only ‘poorly informed’ scientists disagree with UN IPCC’s spoken word.
“In fact there are no predictions by IPCC at all. And there never have been. The IPCC instead proffers ‘what if’ projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions scenarios,” Trenberth wrote in journal Nature’s blog on June 4, 2007. Trenberth also admitted that the climate models have major shortcomings because “they do not consider many things like the recovery of the ozone layer, for instance, or observed trends in forcing agents. There is no estimate, even probabilistically, as to the likelihood of any emissions scenario and no best guess.” (LINK)
Climate Depot Responds
The simplest way to respond to Trenberth’s assertion is to let the latest scientific data, peer-reviewed studies and the UN’s own IPCC scientists speak for themselves.
In 2009, the climate has changed dramatically — the scientific observational data and most surprisingly — the media climate. Even the BBC, the Houston Chronicle, the UK Times, the Washington Post, Christian Science Monitor and New York Times are no longer buying the insulting notion that when the UN IPCC “has spoken” the debate is over.
Trenberth’s Retro Climate Claims
Trenberth is living in 2006 or 2007 America when the media used to believe uncritically the UN claims and never questioned the “man behind the curtain.” The science is disintegrating so fast that even climate activists are now openly lamenting the entire man-made climate fear movement. See: Climate Activists Shock Admission: ‘Climate change campaigners should not have fixated on carbon dioxide’ — ‘only responsible for about half of the problem’ – Sept. 18, 2009
In addition, public opinion continues to turn against climate fear promotion and even activists at green festivals are now expressing doubts over man-made climate fears and a Nobel Prize-winning economist is wishing for ‘tornadoes’ and ‘a lot of horrid things’ to convince Americans of a climate threat.
It’s time Trenberth got a badly needed reality check, which of course Climate Depot is only too happy to provide.
A small sampling of recent developments include: new peer-reviewed studies, real world data, a growing chorus of scientists dissenting (including more UN IPCC scientists), open revolts in scientific societies, more evidence that rising CO2 is a boon for the atmosphere, and the Earth’s failure to warm.
The year 2009 saw a report from 35 international scientists directly countering the UN IPCC’s scientific claims. See: “Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change” This year also saw the flow of peer-reviewed scientific papers continue to be published challenging the UN IPCC climate views. as well. See: Peer-Reviewed Study Rocks Climate Debate! ‘Nature not man responsible for recent global warming…little or none of late 20th century warming and cooling can be attributed to humans’ – July 23, 2009
A Japan Geoscience Union symposium survey in 2008 reportedly “showed 90 per cent of the participants do not believe the IPCC report.”
Scientific meetings are now being dominated by a growing number of skeptical scientists. The prestigious International Geological Congress, dubbed the geologists’ equivalent of the Olympic Games, was held in Norway in August 2008 and prominently featured the voices of scientists skeptical of man-made global warming fears. [See: Skeptical scientists overwhelm conference: ‘2/3 of presenters and question-askers were hostile to, even dismissive of, the UN IPCC’ & see full reports here & here ]
For more complete analysis see: Science of man-made climate fears continues to collapse – August 26, 2009
Here is a very small sampling of what current and former UN scientists have to say about the UN’s claims and its scientific methods. (Presumably, these skeptical UN scientists did not get Trenberth’s memo on how to avoid being “poorly informed.”)
Warming fears are the “worst scientific scandal in the history…When people come to know what the truth is, they will feel deceived by science and scientists.” – UN IPCC Japanese Scientist Dr. Kiminori Itoh, an award-winning PhD environmental physical chemist.
“The IPCC has actually become a closed circuit; it doesn’t listen to others. It doesn’t have open minds… I am really amazed that the Nobel Peace Prize has been given on scientifically incorrect conclusions by people who are not geologists.” – Indian geologist Dr. Arun D. Ahluwalia at Punjab University and a board member of the UN-supported International Year of the Planet.
“Temperature measurements show that the [climate model-predicted mid-troposphere] hot zone is non-existent. This is more than sufficient to invalidate global climate models and projections made with them!”- UN IPCC Scientist Dr. Steven M. Japar, a PhD atmospheric chemist who was part of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) Second (1995) and Third (2001) Assessment Reports, and has authored 83 peer-reviewed publications and in the areas of climate change, atmospheric chemistry, air pollutions and vehicle emissions.
UN IPCC Scientist Kenneth P. Green Declares ‘A Death Spiral for Climate Alarmism’ – September 30, 2009 – ‘We can expect climate crisis industry to grow increasingly shrill, and increasingly hostile toward anyone who questions their authority’ – Dr. Kenneth Green was a Working Group 1 expert reviewer for the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2001
‘The whole climate change issue is about to fall apart — Heads will roll!’ -South African UN Scientist Dr. Will Alexander, April 12, 2009 – Professor Alexander, is Emeritus of the Department of Civil and Biosystems Engineering at the University of Pretoria in South Africa, and a former member of the United Nations Scientific and Technical Committee on Natural Disasters.
“I was at the table with three Europeans, and we were having lunch. And they were talking about their role as lead authors. And they were talking about how they were trying to make the report so dramatic that the United States would just have to sign that Kyoto Protocol,” Christy told CNN on May 2, 2007. – Alabama State Climatologist Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, served as a UN IPCC lead author in 2001 for the 3rd assessment report and detailed how he personally witnessed UN scientists attempting to distort the science for political purposes.
“Gore prompted me to start delving into the science again and I quickly found myself solidly in the skeptic camp…Climate models can at best be useful for explaining climate changes after the fact.” – Meteorologist Hajo Smit of Holland, who reversed his belief in man-made warming to become a skeptic, is a former member of the Dutch UN IPCC committee.
“The quantity of CO2 we produce is insignificant in terms of the natural circulation between air, water and soil… I am doing a detailed assessment of the UN IPCC reports and the Summaries for Policy Makers, identifying the way in which the Summaries have distorted the science.” – South African Nuclear Physicist and Chemical Engineer Dr. Philip Lloyd, a UN IPCC co-coordinating lead author who has authored over 150 refereed publications.
“The claims of the IPCC are dangerous unscientific nonsense” – declared IPCC reviewer and climate researcher Dr Vincent Gray, of New Zealand in 2007. Gray was an expert reviewer on every single draft of the IPCC reports going back to 1990, author of more than 100 scientific publications. (LINK) & (LINK)
“After reading [UN IPCC chairman] Pachauri’s asinine comment [comparing skeptics to] Flat Earthers, it’s hard to remain quiet.” – Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs, who specializes in the statistics of forecast evaluation, serves on the American Meteorological Society’s Probability and Statistics Committee and is an Associate Editor of Monthly Weather Review.
Trenberth’s claim that the UN IPCC is an “very open” also needs examining. The IPCC summary for policymakers is used to scare politicians and goad the public into action. The UN is all about politics.
UN special climate envoy Dr. Gro Harlem Brundtland declared “it’s completely immoral, even, to question” the UN’s alleged global warming “consensus,” according to a May 10, 2007 article. Sounds scientific, doesn’t it?
Dr. John Brignell, a UK Emeritus Engineering Professor at the University of Southampton who held the Chair in Industrial Instrumentation at Southampton, accused the UN of “censorship” on July 23, 2008. “Here was a purely political body posing as a scientific institution. Through the power of patronage it rapidly attracted acolytes. Peer review soon rapidly evolved from the old style refereeing to a much more sinister imposition of The Censorship. As Wegman demonstrated, new circles of like-minded propagandists formed, acting as judge and jury for each other. Above all, they acted in concert to keep out alien and hostile opinion. ‘Peer review’ developed into a mantra that was picked up by political activists who clearly had no idea of the procedures of science or its learned societies. It became an imprimatur of political acceptability, whose absence was equivalent to placement on the proscribed list,” Brignell wrote.
Research by Australian climate data analyst John McLean revealed that the IPCC’s peer-review process for the Summary for Policymakers leaves much to be desired. (LINK) (LINK) (LINK) & (LINK) McLean’s research revealed that the UN IPCC peer-review process is “an illusion.” McLean’s study found that very few scientists are actively involved in the UN’s peer-review process. The report contained devastating revelations to the central IPCC assertion that ‘it is very highly likely that greenhouse gas forcing has been the dominant cause of the observed global warming over the last 50 years.” The analysis by McLean states: “The IPCC leads us to believe that this statement is very much supported by the majority of reviewers. The reality is that there is surprisingly little explicit support for this key notion. Among the 23 independent reviewers just 4 explicitly endorsed the chapter with its hypothesis, and one other endorsed only a specific section. Moreover, only 62 of the IPCC’s 308 reviewers commented on this chapter at all.” Repeating: Only four UN scientists in the IPCC peer-review process explicitly endorsed the key chapter blaming mankind for warming the past 50 years, according to this recent analysis.
Here is a small sampling of what current and former UN scientists have to say about the UN IPCC’s “very open” process.
(Below are excerpts from various U.S. Senate reports which Climate Depot’s Morano authored during his years at the U.S. Senate’s Environment and Public Works Committee.)
One former UN IPCC scientist bluntly told the Senate Environment and Public Works (EPW) committee how the UN IPCC Summary for Policymakers “distorted” the scientists work. “I have found examples of a Summary saying precisely the opposite of what the scientists said,” explained South African Nuclear Physicist and Chemical Engineer Dr. Philip Lloyd, a UN IPCC co-coordinating lead author who has authored over 150 refereed publications.
In an August 13, 2007 letter, UN IPCC Scientist Dr. Madhav Khandekar, a retired Environment Canada scientist, lashed out at those who “seem to naively believe that the climate change science espoused in the [UN’s] Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) documents represents ‘scientific consensus.'” Khandekar continued: “Nothing could be further than the truth! As one of the invited expert reviewers for the 2007 IPCC documents, I have pointed out the flawed review process used by the IPCC scientists in one of my letters. I have also pointed out in my letter that an increasing number of scientists are now questioning the hypothesis of Greenhouse gas induced warming of the earth’s surface and suggesting a stronger impact of solar variability and large-scale atmospheric circulation patterns on the observed temperature increase than previously believed.” “Unfortunately, the IPCC climate change documents do not provide an objective assessment of the earth’s temperature trends and associated climate change,” Khandekar concluded.
Paul Reiter, a malaria expert formerly of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, participated in a past UN IPCC process and now calls the concept of consensus on global warming a “sham.” Reiter, a professor of entomology and tropical disease with the Pasteur Institute in Paris, had to threaten legal action to have his name removed from the IPCC. “That is how they make it seem that all the top scientists are agreed,” he said on March 5, 2007. “It’s not true,” he added.
Hurricane expert Christopher W. Landsea of NOAA’s National Hurricane Center, was both an author a reviewer for the IPCC’s 2nd Assessment Report in 1995 and the 3rd Assessment Report in 2001, but resigned from the 4th Assessment Report after charging the UN with playing politics with Hurricane science. Landsea wrote a January 17, 2005 public letter detailing his experience with the UN: “I am withdrawing [from the UN] because I have come to view the part of the IPCC to which my expertise is relevant as having become politicized. In addition, when I have raised my concerns to the IPCC leadership, their response was simply to dismiss my concerns.” “I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound,” Landsea added.
In addition, a Greenpeace activist co-authored a key economic report in 2007. Left unreported by most of the media was the fact that Bill Hare, an advisor to Greenpeace, was a lead co- author of a key economic report in the IPCC’s 4th Assessment. Not surprisingly, the Greenpeace co-authored report predicted a gloomy future for our planet unless we follow the UN’s policy prescriptions.
The UN IPCC’s own guidelines explicitly state that the scientific reports have to be “change[d]” to “ensure consistency with” the politically motivated Summary for Policymakers.
In addition, the IPCC more closely resembles a political party’s convention platform battle – not a scientific process. During an IPCC Summary for Policymakers process, political delegates and international bureaucrats squabble over the specific wording of a phrase or assertion.
Steve McIntyre of Climate Audit, one of the individuals responsible for debunking the infamous “Hockey Stick” temperature graph, slammed the IPCC Summary for Policymaker’s process on January 24, 2007.
McIntyre wrote: “So the purpose of the three-month delay between the publication of the (IPCC) Summary for Policy-Makers and the release of the actual WG1 (Working Group 1) is to enable them to make any ‘necessary’ adjustments to the technical report to match the policy summary. Unbelievable. Can you imagine what securities commissions would say if business promoters issued a big promotion and then the promoters made the ‘necessary’ adjustments to the qualifying reports and financial statements so that they matched the promotion. Words fail me.”
Former Colorado State Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. also detailed the corruption of the UN IPCC process on September 1, 2007: “The same individuals who are doing primary research in the role of humans on the climate system are then permitted to lead the [IPCC] assessment! There should be an outcry on this obvious conflict of interest, but to date either few recognize this conflict, or see that since the recommendations of the IPCC fit their policy and political agenda, they chose to ignore this conflict. In either case, scientific rigor has been sacrificed and poor policy and political decisions will inevitably follow,” Pielke explained. He added: “We need recognition among the scientific community, the media, and policymakers that the IPCC process is obviously a real conflict of interest, and this has resulted in a significantly flawed report.”
Andrei Kapitsa, a Russian geographer and Antarctic ice core researcher: “The Kyoto theorists have put the cart before the horse. It is global warming that triggers higher levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, not the other way round…A large number of critical documents submitted at the 1995 U.N. conference in Madrid vanished without a trace. As a result, the discussion was one-sided and heavily biased, and the U.N. declared global warming to be a scientific fact.”