CARIE ! RANNOCH !

PH17 2QJ
monckton@mail.com From: The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
From: The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley To: John Key, Esq., Prime Minister of New Zealand and Leader of the National Party. Sir,

St. Andrews Day, 2008

Open letter about climate science and policy

Global warming is not a global crisis

OU CHOSE in your election campaign to support the apocalyptic vision of catastrophic anthropogenic climate

change a lurid and fanciful account of imagined future events that was always baseless, was briefly exciting among the less thoughtful species of news commentators and politicians, but is now scientifically discredited. Yet despite this you told the country, Human-induced climate change is real and its threatening the planet. There are some armchair sceptics out there, but, you affirmed, Im not one of them. Backing you up was your colleague Nick Smith, whom you have appointed your Minister for the Environment and for Climate Change Issues, who says he fully accepts climate change is a happening thing and calls it an issue that is bigger than any party in this Parliament or than any single country. The National Partys policy is to set a target of a 50% reduction in carbon equivalent net emissions, as compared to 1990 levels, by 2050. In shorthand: a 50% cut by 2050. 50 by 50: a target, youve said, that will send a clear message to the world: New Zealand means business on climate change.

Indissoluble bonds of interest and affection

Whether by carbon tax or emissions trading, there is no rational basis for your declared intention that your great nation should directly inflict upon her own working people (and indirectly upon the starving masses of the Third World) the extravagantly-pointless, climatically-irrelevant, strategically-fatal economic wounds that the arrogant advocates of atmospheric alarmism admit they aim to achieve. Britain and New Zealand are bound to each other not just by the ties of commonwealth, but also, like England and Scotland on the first page of Macaulays splendid History of England, by indissoluble bonds of interest and affection. Here in this

little archipelago at the antipode of yourselves, we have a love-love relationship with yourselves it matters to us that New Zealand should thrive and prosper, and not destroy herself in the specious name of Saving The Planet. I applaud the stated intention of both Act and National to re-examine both the fatally flawed emissions-trading plans of the previous government and the fundamentals of the science of global warming, but I remain concerned at your continuing policy goal pointlessly to halve your countrys economic output. Here are the fundamentals that must be examined before you adopt any such madness.

1. Science and the climate: the facts

The facts about rising temperatures
Your environment and climate change spokesman, Nick Smith, has said: There can be no question that the number one environmental issue is pollution from increased greenhouse gases in the atmosphere and the destabilising of the earths climate systems. It has become the hot topic of our time. Is climate change literally a hot topic? As you ponder that question, Sir, consider that the recorded temperature in the Christchurch of 2008 is no warmer than the Christchurch of 1910 as you can establish for yourself by checking the record. Clearly, there are more facts to bring to bear than either your colleagues or your advisers have told you hitherto. So here, below, are the facts about rising temperatures upon which the supposed destabilising of the earths climate is hypothesised. The facts which I shall give you in this letter are taken not from my own imagination, nor from the obscurantist reports of the UNs climate panel, nor from any lobby group, but from the real-world, observed data and the peer-reviewed scientific literature. Very nearly all of the citations that support the crucial facts which your colleagues and advisers seem not to have put before you, and which I shall set forth in this letter, are from peer-reviewed papers. Some, however, such as the documents of the UNs climate panel, the IPCC, are not peer-reviewed in the accepted sense of the term. Peer-reviewed papers will be indicated by citations with the date in parentheses, thus: Boffin et al. (2008). Papers that are not peer-reviewed will be indicated by square brackets, thus: IPCC [2007]. I begin with a geological and historical perspective on global mean surface temperature that your advisors seem to have withheld from you. For most of the past 600 million years, the mode of temperature the temperature that most often prevailed globally is thought to have been 12.5 F higher than todays temperature: for todays temperature, in the perspective of the long recent history of our planet, is unusually low.

600 million years of CO2 concentration vs. surface temperature

During each of the last four interglacial periods over the past half-million years, temperature was 5 to 8 F warmer than the present (Petit et al., 1999).

Each of the past four interglacial periods was warmer than today.

For 2000 years in the Bronze Age, during the Holocene Climate Optimum (which is called an Optimum because warmer is better than cooler), temperature was up to 5 F warmer than the present. Thanks to the warmer weather, on many continents simultaneously, the worlds first great civilizations emerged. Indeed, for most of the past 10,000 years, since the end of the last Ice Age, it has been warmer than the present (Curry & Clow, 2007).

Global warming in geological perspective. Polar temperatures have been warmer than the present for most of the past 10,000 years. The current warm period, which began 300 years ago at the end of the 70-year Maunder Minimum and ended 10 years ago at the end of the 70-year solar Grand Maximum, is, in geological terms, insignificant: it is the minuscule uptick in the temperature graph to the right of the arrow at top right.

It was also warmer during the 600 years of the Graeco-Roman warm period, when the twin civilizations that were the foundation of our own flourished in the Mediterranean. And it was warmer during the half millennium of the Mediaeval Climate Optimum, when the Renaissance reawakened humanity after the Dark Ages, and the great cathedrals and churches of Europe were built.

Unremarkable temperature: Todays global temperature is not in any way exceptional. In the Bronze Age, in the Roman warm period and in the Mediaeval warm period it was warmer than the present.

In 2001 the UNs climate panel made a maladroit and disfiguring attempt [IPCC, 2001] to heighten the baseless alarm that underlies all of its reports by denying that the Middle Ages were warmer than the present. However, three eminent statisticians working at the instigation of the US House of Representatives produced the definitive report [Wegman et al., 2005], confirming the peer-reviewed research of McIntyre & McKitrick (2003, 2005) establishing that the UNs graph had been doctored so as falsely to deny the reality of the mediaeval warm period, to whose existence hundreds of peer-reviewed papers from all parts of the globe attest: for instance, Mangini et al., (2005: Central Alps); Quang et al. (2005: northeastern Tibetan plateau); Gupta et al. (2005: Indian monsoon); Williams et al., (2004: North Island of New Zealand); Pla and Catalan (2005: northwestern Mediterranean); Holzhauser et al. (2005: west-central Europe); Bjorck et al. (2006: central North Atlantic); Rein et al. (2004, 2005: Peru); Grinsted et al. (2006: Iceland); Dahl-Jensen (1998: Greenland summit); etc., etc. Recently, the fabricators of the now-discredited graph tried to defend it (Mann et al., 2008): but their analysis continues to depend upon two suspect datasets, the Tiljander and bristlecone-pine proxies, which if removed reveal that the mediaeval warm period was indeed considerably warmer than the present, just as history has long attested. At both Poles, it was warmer only half a century ago than it is today. For temperatures in the Arctic, see Soon et al. (2004). For the Antarctic, see Doran et al. (2002).

Antarctic warming? What Antarctic warming? Temperature trends in the Antarctic, 1979-2007 (after Doran et al., 2002).

During the Maunder Minimum, a period of more than half a century ending in 1700 when there were no sunspots on the surface of our Sun, a Little Ice Age occurred all over the world (Hathaway, 2004). In 1700 there began a recovery in solar activity that has continued ever since, culminating in the 70-year Solar Grand Maximum that seems recently to have ended. During the Grand Maximum, the Sun was more active, and for longer, than during almost any previous similar period in the past 11,400 years (Solanki et al., 2005; and see Usoskin et al., 2003; and Hathaway, 2004). A symposium of the International Astronomical Union [2004] concluded that it is the Sun that was chiefly responsible for the warming of the late 20th century; that the global warming that had been observed over the previous 300 years had ended; that global cooling would soon become the norm; and that anthropogenic effects on the climate were negligible.

Busie old foole, unrulie Sunne! Between the end of the 70-year Maunder Minimum in 1715 and the end of the 70-year solar Grand Maximum in 1998, during which the Sun was more active than at almost any previous similar period for 11,400 years (Solanki et al., 2005), solar activity gradually increased. So did global temperatures. During the first 250 of the past 300 years, our contribution to the global warming that took place was negligible. The warming between 1975 and 1998 may well have been caused chiefly by the Sun (Scafetta & West, 2008, attribute two-thirds of this warming to the solar Grand Maximum); but the cooling in the seven years since late 2001 has restored temperature trends to the 300-year mean a warming rate of 0.5 K / century [Akasofu, 2008]. Since the warming had persisted for almost 300 years, it is unsurprising that most of the warmest years are recent years.

From 1700-1998, temperature rose at a near-uniform rate of about 1 F per century [Akasofu, 2008]. In 1998, global warming stopped, and it has not resumed since. Indeed, in the past seven years, temperature has been falling at a rate equivalent to as much as 0.7 F per decade [Hadley Center for Forecasting, 2008; US National Climatic Data Center, 2008; University of Alabama at Huntsville satellite lower-troposphere temperature dataset, 2008; RSS satellite dataset, 2008]. Very few news media have given any prominence to this long and pronounced downturn in the temperature trend. The January-January fall in global mean surface temperatures between 2007 and 2008 was the steepest since globaltemperature records were first compiled in 1880.

Seven years unreported global cooling: During the past seven years, global temperatures have been falling, as recorded by the linear regressions (dotted lines) calculated for all four of the major global-temperature datasets. However, concern about global warming has been rising throughout this period, in part because most news media have found it expedient not to report the fact, duration or extent of the global cooling.

As I write this, at the end of November 2008, the Scottish Highlands are deep under snow more of it than we have seen at this time of year for a quarter of a century.

A fogbow, a rare meteorological phenomenon, seen on the snow-covered summit of Carie Gorm, Highland Perthshire

London has just had its first October snow for three-quarters of a century ironically on the very day that the House of Lemmings voted by 363 votes to 3 to destroy some 80% of the UK economy over the next half-century, without any prospect of exercising the slightest effect on the climate.

Global warming hits London: the first October snow for three-quarters of a century struck the UKs capital on the very night when the House of Lemmings voted by 363 to 3 to shut down four-fifths of the British economy over the next half century to Save The Planet from global warming.

It is now thought possible that no new global annual temperature record will be set until at least 2015 (Keenlyside et al., 2008). Yet the projection of the UNs climate panel had been that temperature would rise by about 1 F during the 17 years to 2015. It is no surprise, then, that Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, the panels chairman, has called for a re-evaluation of its hitherto very high estimates of climate sensitivity the temperature change in response to the ever-increasing atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide. The facts about supposedly rising temperatures which I have set out above, can be readily verified by your advisors. All they have to do is to check any of the four datasets I have mentioned, and perform the same linear-regression analysis that I have shown above. If you like, I can assist them in finding the relevant peer-reviewed papers and global temperature datasets. On these facts, there is not a shred of scientific foundation for any assertion along the lines that time is running out when it comes to battling rising temperatures. Since the world is not warming at the rate projected by the UNs climate panel (the IPCC), it follows that the urgency relentlessly suggested by that panel is by no means as great as the UNs reports would have us believe. Some 20 years ago, the IPCC told us we had ten years to avert climate disaster. Today, the IPCCs chairman says exactly the same. In truth, even if there were a global problem hard to maintain in the face of no net warming in the 13 years since 1995, and seven years of net cooling there would be no urgency: warmer weather has occurred before and, if it occurs again, there is no reason to suppose that it will do so suddenly and catastrophically. Why? First, since the climate is chaotic we cannot predict what it will do next, or how suddenly or gently it will do it (Lorenz, 1963; Giorgi et al., 2005, Akasofu [2008], etc., etc.). Secondly, even in response to far greater perturbations than that which the IPCC imagines from our industrial activities, the temperature has not varied by more than 3% either side of its long-run mean at any time in the past half billion years and it is already towards the high end of the range because we are in an interglacial period. Any notion that the increase of just one-ten-thousandth part in the proportion of the atmosphere occupied by a harmless trace gas might cause a climatic perturbation larger than the great variations in the activity of the Sun and the Earths orbital characteristics over the past half billion years is implausible in the extreme. The correct question, posed by Akasofu [2008], is this: Since the world has been warming at a uniform rate in parallel with the recovery of solar activity during the 300 years following the Maunder Minimum, and since humankind could not have had any significant influence over global temperature until perhaps 50 years ago, if then, is there any evidence whatsoever that the observed anthropogenic increase in carbon dioxide concentration over the past half-century has had any appreciable influence, at all, on global temperature? On one measure, there has been no net warming for 28 years.

No net global warming for 28 years: Globally, 2008 will be cooler than 1980, according to the UAH satellite lower-troposphere temperature anomaly record (C).

Another relevant question may occur to you: Is it not strange that the global warming scare has been rising in the media headlines and in the rhetoric of the classe politique throughout the past seven years, even though global temperature has been falling throughout that period? Finally, now that you have the facts about temperature before you, it will be evident to you that you were not correct in having said that a new temperature record seems to be set every few years. Despite rapidly-rising carbon dioxide concentrations, there has been no new record year for global temperature in the ten years since 1998; and, in the United States, there has been no new record year for national temperature since 1934 a record set almost three-quarters of a century ago, and well before humankind could have had any significant influence on temperature.

The facts about carbon dioxide concentration

You have said, our greenhouse gas emissions continue to rise at an alarming rate, implying some certainty that greenhouse gasses are implicated as a cause of climate change. You have said, We have to be seen to do our part for the environment and lowering carbon emission is part of it, implying that carbon dioxide is a pollutant that needs to be expunged from the atmosphere. Indeed, your minister for climate change, Nick Smith, has said that The atmosphere is only 5km thick and has 1/500th of the mass of the oceans. It is the most fragile part of planet Earth. That is why I worry about this graph [indicating that 400,000 years of atmospheric carbon dioxide data shows] CO2 levels are the highest in 400,000 years.

Carbon dioxide concentration is rising but how much does it matter?

Sir, the first assumption above requires heavy qualification: the second is scientifically false. The combined effect of the two statements is profoundly misleading. Greenhouse gases keep the world warm enough for plant and animal life to thrive. Without them, the Earth would be an ice-planet all of the time rather than some of the time. The existence of greenhouse gases, whether natural or anthropogenic, retains in the atmosphere some 100 Watts per square meter of radiant energy from the Sun (Kiehl & Trenberth, 1997) that would otherwise pass out uninterrupted to space. According to the UNs climate panel [IPCC, 2007], anthropogenic radiative forcings from all sources compared with 1750 account for just 1.6% of this total, or perhaps almost 5% if temperature feedbacks as currently overestimated by the UN are taken into account. I say overestimated because the sum of the UNs high-end estimates of individual temperature feedbacks equals the maximum that is possible before an instability occurs in the feedback-amplification equation used by the UN, implying that the central estimates are also very likely to be excessive. Any assumption about rises in greenhouse gas emissions being alarming, therefore, seem somewhat overstated.

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Exaggerated feedbacks: If the IPCCs maximum feedback values, summing to b: were correct, an instability that has not occurred would have occurred. Therefore it is likely that the IPCCs high-end and hence central estimates of the impact of temperature feedbacks on future warming have been exaggerated. The IPCCs estimated values for feedbacks, which account for fully two-thirds of the anthropogenic effect on temperature that it imagines, are based on a single paper published by the lead author of the relevant chapter in the IPCCs 2007 report.

As to the second assumption above, the worst greenhouse gas the one which, through its sheer quantity in the atmosphere, accounts for two-thirds of the 100 Watts per square meter of greenhouse-gas radiative forcing reported by Kiehl & Trenberth (2007, op. cit.) is water vapor. Carbon dioxide accounts for little more than a quarter of the effect of the presence of the atmosphere on temperature. Two-thirds of the carbon dioxide concentration in the atmosphere is naturally present, and carbon dioxide occupies just oneten-thousandth more of the atmosphere today than it did 250 years ago (Keeling & Whorf, 2004, updated): for the atmosphere is large and we are small. The UNs climate panel [IPCC, 2007] thinks a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration compared with 1750 might occur later this century, leading to almost 6 F of warming. However, numerous peer-reviewed papers (e.g. Lindzen, 2008; Monckton, 2008) confirm that the UNs central climate-sensitivity estimate is too large. The temperature increase in consequence of a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration could be as little as 1 F (Chylek et al., 2007; Schwartz, 2007; Lindzen, 2008; Monckton, 2008). The trend in the literature is now firmly towards a very low, harmless and generally beneficial climate sensitivity: for instance, Scafetta and West (2008) attribute two-thirds of the halfcentury of warming that has now been replaced by cooling to variations in solar activity. Chilingar et al. (2008) find that CO2 enrichment of the atmosphere may lead to cooling rather than warming. It is cooling that has been observed globally over the past seven years, though I expect that New Zealands news media, like the UK media, have somehow found it expedient not to say so. Let us at least get the scientific facts straight. The atmospheric concentration of methane present only in concentrations of parts per billion had actually fallen between the year 2000 and late last year, when it began to rise a little once more. As for the concentration of CO2, now occupying less than one-twenty-fifth of one per cent of the atmosphere, research by ErnstGeorg Beck (2008) demonstrates that concentrations of up to 750 parts per million, or about twice todays, were reliably measured in the 19th and early 20th centuries. And even the UNs climate panel [IPCC, 2001] admits that the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere half a billion years ago was up to 25 times todays concentration. For most of the past half billion years, the concentration of CO2 has been far greater than it has been in the past million years: yet life throve, for otherwise we should not be here.

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The annual mean CO2 concentration in parts per million by volume. Todays concentration is less than 390 ppmv.

You have proposed a target of cutting New Zealands greenhouse gas emissions by 50% by the year 2050. Yet your party is supposedly committed to free enterprise, and you have said you are ambitious for New Zealand. Do you not think that a far greater degree of scientific certainty as to the effects of minuscule increases in carbon dioxide concentration on temperature, and on whether todays concentration is really the highest in the past 400,000 years, would be advisable before you inflict strategic damage on any such scale upon your own countrys economy from within?

The facts about the basis of the imagined scientific consensus

Your climate change minister, Nick Smith, recites what he says are the basics of the science behind his portfolio: Some gases like carbon dioxide and methane absorb and re-radiate the suns heat back to earth. The concentrations of these gases in the atmosphere are growing and the majority of scientists believe this will raise temperatures and sea levels significantly over the next century. And you have agreed, saying: "The scientific consensus is clear: human-induced climate change is real and its threatening the planet. Sir, the implication of these quoted remarks is that the serious and credible scientists who are warning us that climate change is real and is threatening the planet outnumber the equally serious and credible scientists who are not warning us of anything of the kind. The reverse is the case. A recent survey (Schulte, 2008) of 539 peer-reviewed scientific papers published since January 2004 and selected at random using the search term global climate change reveals that not a single paper provides any evidence whatsoever that human induced climate change is real or that its threatening the planet.

Not one of 539 climate research papers offered evidence for catastrophe

The fictitious notion of imminent, catastrophic climate change is almost wholly absent in the scientific literature. A tiny handful of catastrophist papers are written by a tiny clique of closely-connected, extravagantly-funded, politically-biased scientists with unhealthily close political and financial connections to certain alarmist politicians of the international Left a tendency that you surely oppose.

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Suppose, ad argumentum, that the UNs exaggerated climate-sensitivity estimates, repeatedly and definitively proven in the peer-reviewed literature and in the unfolding temperature record to be fantasies wholly unrelated either to scientific theory or to observed reality, are true. Even then, the disasters imagined by the UNs climate panel and by certain politicians are unlikely to occur. Since the UNs estimates are indeed exaggerations, and are known to be so, the only potentially-credible basis for the alarmism reflected in your statement falls away.

The mathematicians Maltese Cross: even a simple equation modelling a chaotic object can produce very complex output.

It is vital that you should understand the extent to which the UNs case for panic action is founded not upon theoretical proofs in climatological physics, nor upon real-world experimentation (for nearly all of the parameters necessary to the evaluation of climate sensitivity are not directly measurable, and their values can only be guessed) but upon computer models in short, upon expensive guesswork. However, using computer models to predict the climate, even if the input data were known rather than guessed, cannot ever be effective or accurate: for the climate, in the formal, mathematical sense, is chaotic. The late Edward Lorenz (1963), in the landmark paper that founded the branch of mathematics known as chaos theory, proved that long-run climate prediction is impossible unless we can know the initial state of the millions of variables that define the climate object, and know that state to a degree of precision that is and will always be in practice unattainable. Why is such very great precision necessary? Because it is the common characteristic of any chaotic object, such as the climate, that the slightest perturbation, however minuscule, in the initial value of even one of that objects variables can induce substantial and unpredictable phase transitions sudden changes of state in the future evolution of the object. Unless the initial state of the object is known to an unattainably high degree of precision, neither the timing of the onset, nor the duration, nor the magnitude of these phase transitions can be predicted at all. Accordingly, the predictions go off track very suddenly and dramatically, but ineluctably.

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An example: the Mathematicians Maltese Cross represents a tiny fragment of the chaotic mathematical object known as the Mandelbrot fractal. This image is generated by the very simple, iterative equation f(z) = z2 + c, where c is a complex number. The Mandelbrot equation has only two variables: yet it generates an output so complex that the appearance of the image cannot be predicted by any means unless the initial values of the variable c at all points in the image are known to a precision of at least 12 decimal places. A tiny perturbation in the initial values of c produces an entirely different image.

Chaotic climate: The Met Office had predicted drought just six weeks earlier.

The climate, by contrast, though it is a chaotic object, is defined not by one or two variables but by millions. The least perturbation in the initial value of just one of these variables can change the incidence, timing, magnitude and duration of sudden changes in the state of the climate object (known to mathematicians as phase transitions), throwing off any attempt at long-run prediction (Lorenz, 1963; IPCC, 2001; Giorgi, 2005). And, in this context, long-run can be as little as a few weeks. At the beginning of April 2007, the Met Office predicted that global warming would give the UK the hottest, driest, most drought-prone summer since records began. Six weeks later, the UK had the coldest, wettest, most flood-prone summer since records began. Predicting the long-run evolution of the climate beyond a few weeks is impossible by any method (Lorenz, 1965). Worse, all three of the key variables whose product is climate sensitivity can neither be derived theoretically nor measured empirically: all are mere guesses which the failure of the IPCCs predictions has proven wrong. The UN [IPCC, 2001], accepts that the climate is a complex, non-linear, chaotic object, and, consequently, that longterm prediction of climate states is impossible. Yet it then attempts the impossible by making predictions of climate sensitivity that are already being proven exaggerated by the failure of temperatures to rise as the computer models had predicted (or, recently, at all).

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Forecasting failure: After just seven years, the IPCCs projections made in 2001 are already exaggerated by the equivalent of half of the entire 20th-century increase in global temperature.

All of the climate models relied upon by the UN predict that the distinguishing characteristic or fingerprint of anthropogenic greenhouse-gas forcing as opposed to any other forcings is that in the tropical mid-troposphere, about 6 miles up, temperature over the decades should rise at two or even three times the rate of increase observed at the tropical surface.

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Temperature fingerprints of five radiative forcings: Modelled zonal mean atmospheric temperature change (C per century, 1890-1999) in response to five distinct forcings (a-e), and to all five forcings combined (f). Altitude is in hPa (left scale) and km (right scale) vs. latitude (abscissa). Source: IPCC (2007). The anthropogenic greenhouse-gas hotspot ( graph c) predicted by the models on which the IPCC relies a rate of warming in the tropical upper troposphere that is thrice the surface warming rate is distinct from the pattern generated by the computer predictions for any other type of radiative forcing, and dominates the combined effect of the forcings ( graph f).

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The hot-spot, fingerprint of anthropogenic greenhouse warming, as projected by four of the general-circulation models on which the IPCC relies. Graphs show zonal mean equilibrium temperature change (C) at CO2 doubling (2x CO2 control), as a function of latitude and pressure (hPa). All models clearly show the projected fingerprint of anthropogenic greenhouse-gas warming: the tropical midtroposphere hot-spot is projected to warm at twice or even thrice the surface rate. Source: Lee et al. (2007).

However (and it is crucial that you should understand this), the computer-predicted hot-spot over the tropics that is the supposed fingerprint of anthropogenic greenhouse warming, entirely distinct from that of any other source of warming, has not been observed in any of the tropospheric temperature datasets since reliable measurements were first taken by balloonborne radiosondes 50 years ago. Thirty years of satellite data do not show the hot-spot either. It is not there.

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The absent fingerprint of anthropogenic greenhouse warming: An altitude-vs.-latitude plot of observed relative warming rates in the satellite era reveals that the greater rate of warming in the tropical mid-troposphere that is projected by general-circulation models is absent in this and all other observational datasets, whether satellite or radiosonde. Altitude units are hPa (left) and km (right). Source: Hadley Centre for Forecasting (HadAT, 2006).

Douglass & Knox (2006) and Douglass et al. (2008) have established that the absence of the hot spot predicted by the UNs models is real, and is not (as was suggested by Thorne et al., 2007, or Santer ert al., 2008) a measurement error or artifact within the estimated uncertainty interval of the observed record. Lindzen (2008) estimates that in the absence of the hot-spot the UNs estimate of climate sensitivity must be divided by at least three. Thus, making this adjustment alone, a doubling of carbon dioxide concentration would raise global temperature not by 6 F but by a harmless and beneficial 2 F. You also need to know that the values for climate sensitivity in the computer models in short, the central estimates of how much the worlds temperature will increase in response to a given rise in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere are not outputs from the models, but inputs to them. The computers are being told to assume high climate sensitivity [Akasofu, 2008], so a high climate sensitivity is what they find. This is the computer-age equivalent of the ancient logical fallacy of presumption known as petitio principii begging the question. Sir, how often have you heard that models prove that anthropogenic enrichment of the atmosphere with CO2 is a dangerous threat to the planet? Models, of course, cannot prove anything: all they can do is to indicate what might happen if and only if the input variables were set at the correct values, and if the models were capable of correctly representing the complex object that is the climate, and if the climate were not a chaotic object whose future evolution cannot be predicted by any method, and, above all, if the models are not merely being asked to beg the central question of climate sensitivity by merely outputting their inputs.

Let me summarize the irremediably shaky basis for the UNs alarmist case. It is not based on physical theory. In several fundamental respects, it is at odds with theory. To take just one of many examples, the equation that the UN uses for mutual

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amplification of temperature feedbacks, the Bode equation, was specifically not designed, and is therefore not capable, of correctly evaluating the amplification of feedbacks in a chaotic object. Bode himself, in his 1945 book explaining the equation, makes this explicitly clear with a plainly-worded warning. The UNs use of this equation to model feedbacks (many of which are themselves chaotic) in a chaotic object is, therefore, questionable. Nor is the UNs case based on real-world observation: and, as we have seen, its principal predictions and conclusions are grievously at odds with real-world observation. Once again, these failures cannot be dismissed as insignificant. All of the UNs models predicted warming, and we were told that if the oceans and the atmosphere were to cool then the UNs models must be wrong. From late 2001 on, the oceans and the atmosphere simultaneously cooled. The UN dealt with the problem by ignoring it, as did many of the news media, who simply failed to report that the world has been cooling for seven years. The UNs entire case is based on computer modeling, in which astonishingly the models are told at the outset the values for the very quantity (temperature response to increased carbon dioxide concentration) that we are told they are going to calculate. By now I hope you will appreciate, Sir, how ridiculous it is to any competent mathematician to hear the UNs climate panel claiming that it is 90% certain that most of the observed warming during the 50 years before the warming stopped in 1998 is anthropogenic (as I have pointed out, Scafetta and West, 2008, do not agree). For a start, a 90% confidence level is not a recognized statistical interval: 95% confidence, or two standard deviations, is a recognized interval, but that would be even more absurd than trying to claim 90% confidence for a proposition that depends absolutely for its validity upon parameters that cannot be measured and can only be guessed: and a proposition that is demonstrated to be false with each successive year during which no further global warming takes place. It is regrettable that anyone should seek to make policy, as you have done, on such a manifestly unsound basis. You may like to know how the 90% figure was settled upon. During the negotiations between scientifically-unqualified government representatives that preceded publication of the UN climate panels 2007 report, most representatives wanted to claim 95% confidence. China, however, rightly pointed out that any confidence interval was inappropriate when examining the past behaviour of a chaotic object. So a compromise was reached a 90% confidence interval. It is on nonsense of this sort that the rickety case of the IPCC unsteadily rests.

The facts about rising sea levels

Your climate change minister, Nick Smith, in reciting what he calls the basics of the science of climate change, says: The concentrations of [greenhouse] gases in the atmosphere are growing and the majority of scientists believe this will raise temperatures and sea levels significantly over the next century.

Sea level has been rising at 7 in / century for 150 years. Source: Robinson, Robinson & Soon, 2007.

I have discussed both temperatures and consensus above. The central facts about rising sea levels are as follows.

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Sea level has been rising since the end of the last Ice Age 10,000 years ago. It is 400 feet higher now than it was then. The rate of increase has averaged 4 feet per century. Yet in the 20th century, when we are told that global warming began to have a major impact on global temperature and hence on sea level, sea level rose by little more than 7 inches. Robinson, Robinson & Soon (2007) have shown that sea level has been rising at that rate for about 150 years, and has shown no recent acceleration. There is no scientific basis, therefore, for saying that any anthropogenic warming that may have occurred over the past 50 years has had any appreciable effect on sea level. Nor is there any reason why a little warming or even a lot of warming should cause a dangerously rapid rise in sea level. Why? Because most of the land-based ice that once covered much of the northern hemisphere had melted 9000 years ago, when the last glaciers vanished from Scotland. There is not enough of it left to cause any major rise in sea level, and what is left almost all of it in Greenland and Antarctica is at latitudes and altitudes far too high for any significant melting to occur in the near future. True, the UN imagines that most sea-level rise will come not from the melting glaciers about which the media so frequently fantasize, but from thermosteric expansion sea water swelling as it warms. However, thermosteric expansion can only occur if the body of water in question is getting warmer. The oceans are not getting warmer (except in certain regions, such as the Antarctic Peninsula, where there is evidence of undersea volcanic activity). Lyman et al. (2006) reported that the oceans of the world had been cooling since 2003. They published a correction the following year, to the effect that the oceans had not been cooling, but had not been warming either. Now a definitive study based on readings from 6000 bathythermographs, including the 3000 Argo buoys deployed in 2003, shows that the oceans have indeed been cooling since at least 2003, in line with the atmospheric cooling noted in the observed temperature record. It is no surprise, then, that the UNs climate panel [IPCC, 2007] has been compelled to cut by one-third its previous highend estimate [IPCC, 2001] that sea level would rise 3 feet by 2100. Its new high-end estimate is less than 2 feet, with a best estimate of no more than 1 ft 5 in.

Prof. Moerner

The worlds foremost expert on sea level is Professor Niklas Moerner, who has been studying nothing but sea level throughout his 30-year career. In a recent paper (Moerner, 2004), he condemns the IPCC for its baseless exaggeration of future sea-level rise, and says there is no reason to suppose that sea level will rise any faster in the 21st century than it did in the 20th i.e., by about 8 inches. Moerner also concluded that mean sea level in the Maldives was no higher today than it had been 1,250 years ago.

Sea level in the Maldives has seldom been lower in 1250 years.

There is not and has never been any scientific basis for the exaggerated projections by a certain politician that sea level might imminently rise by as much as 20 feet. That politician, in the year in which he circulated a movie containing that projection, bought a $4 million condominium just feet from the ocean at Fishermans Wharf, San Francisco.

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Would you spend $4m on a luxury apartment in danger of flooding?

Sir, you may well ask whether he actually believed his own prediction and, if so, why he spent so much buying a condominium that if his prediction were right would very soon be worthless. In a recent case in the High Court in London, intended to prevent the transmission of alarmist pseudo-science to children, the judge said of this politician that the Armageddon scenario that he predicts is not based on any scientific view.

The facts about receding glaciers

As minister for tourism you will now doubt be aware that New Zealands Fox and Franz Josef glaciers are advancing. Addtionally, stories about receding glaciers are by no means as dramatic as you might have heard. Since deploying anecdotal evidence from a couple of glaciers does not represent a sufficient sample to be credible as a basis for drawing general conclusions, let us see what the scientific literature says. It may surprise you to learn that there are more than 160,000 glaciers in the world [IPCC, 2001]. Most of these glaciers have never been visited, measured, or analyzed by humankind. The vast majority of them including the biggest on the planet, which is 250 miles long and 40 miles wide are in Antarctica, most of which has been cooling for half a century (Doran et al., 2002; and see RSS Antarctic lower-troposphere temperature record, 2008).

Most of the worlds glaciers are in a region that is cooling.

Professor M. I. Bhat, of the Indian Geological Survey, was kind enough last year to communicate to me his results concerning the 9,575 mountain glaciers that debouch from the Himalayan plateau into India. These glaciers, thanks to the

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British Raj, have been studied and recorded for longer than any others. Professor Bhat reports that most of the glaciers have been receding at a uniform rate since 1880 at the latest. Some of them had begun receding even before this date.

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Professor Bhats analysis is confirmed on a global scale by Robinson, Robinson & Soon (2007), who report that since 1880 mountain glaciers have receded worldwide at a near-uniform rate, with no appreciable acceleration in the second half of the 20th century, before which time the anthropogenic influence on climate must have been negligible. Professor Bhat raises the right question: Given that glacial recession began long before humankind could have had any appreciable effect on global temperature, and given that the rate of recession has remained uniform, on what basis can it be said that it is anthropogenic global warming that is causing the glaciers to recede? The recession of glaciers in the Swiss Alps has revealed mediaeval roadways, forests, and even an entire silver mine that had been buried by ice during the Little Ice Age. The glaciers had not been present in the mediaeval warm period: now they are again absent. There is nothing dramatic about this: climate change is indeed real, and has long been occurring for entirely natural reasons. It is far more difficult than the UNs climate panel and certain politicians have suggested to distinguish between natural climatic cycles and any supposed anthropogenic influence in recent decades. As you will now appreciate, glaciers come and go quite quickly in response to changing climate cycles. Mount Kilimanjaro has been one of the poster-children for anthropogenic global warming. A certain politician has publicly suggested that the observed recession of the Frtwngler glacier at the summit which, he says, may lead to the disappearance of Hemingways snows of Kilimanjaro within a few years has been caused by anthropogenic global warming.

Since satellite records began, there has been no trend in Kilimanjaros temperature

However, the scientific facts are remarkably different. As Professor Bhat might say, the right questions that a true scientist rather than a mere politician would ask are these: When did the recession of the glacier begin? And what has been the trend in temperature at the summit of the mountain? The answers

are these: the glacier began to recede in 1880, and more than half of the snows of Kilimanjaro had already vanished when Hemingway wrote his novel under that title in 1936.

Recently, Kilimanjaros melting has slowed, not accelerated.

Furthermore, since satellite monitoring began in 1970, the surface temperature at the summit has averaged 12.5 F below freezing, and has never exceeded 3 F below freezing (Molg et al., 2003). The glacier is not, therefore, melting. It is ablating, not because of global warming but because of desiccation of the atmosphere caused by a prolonged and natural regional cooling, compounded by imprudent post-colonial deforestation of the surrounding territory. The London High Court judge rightly had harsh words to say about a certain Democrat politicians highly-publicized suggestion that Kilimanjaro had melted because of global warming.

Glaciers receded long before we could have been to blame.

In the very cold winter of 2007/8, during which the biggest January-to-January fall in global temperatures since records began in 1880 was recorded, several glaciers in Greenland began to readvance. The same is also happening with some of New Zealands glaciers. Finally, only a tiny proportion of the future sea-level rise imagined by the UNs climate panel is attributed by it to melting glaciers [IPCC, 2007]. It is true that the excitable media reported that melting glaciers would have a very large effect on sea level, but this was because the UNs bureaucrats had 2

inserted into its 2007 report, after the scientists had signed it off, a table in which the estimated contributions to sea-level rise from glaciers and from ice-sheets had each been multiplied by 10, by the simple expedient of moving four decimal points sideways. When I wrote to the UN pointing out this error, the UN quietly corrected, relabeled, and moved the table: but by then it had obtained the alarmist headlines that had been intended: and not one of the newspapers that had printed the incorrect figure bothered to correct it once the UN had been compelled to revise the table. The correction did not fit the great lie. Metres per century 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 1961-2003 0.042 0.050 0.050 0.140 0.110 1993-2003 0.160 0.077 0.210 0.210 0.280

Thermosteric expansion Glaciers and ice-caps Greenland ice-sheets Antarctic ice-sheets IPCCs sum of lines 1-4:

IPCCs observed contributions to sea-level rise did not add up correctly.

It is episodes such as this that ought to have led you and your advisors to think very carefully about whether the UNs climate panel is as independent, unbiased, science-based, and competent as would be necessary to justify the very drastic damage which you propose to inflict upon the economy of New Zealand.

The facts about disappearing Antarctic ice shelves You will be aware from your visit there in 2007 that the ANDRILL Project in Antarctica a joint effort by New Zealand and international researchers, has concluded that the Ross Ice shelf has disappeared (or melted away) some 20 times in the past 5 million years. The current meltdown appears no different in its characteristics. Eight ice shelves, with a combined area that is less than 2% of the area of Texas, have disintegrated in recent years, and one of them has already re-formed. However, it is significant that all of these ice shelves are concentrated in a single area of Antarctica the Peninsula which itself represents only 2% of the total area of Antarctica. There has been no significant recession of ice shelves anywhere in Antarctica except in the Peninsula, where subsea volcanic activity may have contributed to the observed disintegrations, which are in any event to be expected given that global temperature has been rising for 300 years. In the first 250 of those 300 years, humankind could not by any stretch of the most alarmist imagination be conceived to have had any significant impact on temperature or on melting ice. It is also significant that the Larsen B ice shelf, which disintegrated suddenly a few years ago, had not been present during the mediaeval warm period (Pudsey et al., 2006). As with the glaciers, so with the ice shelves, all we are seeing is a natural cycle in the coming and going of the Earths ice. Since it was 3

warmer than the present throughout most of the past 10,000 years, it is likely that at many times there has been less ice at either Pole than there is today.

The disintegration of the Larsen B Ice Shelf was nothing new: it had been absent during the Mediaeval Warm Period too.

An interesting recent example is the case of what the alarmist clique calls Warming Island a peninsula in northern Greenland that recently turned out to be an island when a small ice shelf joining it to the mainland melted. The news about Warming Island flashed around the world, and various news media carried front-page headlines about this latest alleged evidence for global warming. Setting aside the consideration which cannot be too often repeated that the fact of warming tells us nothing of its cause, one methodical researcher decided to see whether there were any earlier maps that showed Warming Island to be an island. The researcher did not even have to go back as far as the mediaeval warm period. In fact, he had only to go back to 1957, when a book published by an Arctic explorer plainly showed Warming Island as an island. You will recall that in the 1940s the Arctic was warmer than it is today. Therefore Warming Island was then an island, and was still visibly an island when the explorer made his map in the late 1950s. Then a natural cooling cycle supervened, and Warming Island became what we might call Cooling Peninsula. Now it is Warming Island again.

The Aurora Borealis over Warming Island, another failed poster-child for global warming. Copyright: Eric Ristau.

On the evidence, therefore, the satellite images of disappearing ice shelves do not provide any scientific basis for assuming that the warming that caused the disintegrations was other than local; or that it was caused by anthropogenic rather than solar or volcanic warming; or that the ice shelves that disintegrated had always been present until the recent disintegration. In short, these disintegrations provide no basis whatsoever for the drastic policies that you have proposed to remedy what is on any view a non-problem.

The facts about melting polar ice sheets

Te Ururoa Flavell from the Maori Party, from which you have appointed two ministers and on which you rely for confidence and supply, has said: The perilous state of the Earth, as we are challenged by global warming and climate change, is evidenced in the melting of the polar ice caps. Here, Sir, are the facts about the melting of the polar ice sheets. There are four great polar ice sheets: the East and West Antarctic ice sheets; the Greenland ice sheet; and the Arctic ice-cap. We shall consider each in turn here, and the issue of the Arctic ice-cap I will address on page XX. The East Antarctic ice sheet is on a high plateau at high latitude. Most of Antarctica has cooled over the past 50 years (Doran et al., 2002), so much so that environmental damage caused by cold has occurred 5

in some of the Antarctic glens. Therefore, there is no danger of this ice sheet disappearing, and there are no satellite images revealing that it has done so, is doing so, or is about to do so. The West Antarctic ice sheet is grounded below todays sea level. From time to time, therefore, the warmer ocean around it causes sometimes very large pieces of the edge of the ice sheet to disintegrate. However, these edges tend to re-form in the long Antarctic winter. Logs kept by whalers going back hundreds of years record flat-topped icebergs inferentially, pieces of the West Antarctic ice sheet many hundreds of miles long. So there is nothing new in these occasional breakages from the edge of the ice sheet. They have happened before; they have happened again; and they tell us nothing about whether or to what extent the warming (whether natural or anthropogenic) that ceased in 1998 was or is responsible. We know, however, that both the summer and the winter extent of the sea ice surrounding Antarctica was greater in 2007/8 than at any time since the satellite record began 30 years ago. Therefore the West Antarctic ice sheet gives no ground for alarm.

The cooling of Greenland, 1993-2003.

Source: Johannesen et al., 2005

The Greenland ice sheet, like that of East Antarctica, is on a high plateau. Also, that plateau is ringed by mountains: for the enormous weight of the ice sheet has borne down heavily on the rock below to create a basin in which the bulk of the ice sheet sits. That is why recent alarmist stories about moulins summer meltwaters getting below the ice sheet and lubricating it so as to allow it suddenly to rush down to the sea are entirely baseless. Such moulins are not new: they have often been recorded in the past, and they are a normal part of the Greenland summer climate. Some glaciers debouching from the plateau through gaps in the ring of mountains that surrounds it have indeed receded: recently, however, others have advanced. In late May 6

2008, in south-western Greenland, one would normally have expected spring flowers: however, the snow still lay thick on the ground. But the most telling evidence of all is that of Johannesen et al. (2005), who used satellite interferometry to determine that the mean thickness of the Greenland ice sheet increased by 2 inches per year a total of 1 ft 8 in during the decade 1993-2003. Once again, there is no cause for alarm. Once again, results like those of Johannesen have somehow not been reported in the news media, for they do not fit the great lie.

The Sun, not CO2, warms Greenland: plots of solar irradiance against temperature for two weather stations in Greenland. Source: Soon (2004).

The last time the Greenland ice sheet melted was 850,000 years ago: and that melting, of course, occurred entirely through natural causes. The UNs climate panel [IPCC, 2007] says that if the Greenland ice sheet melts again, it will only do so if global temperature was sustained at 10 F above todays for at least a millennium. Even then, according to the UN, the cause of any such disintegration would be natural rather than anthropogenic.

The facts about sustained drought

You will heard, perhaps at length from across the Tasman, that climate change will inexorably lead to sustained droughts, placing water supplies under threat. You might, for instance have heard Tim Flannery, an environmentalist campaigner, predict last June that Sydneys dams would run dry. He said this was the most extreme and the most dangerous situation arising from 7

climate change facing any country in the world right now." He made his prediction just days before a deluge that made that month the wettest June since 1964. The facts about sustained drought are these. The atmosphere has been warming for 300 years, as the activity of the Sun has increased from the Maunder Minimum that ended in 1700 towards the Grand Maximum of the past 70 years, during which solar activity was greater than at almost any previous similar period in the past 11,400 years (Solanki et al., 2004; and see Usoskin et al., 2003, and Hathaway, 2004). One of the few proven results in climatological physics is the Clausius-Clapeyron relation, which establishes that, as the space occupied by the atmosphere warms, so its carrying capacity for water vapor increases near-exponentially. The UNs climate panel calls this phenomenon the water-vapour feedback.

The Clausius-Clapeyron Relation, derived from the First Law of Thermodynamics, demonstrates that, as the space occupied by the atmosphere warms, it can carry near-exponentially more water vapour, the most influential greenhouse gas, causing a temperature feedback.

Over a sufficient timescale of decades, then, a warmer climate will entail not a drier atmosphere but a moister one. Sure enough, some of the worlds driest regions such as the southern Sahara have experienced more, not less, precipitation over the period of the satellite record. The Sahara contrary to the alarmist claims of a certain Democrat politician has actually shrunk in area by 300,000 square kilometers over the past 30 years, allowing nomadic tribes to return to regions that they had not occupied within living memory (Nicholson, 1998, 2001).

Drought? What drought?The land area of the Sahara declined by some 300,000 km2 from 1982 to 1995.

As to suggestions that the world is likely to see reduced water supplies, you are yet again seeing global warming blamed for a problem that has nothing to do with warmer weather. As the human population expands, its demands on water supplies increase, leading to shortages. That, and not global warming, is why many parts of the world do not have regular supplies of drinking water. You may have read John Steinbecks novel, The Grapes of Wrath. It is set in the Great Plains of the 1930s, and its theme is the prolonged and devastating droughts that occurred in the first half of the 20th century but have been absent in the generally warmer and moister climate since.

Moon Lake, in the Great Plains, was prone to drought until 1200 AD, and has been wellwatered for most of the subsequent period.

Once again, therefore, one must be careful with arguments like Flannerys that go from the particular to the general when there was no logical or scientific basis for having done so.

And, while we are on the subject of the Clausius-Clapeyron relation, you need to know that the space occupied by the atmosphere can carry exponentially more water vapor as it warms, regardless of the cause of the warming. Why is this so significant? Because you have probably heard it said that the one undeniable signature of anthropogenic global warming is that the stratosphere has been cooling. The argument runs that carbon dioxide enrichment traps more infrared radiant energy in the troposphere, so less of it escapes from the tropopause to warm the stratosphere, which accordingly cools. However, any warming, whether caused by carbon dioxide or (more probably) by the 70-year solar Grand Maximum that ended with the 20th century, will increase the quantity of water vapour in the atmosphere and water vapour, because of its sheer quantity, is a far more significant greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide. So the cooling of the stratosphere says nothing more than that the troposphere has been warming: it does not tell us anything whatsoever about the cause of the warming. Your alert advisers may say, Ah, but Lord Monckton tells us the troposphere has not warmed for at least a decade. So why is the stratosphere still cooling? Well, it isnt. About a decade ago, the cooling of the stratosphere ceased, broadly coinciding with the stasis in global tropospheric and surface temperatures.

The facts about extreme weather events

A presenter at Nationals BlueGreen conference in September told delegates: Climate scientists are reticent to put individual events down to climate change, but what they do say is that we can expect more extreme weather events. [see http://weblog.greenpeace.org.nz/climate-change/talkingto-the-blue-greens/] Here are the facts about extreme weather events. The UNs climate panel has said, and said repeatedly, that it is not scientifically possible to attribute any extreme-weather event to anthropogenic global warming. The most extreme of all extreme-weather events is the hurricane, tropical cyclone, or typhoon. However, there has been no trend in the frequency of hurricanes that make landfall on the eastern seaboard of the United States for a century, even though global mean surface temperatures rose by more than 1 F during that century. Furthermore, in the past 30 years the frequency of severe tropical cyclones and of severe typhoons has exhibited a pronounced downtrend. The most reliable measure of the combined frequency and intensity of tropical cyclones is the Accumulated Cyclone Energy index, a running 24-month sum of the energy of all reported tropical cyclones. That index has been compiled for 30 years, ever since satellites first allowed us to calculate it with reasonable reliability. In October 2008, the Accumulated Cyclone Energy index reached its lowest value since records began.

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Accumulated Tropical Cyclone Index, 24-month running sum: the values for October 2008 are the lowest in the 29-year satellite record, both globally and in the Northern Hemisphere. Source: Professor Anthony Watts.

It has long been settled science that a warmer climate would reduce the frequency and intensity of severe storms outside the tropics. Until recently, a minority of dissenting scientists had held that global warming might intensify not the frequency but the intensity of hurricanes, tropical cyclones, and typhoons in the region of the Equator. However, it is now known that warmer weather reduces the temperature differential between the Equator and the Poles; and that wind-shear tends to dampen the intensity of the worst hurricanes. Two prominent dissenters notably Emanual (2008) have resiled in recent months from their previously-published opinions to the effect that the intensity of hurricanes might be expected to increase with warmer worldwide weather. There is, therefore, no longer any credible, scientific basis for the implicit conclusion that a higher incidence of extreme-weather events has occurred because of anthropogenic global warming, for three reasons: first, there has been no increase in extreme-weather events in the observed record; secondly, it is not possible to attribute any individual extreme-weather event to anthropogenic global warming; and thirdly, for the past ten years there has been no global warming, so that, even if there had been a higher incidence of extreme-weather events, which there has not, global warming (whether natural or anthropogenic) cannot possibly have been the cause.

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No trend in landfalling Atlantic hurricanes in more than a century. Source: Robinson, Robinson & Soon, 2007.

The facts about sudden changes in animal habits and habitats

You will have heard claims, repeated by John McCain during his campaign, about how global warming is said to cause sudden changes in animal migration patterns, and a loss of their habitat. The facts about sudden changes in animal habits and habitats are not as you will have heard. First, since the climate has always changed naturally (it is, after all, a chaotic object in mathematical terms), animals are constantly having to change their migration patterns, or to move to new habitats as old ones disappear. To take one obvious example, sea level has risen 400 feet in just 10,000 years. This rise in sea level occurred naturally. Vast lands that were formerly inhabited by a great variety of land mammals are now underwater, and are inhabited by fish. The North Sea is a good example. It was not there 10,000 years ago, and Britain was joined to Europe. Secondly, since the fact of the warming that ceased in 1998 tells us nothing of its cause, even where it is possible to attribute significant changes or losses of habitat to warmer weather, and even where such changes or losses are harmful, your implication that the global warming that caused these undesirable changes is anthropogenic has no scientific basis. Thirdly, global warming whether natural or anthropogenic is by no means the most pressing threat to wildlife. The direct intrusion of humanity into the landscape and seascape is the real danger. The scientifically-unwarrantable tendency to ascribe every adverse event in the biosphere to global 12

warming is actually dangerous to the worlds most vulnerable creatures, because it diverts attention and vital resources from the true causes of environmental threats towards the non-problem of anthropogenic global warming. Let me take one example the polar bear, poster-child of the alarmist faction. Acres of print and hours of electronic media coverage have been devoted to the imagined disappearance of the polar bears habitat the Arctic ice-cap. A question that ought to have occurred to your advisors is this: How long has the polar bear stalked the Arctic, and has the Arctic ice-cap been there throughout that period? The answer is that polar bears evolved from the land-based brown bear some 200,000 years ago. But 125,000 years ago there was an interglacial period, during which global temperatures so the ice-core analyses tell us were about 6 F warmer than they are today. We may legitimately infer that there was no ice-cap during that interglacial period: yet the polar bears survived. How? Because they are warmblooded animals and are perfectly capable of surviving on land such as Greenland, or Siberia, or northern Canada, or Alaska if there is no Arctic ice-cap. A certain Tennessean tobacco-planter and politician, in his notoriously-inaccurate sci-fi comedy horror movie about the imagined climate crisis, cited a scientific paper that, he said, revealed that global warming was already killing polar bears. However, the paper concerned, Monnett & Gleason (2006), had actually said that just four polar bears had died in the Beaufort Sea, not because global warming had made sea-ice scarce, but because of unusually strong winds and high sea states in a severe Arctic storm. The politician had simply chosen to misstate the principal conclusion of the paper on the cause of the polar bears death, because the truth did not fit the great lie.

Four dead polar bears, killed not by global warming but by an unusually severe storm.

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The true reason for the fate of the four polar bears is yet another indication, Sir, that the world is being deliberately and systematically misled. To verify the situation still further, I decided to examine the mean extent of sea ice in the Beaufort Sea in the 30 years of the satellite record. There has been very little change in the extent of sea ice there and the change is in the direction of more ice, not less. Therefore every aspect of the story told by the politician about the supposed threat to the survival of polar bears was in substance wholly false. Of course, he took care not to point out that the global population of polar bears has quintupled since the Second World War.

Sea ice is growing in the Beaufort Sea, so the lack of sea ice cannot have killed polar bears there.

Intrigued by this evidence that there is more ice, not less, in the Beaufort Sea, I decided additionally to check the total extent of sea ice in the Arctic on 30 November 1979 and on 30 November 2008. I found that there was almost as much sea ice on St. Andrews day this year as there was in the first year of the satellite record. True, in the summer of 2007 the Arctic sea-ice extent had fallen to its lowest since the satellite record began, but a NASA paper explains that this was caused not so much by global warming as by unusual wind-assisted currents taking warm water from the Tropics to the Arctic. Sea ice extent in the summer of this year was considerably above that of 2007, indicating that something like normal conditions had returned.

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Arctic sea-ice decline? What decline? The extent of Arctic sea ice on St. Andrews Day (purple) has scarcely changed in the 29 years of the satellite record. In 1979, except in Greenland, snow cover was not shown. Source: University of Illinois.

Therefore, even if it were possible to attribute the disappearance of the Arctic ice-cap to anthropogenic rather than to natural global warming, it is not scientifically credible to say that the disappearance would in any way threaten the existence of the polar bears. They survived the far higher temperatures of the previous interglacial period: there is no reason to suppose they would not be able to survive this one. It has also been suggested, not least by the film-making politician, and also by the railway engineer who has been recently reappointed as head of the science working group at the UNs climate panel, that global warming will reduce the quantity and size of land-based glaciers, threatening the water supply of 40% of the worlds population. Having learned not to trust anything that either of these two says about the climate (for neither of then has any qualification in a relevant subject), I verified the position. First, it is not ice-melt but snow-melt that provides 40% of the worlds population with its water supply. Secondly, the extent of winter snow-melt shows no trend whatsoever during the past 40 years, according to the Rutgers University Global Snow Lab. Once again, it seems, we are not being told the truth: for the truth is neither terrifying nor cataclysmic.

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Winter snow cover has remained constant in the Northern Hemisphere throughout the past 40 years. Therefore, there is no discernible threat to the water supplies of those who depend upon the snow-melt for their water supplies. Source: Rutgers University Global Snow Lab.

I also decided to check whether the global sea-ice extent had declined in response to the supposed global warming of the past 30 years. It had not. There has been no trend no trend at all throughout the period of satellite observations.

No decline in the extent of global sea ice has been observed by the satellites since they began observations in 1979.

More facts about polar bears

During the election campaign, you were asked about polar bear populations in the Arctic, amid suggestions that climate change makes their survival shaky.

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The facts are that the chief danger to polar bears has nothing whatever to do with global warming indeed, a recent survey (Norris, 2001) for the World Wide Fund for Nature shows that in those parts of the Arctic that have warmed the population of polar bears has increased; in those parts that have neither warmed nor cooled the population is stable; and in those parts that have cooled the population has fallen. Polar bears, like us, are warm-blooded animals, and, like us, they prefer warmer weather. The recent bitterly cold winter in the Arctic drove many starving bears to approach human habitations in the hope of finding food.

Polar bears like warmer weather: in areas of the Arctic that are warming, polar-bear populations have increased; in areas that are cooling, they are falling; in areas that are unchanged, they are stable. Source: World Wide Fund for Nature, 2002.

The real danger to polar bears is hunting. The chief reason for the increase in their population since the Second World War is that both the hunting of polar bears and the culling of the seals on which they feed have been subjected to legislative control. The protection of polar bears and their food supply has worked, is working, and will continue to work. Once again, you have addressed a non-problem by suggesting that the polar bears are at risk (which they are not) because of anthropogenic global warming, which will be entirely harmless to them, even if the Arctic ice-cap entirely melts away, as it did 125,000 years ago and may well have done during the two-thirds of the past 10,000 years when global temperatures were warmer than they are today. But the key question is this: Does the polar bear exhibit the key characteristic of a species at risk? The key characteristic of a species at risk is, of course, declining population. However, the population of polar bears is not plummeting. Instead, there are five times as many polar bears in the Arctic today than there were in the 1940s. As you may think, Sir, that is hardly the profile of a species facing imminent extinction as its habitat shrinks away. Polar bears do not breed on the Arctic ice-cap, but in land-based 17

dens. Though their current staple diet is seal-blubber, their land-based origins are still evident in the fact that their favorite delicacy is blaeberries, which do not grow on the Arctic ice-cap, but only on land. They grow in abundance here in Rannoch. Even if the Arctic ice-cap vanished, as it has done before, the polar bears would not vanish. There is no scientific basis for any attribution of a nonexistent threat of extinction of polar bears to the non-problem of anthropogenic global warming.

Has the case for alarm about global warming been fabricated?
The UNs climate panel, the international classe politique, the major news media, leading academic institutions, and schoolteachers do not seem to be telling us the truth. In this section of what has inevitably become a long letter, I have set out some of the facts about global warming. I have deliberately excluded any opinions of my own, for, sub specie aeternitatis, they are of little value. Instead, I have presented a sufficiently broad spectrum of evidence, drawn directly from the raw data and from the peer-reviewed, scientific literature, to establish that, at the very least, there is reasonable doubt about whether destroying the Western economies on the scale now proposed by the international Left would make any difference whatever to the climate, even if there were a climate crisis in the first place, which rather obviously, once one looks at the data the media are not reporting there is not. However, if you have done me the courtesy of reading this far, you will wonder, as I do, whether so systematic and widespread a falsification of the true scientific position can be merely accidental. I do not think the errors that appear daily on the lips of certain scientists, politicians, and journalists are accidental. They are deliberate. And we can test this mathematically. For instance, there are 35 major scientific errors in the rocky-horror movie made by the scientifically-illiterate global warming propheteer who is making a fortune out of the climate scare. What is interesting about these 35 errors, a few of which I have mentioned in this letter, is that every single one of them, without exception, falls on the side of manufacturing a problem where none exists, or magnifying a problem where it may exist. Not one of the errors falls on the side of minimizing the imagined threat from global warming. The odds against 35 errors all falling in one direction by pure chance, rather than by deliberate design, are less than 1 in 34 billion. The errors were, therefore, deliberate. Before I leave the scientific segment of this letter, I want to draw your attention to just one more instance of data manipulation. Once again, it seems to me that the departure from the objective truth was and is deliberate. Engineer Pachauri, in a recent lecture at the University of New South Wales, showed his audience a graph of global mean surface temperatures over the past 150 years. The graph has been distorted so as to imply that temperatures have been rising very fast. A simple technique has been used exaggerating the intervals between temperatures on the y axis, so as to make the graph appear steeper. This is a trick that the UNs climate panel uses routinely. Engineer Pachauris graph also carefully truncates the temperature record in 2004, so as to conceal from viewers the extent of the decline in mean global surface temperatures in recent years.

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The global-mean-temperature graph drafted by IPCC scientists, scaled to magnify the apparent rate of warming by stretching the y axis, and by carefully truncating the graph in 2004 to conceal the rapid fall in temperatures that has occurred in recent years.

Engineer Pachauri then explained to his listeners that the rate of increase in global temperatures over the past 25 years had been exceptional. He also said that global temperatures were still rising. Both of these statements were untrue. First, as we have seen, temperatures have risen much more steeply in the past than recently, and the absolute magnitude of todays temperatures is well below the mean for the past 10,000 years, and very substantially below the peak temperatures inferred for each of the past four interglacial periods, that have occurred at intervals of roughly 125,000 years. However, even within the past 150 years the warming rate of the past 25 years is by no means exceptional. In fact, precisely the same rate of warming occurred between 1860 and 1880, and again between 1910 and 1940. As previously noted, temperatures have been rising for 300 years, in parallel with the increase in solar activity over the period. Therefore it is unsurprising that temperatures have indeed risen as fast before as they have in the past 25 years.

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Parallel warming rates: On three occasions 1860-1880, 1910-1940, and 1975-1998 the rates of warming have been identical. There was, therefore, nothing unusual about the period of warming that culminated in the great El Nino of 1998.

In fact, the fastest warming rate in the instrumental record occurred not in the past 25 years but between 1700 and 1735. In just over a third of a century, as the Sun recovered from the 70-year Maunder Minimum, during which there were no sunspots and therefore very little solar activity, temperatures in central England rose by a staggering 2.2 degrees C (4 F). That rate of warming, though measured by less-than-reliable instruments and regional rather than global, was about eight times the warming rate that Engineer Pachauri described as unprecedented. And, while we are on this point, since there has been warming for 300 years, I hope you will not mind me reminding you that one would expect most of the warmest years to have occurred recently. The fact that many recent years are among the warmest since the global-temperature dataset was first compiled in 1880 does not tell us that the recent warming is unprecedented, still less that it is anthropogenic. Given the recovery of the Sun between the Maunder Minimum that ended 300 years ago and the Grand Maximum that ended a decade ago, the warming of the 20th century was unsurprising. However, Engineer Pachauri went still further. He showed his audience a further graph, this time taken from the IPCCs 2007 climate assessment. That graph, he said, showed that the rate of warming over the past 25 years was steeper than that over the past 50 years, that was steeper in turn than the warming rate over the past 100 years, that was steeper than the rate over the past 150 years. So, he said, the rate of warming had been accelerating throughout the past 150 years. There are so many things wrong with what Engineer Pachauri said that it is difficult to know quite where to begin. First, he carefully made the most of the truncated graph, failing to draw his audiences 20

attention to the fact that there has been no net warming for 13 years on any measure, and that on all measures global temperatures have been falling for 7 years. Next, his technique for bending the interpretation of the graph so that it would show an apparently-inexorable increase in the warming rate over the past 150 years depended upon one of the oldest and most disreputable statistical tricks in the armoury of the global warming liars the careful selection of start-points and end-points to produce a distorted result. Thirdly, it is universally agreed, and for good theoretical reasons, that humankind cannot have had a significant influence on the climate except in the past 40 or 50 years. Before that, there were too few of us, and we had too little influence. Therefore, even if Engineer Pachauris bending of the graph were appropriate, all he was demonstrating was the fact that most of the warming over the past 150 years was entirely natural.

The start-point and end-point ploy allows nonsensical conclusions to be drawn.

The simplest way to demonstrate the methodological fallacy of Engineer Pachauris approach is to play the same trick in reverse. For instance, we could show that the warming rate from 1905 to 2005 was only half the rate of warming from 1905 to 1945. For good measure, we could add that the cooling rate from 1998 to 2008 was a continuation of the long-established curve. Yet Engineer Pachauri is not exclusively to blame for this childish and mendacious statistical prestidigitation: for the graph showing the four apparently inexorably-increasing warming rates was lifted straight from the IPCCs 2007 report, in which the bureaucrats after the scientists had finalized the draft had replaced the straightforward (but truncated) temperature graph with the bent graph.

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The declining warming rate: A demonstration of the influence of the arbitrary choice of endpoints on the apparent trend of a graph.

It is sad that the IPCCs officials should have sunk so low as to alter the scientific findings inaccurately and mendaciously, so that Engineer Pachauri can go about making an unjustifiable political point about the apparent (but not genuine) acceleration in the rate of global warming over the past 150 years. This is not the first time the IPCC has behaved in this way. Though Engineer Pachauri likes to say that its processes are entirely transparent, they are not. For instance, in 1995, the scientists had concluded No study to date has positively attributed all or part [of observed climate change] to anthropogenic causes. The scientists, in the draft they had submitted to the IPCC, had said over and over again that there was no discernible anthropogenic effect on global temperature. For instance When will an anthropogenic effect on climate be identified? It is not surprising that the best answer to this question is, We do not know. This conclusion was not acceptable to the bureaucrats and politicians of the rent-seeking, international Left. They engaged one Santer, an acquiescent junior technician of no particular ability or eminence, simply to redraft the final report that had been submitted by the scientists, so as to remove dozens of references to the absence of any anthropogenic signal in the temperature record, and to replace them with precisely the opposite conclusion, as follows The body of evidence now points to a discernible human influence on global climate. 22

The body of evidence pointed and points to no such thing. But the IPCC knew full well that if its second report followed the first in saying that humankinds influence on the climate was negligible it might occur to the worlds politicians that they should cease to fund it, on the basis that the correct financial allocation for addressing a non-problem is zero. So they simply rewrote the central conclusion of the 1995 report to state the opposite of what the scientists had concluded. Sir John Houghton, Engineer Pachauris predecessor as chairman of the science working group of the UNs climate panel, was once asked about this alteration of the text of the final report. He replied that he was unaware that any final report had ever been altered. He may or may not have been telling the truth: but it is clear that the scientists final text was indeed drastically altered at a number of points, so the IPCC could draw what was the politically correct, rather than the scientific, conclusion. And so it has been ever since. In this letter I have not even addressed perhaps the greatest scientific scandal of our age the outright fabrication of the hockey-stick graph that purported to abolish the mediaeval warm period, so that the IPCC could falsely whip up profitable alarm by pretending in its 2001 assessment report that todays temperatures were warmer than at any time in the past 1000 years. The fabricators of this graph had used a computer algorithm that always generated curves that abolished the mediaeval warm period, even when random red noise was used instead of real data; they had said they had used proxy data for the mediaeval warm period, but had in fact replaced the real data for that period with estimates of their own, without which the warm period would still have appeared in their graph even when their defective algorithm was used; they had hidden the real proxy data for the mediaeval warm period in a file marked CENSORED_DATA; they had given 390 times as much weighting to proxy data that produced hockey-stick shapes with no mediaeval warm period than to proxy data that showed the warm period; they had refused to share their programs and data with other researchers wishing to verify their results; when their error was pointed out they waited two years before publishing a belated and inadequate corrigendum; they then invited colleagues to publish similar papers using statistical trickery to abolish the mediaeval warm period; then, even though statisticians appointed by the US Congress, and the US National Academy of Sciences, had confirmed peer-reviewed results in the scientific literature to the effect that their defective graph had a validation skill not significantly different from zero, the IPCC nevertheless continued to use the defective graph in its publications, including the 2007 report; and the graphs fabricators subsequently produced a further paper attempting to justify their graph, in which they continued to rely chiefly upon temperature proxies taken from bristlecone pines, which the IPCC had previously recommended against on the ground that bristlecones are influenced to grow bigger tree-rings not merely by warmer temperature but also by wetter weather and by additional CO2 in the atmosphere. If, therefore, anyone tells you that the IPCC is an open, transparent, or competent organization, free from political prejudice or scientific bias, ask them why the IPCC continues to rely upon the hockeystick graph that falsely abolished the mediaeval warm period, which is well established in the literature to have been real, global, and up to 3.75 degrees C warmer than the present. Sir, do you want to close down nearly all of New Zealands economy now that you know that the IPCC has been lying to you and to the world?

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Science and the climate: Conclusion

Sir, every one of the reasons advanced by the IPCC and its faithful adherents for alarm and consequent panic action has been demonstrated to be hollow and without any scientific foundation or merit. Yet, if your proposal to close down half of the economy of New Zealand is to be justifiable, then the false scientific and policy propositions that you have advanced must be shown to be true. Here, then, are ten propositions, with each of which you appear to agree, each of which is actually false. All of these propositions must be proven true before any action is taken to tamper with the climate, still less the fatal, self-inflicted wounds that you would invite your nation to make to her economy:
1. The scientists, politicians, and media behind global warming are honest: 2. The debate is over and all credible climate scientists are agreed: 3. Temperature today has risen exceptionally fast, above natural variability: 4. Changes in solar activity do not much impact todays global warming: 5. Greenhouse-gas increases are the main reason why it is getting warmer: 6. The fingerprint of anthropogenic greenhouse warming is clearly present: 7. Computer models are accurate enough to predict the climate reliably: 8. Global warming is to blame for present and future climate disasters: 9. Mitigating climate change will be cost-effective: 10. Taking precautions, just in case, would be the responsible course: They are not; They are not; It has not; They do; They are not; It is absent; They cannot be; It is not; It will not; It would not be.

We have examined the scientific propositions that you have advanced, and found them wanting. In the second part of this letter, we shall turn to your policy prescriptions and the basis for them.

To be continued

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