“Consensus”?What “Consensus”?
Among Climate Scientists, The Debate Is Not Over
By
The Viscount Monckton of Brenchley
Abstract
t is often said that there is a scientific “consensus” to the effect that climate change will
be “catastrophic” and that, on this question, “the debate is over”. The present paper
will demonstrate that the claim of unanimous scientific “consensus” was false, and
known to be false, when it was first made; that the trend of opinion in the peer-reviewed
journals and even in the UN’s reports on climate is moving rapidly away from alarmism;
that, among climate scientists, the debate on the causes and extent of climate change is by
no means over; and that the evidence in the peer-reviewed literature conclusively
demonstrates that, to the extent that there is a “consensus”, that “consensus” does not
endorse the notion of “catastrophic” climate change.
The origin of the claim of “consensus”
avid Miliband, the Environment Minister of the United Kingdom, was greeted by
cries of “Rubbish!” when he told a conference on climate change at the Holy See in
the spring of 2007 that the science of climate and carbon dioxide was simple and settled.
Yet Miliband was merely reciting a mantra that has been widely peddled by politicians
such as Al Gore and political news media such as the BBC, which has long since
abandoned its constitutional obligation of objectivity on this as on most political subjects,
and has adopted a policy of not allowing equal air-time to opponents of the imagined
“consensus”.
The claim of “consensus” rests almost entirely on an inaccurate and now-outdated singlepage
comment in the journal Science entitled The Scientific Consensus on Climate
Change (Oreskes, 2004). In this less than impressive “head-count” essay, Naomi
Oreskes, a historian of science with no qualifications in climatology, defined the
“consensus” in a very limited sense, quoting as follows from IPCC (2001) –
“Human activities … are modifying the concentration of atmospheric
constituents … that absorb or scatter radiant energy. … most of the observed
warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in
greenhouse gas concentrations.”
The limited definition of “consensus”
reskes’ definition of “consensus” falls into two parts. First, she states that
humankind is altering the composition of the atmosphere. This statement is
uncontroversial: for measurement has established that the concentration of carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere has risen over the past 250 years to such an extent that CO2 now
constitutes almost 0.01 per cent more of the atmosphere than in the pre-industrial era.
However, on the question whether that alteration has any detrimental climatic
significance, there is no consensus, and Oreskes does not state that there is.
The second part of Oreskes’ definition of the “consensus” is likewise limited in its scope.
Since global temperatures have risen by about 0.4C in the past 50 years, humankind –
according to Oreskes’ definition of “consensus” – may have accounted for more than
0.2C.
Applying that rate of increase over the present century, and raising it by half to allow for
the impact of fast-polluting developing countries such as China, temperature may rise by
0.6C in the present century, much as it did in the past century, always provided that the
unprecedented (and now-declining) solar activity of the past 70 years ceases to decline
and instead continues at its recent record level.
There is indeed a consensus that humankind is putting large quantities of greenhouse
gases into the atmosphere; that some warming has resulted; and that some further
warming can be expected. However, there is less of a consensus about whether most of
the past half-century’s warming is anthropogenic, which is why, rightly, Oreskes is
cautious enough to circumscribe her definition of the “consensus” about the
anthropogenic contribution to warming over the past half-century with the qualifying
adjective “likely”.
There is no scientific consensus on how much the world has warmed or will warm; how
much of the warming is natural; how much impact greenhouse gases have had or will
have on temperature; how sea level, storms, droughts, floods, flora, and fauna will
respond to warmer temperature; what mitigative steps – if any – we should take; whether
(if at all) such steps would have sufficient (or any) climatic effect; or even whether we
should take any steps at all.
Campaigners for climate alarm state or imply that there is a scientific consensus on all of
these things, when in fact there is none. They imply that Oreskes’ essay proves the
consensus on all of these things. Al Gore, for instance, devoted a long segment of his film
An Inconvenient Truth to predicting the imminent meltdown of the Greenland and West
Antarctic ice-sheets, with a consequent global increase of 20 feet (6 m) in sea level that
would flood Manhattan, Shanghai, Bangladesh, and other coastal settlements. He quoted
Oreskes’ essay as proving that all credible climate scientists were agreed on the supposed
threat from climate change. He did not point out, however, that Oreskes’ definition of the
“consensus” on climate change did not encompass, still less justify, his alarmist notions.
Let us take just one example. The UN’s latest report on climate change, which is claimed
as representing and summarizing the state of the scientific “consensus” insofar as there is
one, says that the total contribution of ice-melt from Greenland and Antarctica to the rise
in sea level over the whole of the coming century will not be the 20 feet luridly illustrated
by Al Gore in his movie, but just 2 inches.
Gore’s film does not represent the “consensus” at all. Indeed, he exaggerates the
supposed effects of ice-melt by some 12,000 per cent. The UN, on the other hand,
estimates the probability that humankind has had any influence on sea level at little better
than 50:50. The BBC, of course, has not headlined, or even reported, the UN’s “counterconsensual”
findings. Every time the BBC mentions “climate change”, it shows the same
tired footage of a glacier calving into the sea – which is what glaciers do every summer.
What Oreskes said
reskes (2004) said she had analyzed –
“928 abstracts, published in refereed scientific journals between 1993 and 2003,
and listed in the ISI database with the keywords ‘climate change’.”
She concluded that 75% of the papers either explicitly or implicitly accepted the
“consensus” view; 25% took no position, being concerned with palaeoclimate rather than
today’s climate; and –“Remarkably, none of the papers disagreed with the consensus position. … This
analysis shows that scientists publishing in the peer-reviewed literature agree
with IPCC, the National Academy of Sciences, and the public statements of their
professional societies. Politicians, economists, journalists, and others may have
the impression of confusion, disagreement, or discord among climate scientists,
but that impression is incorrect. … Our grandchildren will surely blame us if they
find that we understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed to
do anything about it. … There is a consensus on the reality of anthropogenic
climate change.”
It is not clear whether Oreskes’ analysis was peer-reviewed, since it was presented as an
essay and not as a scientific paper. However, there were numerous serious errors,
effectively negating her conclusion, which suggest that the essay was either not reviewed
at all or reviewed with undue indulgence by scientists who agreed with Oreskes’ declared
prejudice – shared by the editors of Science - in favour of the alarmist position.
What Oreskes got wrong
r. Benny Peiser, of Liverpool John Moores University in the UK, conducted a search
of the peer-reviewed literature on the ISI Web of Science database between 1993
and 2003. He found not 928 but more than 12,000 papers mentioning the phrase “climate
change”. When he pointed this out, the editors of Science were compelled to publish an
erratum to the effect that the search term which Oreskes had used was not, as stated in her
essay, “climate change” but rather “global climate change”. Accordingly, Oreskes’ essay
had covered not the entire corpus of scientific papers on climate change over the stated
decade but fewer than one-thirteenth of them.
Dr. Peiser used “global climate change” as a search term and found 1,117 documents
using this term, of which 929 were articles and only 905 also had abstracts. Therefore it is
not clear which were the 928 “abstracts” mentioned by Oreskes, and Science did not, as it
would have done with a peer-reviewed scientific paper, list the references to each of the
“abstracts”.
Significantly, Oreskes’ essay does not state how many of the 928 papers explicitly
endorsed her very limited definition of “consensus”. Dr. Peiser found that only 13 of the
1,117 documents – a mere 1% – explicitly endorse the consensus, even in her limited
definition.
Dr. Peiser’s research demonstrated that several of the abstracts confounded Oreskes’
assertion of unanimity by explicitly rejecting or casting doubt upon the notion that human
activities are the main drivers of the observed warming over the last 50 years. Thus, in
Oreskes’ sample, more than twice as many appeared to have explicitly rejected or
doubted the “consensus” as had explicitly endorsed it.
According to Dr. Peiser, fewer than one-third of the papers analyzed by Oreskes either
explicitly or implicitly endorsed the “consensus”, contrary to Oreskes’ assertion that the
figure was 75%. In addition, 44 abstracts focused on the natural as opposed to
anthropogenic causes of climate change, and did not include any direct or indirect link or
reference to human actitivies, carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gas emissions, let alone
anthropogenic forcing of recent climate change. More than half of the abstracts did not
mention anthropogenic climate change at all and could not, therefore, reasonably be held
to have commented either way upon the “consensus” as defined by Oreskes.
Dr. Peiser wrote to Science to point out these and other anomalies in Oreskes’ essay. The
editors of Science at first asked him to shorten his letter: then, after he had sent in his
shortened version, they changed their minds and refused to publish it –
“After realizing that the basic points of your letter have already been
widely dispersed over the internet, we have reluctantly decided that we
cannot publish your letter. We appreciate your taking the time to revise it.”
In fact, Dr. Peiser had been careful to ensure that none of his material had appeared in
any public forum, whether on the Internet or otherwise. In any event, it is reprehensible
that a learned journal should publish defective material and should then, in effect, expect
its readers to surf the Internet to find the truth.
The editors of Science also refused to publish any of the numerous other letters that they
had received pointing out the deficiencies in Oreskes’ analysis.
At the time, the editors of Science had received (and rejected) a research paper giving the
results of a survey of some 500 international climate researchers conducted by Professors
Dennis Bray and Hans von Storch of the German Institute for Coastal Research. The
survey had found that – “a quarter of respondents still question whether human activity is
responsible for the most recent climate changes.”
Dr. Peiser has commented:
“The decision to publish Oreskes' claim of general agreement (just days
before an important UN conference on global warming, the Tenth
Conference of the Parties to the UN Convention on Climate Change), was
apparently made while the editors of Science were sitting on a paper that
showed quite clearly the opposite.
“It would appear that the editors of Science knowingly misled the public
and the world's media.
“In my view, such unethical behaviour constitutes a grave contravention,
if not a corruption of scientific procedure. This form of unacceptable
misconduct is much worse than the editors' refusal to publish the
numerous letters and rebuttals regarding Oreskes' flawed study.”
Furthermore, what of the countless research papers that show global temperatures were
similar or even higher than today’s during the Holocene Climate Optimum and the
Medieval Warm Period, when atmospheric CO2 levels were much lower than at present?
What of the papers showing that solar variability is a key driver of recent climate change,
and that in the past 70 years the Sun has been more active, for longer, than at almost any
comparable period in the past 11,400 years?
What of the papers echoing Lorenz (1963), who, in the paper that founded chaos theory,
stated and demonstrated his famous theorem that the climate is a mathematically-chaotic
object that is by its nature unpredictable unless one fully understands not only all the
relevant evolutionary processes but also the initial state of the global climate to a
precision that is in practice altogether unattainable?
There are hundreds of learned papers, many of them written by the world's leading
experts in climatology and related fields, that have raised serious reservations about the
notion of a “consensus” as to the alarmist presentation of climate change. Many of these
papers explicitly reject the “consensus”, even in the limited sense used by Oreskes.
There is no such thing as a “scientific consensus”, except in a very limited sense. This
may be readily demonstrated by quotation from dozens of papers casting doubt on the
“consensus”.
Some examples of papers which fell within Oreskes’ search criteron and within her
chosen timeframe but which she regarded as supportive of her imagined “unanimous”
consensus:
AMMANN et al. (2003) detected evidence for close ties between solar
variations and surface climate.
REID (1997) found that “the importance of solar variability as a factor in
climate change over the last few decades may have been underestimated in
recent studies”.
KONDRATYEV and Varotsos (1996) criticize “the undoubtedly
overemphasized contribution of the greenhouse effect to the global climate
change”.
Two abstracts reviewed by Oreskes directly and bluntly rejected the “consensus” as she
had defined it, but she counted them as “consensual” nevertheless:
GERHARD and Hanson (2000):
“The American Association of Petroleum Geologists’ Ad Hoc Committee
on Global Climate Issues has studied the supposition of human-induced
climate change since the committee’s inception in January 1998. This
paper details the progress and findings of the committee through June
1999, At that time there had been essentially no geologic input into the
global climate change debate. The following statements reflect the current
state of climate knowledge from the geologic perspective as interpreted by
the majority of the committee membership. The committee recognizes that
new data could change its conclusions. The earth’s climate is constantly
changing owing to natural variability in earth processes. Natural climate
variability over recent geological time is greater than reasonable estimates
of potential human-induced greenhouse gas changes. Because no tool is
available to test the supposition of human-induced climate change and the
range of natural variability is so great, there is no discernible human
influence on global climate at this time.”
FERNAU et al. (1993):
“This article examines the status of the scientific uncertainties in
predicting and verifying global climate change that hinder aggressive
policy making. More and better measurements and statistical techniques
are needed to detect and confirm the existence of greenhouse-gas-induced
climate change, which currently cannot be distinguished from natural
climate variability in the historical record. Uncertainties about the amount
and rate of change of greenhouse gas emissions also make prediction of
the magnitude and timing of climate change difficult. Because of
inadequacies in the knowledge and depiction of physical processes and
limited computer technology, predictions from existing computer models
vary widely, particularly on a regional basis, and are not accurate enough
yet for use in policy decisions. The extent of all these uncertainties is such
that moving beyond no-regrets measures such as conservation will take
political courage and may be delayed until scientific uncertainties are
reduced.”
Though Oreskes has challenged Dr. Peiser’s analysis by pointing out that the paper by
Gerhard and Hansen was not peer-reviewed, her essay appears not to have been peerreviewed
either. It may even be the case that the authors of most or even all of the cited
abstracts personally believe that humankind is responsible for more than half of the 0.4C
observed warming of the past half century. Dr. Peiser accepts, as does the author of the
present paper, that most climate scientists published in the journals probably believe that
humankind has contributed more than 0.2C of the 0.4C observed warming over the past
half century. But the published papers we have quoted, nevertheless, raise sufficient
doubts about important aspects of the imagined “consensus” to demonstrate the falsity of
Oreskes’ claim that not one of the abstracts was counter-consensual.
Nor is the explicit and implicit rejection of the "consensus" confined to individual
research papers such as those mentioned above. Distinguished scientific organizations
such as the Russian Academy of Science and the U.S. Association of State Climatologists
have also stated that they are skeptical of the imagined “consensus”.
Dr. Peiser concludes:
“The stifling of dissent and the curtailing of scientific skepticism is
bringing climate research into disrepute. Science is supposed to work by
critical evaluation, open-mindedness and self-correction. There is a fear
among climate alarmists that the very existence of scientific skepticism
and doubts about their gloomy predictions will be used by politicians to
delay action. But if political considerations dictate what gets published, it's
all over for science.”
After examining the erroneous essay by Oreskes, the unsatisfactory circumstances in
which it was published, and the failure of Science to correct more than one of its
numerous deficiencies, we may conclude as follows:
• that Oreskes’ essay provides no sound basis for the assertion that a
unanimous scientific “consensus” exists on climate change, for, though
most climate scientists probably believe that humankind has caused
0.2C of the past half-century’s 0.4C warming, there is no unanimity;
• that even in the limited sense defined by Oreskes, there were more
scientific papers explicitly doubting or even rejecting the “consensus”
than explicitly supporting it;
• that less than half of the papers which Oreskes said had implicitly
endorsed the “consensus” had in fact done so;
• that more than half of the papers which Oreskes considered had not
mentioned anthropogenic climate change at all;
• that the definition of “consensus” in Oreskes’ essay is so limited, and
her findings as published so greatly at variance with the content of the
papers she reviewed, that the essay provides no justification for her
frankly-political contention that – “our grandchildren will surely blame us they find that we
understood the reality of anthropogenic climate change and failed
to do anything about it”; and
• that Science, having been given evidence of Oreskes’ errors before
publication, in the form of a direct survey of more than 500 climate
scientists, and after it, in the form of several letters pointing out the
material errors some of which we have reported here, refused to allow
the survey, the letters, or any other correction to appear in print, save
only the correction of the database search term which Oreskes had
used.
Bringing the analysis of “consensus” up to date
Oreskes’ essay is now outdated. Since it was published, more than 8,000 further
papers on climate change have been published in the learned journals. In these
papers, there is a discernible and accelerating trend away from unanimity even on her
limited definition of “consensus”.
Schulte (2007: submitted) has brought Oreskes’ essay up to date by examining the 539
abstracts found using her search phrase “global climate change” between 2004 (her
search had ended in 2003) and mid-February 2007. Even if Oreskes’ commentary in
Science were true, the “consensus” has moved very considerably away from the
unanimity she says she found.
Dr. Schulte’s results show that about 1.5% of the papers (just 9 out of 539) explicitly
endorse the “consensus”, even in the limited sense defined by Oreskes. Though Oreskes
found that 75% of the papers she reviewed explicitly or implicitly endorsed the
“consensus”, Dr. Schulte’s review of subsequent papers shows that fewer than half now
give some degree of endorsement to the “consensus”. The abstract of his paper is worth
quoting in full:
“Fear of anthropogenic ‘global warming’ can adversely affect patients’
well-being. Accordingly, the state of the scientific consensus about
climate change was studied by a review of the 539 papers on “global
climate change” found on the Web of Science database from January 2004
to mid-February 2007, updating research by Oreskes (2004), who had
reported that between 1993 and 2003 none of 928 scientific papers on
“global climate change” had rejected the consensus that more than half of
the warming of the past 50 years was likely to have been anthropogenic. In
the present review, 32 papers (6% of the sample) explicitly or implicitly
reject the consensus. Though Oreskes said that 75% of the papers in her
sample endorsed the consensus, fewer than half now endorse it. Only 7%
do so explicitly. Only one paper refers to “catastrophic” climate change,
but without offering evidence. There appears to be little evidence in the
learned journals to justify the climate-change alarm that now harms
patients.”
Schulte’s table of results is also worthy of reproduction –
____________________
______________________________________________________________________________
Abstracts on ISI Web of Science Oreskes (2004) Schulte’s review
Period under review: 1993 to 2003 2004 to 2007
Quantity of documents reviewed: 928 documents 539 papers
Mean annual publication rate: 84.3 documents.yr –1 254.6 (+201%)
Explicit endorsement of the consensus: Not stated 7% (38 papers)
Explicit or implicit endorsement: 75% 45% (244 papers)
Explicit rejection of the consensus 0% 1.3% (7 papers)
Explicit or implicit rejection: 0% 6% (32 papers)
New data / observations on climate change: Not stated 24% (127 papers)
New research on the consensus question: Not stated 2% (13 papers)
Quantitative evidence for the consensus: Not stated 0% (no papers)
Mention of “catastrophic” climate change: Not stated 0% (one paper)
______________________________________________________________________________
____________________
Unlike Oreskes, who does not quote even one of the 928 papers upon which her analysis
was based, Schulte cites some of the counter-consensual papers from his sample –
Cao et al. (2005) point out that, without the ability to quantify variations in the terrestrial
carbon sink both regionally and over time, climate projections are unreliable –
“To predict global climate change and to implement the Kyoto Protocol
for stabilizing atmospheric greenhouse gases concentrations require
quantifying spatio-temporal variations in the terrestrial carbon sink
accurately. During the past decade multi-scale ecological experiment and
observation networks have been established using various new
technologies (e.g. controlled environmental facilities, eddy covariance
techniques and quantitative remote sensing), and have obtained a large
amount of data about terrestrial ecosystem carbon cycle. However,
uncertainties in the magnitude and spatio-temporal variations of the
terrestrial carbon sink and in understanding the underlying mechanisms
have not been reduced significantly.”
Gerhard (2004), discussing the conflict between observation, theory, and politics, says –
“Debate over whether human activity causes Earth climate change
obscures the immensity of the dynamic systems that create and maintain
climate on the planet. Anthropocentric debate leads people to believe that
they can alter these planetary dynamic systems to prevent what they
perceive as negative climate impacts on human civilization. Although
politicians offer simplistic remedies, such as the Kyoto Protocol, global
climate continues to change naturally.”
Leiserowitz (2005) reports –
“results from a national study (2003) that examined the risk perceptions
and connotative meanings of global warming in the American mind and
found that Americans perceived climate change as a moderate risk that
will predominantly impact geographically and temporally distant people
and places. This research also identified several distinct interpretive
communities, including naysayers and alarmists, with widely divergent
perceptions of climate change risks. Thus, ‘dangerous’ climate change is a
concept contested not only among scientists and policymakers, but among
the American public as well.”
Lai et al. (2005) offer an entirely new hypothesis to explain recent warming of the
climate –
“The impacts of global warming on the environment, economy and society
are presently receiving much attention by the international community.
However, the extent to which anthropogenic factors are the main cause of
global warming, is still being debated. … This research invokes some new
concepts: (i) certain biochemical processes which strongly interact with
geophysical processes in climate system: (ii) a hypothesis that internal
processes in the oceans rather than in the atmosphere are at the center of
global warming; (iii) chemical energy stored in biochemical processes call
significantly affect ocean dynamics and therefore the climate system.
Based on those concepts, we propose a new hypothesis for global
warming.”
Moser (2005) explores the assessment of rising sea levels and in state-level managerial
and policy responses to climate change impacts such as sea-level rise in three US states –
“Uncertainties in the human dimensions of global change deeply affect the
assessment and responses to climate change impacts such as sea-level
rise.”
Shaviv (2006) considers the cosmic-ray forcing posited by Svensmark et al. (2006), and
concludes that, if the effect is real, natural climate variability rather than anthropogenic
enhancement of the greenhouse effect has contributed more than half of the warming
over the past century – “The cosmic-ray forcing / climate link … implies that the increased solar
luminosity and reduced cosmic-ray forcing over the previous century
should have contributed a warming of ~0.47K, while the rest should be
mainly attributed to anthropogenic causes.”
Zhen-Shan and Xian (2007) say that CO2 forcing contributes less to temperature change
than natural climate variability, that the anthropogenic enhancement of the greenhouse
effect –
“could have been excessively exaggerated” … Therefore, if CO2
concentration remains constant at present, the CO2 greenhouse effect will
be deficient in counterchecking the natural cooling of global climate in the
following 20 years. Even though the CO2 greenhouse effect on global
climate change is unsuspicious, it could have been excessively
exaggerated. It is high time to re-consider the trend of global climate
changes.”
Whatever “unanimity” may have been thought or claimed to exist before 2004 in the
peer-reviewed literature, there is certainly none in the peer-reviewed journals that have
been published since.
Is there a scientific “consensus” wider than that defined by Oreskes?
e have established that Oreskes’ essay does not really lend any scientific
credibility to the panicky predictions of a small minority of scientists many of
whom have Left-leaning political opinions or connections.
The outright scaremongers are led by James Hansen, a donor of thousands of dollars to
the re-election campaigns of Al Gore and John Kerry. He showed Congress a graph in
1988 that set the trend for wildly-exaggerated projections of future global temperature.
The graph presented three scenarios, the most extreme of which had no basis in the
scientific literature or in previously-observed trends.
Politicians at that time treated the graph with respect because it had been generated by a
computer. Yet the model which generated the graph, still in use by Hansen and the UN
today, continues to contain “flux adjustments” – i.e. fudge-factors – many times greater
than the very small perturbations which the model is supposed to predicting.
Hansen’s model is discredited by the observed temperatures since 1988 –
Hansen’s graph, updated to depict observed temperature to end 2006 overlaid in red,
shows that the temperature trend projected by the GISS model used by Hansen is nearidentical
to that which the model had projected on the assumption that atmospheric CO2
concentrations had been substantially reduced from 1989 onward and stabilized by 2000.
On this evidence (and this is the evidence that launched the “global warming” scare), it
would be legitimate to conclude that the additional CO2 that has entered the atmosphere
since Hansen’s graph was published has had no climatic influence whatsoever.
Yet Hansen’s computer model, and others very like it, are the chief reason offered by the
alarmists for claiming a “consensus” for an extreme version of climate change that even
goes so far as to predict the eventual eradication of more than half the world’s species
(State of the Wild:
http://www.giss.nasa.gov/~jhansen/preprints/Wild.070410.pdf
).
This broader and more frankly alarmist definition of “consensus” that is presented by
Hansen, Al Gore, and the BBC has even less warrant in the peer-reviewed literature than
the “consensus” to the effect that humankind has caused most of the slight warming of
the past half-century. On this definition of “consensus”, we are led to believe that all
serious scientists are agreed on the imminence of catastrophe and on the urgent need for,
and the likely effectiveness of, costly and extreme mitigative or remedial measures.
It is crucial to appreciate that Oreskes’ paper does not lend any scientific credibility to the
alarmists’ extreme views on climate change. The more honest among them recognize
how careful she was to constrain the scope of her definition so that at least it bore some
relation, however threadbare, to the peer-reviewed literature that she had analyzed. The
alarmists, therefore, now find themselves compelled to fall back upon some additional
mantras which, if recited often enough, come to seem true.
“2,500 scientists can’t be wrong”
First among these is that the UN’s latest report on climate change (IPCC, 2007) was
written by 2,500 scientists – and “2,500 scientists can’t be wrong”. In fact, however,
the scientific chapters were contributed by a far smaller number than this. Furthermore,
we are now able to offer proof that the UN cannot have obtained the approval of as many
as 2,500 scientists to the text before it was published.
The first table of figures that occurs in the UN’s Summary for Policymakers as first
published, Table SPM-0, sets out and quantifies four sources of sea-level change:
The IPCC’s incorrectly-summed sea-level table
Officials inserted this table after the scientists had finalized the draft of the 2007 report
This curious table was not in the final draft of the IPCC’s 2007 report as approved by the
hundreds of scientists who had had a hand in the drafting. UN officials had inserted it
after the event, but before publication.
The reason for this furtive last-minute insertion behind the backs of the “2,500 scientists”
may have been the revelation by the Science Correspondent of the Sunday Telegraph,
some weeks before publication of the report, that the UN had drastically reduced its highend
projection of the rise in sea level to 2100, from 3 feet to less than 2 feet.
The fifth row of the table, entitled Sum of individual climate contributions to sea-level
rise, is the result of an extravagantly incorrect addition:
An intentional error by the IPCC?
Meters per century 1961-2003 1993-2003
1. Thermosteric expansion 0.042 0.160
2. Glaciers and ice-caps 0.050 0.077
3. Greenland ice-sheets 0.050 0.210
4. Antarctic ice-sheets 0.140 0.210
5. IPCC’s sum of lines 1-4: 0.110 0.280
6. Correct sum of lines 1-4: 0.282 0.657
How did so incompetent an error arise? Inferentially, the error occurred because the UN,
in the version of the 2007 report of its scientific working group which was presented to
journalists at its extravagantly-publicized launch, had exaggerated the projected
contributions from the Greenland and Antarctic ice-sheets tenfold, by the ingenious
expedient of putting the decimal points in the wrong place, four times.
The UN’s corrected sea-level table
Observed rate of sea-level rise and estimated contributions from different sources
After protests from the author of the present paper, the UN quietly corrected Table SPM-
0, and diverted attention from what they had done by relabeling it Table SPM-1.
By then, of course, the intended damage had been deftly done. Thousands of journalists
worldwide had written excitable articles about the impending (though in reality nonexistent)
acceleration in the rate at which the Greenland and Antarctic ice-caps would
melt.
In the final version of the table, units have been changed from metres per century in the
previous version to millimetres per year.
Why did the IPCC’s 2,500 scientists fail to spot so serious an error? Because the table did
not appear at all in the final draft of the Summary for Policymakers that the scientists had
worked on. This episode demonstrates with great clarity that it is incorrect to assume that
all of the 2,500 scientists said to have participated in the IPCC’s working groups have
even seen, let alone accepted, the final text that has been published in their names.
The UN fails to state that its reduced best estimate of a 30cm sea-level rise (just 1 ft per
century) is less than a third of the average centennial rise in sea level since the end of the
last Ice Age.
The last-minute list of contributions to sea-level rise does not include an item quantifying
the effects on sea level of the extraction of groundwater in all parts of the world.
Morner (2004), the world’s foremost expert on sea-level change, has written –
“There is a total absence of any recent ‘acceleration in sea level rise’ as
often claimed by IPCC and related groups.”
Finally, it is worth noting that the UN’s brief but, in public-relations terms, ingeniously
effective 900% exaggeration of the projected contributions of the Antarctic and
Greenland ice-caps to future increases in global sea level is an echo of Al Gore’s
12,000% exaggeration of precisely the same topic.
Why? Because, as the BBC knows, pictures of glacial ice collapsing into the sea are a
telegenic method of misleading the viewers into believing that the greatest of the
imagined threats from “global warming”, namely the supposedly imminent 20ft rise in
global sea level and the consequent displacement of tens of millions of people, is true
when, insofar as there is a “consensus” among climate scientists, that “consensus” is to
the effect that there is little danger of a 20ft rise in sea level until several millennia have
passed, and that most of the rise in sea level is likely to be natural.
From this episode we know that the “2,500 scientists” who, we are told, approved every
word of the politically-charged 2007 UN report on climate change could not have done
so.
“All leading scientific bodies are in agreement”
second mantra that is often recited by the alarmists is to the effect that all leading
scientific bodies worldwide are in agreement that urgent action is necessary to
prevent catastrophe.
Certainly, political pressure-groups like the US National Academy of Sciences and the
Royal Society (one of Britain’s oldest taxpayer-funded lobby-groups) have screamed
almost as loudly as the alarmist politicians and media. A joint statement by 11 national
scientific bodies, including these two, says we need to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions
immediately, and spend a great deal more money on scientists, or catastrophe will follow.
However, in such statements as this, there is a curious scarcity of references to specific
articles in the peer-reviewed scientific journals. These scientific pressure-groups are
unable to point to a scientific consensus on their extremist proposition in the learned
journals; for the number of peer-reviewed articles predicting doom is vanishingly small,
and nearly all of them are written by the members of a tiny, politically-connected clique.
Of these national scientific pressure-groups, the U.S. National Research Council (an
advisory and public policy arm of the National Academy of Sciences) is perhaps the most
militantly ridiculous. It is recorded (Newsweek, April 28, 1975) as having produced a
report 30 years ago alerting the nation to the imagined consequences of global cooling.
That entertaining report said –
“A major climatic change would force economic and social adjustments
on a worldwide scale, because the global patterns of food production and
population that have evolved are implicitly dependent on the climate of
the present century.”
The National Academy of Sciences has changed its opinion with the weather. Between
1940 and 1975, global temperature had fallen, notwithstanding a continuous and
monotonic increase in atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide and other
greenhouse gases, and notwithstanding an increase in solar activity, suggesting a larger
role for the oceans than the UN at present admits.
In response to the supposed threat of “global cooling”, the National Academy of Sciences
trotted out its report, which, though cautiously expressed as was then the custom, was
certainly exciting enough to attract the widespread media attention that such politicized
bodies now crave. And we were told, then as now, by media outlets such as the BBC, that
global cooling represented the scientific “consensus”.
Since 1975, global temperature has risen. The NAS has joined other politicized science
bodies round the world to produce another report, this time expressed in alarmist terms
and going exotically beyond the “consensus” as defined by Oreskes (2004).
Politicized individuals, as well as groups, have made the transition from cryo-alarmism to
thermo-alarmism with seamless disregard for intellectual self-consistency.
One such is the amiable, eccentric British eco-diplomatist, Sir Crispin Charles Cervantes
Tickell, who energetically argued for State expansion, intervention, and taxation to
address the “problem” of “global cooling” 35 years ago, and today unblushingly argues,
no less enthusiastically, for State expansion, intervention, and taxation to address the
“problem” of “global warming”.
These easy transitions of allegiance to pseudo-scientific hypotheses mask a consistency
of allegiance to an explicitly dirigiste, anti-free-market, anti-business ideology. Often,
when the word “consensus” is prayed in aid by bureaucrats, politicians and scientists
talking about “global warming”, they do not mean a consensus about the science, but a
undeclared “consensus” on the international Left about the political measures which they
wish to frighten the world into adopting, regardless of the direction in which the science
actually points, and regardless of whether there is a scientific consensus at all.
Conclusion
ne has only to cut away the alarmist rhetoric and the media distractions, one has
only to focus on the central question in the climate-change debate, and at once the
fact that there is no scientific consensus about climate change is laid bare. The central
question is this: By how much will global temperature increase in response to any
foreseeable increase in the atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide? On that
question, which the bureaucrats call the “climate sensitivity question”, there is no
consensus whatsoever among the scientific community. We have seen how Hansen’s
initial attempt at prediction, albeit using one of the largest computer models of the
climate on the planet, turned out to contain an unfortunate element of exaggeration. It is
inevitably the extreme scenarios that attract the attention of politicians and the media.
The UN’s own attempts to reach “consensus” on the climate sensitivity question
demonstrate all too clearly not only that it cannot perform simple additions credibly but
also that it does not even agree with itself. The internal inconsistencies in the UN’s
documents are numerous and growing. We have already seen how it has changed its mind
on sea level, as well as performing incorrect addition sums for what appears to have been
a political purpose. On the climate sensitivity question, too, the IPCC does not agree with
itself. In 2001, it said that the sum of the major climate “forcings” that contribute to
temperature change was approximately 2.4 watts per square meter. Now it has decided
that the “forcing” from carbon dioxide is largely canceled out by the negative “forcing”
from the pollution that accompanies fossil-fuel burning, particularly in China and India,
preventing sunlight from reaching the Earth.
Likewise, if one aggrgates up the UN’s central estimates of the contributions of all
climate “forcings” and temperature “feedbacks” to the projected warming from increased
greenhouse gases, the total comes to just half the UN’s published central estimate of a
3.2C temperature increase in response to a doubling of the atmospheric CO2
concentration. Once again, a large exaggeration is evident, right at the heart of the
alarmist case. If the UN’s documents do not even agree with themselves, how can any
kind of “consensus” be claimed?
The Russian Academy of Sciences and the US Association of State Climatologists are
just two of the scientific organizations that have trenchantly expressed serious doubts
about the imagined “consensus” on climate change. They have recently been joined by
the Administrator of NASA, who has said that it is arrogant to make the Panglossian
assumption that today’s climate is the best of all possible climates, and still more arrogant
to assume that any of the more or less futile remedial measures which have been
advocated will make any significant climatic difference. The Administrator ought to
know: for it is his organization that gathers much of the weather data via satellite upon
which the rickety edifice of the climate-change “consensus” is constructed.
A growing number of scientists who had previously subscribed to the alarmist
presentation of the “consensus” are no longer sure. They are joining the numerous
climatologists – many of them with outstanding credentials – who have never believed in
the more extreme versions of the alarmist case. Indeed, many scientists now say that there
has been no discernible human effect on temperature at all. For instance, Buentgen et al.
(2006) say: “The 20th-century contribution of anthropogenic greenhouse gases and
aerosol remains insecure.”
Let the last word go to Mike Hulme, Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change
Research in the UK, who has himself undergone something of a conversio morum on
climate change, and has written:
“The IPCC is not going to talk about tipping points; it's not going to talk
about five-meter rises in sea level; it's not going to talk about the next ice
age because the Gulf Stream collapses; and it's going to have none of the
economics of the Stern Review. It's almost as if a credibility gap has
emerged between what the British public thinks and what the international
science community think. …
“Over the last few years a new environmental phenomenon has been
constructed … - the phenomenon of ‘catastrophic’ climate change. It
seems that mere ‘climate change’ was not going to be bad enough, and so
now it must be ‘catastrophic’ to be worthy of attention. The increasing use
of this pejorative term - and its bedfellow qualifiers ‘chaotic’,
‘irreversible’, ‘rapid’ - has altered the public discourse around climate
change.
“This discourse is now characterised by phrases such as ‘climate change is
worse than we thought’, that we are approaching ‘irreversible tipping in
the Earth's climate’, and that we are ‘at the point of no return’. I have
found myself increasingly chastised by climate change campaigners when
my public statements and lectures on climate change have not satisfied
their thirst for environmental drama and exaggerated rhetoric. It seems
that it is we, the professional climate scientists, who are now the
(catastrophe) sceptics. How the wheel turns!”
Christopher Walter, Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, is a
former policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher during her years as Prime
Minister of the United Kingdom. He may reached through SPPI, or
directly at (+44 1882 632341) (monckton@mail.com).
The views and opinions expressed in this paper are those of the author,
and not necessarily those of SPPI.