Monday, October 29, 2007

"Trenberth’s Twenty-Three Scientific Errors in One Short Article"

Yet another excellent piece by Christopher Monckton (dated 10/24/07) is here. You should read the whole thing.

Excerpts:
Error 20. Trenberth says the IPCC’s reports “are thoroughly reviewed”. They are not.

The crucial chapter in which the IPCC blames climate change on humanity was reviewed by only 40 people chosen by the IPCC itself. The authors of the IPCC’s chapter decided to reject more than half of the reviewers’ comments (and very nearly all of the comments that were critical). This is not peer-review in the accepted sense. Only a tiny handful even of the hand-picked “reviewers” explicitly agreed with the IPCC’s conclusion that humankind is chiefly responsible for recent warming of the climate.

Error 21. Trenberth says, “Most of the so-called ‘deniers participate” in the IPCC process, “and their comments are fully taken into account”. This is known to be untrue.
For instance, Paul Reiter pointed out during discussions on the draft 2001 report that the ban on DDT had done far more to spread malaria than “global warming,” that the malaria mosquito does not need temperatures any higher than 15 degrees C and is not therefore tropical, and that the largest recent outbreak of malaria was in Siberia in the 1920s and 1930s, when 13 million were infected and 600,000 died, 30,000 of them at Archangelsk on the Arctic Circle. All his comments were rejected in favour of a nonsensical statement to the effect that “global warming” would spread malaria. It will not. When Paul Reiter asked for his comments to be taken into account, the IPCC refused. He resigned, and then had to threaten to sue before the IPCC would take his name off the defective chapter on the imagined ill effects of “global warming” on human health.
...
Conclusions
Trenberth’s shallow analysis discredits both him and the IPCC in which he plays “a major part”. The likelihood that Trenberth, in a short article, would have made as many as 23 errors all falling in the direction of undue alarmism and flagrant exaggeration by mere accident is less than 1 in 8 million. Sir John Houghton, the first chairman of the IPCC, in which Trenberth plays “a major part”, wrote in 1994 that “Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen.” If Trenberth and the IPCC, in which he plays “a major part”, go on announcing disasters when none are in truth at all likely, then indeed no one will listen, and no one should. From now on, we want honest, unbiased science. No more lies. Tell us the unvarnished, unexaggerated truth. Then, and only then, we will listen.

2 comments:

Tom Moriarty said...

Trenberth's exaggerations are par for the course. He had an article in the supposed journal Scientific American this summer in which an artist's rendering of a "future hurricane" stretched form Brazil to Canada. Visual hyperbole at its worst. You can see this "future hurricane" compared to a satellite image of Katrina at

http://tom-moriarty.blogspot.com/2007/09/warmer-oceans-stronger-hurricanes.html

Can you tell me what your source of the total solar irradiance was on the graph on the left? Thanks

Tom Moriarty

Tom said...

Hi Tom,

Thanks for your comment. The graph you mentioned actually appears on page 7 of the Monckton piece that I linked; the source appears to be a Willie Soon paper from 2004.

Tom