Quadrant Online - Monckton on the IPCC

Minchin: How did science go so wrong on this issue? What caused the corruption of the scientific establishment?

Monckton: An ancient economic principle holds that he who pays the piper calls the tune. Climate science, like almost all science, is a monopsony—the only paying customer is the state. Bureaucrats and politicians find the notion of saving us from ourselves at our expense mesmerically attractive. So, as soon as the environmental pressure groups had got the scare going, the classe politique joined in with gusto because they found it socially convenient, politically expedient, and financially profitable. Scientists who dared to step out of line were menaced with loss of tenure and of funding. When Garth Paltridge first spoke out against the nonsense, the Australian funding authority for all scientific research telephoned him within 24 hours and threatened that if he ever went public again he would be cut off without a penny. That's how the "consensus" was built—by brute force.

Minchin: Should the IPCC be reformed or disbanded?

Monckton: I have long agreed with my noble friend Lord Lawson of Blaby that the IPCC should be disbanded. It is corrupt from top to bottom, its pseudo-science has been exposed for the scam it is, and multiple lines of evidence now suggest that climate sensitivity to anthropogenic CO2 enrichment of the atmosphere is perhaps one-seventh of the IPCC's central estimate, if that.

Minchin: What is the purpose of your forthcoming visit to America?

Monckton: I have three major speaking engagements: the convocation of the Liberty University, at which all 10,000 staff and students will be present; a debate in Utah with Bobby Kennedy, Jr., sponsored by the governor; and a Tea Party rally on the National Mall in Washington, DC.

- Bishop Hill blog - Reisinger and the divergence problem

Now correct me if I'm wrong, but I thought that paleoclimatologists picked trees that were sensitive to temperature rather than precipitation when they set about recreating temperatures of the past. If a drop in rainfall can cause a drop in growth now, then it could have caused a drop in the past. In other words, the paleo guys will have to admit that they know absolutely nothing about temperatures before the nineteenth century.

Despite Climategate, IPPC [sic] Mostly Underestimates Climate Change: Scientific American Podcast

Speaking at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, James McCarthy of the Harvard Medical School Center for Health and the Global Environment noted that the IPCC usually errs on the conservative side. Steve Mirsky reports.

Lacis [spells out his overconfidence in models]: On Role of CO2 in Warming - Readers' Comments - NYTimes.com

Results from Hansen et al. (2005) show that increases in CO2, CH4, CFCs, N2O, ozone, and stratospheric water vapor due to methane oxidation, account for 2.91 W/m2 of the radiative forcing accumulated from 1750 to 2000, distributed 52, 19, 10, 5, 12, and 2, by percentage, respectively. Note that this 2.91 W/m2 of radiative forcing is attributable entirely to human activity.  [Note that over a 250 year period, this guy actually believes he can calculate this number to two decimal places.]

Having been injected into the climate system, this causes the global temperature to get warmer. No amount of histrionic finger pointing to possible and imagined changes in cosmic rays, magnetic fields, planetary alignments, or unrecognized natural variability of the climate system, can deny the factual evidence and make this fully documented anthropogenic greenhouse forcing of the climate system disappear and go away.

Whether we approve, or disapprove, does not really matter, about 3 W/m2 of anthropogenic greenhouse gas forcing to date is absolutely, positively, and definitely there. It is causing global warming to happen, and the magnitude of the forcing is steadily increasing because atmospheric concentration of greenhouse gases is increasing as a result of human activity. This much the IPCC AR4 report could have, and should have stated without any equivocation.

To model climate change, all significant radiative forcings need to be identified and included. Besides the anthropogenic greenhouse gases, there is 0.3 W/m2 of positive forcing due to increased solar irradiance as inferred from long-term changes in sunspot activity, 0.15 W/m2 cooling due to land use changes, a net cooling of 1.3 W/m2 due to direct and indirect aerosol effects, as well as transitory cooling caused by stratospheric aerosols from large volcanic eruptions.