A new book has just been released by Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. It's purpose is to "present an authoritative and detailed rebuttal of the findings of the United Nations's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on which the Obama Administration and Democrats in Congress rely for their regulatory proposals." Some key findings: The scholarship in this book demonstrates overwhelming scientific support for the position that the warming of the twentieth century was moderate and not unprecedented, that its impact on human health and wildlife was positive, and that carbon dioxide probably is not the driving factor behind climate change. The authors cite thousands of peer-reviewed research papers and books that were ignored by the IPCC, plus additional scientific research that became available after the IPCC's self-imposed deadline of May 2006. * The IPCC claims to find evidence in temperature records that the warming of the twentieth century was "unprecedented" and more rapid than during any previous period in the past 1,300 years. But the evidence it cites, including the "hockey-stick" representation of earth's temperature record by Mann et al., has been discredited and contradicted by many independent scholars. * A corrected temperature record shows temperatures around the world were warmer during the Medieval Warm Period of approximately 1,000 years ago than they are today, and have averaged 2-3ºF warmer than today's temperatures over the past 10,000 years. * Evidence of a global Medieval Warm Period is extensive and irrefutable. Scientists working with a variety of independent methodologies have found it in proxy records from Africa, Antarctica, the Arctic, Asia, Europe, North America, and South America. * The IPCC cites as evidence of modern global warming data from surface-based recording stations yielding a 1905-2005 temperature increase of 0.74ºC +/- 0.18ºC. But this temperature record is known to be positively biased by insufficient corrections for the non-greenhouse-gas-induced urban heat island (UHI) effect. It may be impossible to make proper corrections for this deficiency, as the UHI of even small towns dwarfs any concomitant augmented greenhouse effect that may be present. * Highly accurate satellite data, adjusted for orbit drift and other factors, show a much more modest warming trend in the last two decades of the twentieth century and a dramatic decline in the warming trend in the first decade of the twenty-first century. * The "fingerprint" or pattern of warming observed in the twentieth century differs from the pattern predicted by global climate models designed to simulate CO2-induced global warming. Evidence reported by the U.S. Climate Change Science Program (CCSP) is unequivocal: All greenhouse models show an increasing warming trend with altitude in the tropics, peaking around 10 km at roughly twice the surface value. However, the temperature data from balloons give the opposite result: no increasing warming, but rather a slight cooling with altitude. * Temperature records in Greenland and other Arctic areas reveal that temperatures reached a maximum around 1930 and have decreased in recent decades. Longer-term studies depict oscillatory cooling since the Climatic Optimum of the mid-Holocene (~9000-5000 years BP), when it was perhaps 2.5º C warmer than it is now. * The average temperature history of Antarctica provides no evidence of twentieth century warming. While the Antarctic peninsula shows recent warming, several research teams have documented a cooling trend for the interior of the continent since the 1970s. http://www.nipccreport.org/
You've posted Fred Singer's bullshit on this forum before - do you not remember the name? He's kind of famous among the people who keep track of Exxon's little science flunkies. Here's a short and very partial synopsis: http://www.desmogblog.com/node/1478 As far as the assertions in blue there, a couple are old friends (there's some kind of significance or controversy about the well known Medieval Warm Period, the Mann hockey stick has been discredited, etc) and one or two were new to me. I'll go way out on a limb, here, and make a prediction in total ignorance, just because I know who Fred Singer is and what he's been doing for a living: when I get around to checking out this assertion I have never seen before, I will find out it's bullshit in some fashion - that its slippery wording is concealing a significant fact, or it is simply misrepresenting the situation it describes, or the implications are not as presented, or something like that. This one:
You're right iceaura, it's a breeze to debunk, because Singer is greatly oversimplifying our climate, as if it's just a porridge that can be too hot, too cold, or just right. I'll look up references if anyone wants to challenge me, but it only takes a basic understanding of weather and climate to see that Singer's full of oversimplified hot air. In meteorology "lapse rate" describes the rate at which temperature decreases with altitude in the troposphere (which you probably know is the lower part of the atmosphere, where we live, breath, grow food, etc.) A high lapse rate (which Singer suggests is inconsequential) means unstable air. In unstable air, moist air that is lifted by any surface or solar effect is more prone to accelerating in rising. If bumped upward, a powerful runaway reaction kicks in- "Latent heat" (the energy released when water condenses) causes rising moist air to warm by its own chemistry. If that rising moist air is surrounded by a high ambient lapse rate, a powerful differential in air density develops, and convective weather goes off like megakiloton uncorked champagne, becoming big weather- thunderstorms and hurricanes that shoot right up into the stratosphere (where lapse rate reverses and moderates the reaction). So what Singer unwittingly supports (or deceptively conceals) is what basic meteorology and climatology observe and anticipate: An intensification of weather (including colder weather some places- Northern Europe for example, concentration of precipitation, more frequent flooding in the tropics and hotter, faster-expanding deserts). This is the predictable result of the water cycle of our atmosphere kicking into a higher energy state, where things happen a little faster and with more extremes. When Singer dismisses warming of the atmosphere as less serious because most heating happens from the bottom up, he's conspicuously avoiding the simple reality that we are bottom-dwellers and bottom-feeders in an increasingly-volatile ocean of air. The sea-change in our weather probably is less disconcerting with one's head in the sand.
james of course they do, they are called the National party. I mean why do you think Turnbull who was so strongly infavor of the howard goverment taking action has suddenly been paralised? Willson tucky and his ilk have taken control away from him
I read a Fred Singer book about climate change and found it appaulingly bad and severely biased. Until a mechanism for the 100,000 year glacial cycle is found (it´s the biggest influence on Earth´s climate) and also the 1,470 year cycle (which is a total mystery for the mainstream) then there will always be IPCC climate conclusion objectors (and rightly so).
in the 1970s a panel of scientists came to the conclusion that elevated temperatures can be seen in 20 years due to the catalyzing effect of chlorine from chloro-fluoro carbons and ozone. this would allow an increase in infrared penetration. also, when we are talking climate we are usually referring to spans of over 50 years, closer to 100.
There are dramatic climate changes within this timeframe in both the glacial cycle and millennial cycle though.
