That letter, like everything that "supports Sculptor's position" of confirmation bias, is argued from dubious premises and errors of fact. It also repeats propaganda memes and disingenuous phrases common to fossil fuel industry and US Republican Party media operations, their lavishly funded "think tank" outputs, and other overtly political sources.
It is, in other words, bullshit: propaganda, not a serious intellectual effort. Any actual scientist who signed that stank should be ashamed of themselves.
The letter's dubious premise of greatest significance is that the IPCC presents one-sided, radical, or extreme positions on climate change, and does that exhaustively (which is to say, includes all the reasonable ones). That premise lies behind the entire letter, one way or another.
(The IPCC emphasizes, reports in the forefront, only compromised and "conservative" positions, and deliberately excludes or downplays some politically sensational findings even when supported by research, analysis, and scientific consensus. There are many sober, well-considered, well-supported, research backed positions regarding climate change that are considerably more dramatic and sensational than the IPCC reports, but completely suitable for Geographical Society adoption: the letter pretends otherwise.)
As far as the errors of fact, a sample: (The significant anthropogenic rise of CO2 predates 1943, the fraction of warming is not "almost half", and the differences there are critical to other arguments in the letter)
(The Hockey Stick is not social media nonsense. It is peer reviewed, journal published, thoroughly analyzed, and critically unrefuted, research reporting.)
(That is simply false, of course. The pause never existed, and if it had it would have suggested no such thing.)
As far as disingenuous phrases or arguments, outright dishonest propaganda memes, etc, one could quote almost the entire letter. A smatter of highlights:
= = = = = =
- As this letter makes clear, it is not true that 97% of scientists unreservedly accept that AGW theory is fixed, or that carbon and CO2 are ‘
pollutants’ and their production should be penalised; how can the primary nutrient in photosynthesis be a pollutant?
- - - -
Topics for such a dialogue could examine the evidence that
- CO2 alone as the principle driver of temperature, or climate.
- Climate Change is largely real, natural, and mostly beyond our control.
- Manipulation of climate data has been used to support ‘global warming’.[ii]
- Most climate alarms are little more than scaremongering.
- CO2 is mainly beneficial, NOT dangerous but blanket decarbonisation is.
- Industrial effluents and plastics, deforestation and overfishing are dangerous– and are being side-lined by the focus on CO2 emissions.
- - - - -
- The current hiatus or pause in warming.
- Why the 285 ppm of atmospheric CO2 estimated for the beginning of the Industrial Revolution is in any way, a desirable benchmark. It coincides with the Victorian Little Ice Age, a period of starvation and population decline, which cannot possibly be a desirable target, unless you want to depopulate the earth.
- Climate models always predict higher temperatures than actually occur
- The absence of the predicted tropospheric hotspot – the ‘fingerprint of AGW’.
- CO2 and temperature were higher than today during the previous 50 million years plus, with no CAGW effects, why not?
- The natural warming of 8°C and ~100ppm increase in CO2 during the Holocene up to the 1800s, and the subsequent 125 ppm increase in CO2 after 1950, accompanied by a miserly ~1°C temperature rise.
- The Holocene enigma of generally falling but fluctuating temperatures from ~3,000BP, accompanied by rising CO2 that predates industrial CO2 emissions.
- How AGW theory relies on radiative transfer only to heat the planet, and seemingly ignores insolation, enthalpy and water vapour.
- The inability of the science of AGW to sharpen the range of estimates of climate sensitivity (currently between 1.5 oC and 6.4°C according to GSL) despite over 30 years of hugely funded effort; surely the science has failed?
- Earth System Sensitivity concept introduced by GSL, which ‘could be twice’ climate sensitivity’ noted above (2013 Addendum, page 4)
Such rational failures have to be of concern to the GSL as they demonstrate that CO2 alone does not, nay cannot drive global warming, so how can it drive climate change?
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In other words, a tour of the Fox News treatment of AGW, missing only the accusation of scientists falsifying data to get grant money from the Globalists. That would have been a bit too far, apparently.
