bc, who hopes this is the last gasp of the debunkers.
George Monbiot
Tuesday November 14, 2006
The Guardian
For the past nine days my inbox has been filling up with
messages labelled "Your scam exposed", "The great fraud
unravels" and "How do you feel now, asshole?". They are
referring to a new "scientific paper", which proves that
the "climate change scare" is a tale "worthier of St
John the Divine than of science".
Published in two parts on consecutive Sundays, it runs
to a total of 52 pages, containing graphs, tables and
references. To my correspondents, to a good many
journalists and to thousands of delighted bloggers, this
paper clinches it: climate change is a hoax perpetrated
by a leftwing conspiracy coordinated by the United
Nations.
So which was the august journal that published it?
Science? Nature? Geophysical Research Letters? Not
quite. It was the Sunday Telegraph. In keeping with most
of the articles about climate change in that
publication, it is a mixture of cherry-picking,
downright misrepresentation and pseudo-scientific
gibberish. But it has the virtue of being
incomprehensible to anyone who is not an atmospheric
physicist.
The author of this "research article" is Christopher
Monckton, otherwise known as Viscount Monckton of
Brenchley. He has a degree in classics and a diploma in
journalism and, as far as I can tell, no further
qualifications. But he is confident enough to maintain
that - by contrast to all those charlatans and amateurs
who wrote the reports produced by the UN's
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change - he is
publishing "the truth".
The warming effects of carbon dioxide, Lord Monckton
claims, have been exaggerated, distorted and made up
altogether. One example of the outrageous fraud the UN
body has committed is the elimination from its
temperature graphs of the "medieval warm period", which,
he claims, was "real, global and up to 3C warmer than
now". He runs two graphs side by side, one of which
shows the temperature record over the past 1,000 years
as rendered by the UN panel, and the other purporting to
show real temperatures over the same period.
The world was so hot 600 years ago, he maintains, that
"there was little ice at the North Pole: a Chinese naval
squadron sailed right round the Arctic in 1421 and found
none". By contrast the planet is currently much cooler
than climate scientists predicted. In 1988, for example,
the world's most celebrated climatologist, James Hansen
of Nasa, "told the US Congress that temperature would
rise 0.3C by the end of the century (it rose 0.1C), and
that sea level would rise several feet (no, one inch)".
Most importantly, "the UN repealed a fundamental
physical law", doubling the size of the constant
(lambda) in the Stefan-Boltzmann equation. By assigning
the wrong value to lambda, the UN's panel has
exaggerated the sensitivity of the climate to extra
carbon dioxide. Monckton's analysis looks impressive. It
is nonsense from start to finish.
His claims about the Stefan-Boltzmann equation have been
addressed by someone who does know what he's talking
about, Dr Gavin Schmidt of Nasa's Goddard Institute for
Space Studies. He begins by pointing out that Stefan-
Boltzmann is a description of radiation from a "black
body" - an idealised planet that absorbs all the
electromagnetic radiation that reaches it. The Earth is
not a black body. It reflects some of the radiation it
receives back into space.