Lord Monckton responds to Ellen Gooodman's Global Warming Diatribe

Dear Ms. Goodman - I saw your political piece about climate in the
Globe. I should like to mention of the science. 

The IPCC's latest report is in fact appreciably less alarming than its
predecessors. The high-end sea-level forecast to 2100 has been cut by
half, and the best estimate is that the rate of increase in sea level
will be no greater than in the past century - i.e. between a third and a
quarter of the average rise in sea level since the last Ice Age ended
10,000 years ago. Nothing to worry about there. 

And, though the IPCC has increased its confidence interval concerning
the fact of our effect on climate a little (from 67% to 90%, where
statisticians would not regard anything less than 95% as near-certain),
it is far less certain than before about the amplitude. In fact, the
IPCC has reduced its estimate of our entire impact on the climate since
1750 from more than 2.4 to just 1.6 watts per square meter, a reduction
of one-third. 

One consequence of that reduction is that the IPCC's estimate of the
"climate sensitivity" to a doubling of the atmospheric CO2 content
(which might occur by the end of this century) has been cut for the
fourth time: 4.4 watts per square meter in 1990; 4 in 1995; 3.7 in 2001;
and 3.67 now. Putting these new figures together, and also taking into
account the IPCC's very sharp downward revision in the effect of major
climate feedbacks such as the Clausius-Clapeyron water-vapor feedback
(where they now make some - though still insufficient - allowance for
the lapse rate), one can calculate that our effect on global mean
surface air temperature over the coming century will probably be not
much either side of 0.6 degrees Celsius. 

Since it was 3 to 5 degrees Celsius warmer than today during each of the
last four interglacial periods, and was up to 3 degrees C warmer in many
places during the mediaeval climate optimum less than 1000 years ago,
the growing consensus among most climatological physicists is that the
very large temperature increases still predicted by the IPCC (which
never had a sound observational basis, but were entirely derived from
computer modeling) now have as little justification in theory as they do
in practice. 


See, for instance, Buentgen et al. (2006) in the Journal of Climate,
where the conclusion of a long and learned paper is that the
anthropogenic signal cannot be clearly detected against the background
of natural climate variability. The paper refers to the interesting work
of Sami Solanki et al. in Science in 2005, where the authors reported
that the Sun has been hotter, for longer, in the past half-century than
at any time in the previous 11,400 years - a result of which Solanki's
co-author, Usoskin, has recently published a confirmation. 

Or talk to just about any solar physicist, and ask about the likely
effect on global temperature over the coming century of the
now-significant attenuation in the subsurface magnetic convection
currents within the Sun. It seems we may be in for some global cooling. 

Finally, one political point. There is no economic justification for the
prodigious misallocation of world financial resources that would be
necessary if we were to achieve any significant reduction in
greenhouse-gas emissions in the next 50 years, after which the
increasing scarcity and rising price of fossil fuels will do all that is
necessary without the need for dirigiste State intervention. As any
standard economics textbook will make clear to you, the first victims of
any significant misallocation of resources are the poor. It is in their
name that I appeal to you to place science before politics in
considering climate change. - Monckton of Brenchley