Dueling scientists’ letters indicate full review required
by Tim Ball
It was inevitable. Architects of the previous government’s Kyoto
policy and beneficiaries of the billions of dollars wasted on the
file have sent their own open letter to the Prime Minister
contradicting the open letter signed by 61 climate experts who asked
for open consultations on the underlying science. In their counter
attack, the 90 ‘establishment’ scientists, many of them civil
servants, magisterially proclaimed, “The scientific views we express
are shared by the vast majority of the national and international
climate science community … There is increasing unambiguous evidence
of a changing climate in Canada and around the world.”
As I, and 60 of my peers explained in the original open letter, such
statements are meaningless, except in their power to intimidate those
who dare contest green dogma.
The coordinator of the open letter from the alarmist Group of 90
(Go90) was ex-Assistant Deputy Minister of Environment Gordon McBean.
This is fitting because he was also the major architect of
Environment Canada’s climate change policies during his years as ADM
when millions were wasted on largely useless computer climate models
while basic legislated operations suffered. For example, there are
fewer weather stations operating in Canada now than there were in
1960. Ironically, fewer stations means less data, dramatically
reducing our chances of resolving major climate science questions.
The recent action by the PM to reopen a station in Labrador was a
first small step to undo McBean’s mistakes.
It should be noted that McBean retired from government in 2000 and
took an annual salary of $140,000 to become the first Chair of the
government-funded Canadian Foundation for Climate and Atmospheric
Sciences (CFCAS). CFCAS was created with $61 million of taxpayers
money while McBean was ADM. McBean’s foundation now needs more
money, and its Chair – who was also a major player in the formation
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN body
largely responsible for raising the global warming alarms in the
first place - is authoring correspondence that would help a case for
its continued funding. Transparency in government demands at least
that the public know who has a vested interest in keeping global
warming fears hot.
Besides the questionable origin of the letter, it is also full of
holes scientifically. The claim that there is some sort of consensus
in the scientific community about the causes of global climate change
is pure fabrication. As indicated by our ‘Group of 61’ (Go61), the
field is highly controversial and we are a long way from properly
understanding the climate system. Many public documents back this up:
The Oregon Petition, endorsed by nearly 8,000 scientists in physics,
geophysics, climatology, meteorology, oceanography, as well as in
related fields of chemistry, biochemistry and biology, stated, "there
is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon
dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in
the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth's
atmosphere and disruption of the Earth's climate."
The Heidelberg Appeal, signed by nearly 4,000 scientists from 106
countries including 72 Nobel Prize winners, warned of the "irrational
ideology" driving global-warming science.
The anti-Kyoto Leipzig Declaration was endorsed by 80 scientists,
mostly climate and atmospheric experts.
Our side can play the numbers game as well as McBean’s, but when all
is said and done the argument is pointless – scientific validity is
not determined by a show of hands. If it were then we would be in
trouble indeed - thirty years ago the consensus was that we were soon
to enter another ice age.
Doomsters such as the Go90 push for government policy to be based on
reports such as the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA) and
especially those of the IPCC. But the ACIA, a major project of
McBean, is riddled with errors and exaggerations and very few climate
scientists were involved in its construction. The Go90 also fail to
acknowledge that the science reports of the IPCC concede repeatedly
that climate science is still immature and so warn not to use their
work as the basis of policy. But most media and government only read
the executive summary of the IPCC’s work which is now totally
discredited by its repeated use of the Mann “Hockey Stick”, a highly
flawed representation of temperature over the past millennium. As
New Zealand-based IPCC expert reviewer Dr. Vincent Gray explains, “No
convincing evidence has been presented by the IPCC, or anyone else,
that a surface temperature increase has resulted from increase of
greenhouse gas.”
IPCC work has never been put to rigorous scientific review. Although
the major IPCC report due next year is supposedly being peer-
reviewed, those who are allowed to conduct this review have been
selected by an unnamed group of people sworn to secrecy. We do not
know who will write the Summary and so it is likely that the scandals
associated with earlier reports will continue.
The Go90 cite statistics that are now an established part of global
warming folklore: “global mean temperatures will increase between
1.4 to 5.8°C from 1990 to 2100.” “Over the past century, the
globally-averaged annual temperature increased by 0.6°C and the world
is now warmer than at any time in at least the last 1000 years.”
Problem is, such predictions are based on the output of computer
simulations that, besides being downgraded, have never worked. The
warming predicted for arctic and subarctic stations has simply not
materialized and every other scenario they have projected has been
wrong as well. 0.6°C in a century is well within natural variability
and, more importantly, is derived from a completely inadequate
database with many of the records manipulated and seriously
contaminated by the urban heat island effect.
And so it goes – contrary to assertions from the Go90, extreme
weather will decrease, not increase, in a warmer world and there is
no indication such events are on the rise in Canada; cooling, not
warming is happening in much of the Arctic; Russian and American
National Academies have made it clear they do NOT endorse the
statements the Go90 say they do. In fact, virtually every argument
presented in favour of draconian greenhouse gas reductions by the
Go90 in their open letter is either wrong or grossly exaggerated.
If the Go90 are so confident in their position then what have they to
fear from the Go61’s recommendation that a series of open, public
hearings be held on the science of the multibillion dollar climate
change file? Prime Minister Harper needs to order a thorough review
as soon as possible.