To the Editor:
Halloween comes a month early this year with the September 27th release of the next big United Nations climate change report. Innocuously entitled "Working Group I: The Physical Science Basis", the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) doesn't sound scary. But it is certain to provide endless fodder for doomsday coverage by media the world over.
That is its purpose of course: to convince the press to frighten the public so that they pressure governments into multi-billion dollar climate change plans. The science is settled, the IPCC and climate activists will tell us. It is past time for action.
The IPCC could not conclude anything else. UN climate change activities must adhere to the doctrine laid down in 1992 by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC). At that year's Rio Summit, virtually all national leaders endorsed the FCCC's proclamation that humanity must work to accomplish "stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system."
That 21 years ago, and even today, no one knows what, if any, greenhouse gas level would cause climate problems is immaterial. The climate change express left the station long ago.
So in the two decades since Rio the UN has done what you would expect a well-funded, unelected bureaucracy to do when put in charge of solving a problem. They convened huge international conferences in exotic locations to orchestrate climate treaties. They created global warming and alternative energy 'roadmaps' for the world to follow. They designed strategies to monitor and enforce countries' compliances with treaty obligations. And of course, the UN will run the developing nations $100 billion Green Fund.
No matter what science and observational evidence actually tell us, it is not realistic to expect one part of the UN, here the IPCC, to conclude that the problem other parts of the organization has been pushing the world to solve may not actually exist.
What has clearly been needed for a very long time is an anti-IPCC, a formal group of equally qualified but independent experts who do not support the hypothesis that our greenhouse gas emissions, carbon dioxide (CO2) in particular, are causing climate problems. Then media could report the arguments for and against the man-made global warming hypothesis and let the public and their elected officials decide who is most credible and what, if any, actions should be taken.
While there have been open letters and petitions signed by leading experts asserting that the IPCC is wrong, the skeptics side has never had anything like the weighty tomes issued every five or six years by the IPCC. So, most reporters cited IPCC proclamations as if there were no equally credible alternative.
All that is about to change.
On September 17, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), a panel of leading scientists and scholars from across the globe, will issue a report entitled Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science. Strategically timed to precede the release of the IPCC document by 10 days, the NIPCC report will reveal a scientific community deeply uncertain about the reliability of the computer models used by the IPCC to predict climate problems. Climate Change Reconsidered II (CCR-II) will also demonstrate that many of the world's leading climate experts now question, or entirely refute, the IPCC's basic postulates and its interpretations of the observational evidence.
The NIPCC criticism doesn't come from a "fringe" group of scientists: it is repeated in thousands of articles in the peer-reviewed literature, many of which are listed and interpreted by the scientist authors of the NIPCC report. Unlike the IPCC, the NIPCC is not sponsored by the UN or member governments and so is not politically motivated to come to any pre-ordained conclusion. It is co-authored and co-edited by Dr. Craig Idso, chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change; Professor Robert Carter, Former Head of the School of Earth Sciences, James Cook University, Australia, and S. Fred Singer, Ph.D., president of the Science and Environmental Policy Project and professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia. Forty-six other climate experts from 14 countries acted as authors and reviewers.
CCR-II focuses especially on research papers that were either overlooked by the IPCC or that contain data, discussion, or implications arguing against the dangerous global warming hypothesis. The report concludes that the IPCC has exaggerated the amount of warming likely to occur due to rising CO2 concentrations and that whatever warming may occur will be harmless.
The key question to be answered in the climate change debate is not whether 'climate change is real', or whether human activities have some impact. Both are obviously true. The real question is whether reputable science indicates that it is worth spending hundreds of billions of dollars to restructure our energy infrastructure to avoid a man-made climate catastrophe.
Activists cite the reports of the IPCC to support an affirmative answer to this question. The new report of the NIPCC suggests the exact opposite is true.
Government, industry, education and media leaders must insist on an immediate cessation of expenditures on climate change pending a complete re-examination of the file. No matter who's right, the stakes are too high to do anything else.
Tom Harris, Ottawa, ON.
