Australian scientists reveal fraud of anthropogenic global warming

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When politics engulfs science...

The Age
July 8, 2005

The UN peak body on climate change relies on a flawed model, writes William Kininmonth.

The spectre of dangerous climate change caused by human activity, including more droughts, more floods and more extreme weather, has emerged over the past two decades. This vision for the future has been advanced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body established by the United Nations in 1988 to provide an authoritative statement of scientific opinion on climate change.

The first IPCC report in 1990 became the basis for negotiating the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The objective of the convention, signed by more than 150 countries at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, is to prevent dangerous climate change by reducing carbon dioxide emissions.

The Kyoto Protocol, to impose limits on carbon dioxide emissions by industrialised countries, came into force in early 2005.

The main activity that contribute to increased carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere is the burning of fossil fuels, especially for energy, mineral refining, transport, industrial and domestic purposes. Land management practices, particularly deforestation, can also contribute.

The IPCC has issued follow-up reports based on new research over the intervening years. The third report, issued in 2001, claimed that it was likely that most of the global warming observed over the previous 50 years was attributable to human activities. Careful examination of the report, particularly its summary for policymakers, reveals a simplistic view of the climate system and a dangerous reliance on projections from rudimentary computer models.

The IPCC strives to make the point that climate variations can be explained exclusively by radiative forcing: that is, processes that affect the balance between heat absorbed from the sun and heat radiated into space. The IPCC hypothesis rests on the assumption that increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will reduce the emission of radiation to space and cause the Earth to warm.

That the Earth had a stable climate before industrialisation began cannot be substantiated.

The assumption that the Earth had a stable climate and was in radiation balance before industrialisation began cannot be substantiated and is unlikely to be true. The reconstruction of past climates from geological and fossil records identifies a pattern of variability that is not consistent with the IPCC concept of stability.

The IPCC radiative forcing hypothesis ignores the atmospheric and ocean circulations that transport surplus solar energy from the tropics to polar regions. Nowhere are local temperatures due solely to radiation processes, a fact that goes to underscore the fallacy of the hypothesis.

The projections of rudimentary computer models are also flawed. There are many energy exchange processes within the climate system, including the formation of clouds and their interaction with the Earth's radiation fields, of which there is still only limited understanding. These processes are tuned in the computer models so that the current climate statistics are reproduced much as they are observed.

An international project to compare the computer models developed by different research groups was carried out during the preparation of the IPCC's third report. The project showed clearly that the computer models significantly underestimated the rate of transport of excess energy from the tropics to the polar regions.

This substantial deficiency, which directly affects climate projections with enhanced carbon dioxide concentrations, was neither recognised nor commented on by the IPCC.

The IPCC hypothesis of human-caused global warming, and the computer modelling tools that are used to substantiate it, are seriously flawed. Naturally occurring water vapour, not carbon dioxide, is the primary greenhouse gas in the atmosphere, and its pattern of concentration varies continually. In addition, the circulations of the atmosphere and the oceans and their interactions cannot be ignored in any considerations of future climate. The complex ocean circulations, the flywheel of the climate system, are only now beginning to be observed in detail.

Carbon dioxide concentrations cannot be shown to have any appreciable effect on future climate, and we are not likely to alter the course of future climate by restricting carbon dioxide emissions. We need to be alert, however, to the potential for natural climate change and its inherent dangers.

In the relatively recent past the Earth has experienced both slightly warmer and much cooler conditions, the latter accompanied by more extensive mountain and polar ice.

Of concern to Australia is the global evidence for significant changes in rainfall over many of the subtropical desert regions. If the observed 5000-year trend of reducing rainfall and desertification over North Africa and the Middle East is part of a global pattern of subtropical drying, there are big consequences for Australia.

Research into the climate system must be actively continued. The knowledge gained will be the basis for early warning of change and help identify mitigating strategies. However, there is no evidence that the course of climate change can be appreciably altered by humans, at least not by reducing emissions of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere.

William Kininmonth is a meteorological consultant. Between 1985 and 1998, he was the head of Australia's National Climate Centre.

Mankind 'can't influence' climate

Article from: AAP

By Simon Kirby

April 12, 2007 12:17am

• Solar activity a greater climate change driver than man
• '0.1 per cent of carbon dioxide due to human activity'
• Geologist says he doesn't care if no-one agrees

MANKIND is naive to think it can influence climate change, according to a prize-winning Australian geologist.

Solar activity is a greater driver of climate change than man-made carbon dioxide, argues Ian Plimer, Professor of Mining Geology at the University of Adelaide and winner of several notable science prizes.

“When meteorologists can change the weather then we can start to think about humans changing climate,” Prof Plimer said.

“I think we really are a little bit naive to think we can change astronomical and solar processes.”

Speaking last night after presenting his theory for the first time, to the Australasian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy in Sydney, Prof Plimer said he had researched the history of the sun, solar and supernovae activity and had been able to correlate global climates with solar activity.

“But correlations don't mean anything, you really need a causation,” Prof Plimer said.

So he then examined how cosmic radiation builds up clouds.

A very active sun blows away the cosmic radiation, while a less active sun allows radiation to build up, he said.

“So you can very much tie in temperature, cloud formation, cosmic radiation and the sun,” he said.

The next part of Prof Plimer's research was to examine the sources of carbon dioxide.

He said he found that about 0.1 per cent of the atmospheric carbon dioxide was due to human activity and much of the rest due to little-understood geological phenomena.

Prof Plimer also argued El Nino and La Nina were caused by major processes of earthquake activity and volcanic activity in the mid-ocean ridges, rather than any increase in greenhouse gases.

Nor does the melting of polar ice have anything to do with man-made carbon dioxide, he said.

“Great icebergs come off, not due to temperature change but due to the physics of ice and the flow of ice,” Prof Plimer said.

“There's a lag, so that if temperature rises, carbon dioxide rises 800 years later.

“If ice falls into the ocean in icebergs that's due to processes thousands of years ago.”

On the same basis, changes to sea level and temperature are also unrelated to anything happening today, he said.

“It is extraordinarily difficult to argue that human-induced carbon dioxide has any effect at all,” he said.

Prof Plimer added that as the planet was already at the maximum absorbance of energy of carbon dioxide, any more would have no greater effect.

There had even been periods in history with hundreds of times more atmospheric carbon dioxide than now with “no problem”, he said.

The professor, a member of the Australian Skeptics, an organisation devoted to debunking pseudo-scientific claims, denied his was a minority view.

“You'd be very hard pushed to find a geologist that would differ from my view,” he said.

He said bad news was more fashionable now than good and that people had an innate tendency to want to be a little frightened.

But Prof Plimer conceded the politics of greenhouse gas emissions meant that attention was being given to energy efficiency, which he supported.

The professor, who is writing a book on the subject, said he only used validated scientific data, published in reputable peer-reviewed refereed journals, as the basis of his theories.