Information leaked from a report compiled by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicates that heat from the sun may play a larger role in increasing the Earth’s temperatures than previously thought.
Fox News, which released the story, identified the source as Alec Rawls, who posts on a blog called StopGreenSuicide.com. Rawls told FoxNews.com, “Even after the IPCC acknowledges extensive evidence for … solar forcing beyond what they included in their models, they still make no attempt to account for this omission in their predictions. … It’s insane.
Fox noted that Rawls blames the UN for burying its point about the effect of the solar energy on climate change in Chapter 11 of its report.
A visit to StopGreenSuicide.com reveals a post that Rawls made last December 13 in which he states that he participated in an “expert review” of the IPCC report, called “AR5, Working Group 1,” and that he believes he is fully justified in leaking the full draft of the report to the public. Rawls weighed the ethical pros and cons of leaking the report carefully, saying that “The ethics of leaking tax-payer funded documents requires weighing the ‘public’s right to know’ against any harm to the public interest that may result.”
In making his case, Rawls cited a statement from Christiana Figueres, Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, that the UN’s climate agency was exerting considerable influence on national governments to engage in centralized transformation of their societal infrastructures. Said Figueres:
We are inspiring government, private sector, and civil society to [make] the biggest transformation that they have ever undertaken. The Industrial Revolution was also a transformation, but it wasn’t a guided transformation from a centralized policy perspective. This is a centralized transformation that is taking place because governments have decided that they need to listen to science.
To which Rawls comments:
So may we please see this “science” on the basis of which our existing energy infrastructure is to be ripped out in favor of non-existent “green” energy? The only reason for secrecy in the first place is to enhance the UN’s political control over a scientific story line that is aimed explicitly at policy makers. Thus the drafts ought to fall within the reach of the Freedom of Information Act.
Rawls’ greatest point of contention with the UN report is the relative weight it placed on two forces that may be held responsible for global warming: natural or anthropogenic (caused by man). He noted that the authors of Chapter 7 of the report admitted “strong evidence” for what is described as “enhanced solar forcing” (forcing beyond total solar irradiance, or TSI — i.e., the amount of solar radiation received at the top of the Earth’s atmosphere).
However, another group of authors in Chapter 8 of the report stated a conclusion that contradicted the previous findings: “There is very high confidence that natural forcing is a small fraction of the anthropogenic forcing.” In refuting the Chapter 8 authors’ conclusions, Rawls wrote:
This analysis, where post-1980 warming gets attributed to the human release of CO2 on the grounds that it cannot be attributed to solar irradiance, cannot stand in the face of the Chapter 7 admission of substantial evidence for solar forcing beyond solar irradiance. Once the evidence for enhanced solar forcing is taken into account we can have no confidence that natural forcing is small compared to anthropogenic forcing. [Emphasis in original.]
Rawls continues:
The admission of strong evidence for enhanced solar forcing changes everything. The climate alarmists can’t continue to claim that warming was almost entirely due to human activity over a period when solar warming effects, now acknowledged to be important, were at a maximum. The final draft of AR5 WG1 is not scheduled to be released for another year but the public needs to know now how the main premises and conclusions of the IPCC story line have been undercut by the IPCC itself.
Rawls asked openly in his article: “Will some press organization please host the leaked report?” While Fox News did not publish the entire report, by providing a URL for his blog (which itself is linked to the report) it did the next-best thing.
Fox presented a fairly balanced summary of the two arguments in its report, devoting 306 words citing Rawls or others validating his position and 424 words quoting those holding to the opposing position that most global warming is caused by carbon dioxide attributed to human activities.
One “expert” quoted by Fox taking a stand opposing Rawls is Aaron Huertas of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Said Huertas: “I see climate contrarians try this trick almost every time a big new solar study comes out. They somehow tend to neglect mentioning that solar variation is smaller than the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide.”
Though he produced no evidence to prove his assertion, Huertas also attempted to connect the coastal flooding in the Northeast caused by Hurricane Sandy to “climate change.”
However, Fox also cited a NASA study attributing the “Little Ice Age” of 1650-1715 to an absence of solar activity (sunspots) during that period.
An earlier Fox News report published on January 28 indicated that claims about global warming have been overestimated for 20 years, citing a chart found in the IPCC report leaked by Rawls that compared four temperature models. Fox interviewed Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of Alabama at Huntsville, who said: “Temperatures have not risen nearly as much as almost all of the climate models predicted…. Their predictions have largely failed, four times in a row … what that means is that it’s time for them to re-evaluate.
Spencer said of the information shown in the IPCC report charts, “It is evidence that CO2 is not nearly as strong a climate driver as the IPCC has been assuming. This is the possibility they do not allow to be considered, because it would end all of their policy-changing goals.”
As we observed earlier in the quote from the UN’s Christiana Figueres, those attempting to exploit climate change to further their agendas admittedly have policy-changing goals.
A February 1 editorial in Investors Business Daily stated that most global warming models are “hopelessly flawed.” As evidence, IBD quoted Terje Berntsen, project manager of The Research Council of Norway. By analyzing temperature statistics, the Nowegian group refuted projections made by the IPCC that global temperatures will rise by three degrees Celsius by 2050 if, by then, carbon dioxide levels double from levels of the pre-industrialized world of 1750. The Research Council of Norway, after plugging in real temperature data from 2000 to 2010 into its calculations, determined that an increase in temperature due to a doubling of CO2 would be only 1.9 degrees Celsius.
“Thus, when the researchers factor in the observations of temperature trends from 2000 to 2010, they significantly reduce the probability of our experiencing the most dramatic climate change forecast up to now,” say the Norwegians.
Berntsen said, “We are most likely witnessing natural fluctuations in the climate system — changes that can occur over several decades — and which are coming on top of a long-term warming. The natural changes resulted in a rapid global temperature rise in the 1990s, whereas the natural variations between 2000 and 2010 may have resulted in the leveling off we are observing now.”
The IBD writer summarized the problem with notable candor:
Predictions of doom have turned out to be nothing more than madness and there is no reason, none, to think that the fate we have allegedly determined for ourselves will ever happen. As we’ve learned over the last 20 years, there are too many unknowns, too many variables. If there come adverse effects of climate, humanity will adapt as needed, as it has for many millennia.
“The U.N.’s Global Warming War On Capitalism: An Important History Lesson,” an article published online by Forbes on January 22, quoted a statement made by Christopher Monckton, the third viscount of Benchley and advisor to former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who is a skeptic concerning the manmade causes of “global warming.” Monckton told a somewhat startled audience at a UN-sponsored climate conference in Doha, Qatar, last December that “in the 16 years we have been coming to these conferences, there has been no global warming at all.”
Furthermore, said Monckton, “If we are to take action [of the sort the global-warming crowd proposes], the cost of that would be many times greater than the cost of taking adaptive measures later. So our recommendation, therefore, is that we should initiate very quickly a review of the science to make sure we are all on the right track.”
The article, which has much valuable insight too lengthy to review here, featured an important quote from former U.S. Senator Timothy Wirth (D-Colo.), who represented the Clinton-Gore administration as U.S. Undersecretary of State for Global Issues at the first UN Earth Climate Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. At that summit, Wirth made a revealing statement:
We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.
As the IPCC report leaked by Alec Rawls, and a wealth of evidence supplied by respected global warming skeptics such as Dr. S. Fred Singer, Bjorn Lomborg, Richard Lindzen, and others strongly indicates, it is very likely that the theory of human-caused global warming is wrong. If so, it seems highly illogical that implementing policies based on a wrong theory can benefit either our economy or the environment.
Related article: Leaked IPCC Climate Report Shows UN Overestimated Global Warming
