It appears to be a serious paper. Perhaps, once again, the media, politicians, and many climate researchers with financial and activist agendas are wrong.
Here is the Foreword
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In his speech at the United Nations’ climate conference on September 24, 2007, Dr. Vaclav Klaus, president of the Czech Republic, said it would most help the debate on climate change if the current monopoly and one-sidedness of the scientific debate over climate change by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were eliminated. He reiterated his proposal that the UN organize a parallel panel and publish two competing reports.
The present report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) does exactly that. It is an independent examination of the evidence available in the published, peer-reviewed literature – examined without bias and selectivity. It includes many research papers ignored by the IPCC, plus additional scientific results that became available after the IPCC deadline of May 2006.
The IPCC is pre-programmed to produce reports to support the hypotheses of anthropogenic warming and the control of greenhouse gases, as envisioned in the Global Climate Treaty. The 1990 IPCC Summary completely ignored satellite data, since they showed no warming. The 1995 IPCC report was notorious for the significant alterations made to the text after it was approved by the scientists – in order to convey the impression of a human influence. The 2001 IPCC report claimed the twentieth century showed ‘unusual warming’ based on the now-discredited hockey-stick graph. The latest IPCC report, published in 2007, completely devaluates the climate contributions from changes in solar activity, which are likely to dominate any human influence.
The foundation for NIPCC was laid five years ago when a small group of scientists from the United States and Europe met in Milan during one of the frequent UN climate conferences. But it got going only after a workshop held in Vienna in April 2007, with many more scientists, including some from the Southern Hemisphere. The NIPCC project was conceived and directed by Dr. S. Fred Singer, professor emeritus of environmental sciences at the University of Virginia. He should be credited with assembling a superb group of scientists who helped put this volume together.
Singer is one of the most distinguished scientists in the U.S. In the 1960s, he established and served as the first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service, now part of the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and earned a U.S. Department of Commerce Gold Medal Award for his technical leadership. In the 1980s, Singer served for five years as vice chairman of the National Advisory Committee for Oceans and Atmosphere (NACOA) and became more directly involved in global environmental issues.
Since retiring from the University of Virginia and from his last federal position as chief scientist of the Department of Transportation, Singer founded and directed the nonprofit Science and Environmental Policy Project, an organization I am pleased to serve as chair. SEPP’s major concern has been the use of sound science rather than exaggerated fears in formulating environmental policies.
Our concern about the environment, going back some 40 years, has taught us important lessons. It is one thing to impose drastic measures and harsh economic penalties when an environmental problem is clear-cut and severe. It is foolish to do so when the problem is largely hypothetical and not substantiated by observations. As NIPCC shows by offering an independent, non-governmental ‘second opinion’ on the ‘global warming’ issue, we do not currently have any convincing evidence or observations of significant climate change from other than natural causes.
Frederick Seitz President Emeritus, Rockefeller University Past President, National Academy of Sciences Past President, American Physical Society Chairman, Science and Environmental Policy Project
February 2008
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Here is the Conclusion.
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The central problems for policymakers in the debate over global warming are (a) is the reported warming trend real and how significant is it? (b) how much of the warming trend is due to natural causes and how much is due to human-generated greenhouse gases? and (c) would the effects of continued warming be harmful or beneficial to plant and wildlife and to human civilization?
In this NIPCC report we have presented evidence that helps provide answers to all three questions.
The extent of the modern warming – the subject of the first question – appears to be less than is claimed by the IPCC and in the popular media. We have documented shortcomings of surface data affected by urban heat islands and by the poor distribution of land-based observing stations. Data from oceans, covering 70 percent of the globe, are also subject to uncertainties. The only truly global observations come from weather satellites, and these have not shown any warming trend since 1998, for the past 10 years.
This report shows conclusively that the human greenhouse gas contribution to current warming is insignificant. Our argument is based on the well- established and generally agreed-to ‘fingerprint’ method. Using data published by the IPCC and further elaborated in the U.S.-sponsored CCSP report, we have shown that observed temperature- trend patterns disagree sharply with those calculated from greenhouse models.
We show that the twentieth century is in no way unusual and that warming periods of greater magnitude have occurred in the historic past – without any catastrophic consequences.
We also discuss the many shortcomings of climate models in trying to simulate what is happening in the real atmosphere.
If the human contribution to global warming due to increased levels of greenhouse gases is insignificant, why do greenhouse gas models calculate large temperature increases, i.e., show high values of ‘climate sensitivity’? The most likely explanation is that models ignore the negative feedbacks that occur in the real atmosphere. New observations reported from satellites suggest it is the distribution of water vapor that could produce such strong negative feedbacks.
If current warming is not due to increasing greenhouse gases, what are the natural causes that might be responsible for both warming and cooling episodes – as so amply demonstrated in the historic, pre-industrial climate record? Empirical evidence suggests very strongly that the main cause of warming and cooling on a decadal scale derives from solar activity via its modulation of cosmic rays that in turn affect atmospheric cloudiness. According to published research, cosmic-ray variations are also responsible for major climate changes observed in the paleo-record going back 500 million years.
The third question concerns the effects of modest warming. A major scare associated with a putative future warming is a rapid rise in sea level, but even the IPCC has been scaling back its estimates. We show here that there will be little if any acceleration, and therefore no additional increase in the rate of ongoing sea-level rise. This holds true even if there is a decades-long warming, whether natural or manmade.
We show that the twentieth century is in no way unusual and that warming periods of greater magnitude have occurred in the historic past – without any catastrophic consequences.
We also discuss the many shortcomings of climate models in trying to simulate what is happening in the real atmosphere.
If the human contribution to global warming due to increased levels of greenhouse gases is insignificant, why do greenhouse gas models calculate large temperature increases, i.e., show high values of ‘climate sensitivity’? The most likely explanation is that models ignore the negative feedbacks that occur in the real atmosphere. New observations reported from satellites suggest it is the distribution of water vapor that could produce such strong negative feedbacks.
If current warming is not due to increasing greenhouse gases, what are the natural causes that might be responsible for both warming and cooling episodes – as so amply demonstrated in the historic, pre-industrial climate record? Empirical evidence suggests very strongly that the main cause of warming and cooling on a decadal scale derives from solar activity via its modulation of cosmic rays that in turn affect atmospheric cloudiness. According to published research, cosmic-ray variations are also responsible for major climate changes observed in the paleo-record going back 500 million years.
The third question concerns the effects of modest warming. A major scare associated with a putative future warming is a rapid rise in sea level, but even the IPCC has been scaling back its estimates. We show here that there will be little if any acceleration, and therefore no additional increase in the rate of ongoing sea-level rise. This holds true even if there is a decades-long warming, whether natural or manmade.
Other effects of a putative increase in temperature and carbon dioxide are likely to be benign, promoting not only the growth of crops and forests but also benefiting human health. Ocean acidification is not judged to be a problem, as indicated by available data. After all, CO2 levels have been up to 20 times the present value during the Phanerozoic Period, the past 500 million years. During this time Earth’s climate has been remarkably stable, with no ‘run-away’ greenhouse effects – indicating strong negative feedbacks.
If, for whatever reason, a modest warming were to occur – even one that matches temperatures
seen during the Medieval Warm Period of around 1100 AD or the much larger ones recorded during the Holocene Climate Optimum of some 6,000 years ago – the impact would not be damaging but would probably be, on the whole, beneficial. [Lamb 1982, and Figure 26]
Policy Implications
Our findings, if sustained, point to natural causes and a moderate warming trend with beneficial effects for humanity and wildlife. This has obvious policy implications: Schemes proposed for controlling CO2 emissions, including the Kyoto Protocol, proposals in the U.S. for federal and state actions, and proposals for a successor international treaty to Kyoto, are unnecessary, would be ineffective if implemented, and would waste resources that can better be applied to genuine societal problems [Singer, Revelle and Starr 1991; Lomborg 2007].
Even if a substantial part of global warming were due to greenhouse gases – and it is not – any control efforts currently contemplated would give only feeble results. For example, the Kyoto Protocol – even if punctiliously observed by all participating nations – would decrease calculated future temperatures by only 0.02 degrees C by 2050 [re-calculated from Parry et al. 1998], an undetectable amount.
To sum up: This NIPCC report falsifies the principal IPCC conclusion that the reported warming (since 1979) is very likely caused by the human emission of greenhouse gases. In other words, increasing carbon dioxide is not responsible for current warming. Policies adopted and called for in the name of ‘fighting global warming’ are unnecessary.
It is regrettable that the public debate over climate change, fueled by the errors and exaggerations contained in the reports of the IPCC, has strayed so far from scientific truth. It is an embarrassment to science that hype has replaced reason in the global debate over so important an issue.
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