Day of the sceptics at climate summit

It was the day of the sceptics. Some of the world’s best know names were in Copenhagen, though not at the Bella Center, to propound their views that the Intergovernment Panel on Climate Change had overplayed its hands and in fact their was no evidence that the Earth was warming because of human intervention. The email leakage scandal, which has cast a shadow over the deliberations, came as a strong shot in the arm for their cause.

“I think they should shut down the summit, and all go home, because nothing’s really happening to climate which warrants international action,” said Christopher Monckton who’s a scientist, a hereditary peer and was an advisor to Margaret Thatcher. “The politicians and some scientists have get together to scare the world into taking action and throwing billions of dollars at a problem which does not really exist,” he said adding that science is exactly what the IPCC is not really depending on to buttress its cause.

S. Fred Singer American atmospheric physicist and professor emeritus of environment science at the University of Virginia said that carbon dioxide was not a pollutant and its more of it in the air would not be harmful for human beings. He said the Earth may be warming, but that has nothing to do with human activity, it’s part of the climate cycle which has been place long before humans came.

Singer, who has written for Financial Chronicle, said that “frightening ourselves to death” will not solve any problem adding that the scary scenario painted by the IPCC on sea level rise is largely fiction. Temperature modeling cannot tell you what temperatures in the 20th century were. He called the IPCC’s conclusion on human origin of climate change to be “bogus, bunkum and all rubbish.”

The two scientists said if any evidence was needed, the leakage of the emails from the University of East Anglia in the UK had shown how scientists manipulated data to support their conclusion. They also kept out facts which did not conform to their theories. Singer called for investigation into how the scientists “committed fraud” and prosecutions should follow.

Monckton said according to analysis of the emails, it was not “hacked into or stolen” by someone, but was most likely released by a whistleblower inside the scientific community. This was evident from the fact that email addresses and communication of personal nature had been removed from the emails released, he said, adding that no hacker would do such a thing. He also plans to ask the UK House of Lords to take up investigation on the “fraud committed.”

He said he and Singer had written to the commissioner heading the freedom of information act office asking that the scientists who had attempted to keep away information from the statutory body, as was seen in the communications, should be prosecuted. He also said that the “whistleblower” would be protected under the act passed by parliament in UK a while ago to exactly do that. Singer was in Oslo on Tuesday to convince a group of ten members of parliament to start an investigation into the data used by the IPCC and whether it was manipulated, since it was parliament which had set up the committee to award the Nobel Peace Prize to IPCC and the former US vice president Al Gore

Tom Harris, a Canada-based scientist and executive director of .international climate science coalition said that 151 climate scientists had signed up with the coalition to send a challenge to the IPCC to come up with “credible answer to several questions raised by the scientists.” He said with the revelations in the emails that critical temperature data used by the IPCC had been “intentionally distorted” to increase warming trends, it was imperative that they re-examine the conclusions.

Asking for a thorough re-examination of the scientific evidence supporting proposed mitigation actions, the coalition has asked the IPCC to substantiate claims that: Recent climate change is unusual in comparison with historical records; and that human emissions of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases were “dangerously impacting climate.” It also wanted an anwer whether computer-based models are reliable indicators of future climate.

Harris said it was a “myth” that there was scientific “consensus,” on the IPCC latest report. “Only 61 climate scientist made any comment, and only about 5 agreed with the whole conclusion of Chapter 9 which is the most crucial part of the report on human link to climate change,” he said.

Nils-Axel Morner, former associate emeritus professor at the institute of paliogeophysics and geodynamics at the Stockholm University, who came back a month ago from Bangladesh studying whether there was a rise in sea levels which could threaten the lives of the people there said there was no evidence of any such change. Morner said that he had since last year studied sea level changes in Maldives, Tuvalu and other vulnerable places and there was “absolutely no evidence of any sea level rise,” but politicians “will frighten the poor inhabitants to react.”