Wednesday, February 3, 2010

What is Science? And Who is Qualified to Speak?

Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairperson of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has no training whatsoever in climate science. Yet he heads the pontification panel which proliferates the new gospel of a hotter world. How come? Why did the United Nations not choose someone who was competent? His degree and training is in railroad engineering. You read it right. This man was educated to make railroads from point A to point B.

So we have the fact that a non-expert heads the IPCC. Then we have the fact that glaciers are not melting by 2035; this major scaremongering is now being defended as a minor error (it was originally meant to be 2350, some have clarified). The date was spouted first by Syed Hasnain, an Indian glacier expert, who borrowed the statement from a mountain climber, in an interview to a magazine. It had no scientific validity, and, as Hasnain has himself said, was speculative. So, as it turns out, this “scientific fact” turns out to be completely bogus, yet was published as fact, and with the strength and substance of “science” behind it, when in fact there was none.

The same goes for dire predictions on Amazon rain forests. The IPCC maintained that there would be a huge depletion in Amazon rain forests because of [global warming] lack of precipitation. Needless to add, no Amazon rain forest expert could be found to back this claim. They depended, instead, on a report by a freelance journalist and activist, and now it has blown up in their faces as well.

So is there any good science to support global warming? Not lately. Most of the so-called “science” is a few years old, and now most of that is being called into question as well. “There is no scientific consensus at all that man-made CO2 emissions cause global warming, as claimed by the IPCC. In a recent paper, Lord Monckton of Brenchley, who has worked extensively on climate change models, argues: ‘There is no scientific consensus on how much the world has warmed or will warm; how much of the warming is natural; how much impact greenhouse gases have had or will have on temperature; how sea level, storms, droughts, floods, flora, and fauna will respond to warmer temperature; what mitigative steps—if any—we should take; whether (if at all) such steps would have sufficient (or any) climatic effect; or even whether we should take any steps at all.”

An investigation by Dr Benny Peiser, director, Global Warming Policy Foundation, has revealed that only 13 of the 1,117, or a mere 1 per cent of the scientific papers crosschecked by him, explicitly endorse the consensus as defined by the IPCC. Thus the very basis of the claim of consensus on global warming is false. And so deeply entrenched is the global warming lobby, the prestigious journal Science did not publish a letter that Dr Peiser wrote pointing out the lack of consensus. Says Dr Peiser, “The IPCC process by which it arrives at its conclusions lacks balance, transparency and due diligence. It is controlled by a tightly knit group of individuals who are completely convinced that they are right. As a result, conflicting data and evidence, even if published in peer-reviewed journals, are regularly ignored, while exaggerated claims, even if contentious or not peer-reviewed, are often highlighted in IPCC reports. Not surprisingly, the IPCC has lost a lot of credibility in recent years.

Sadly, government ideologues like President Obama cling to the global warming myth and ridicule the right for questioning it–and worse, he’s prepared to force through global warming based legislation even if it turns out to be a hoax. What kind of a president is that?

Another total lie has been that the Sunderbans in Bangladesh are sinking on account of the rise in sea level. The IPCC claimed that one-fifth of Bangladesh will be under water by 2050. Well, it turns out this is an absurd, unscientific and outrageous claim. According to scientists at the Centre for Environmental and Geographical Information Services (Cegis) in Dhaka, its surface area appears to be growing by 20 sq km annually. Cegis has based its results on more than 30 years of satellite imagery. IPCC has not retracted this claim. As far as they are concerned, Bangladesh is a goner by 2050, submerged forever in the Bay of Bengal.

“The revelations have been nothing short of jaw dropping. Dozens of claims made in the IPCC 2007 report on climate change that was supposed to represent the "consensus" of 2500 of the world's climate scientists have been shown to be bogus, or faulty, or not properly vetted, or simply pulled out of thin air.

We know this because newspapers in Great Britain are doing their job; vetting the 2007 report item by item, coming up with shocking news about global warming claims that formed the basis of argument by climate change advocates who were pressuring the US and western industrialized democracies to transfer trillions of dollars in wealth to the third world and cede sovereignty to the UN.” from The American Spectator, February 2, 2010

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