The Emperor Has No Clothes (It`s a Good Thing We Have Global Warming or He`d Freeze)

The Global Warming Grifters are growing desperate-and increasingly people are realizing the Emperor has no clothes:



Stern's report scaremongering

By Piers Akerman

Daily Telegraph (Australia), November 05, 2006



Few government reports have been greeted with
less scepticism than Nicholas Stern's scary
scenario on climate change, but seldom has a
report purporting to be a serious study been so
deficient in scientific back-up.

While its contents have been taken as gospel by
various interest groups, the media and the ALP, a
number of bona fide experts are deeply concerned
at the report's lack of any real intellectual rigour.

Without gilding the lily, Dr Brian O'Brien, a
strategic and environmental consultant, who was
the founding Director and Chairman of the Western
Australia Environmental Protection Authority, and
previously Professor of Physics and Space Science
in the US, has all the credentials necessary to
make a reasoned, educated review of such a report.

His verdict is damning. He says that not only are
its forecasts out of whack with the last report
of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC) of 2001, but also that if Stern wasn't so
driven by political goals he should have waited
until next year when the IPCC's fourth report is due to be published.

"I think they're being quite naughty,'' he said.
"All this apocalyptic talk when the situation is
not so cataclysmic that they couldn't have waited
till 2007 for the best available transparent data
rather than rely on the coupling together of a
five-year-old, out-of-date IPCC report, amended
with references to a difficult-to-obtain German
publication Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change,
edited by H.J.Schellnhuber (Cambridge University
Press), which is not only not readily available
but was not subjected to the usual process of peer review.''

Professor O'Brien, who has a number of
experiments still orbiting Earth aboard various
satellites is currently assisting NASA recover
data from the Apollo 11 program which the space
agency "misplaced'' before coding, was clearly
exasperated when he spoke with me from his Perth home.

"There are a number of obvious problems with the
report,'' he said, "not least being that Stern
relies on the IPCC's 2001 report which estimated
the maximum sea level rise forecast by 2100 would
be somewhere between 9cm and 88cm and a leaked
report of next year's IPCC report says the rise
is possibly between 14cm and 43cm.''

Clearly, Stern has chosen to take the darkest
possible view of the future. The professor said
that in its initial report in 1995, the IPCC
explicitly stated that its definition of climate
change differed from that of the United Nations
and Kyoto, because their definition included
natural events plus human activities.

"The first question, then, is what is climate
change, if the scientific group advising the UN
is thinking about natural phenomena as well as
the scary stuff?'' he asked. "How about the
so-called Federation drought which ran from 1895
to 1903, and the drought which ran from 1991 to
'95, or the two in between, which had the most
devastating effect in extent and on primary
production, according to the Australian Bureau of
Statistics Year Book for 2001?''

Professor O'Brien referred to remarks made by
Robert White, the President of the US National
Academy of Engineering to the annual general
meeting of the US Academy of Science, in
Washington, in April, 1989, where he said:
"Whether we in the scientific community like it
or not, we have awakened the political beast; we
are confronted with an inverted pyramid of knowledge.

"A huge and growing mass of proposals for policy
action is balanced upon a handful of real facts.''

Professor O'Brien described a diagram of a big
inverted pyramid, standing on a tiny little apex
of a few facts such as increasing concentration
of gases and a mass of assumptions rising on top
of that, and exploding into all sorts of models and scenarios.

The Stern report, he said, is now at the peak of
the apocalyptic drawing. He said the Stern
report's sky-is-falling approach to climate
change was exactly the same as the technique used
at the first world conference on the changing
atmosphere, and implications for global security
held in Toronto in June, 1988.

The opening quote at the conference, attended by
more than 300 people from 46 nations was:
"Humanity is conducting an unintended,
uncontrolled, globally pervasive experiment whose
ultimate consequences could be second only to a global nuclear war.''

This alarmist approach reeked of stupidity, snake
oil, and misguided gospel preaching but was in
line with a formula adopted by the first chairman
of the IPCC, Sir John Houghton, who produced the
IPCC's first three reports in 1990, 1995 and 2001
and wrote in his book Global Warming, The
Complete Briefing, in 1994: "Unless we announce
disasters no one will listen.''

Evoking the Great Depression and World War II may
garner headlines for climate change but, without
a factual basis, the Stern report is little but grandiose scare-mongering.

It would be irresponsible in the extreme for
politicians to make major policy changes - and
major economic commitments - on such specious arguments.