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Location: St. Louis, Missouri, United States

Tuesday, February 20, 2007

Singer on the IPCC

S. Fred Singer discusses the IPCC report at Sepp:

IPCC CONCLUSION IS UNTENABLE
By S Fred Singer
Letter to Nature (sent Feb. 9, but not accepted for publication)
Printed Feb. 13 on


Michael Hopkin (in Nature, 6 Feb
2007
)
writes about an illusionary ``consensus`` on the
IPCC report (Nature Feb. 6, 2007). But a
comparison of model-predicted with observed
patterns of warming contradicts the major IPCC
conclusion that the cause of current warming is ``very likely`` human.

Hopkin implies that the ``apparent discrepancy
between warming at Earth's surface and
temperatures in Earth's lower atmosphere`` has
been resolved. Not true. The key document is
the recent report of the US Climate Change
Science Program (CCSP), which is based on best
current information. It can be found at


In spite of a poorly worded Executive
Summary, the disparity between tropospheric and
surface temperature trends is quite apparent in
the report itself. Greenhouse models (see Figure
1.3F) indicate that the tropics provide the most
sensitive location for their validation; trends
there increase strongly with altitude, peaking at
around 10 kilometers. Actual observations,
however, show the opposite: flat or even
decreasing tropospheric trend values (see Fig.
3.7 and also Fig. 5.7E). This disparity is
demonstrated most strikingly in Figure 5.4G,
which shows the difference between surface and
troposphere trends for a collection of models
(displayed as a histogram) and for balloon and satellite data.

Allowing for uncertainties in the data and
for imperfect models, there is only one valid
conclusion from this failure of greenhouse models
to explain the observations: The human
contribution to global warming is still quite
small, so that natural climate factors are dominant

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