Nature or Nurture: Climate Change?

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Shoot me the links. It's hard to sort out all the expert opinion. Ethically, we must care and do our best whether our efforts change anything or not.

"Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate" - NIPCC

Thursday, March 06, 2008

You've no doubt heard about the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change -- the IPCC. The IPCC is a group of government-approved scientists convened to provide a UN-approved examination of the evidence available on the causes and consequences of man-made global warming. Their reports and their 'Summaries for Policymakers' of these reports are widely reported and, according to a new group of scientists called the NIPCC, highly selective.

The NIPCC is an international coalition of scientists under the title of Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, who met recently in New York in the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, concluding the conference by issuing the Manhattan Declaration which declares "'Global warming' is not a global crisis,"

That world leaders reject the views expressed by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as well as popular, but misguided works such as “An Inconvenient Truth,” [and]

that all taxes, regulations, and other interventions intended to reduce emissions of CO2 be abandoned forthwith.

The NIPCC was "convened to provide an independent examination of the evidence available on the causes and consequences of climate change in the published, peer-reviewed literature – examined without bias and selectivity. It includes many research papers ignored by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), plus additional scientific results that became available after the IPCC [last] deadline of May 2006." The NIPCC scientists argue that "The IPCC is pre-programmed to produce reports to support the hypotheses of anthropogenic warming and the control of greenhouse gases."

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.

The NIPCC's Summary for Policymakers was released at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change held in New York, and can be downloaded here: 'Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climate' (pdf). Chapter headings offer a fair summary of the contents:

• Most of modern warming is due to natural causes
• Climate models are not reliable
• The rate of sea-level rise is unlikely to increase
• Do anthropogenic greenhouse gases heat the oceans?
• How much do we know about carbon dioxide in the atmosphere?
• The effects of human carbon dioxide emissions are uncertain
• The economic effects of modest warming are likely to be positive

MSM coverage of the conference can be found at these sources:

Natural Forces, Not Man, Causing Global Warming, Scientist Says Crosswalk.com, VA
Cool View of Science at Meeting on Warming New York Times
Hundreds of experts assert 'alarmists' in climate debate 'have had ... WorldNetDaily
Global Warming Skeptics Insist Humans Not at Fault Washington Post
Analyze this, ye warming believers: Peter Foster National Post
Hundreds of experts assert 'alarmists' in climate debate 'have had ... WorldNetDaily
Courts Confront Climate Change Hawaii Reporter
Amazing Climate Predictions Revealed—Climate Models Reviled Reason Magazine

And from some of the blogs there's Voices of Sanity on the Climate from Power Line, and of course The Reference Frame, whose author Lubos Motl is one of the authors of the NIPCC Summary.

Got some valid information that argues the other side? Shoot me the links. It's hard to sort out all the expert opinion.