A Response to Gavin Schmidt’s Critique of Monckton’s “Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered”

Excerpt: For the second time, the FalseClimate1 propaganda blog, founded by two co-authors of the now-discredited2 “hockey-stick” graph by which the UN’s climate panel tried unsuccessfully to abolish the mediaeval warm period, has launched a malevolent, scientifically-illiterate, and unscientifically-ad-hominem attack on a publication by me. 

My 8000-word paper, Climate Sensitivity Reconsidered3, was published in Physics and Society in July 2008, after a request from the editors that I should submit a paper setting out the methods by which the UN had overstated the likely warming in response to doubling the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. (More...)

Monckton Rebuts Dr. Arthur Smith of American Physcial Society

Excerpt: Dr. Smith’s criticisms of my paper are superficially ingenious but in reality unmeritorious. Objectively speaking, the IPCC’s method of evaluating climate sensitivity, which is faithfully, concisely, and correctly expounded in the first part of my paper, suffers from multiple exaggerations and contains serious conceptual flaws – such as the abuse of the Bode equation – and is subject to uncertainties whose combined effect is so great as to render meaningless its 2007 conclusion that, to a 90% confidence interval, we have been responsible for more than half of the warming that may have occurred over the past half-century, and which ceased with the great el Nino of 1998. Were we to be permitted to stray from the mathematics and physics just for a fleeting instant, we might say of the IPCC’s conclusions what Pope Innocent X said of the Treaty of Westphalia – that they are “null, void, invalid, iniquitous, unjust, damnable, reprobate, inane, and empty of meaning for all time.” (More...) 

Birmingham University (UK) has seen fit to publicise an article by Jean-Francois Mouhot from the Modern History Department entitled, 'Free the Planet,' which is published in the journal History Today. The University Media Release follows:

Slaves to Fossil Fuels - a Dangerous Warning from History

A historian has drawn uncomfortable parallels between our current attitudes to fossil fuels and climate change and the behaviour of mid 19th century slave owners, with worrying predictions for the future.

Jean-Francois Mouhot, from the University of Birmingham, calls for a recognition of “the evil of continuing to live as we currently do.” Comparing the attitude of slave owners with our modern day attitudes to oil says Mouhot, is valid and useful, because so many people acknowledge that owning slaves is wrong.

Mouhot says: “It is almost impossible in our contemporary world to live without relying on some sort of energy of the fossil variety. We are perhaps as much victims as culprits of a consumer society. However, our moral duty once we become aware of the evil of the system is to resist it.”

Detroit — More proof that we’re reliving the 1970s. . . .

Having passed legislation flogging U.S. automakers with a mandated fleet average of 35 mpg for by 2020 (an echo of 1975’s expensive 27 mpg mandate), Congress is now rushing in with first aid. Michigan’s Congressional delegation is making a major push to bail out U.S. automakers that are suffering disproportionate losses in the U.S. auto market (as happened in the late ’70s culminating in the rescue of Chrysler in 1979).

The Detroit News reported Tuesday that Democrat John Dingell is spearheading the package which includes “$5 billion in direct loans over five years; $3 billion a year for five years to help speed the retirement of 1.5 million older, less efficient vehicles; $2 billion over five years in tax breaks for advanced vehicles (and) $800 million over three years to develop an ‘advanced battery trust fund’ to help build three domestic battery manufacturing facilities.”

Additionally, more than 70 members have signed a letter urging five-year, $25-billion loan guarantees for automakers as part of a second stimulus package.

We recognize almost all the characters even if some do not exist today such as knights. One we are unfamiliar with, in name at least is the Pardoner. Johnson describes him as follows, “The Pardoner, a seller of indulgences, is a complete and shameless rogue; but Chaucer, not content with exposing his impudence, shows how good he was at his job and how powerfully he preached against sinfulness.  The Pardoner had also been taught to use the figure of death to scare his hearers.” So the Pardoner sold indulgences or pardons, hence his name.

If we just had the Pardoner and the tale he told to entertain his fellow pilgrims it would be interesting, but not expose the true meaning of his tale and the duplicity and hypocrisy of the character. Hypocrisy is the one thing people despise in any aspect of life, but especially in religious and political leaders. Chaucer cleverly provides us with a prologue in which the Pardoner, as if talking off the record, explains his activities and motives and exposes his hypocrisy.

There is something odd about the ferocious amount of energy expended suppressing any dissent from orthodoxy on climate change. After all, the climate cataclysmists have won the war of public opinion - for now, at least - with polls, business, media and Government enthusiastically on board.

So, if their case is so good, why try so fervently to extinguish other points of view? There is a disturbingly religious zeal in the attempts to silence critics and portray them as the moral equivalent of holocaust deniers.

Take the British Channel 4 documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, which aired on the ABC last year with an extraordinary post-show panel of debunkers assembled to denounce it. The one program which actually questioned the consensus on man's contribution to climate change, it has been singled out for condemnation and forensic dissection in a way no other program has, least of all Al Gore's error-riddled An Inconvenient Truth.

This week, the British communications regulator, Ofcom, published a long report dealing with 265 complaints about perceived inaccuracy and unfairness in Swindle.

The Glengarry Landowners Association said it believes global warming is a fabrication, and not the result of human activity on Earth.

At its August 6 public meeting, the GLA is taking the position that “the only thing man-made about global warming is the story itself,” and will feature two prominent, critical viewpoints against the concept that humans have had an impact on the planet’s ecosystem.

The GLA will be providing a counterpoint to Al Gore’s 2006 documentary “An Inconvenient Truth,” airing a British documentary called “The Great Global Warming Swindle.”

“It seems as if Al Gore’s version of impending doom and gloom has got enough attention in church halls and high school auditoriums, so we want to give the public the chance to hear the other side of the debate,” GLA director Jamie MacMaster said in a press release.