Distinguished Non Scientist Speaks Out Against The Lies Of Science And The Great Leftist Cabal That Is Out To Get Us
Oz Boow
Puzzle me this: climate change theory allows no ice age
BEN CUBBY ENVIRONMENT
January 16, 2010
Ads by Google
Green House Gas Emissions
Calculate & Report on Green Houseemissions and carbon tracking.
CHRISTOPHER WALTER, the Third Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, likes riddles.
In 1999 he announced to the world that he had invented a puzzle made up of 209
irregular polygons and said he would pay �1 million to the first person to
solve it.
It was a brilliant marketing ploy and the mind-bending Eternity puzzle was a
best-seller.
Two University of Cambridge mathematicians, with the aid of a custom-made
computer program, solved it within months.
Lord Monckton was reportedly forced to sell his 67-bedroom mansion to pay the
prizewinners. But six years later he claimed that he had been planning to sell
the house anyway and the tale of his financial ruin was simply made up to sell
more puzzles.
He has shifted his gaze from puzzles to climate change, and the riddle at the
heart of his alternative climate-change theory looks, to the untrained eye,
even more mischievous.
The theory relies on some superficially impressive mathematics. Though climate
scientists immediately debunked his hypothesis when it was published in 2008,
Lord Monckton is still the most prominent intellectual spokesman for the
climate-change sceptic movement.
He is set to arrive in Australia next week on a speaking tour with the support
of a group of business people, including the mining heiress Gina Rinehart. He
has offered to give the Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, a tutorial in climate
science.
''The scientifically illiterate, economically innumerate policies that you
advocate - however fashionable you may conceive them to be - are killing
people by the million,'' he wrote in an open letter to Mr Rudd this month.
The crux of Lord Monckton's complaint is that the world's climate is nowhere
near as sensitive to greenhouse gases as climate scientists believe. The
thousands of researchers who have worked on the problem since the 1890s have
all been getting their maths wrong, he believes.
It is a bold thesis because climate sensitivity is the keystone to our
understanding of global warming.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change thinks that the effect of
doubling the amount of heat-trapping gases in the atmosphere would make the
world warmer by about 2.5 to 4 degrees. Most studies measure the change at
about 3 degrees. Climate-change action is based on this consensus view.
Lord Monckton's concept is based on the idea that the calculations have
inflated the warming potential of greenhouses gases by about six times.
His theory was published in Forum on Physics and Society, the online
newsletter of the American Physical Society.
It was not a peer-reviewed journal, so it was not subject to the normal level
of scientific scrutiny that applies to original research, but it was enough to
give the claim an initial veneer of credibility.
The argument Lord Monckton mounted has been painstakingly picked apart by
several eminent climate-change researchers, but it was an Australian computer
scientist, Tim Lambert, who helped collate many of the flaws on his website.
''A lot of the equations used to cover it up were right, but the argument was
complete gibberish,'' Mr Lambert said.
The hypothesis took the lowest possible range of carbon dioxide's known
warming effect on climate, multiplied it by the lowest possible effect of the
various feedbacks that amplify the warming effect, to give a figure well below
that shown by any observation.
One of the implications of the hypothesis was that, given what we know about
climate, there could not have been ice ages in the past.
''The hypothesis is completely inconsistent with the observations,'' said
Professor Matthew England, the co-director of the Climate Change Research
Centre at the University of NSW.
''In science, the world isn't wrong so the calculations must be wrong.''
The American Physical Society quickly started receiving complaints from its
members about the piece, and a lengthy disclaimer was added to the piece
saying the society did not endorse Lord Monckton's findings.
However, the paper is still the core of the argument he will be promoting on
his Australia tour.