Senior Skeptic Scientist Blames Eco Religion for Climate Dogma
Veteran global warming skeptic who reviewed almost every UN major study on global warming summarizes how it’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lost the confidence of the public and scientists in general. Dr. Vincent Gray, with a distinguished career in physical chemistry from Cambridge University and a 100+ scientific and technical articles, patents and publications reveals all in his January newsletter. Dr. Gray also points the finger of blame at the cult of environmentalism that rose in the 1980’s to captivate a generation of credulous minds. The unexpurgated version appears below.
NZCLIMATE TRUTH NEWSLETTER NO 303
JANUARY 6TH 2013
THE INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON CLIMATE CHANGE (IPCC)
INTRODUCTION
During the 1980s a new anti-science pseudo religion called ENVIRONMENTALISM became very popular. It replaced the conventional deity with THE ENVIRONMENT, which is a kind of mythical earthly Paradise, which is worshipped, and demanding of constant sacrifices. It has established Ministries in most countries and a host of activists who impose its dogma on most news outlets.
Its dogma includes:
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A static medieval earth with constant species and ecosystems subject only to “natural variability” but threatened by change from the evil influence of humans.
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The biblical concept the humans have responsibility for all other organisms
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The replacement of evolution by “sustainability”
THE IPCC
A new pseudo scientific theory of the climate was developed to bolster the beliefs of the “Environmentalists” which ignored the accumulated wisdom of several hundred years of scientific meteorology and replaced it with a static climate, exclusively controlled by radiation, whose only overall change was “warming” caused by human changes in atmospheric concentrations of trace gases in the atmosphere. After several Conferences on the subject the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was set up jointly by the World Meteorological Organisation and the United Nations Environmental programme in 1988 to provide “scientific“ justification for this theory which was launched at the United Nations “Earth Summit” Conference in Rio de Janeiro in June 1992.
Three Working Groups WGI, Science, WG2, Impacts Vulnerability and Adaptation, and WGIII Mitigation were set up to gather and process scientific information which might support the theory. In later reports these were summarized in a Synthesis Report.
My involvement with the IPCC began when I was working at Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China in 1998 and at The Teachers University in Kunming in 1989. I became interested in this new climate theory that was being promoted by the scientific journals in the college libraries. It seemed plausible and I gave several lectures on it.
I returned regularly to New Zealand where I visited my former employer, The Coal Research Association, where I had been Chief Chemist. I found that they had received the First Draft of the First IPCC Science Report, inviting comments. I supplied some which were sent, with others, to the New Zealand Ministry of the Environment who forwarded them to the IPCC with all the others from New Zealand. I commented on the Second Draft during my visit to the USA in 1989 which I read at the premises of the Marshall Institute in Washington DC.
These comments were not acknowledged in the Final Report, “Climate Change – The IPCC Scientific Assessment” (1990) which only listed four individual comments from New Zealand.
The Report was a propaganda exercise promoting the models. They put the actual climate observations right at the end, making it difficult to check their claim that “The size of the warming is broadly consistent with predictions of climate models.”
They also said “but it is also the same magnitude as natural variability.” This was the only Report that talked of “predictions”, but the text showed that this did not go beyond simulation of past results and personal opinions of authors. There was no evidence of successful future prediction in any of the Reports. With all the Reports, there was a “Summary for Policymaker” which was really a “Summary by Policymakers”, because it was dictated line by line to Drafting Authors by the anonymous Government representatives who control the IPCC.
After “Climate Change (1990)” a Supplementary Report, ”Climate Change 1992” followed. This time my comments were listed under the name of the Director of Coal Research, R.S. Whitney. This Report had the statement “Scenarios are not predictions of the future and should not be used as such” It also listed a new set of futures scenarios which replaced those in Climate Change 1990.
All the Reports were intended to influence particular meetings of the supporters of the IPCC. The first two played an important role in influencing the proceedings of the Earth Summit of the United Nations in Rio De Janeiro in June 1992. 41 nations pledged to control emissions of greenhouse gases and signed the Framework Convention on Climate Change that defined “Climate Change”, legally, as exclusively due to human emissions, whereas “Natural Changes” were merely “variable.”
On my return to New Zealand in 1991 the Coal Research Association held a two-day Conference in October where the keynote Speaker on the second day was Fred Singer, Professor of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia, the most prominent US critic of the IPCC. I offered him two articles, one on the 1990 IPCC Report and the second of the 1992 supplement, which he subsequently published in a volume entitles “The Greenhouse Debate Continues”.
The 1994 IPCC Report was devoted to “Radiative Forcing and an Evaluation of the 1992 Emissions Scenarios” which had replaced the ones in Climate Change (1990). My name was listed as a reviewer for the first time under “Non Government Organizations.”
The Chapter on “Scenarios” stated, “Since scenarios deal with the future they cannot be compared with observations.” I published papers about these reports, two in “Chemistry in New Zealand (1994, 1996) and one in New Zealand Science Review (1996). The Second (1995) IPCC Report became notorious, as the Final Draft WGI Report did not meet the requirements of the anonymous Government members who dictated the “policymakers summary” and they engaged Ben Santer to alter a number of the statements in Chapter 8 of the Final Draft. These were very numerous. Amongst them was deletion of the statement:
“None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases,” which remains true to this day.
The First Report had a Chapter 4 entitled “Validation of Climate Models.” The same Chapter was in the First Draft of the next Report. I commented that since no Climate Model has ever been validated the title was inappropriate. In the next draft they had changed the title to “Evaluation of Climate Models”, and changed the word “validation” to “evaluation” no less than fifty times throughout the Chapter.
It should be explained that the term “validation” is a process whereby computer models may be tested to find whether they are suitable for future prediction. It involves a range of evidence for successful forecasts over the range required, to a satisfactory level of accuracy. This process has still never been carried out, so no model so far is suitable for future prediction.
In the same Second Draft, and ever afterwards the claim for successful prediction has never been made. The results of all computer models are “projections” dependent on the validity of the assumptions made. They are “evaluated” and “attributed” entirely on the opinions of the evaluators. The US Think Tank, the Heartland Institute, published my comments on this Report.
I was probably the only scientist who commented on the IPCC 2000 Special Report on Emissions Scenarios since it was part of the activity of the Committee WGIII. It put forward a new set of scenarios that were imposed on the scientists of WGI. I wrote a paper for the Journal “Climate Research” entitled “The IPCC Scenarios, Are they Plausible” which essentially showed that they were not. According to the Climategate emails, this paper led to the sacking of not only the Editor involved, but also the entire editorial board.
The Third Report in 2001 led to an invitation by Fred Singer for an International team of climate sceptics to Washington DC where we lectured in the Capitol building to an audience of mainly U.S. Government officials. After this, the Kyoto Treaty was no longer accepted by the USA and we hope we played a part in this decision.
I wrote a book “The Greenhouse Delusion: A Critique of Climate Change 2001” which was published by Multi-Science Publishers UK. Ken Shirley MP launched it in Wellington in 2002 in the Parliament buildings. It is still in print and was recently offered on Amazon.com. The Authors of Chapter 1 of “Climate Change 2001” signed their professional death warrant when they wrote: “The fact that the global mean temperature has increased since the late 19th Century and that other trends have been observed, does not necessarily mean that an anthropogenic effect on the climate has been identified. Climate has always varied on all time-scales, so the observed changes may be natural.”
The Fourth Report (2007) took special precautions to ensure that no true statement about the climate like this one could ever appear again. Chapter 1 was now entitled “Historical Overview of Climate Change Science” which dealt exclusively with the FCCC definition of “Climate Science”. It omitted all mention of conventional meteorology and concealed all the many measurements of atmospheric carbon dioxide carried out between 1850 and 1975.
By this time I was largely debarred from lecturing in New Zealand. I was therefore surprised that in March 2006 I was invited to the Beijing Climate Center, where I gave three lectures covering most of my criticisms of the 4th (2007) IPCC Report, on the First Draft of which I had already commented. The Chairman of the WGI Committee that produced the Report was the Senior Fellow at the Beijing Climate Center Professor Yihui Ding. When I was given a paper in which he was the second author, which essentially showed that there had been no significant temperature change in China for 100 years, I assumed that he may be sympathetic to some of my comments. So I made as many as 1,878 comments on the next draft, 16{154653b9ea5f83bbbf00f55de12e21cba2da5b4b158a426ee0e27ae0c1b44117} of the total received.
Up to that time, all my comments were secret. I spent some time going through the published Reports trying to find out whether they had taken any notice of my comments. With the Fourth Report a demand that the comments and their treatment be made public was made through the Official Information Act, so all of them have been published, with most of them rejected out of hand, with no attempt to provide a reply.
I summarised my comments in a paper on the “Summary for Policymakers” to “Energy in Environment” in 2007. When the Report was published I found that Professor Ding was no longer Chairman, although he is still in his post and has contributed to the current Fifth IPCC Report.
There were several attempts by independent scientists to publish an alternative Report to the IPCC 4TH Report. I joined one of them, assembled by Fred Singer, who met in Vienna in April 2007 to discuss their contributions. The Heartland Institute as “Climate Change Reconsidered” published the report in August 2009.
The 5th IPCC Report is now under way, and I have commented on both the drafts of the WGI Committee. The details of the Second Draft have now been “leaked” so there is currently much discussion of its contents on the Internet. Much of the material in this Newsletter has already been published in my “Spinning the Climate” (2009), my autobiography “Confessions of a Climate Sceptic” (2010), “The Triumph of Doublespeak (2010) and several Newsletters
Dr. Vincent Gray Wellington, New Zealand
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