U.N.’s IPCC fiddled climate change data – Christopher Booker

    This data will be used to justify wrong-headed actions which will destroy western economies, and have no impact on the weather.

In his book “The Real Global Warming Disaster”, Booker said the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change used distorted data in the infamous “Hockey Stick” graph, often re-wrote the “Summary for Policymakers” to draw conclusions about the fate of the climate that weren’t substantiated by the science, and were party to political pressure to silence dissenting scientific voices.

The IPCC’s computer model-generated forecasts call for substantial, climate-wrecking temperature increases over the next century, unless CO2 emissions from the burning of fossil fuels like coal and oil are slashed. Some Western nations now say they will cut CO2 by 80 per cent by 2050. Expect most of us to be back living in caves if that happens.

Most governments and many scientists beg to differ with Booker and say a Copenhagen meeting in December must agree severe limits on CO2 to stop catastrophic warming. Curiously, the world’s mainstream media has given warmists a free ride, possibly on the grounds that checking the facts might ruin a good story. It’s much more interesting to write about how we are all going to die unless our heroic politicians step in and save us. But as pay day looms, maybe we can expect a change of heart.

Our “heroes” in the E.U. are suggesting that we pay upwards of €100 billion a year to poor nations by 2020 so they can avoid increasing their consumption of fossil fuels on their way to combating poverty and disease.

According to Booker, this is a potentially disastrous course of action which will cripple western economies, and have no discernible influence on the climate.

Booker said IPCC scientists, which Al Gore was telling BBCTV’s NewsNight include up to 2,500 of the world’s top scientists from Albania to Zimbabwe, were in fact a clique of about 50 mainly British and U.S. scientists with axes to grind.

The “Hockey Stick” graph, which showed that current temperatures were the highest for 1,000 years and climbing, was in fact generated by using a computer programme which ignored data unfavourable to the cause, and was designed to produce the inevitable result. Booker points out that global temperatures climbed to substantially higher levels by 1200, some 600 years before the Industrial Revolution’s coal-burning started, slipped down from 1350 to 1850, before climbing erratically to present day levels still below 1200’s. Booker says that if, as the IPCC claims, global temperature reacts to increasing carbon dioxide (CO2), this data has to be explained.

During the twentieth century, global temperatures declined from the 1940s to mid-1970s as CO2 emissions accelerated, rose again until 1998, and have been sliding since, as CO2 emissions climbed. This would seem to suggest that CO2 is not linked to global warming.

Last month BBC climate correspondent Paul Hudson pointed out that the IPCC’s computers had failed to predict the downturn in temperatures since 1998, but this hasn’t curbed the clamour by the so-called “warmists” to save the world.

Booker says many eminent scientists now say that anyone looking for an explanation for climate change would be better off looking at the influence of the sun, but governments aren’t listening.

He quotes Professor Richard Lindzen, from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who he describes as the world’s leading atmospheric physicist, pointing to this wealth-threatening hysteria.

“Future generations will wonder in bemused amazement that the early 21^st century’s developed world went into hysterical panic over a globally averaged temperature increase of a few tenths of a degree and, on the basis of gross exaggerations of highly uncertain computer projections combined into implausible chains of inference, proceeded to contemplate a roll-back of the industrial age,” Lindzen said.