The 2008 International Conference on Climate Change

The 2008 Non-Governmental International Conference on Climate Change has been meeting in New York since March 2. This meeting was convened by those scientists who are not part of the Goracle's "consensus" about global warming.




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A summary of the opinions and arguments being aired at the NG-IPCC can be found in the publication Nature, Not Human Activity, Rules the Climage. The document begins with a rebuttal of the work of the highly politicized UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) penned by Frederick Seitz, President Emeritus, Rockefeller University, past President of the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, and Chairman of the Science and Environmental Policy Project:

The IPCC is pre-programmed to produce reports to support the hypotheses of anthropogenic warming and the control of greenhouse gases, as envisioned in the Global Climate Treaty. 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 document sumarizes its findings in Section 1:

The IPCC continues to undervalue the overwhelming evidence that, on decadal and century-long time scales, the Sun and associated atmospheric cloud effects are responsible for much of past climate change. It is therefore highly likely that the Sun is also a major cause of twentieth century warming, with anthropogenic GH gases making only a minor contribution. In addition, the IPCC ignores, or addresses imperfectly, other science issues that call for discussion and explanation.

The present report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) focuses on two major issues – the very weak evidence that the causes of the current warming are anthropogenic (Section 2) and the far more robust evidence that the causes of the current warming are natural (Section 3) – and then addresses a series of less crucial topics:

- Computer models are unreliable guides to future climate conditions (Section 4);

- Sea-level rise is not significantly affected by rise in GH gases (Section 5);

- The data on ocean heat content have been misused to suggest anthropogenic warming. The role of GH gases in the reported rise in ocean temperature is largely unknown (Section 6);

- Understanding of the atmospheric carbon dioxide budget is incomplete (Section 7);

- Higher concentrations of GH gases are more likely to be beneficial to plant and animal life and to human health than lower concentrations (Section 8); and

- Conclusion: Our imperfect understanding of the causes and consequences of climate change means the science is far from settled. This, in turn, means proposed efforts to mitigate climate change by reducing GH gas emissions are premature and misguided. Any attempt to influence global temperatures by reducing such emissions would be both futile and expensive (Section 9).

Do see the entire report. And keep your hands firmly on your wallets until you decide whether we really need to engage in economy busting measures - such as biofuels and carbon credits - on the basis of the assertions of the Goracle.