THE MYTH OF THE COPENHAGEN CLIMATE CONSPIRACY

 

Copenhagen: Climate Conference's Well-Deserved Host 

By Nick Gier, Professor Emeritus, University of Idaho (nickgier@roadrunner.com)

 

Climate skeptics are praising Lord Christopher Monckton's October 14 address to the Minnesota Free Market Institute in which he declared that man-made global warming is a hoax.  Monckton also revealed the Copenhagen Conspiracy, which predicts that at the Copenhagen Climate Conference, Obama and other world leaders will set up a Communist world government under the guise of flawed climate studies.

 

As an adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, one of Monckton's most controversial proposals was that all people testing HIV-positive should be quarantined, a draconian move carried out only in Communist Cuba. Canadian journalist Ethan Baron describes Monckton as a "whacked-out, far-right ideologue with an ego the size of the Antarctic ice sheet."

 

The good lord's degree is in journalism, but I'm sure it is more substantial than Sarah Palin's sports journalism diploma from my university.  Monckton's only article on climate change was published in the American Physical Society's Forum on Physics and Society.  This newsletter is not peer reviewed, and it appears that article was accepted primarily to create balance in the global warming debate.

 

After the publication of Monckton's article, Arthur Smith, a member of the American Physical Society, counted 125 errors in it. After pointing all of the inaccuracies and deceptions in one of Monckton's graphs CO2 emissions shown in Minnesota, NASA's Gavin Schmidt asks "How can this be described except as fake?"

         

Earlier in the year scientists from RealClimate.org studied some of Monckton's graphs, and they decided that the Third Viscount of Brenchley misrepresented data from the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and manipulated other evidence to conclude that there has been substantial cooling since 2002. The World Meteorological Institute, that left-wing organization that feeds lies to your weather reporter every evening, just released a report indicating that the first years of the 21st Century (except for 1998) were the warmest on record.  The oceans are warming at even an more alarming rate. Tom Wigley of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) states: "All these data came from National Meteorological Services, and the originals are still there for anyone to access. Indeed other groups such as GISS and NOAA have independently accessed these data and independently reproduced our results."

 

Climate skeptics are capitalizing on illegally obtained e-mails from the CRU at East Anglia University.  The claim that these messages are the "smoking gun" that anthropogenic climate change is a fraud is of course absurd. At least seven experts in science ethics contacted by the Associated Press have read the e-mails, and they have concluded that, while there was intemperate language about climate skeptics, there was neither fabrication nor manipulation of data.

 

A very recent study done by two University of Washington scientists (posted on RealClimate.org) compared CRU graphs against those generated from independent data, and they demonstrated that there was no cheating on the part of the CRU scientists.  An Italian scientist (referenced in the same post) did a check using a different method and also vindicated the embattled researchers. 

 

On December 4 the Union of Concerned Scientists released a statement showing in some detail how skeptics have distorted the content of the CRU e-mails.  On the same day American Association for the Advancement of Science reaffirmed the evidence on anthropogenic global warming that it presented to Congress in October, and it stated, that apart from the CRU data, there are "multiple lines of scientific evidence that global climate change caused by human activities is now underway, and it is a growing threat to society."

 

Climate scientists have been under tremendous pressure to release documents to climate skeptics, who have no desire to do serious science; rather, their main motivation is to discredit the solid science that is being done.  Using the same tactics as "creation" scientists, who also do no science of their own, climate skeptics take statements out of context and if needed, as in the case of Monckton, make up their own data.

 

In a December 1st statement, Lawrence Livermore National Lab scientist Ben Santer explains that the "data mining" being done by skeptics "has little to with extracting meaning from personal e-mail correspondence on complex scientific issues. This form of mining seeks to find dirt--to skew true meaning, to distort, to misrepresent, to take out of context.  It seeks to destroy the reputations of exceptional scientists." Santer has received death threats for belief in anthropogenic warming, and recently the CRU scientists have received similar threats. Climate skeptic Douglas J. Keenan, a London financial trader, called the FBI to investigate climate scientist Wei-Chyung Wang, who was cleared by the University of Albany for any wrong-doing.  Death threats to climate scientists are now being investigated by the FBI.  

 

Climate scientists are afraid that young, bright students will not choose their field because of this harassment and intimidation.  One cannot blame these scientists for circling the wagons and privately speaking ill of these rabid ideologues. It has been estimated that 40 percent of America's prosperity was due to advances in science and technology, and the right-wing's war on science and professional expertise, in addition to far fewer American students entering these fields, will make it very difficult for us to be economically competitive in the 21st Century.

 

Much hay has been made of East Anglia researcher Phil Jones' use of a "trick" in one of his papers, but in this context it simply means an ingenious way of presenting data.  This is a legitimate method to draw conclusions from otherwise intractable data.  Do we call dogs that do tricks "cheats"?  Of course not. We praise them for being clever and well trained.

 

One e-mail indicated that two papers by climate skeptics might be withheld from the 2007 IPCC report, but in the end both papers were included and discussed. Another e-mail by Phil Jones instructed his colleagues to delete e-mails that were requested by skeptics, but his colleagues say that they did not comply.  The CRU issued the following statement: "No record has been deleted, altered, or otherwise dealt with in any fashion." Phil Jones has stepped down from his position not because he is guilty of anything, but because the CRU is now doing an independent investigation.  It's a shame that there is no formal policing (except public exposure and discrediting) of the nay-sayers of anthropogenic climate change.

 

Let's look at the credentials of three other climate skeptics.  The first one is Tim Ball, who sued the Calgary Herald for libel.  In court papers available on the web, the newspaper was able to prove (1) that Ball lied that he was the first Ph.D. in climatology in Canada; (2) that he was not a professor of climatology at the University of Winnipeg; that (3) he had no peer-reviewed papers in the field for 13 years, and (4) that he was a "paid promoter of the oil and gas industry rather than a practicing scientist."  Ball has wisely withdrawn his suit.

 

Then there is Patrick Michaels, a fellow at the CATO Institute, which insists on free market solutions for everything.  Climate scientist Tom Wigley states that Michaels' "statements on the subject of computer models are a catalogue of misrepresentations and misinterpretation.  Many of the supposedly factual statements made in his testimony are either inaccurate or are seriously misleading."

 

Finally, there is the GOP's circuit speaker John Theon, who has not done any science for thirty years, and therefore has no expertise to comment on sophisticated computer climate modeling.  As a former NASA official, Theon falsely claims to have been James Hansen's boss, and he is also the source of the claim that Hansen, one of the nation's top climate scientists, manipulated data.

 

Global Warming Deniers skeptics claim that investing in the green economy that will control greenhouse gas emissions will force the world to back to the Stone Age.  In this column I demonstrated that Denmark is on track to meet its Kyoto obligations, and is promising another 20 percent cut by 2020. There is nothing Paleolithic about this nation's low unemployment, low budget deficits, highly competitive economy, and aggressively green economy.  There is consensus that the threat could be met with an average investment of 1 percent of global GNP, which contrasts with the 5 percent of GNP that was just spent to save the world economies from the follies of unregulated free markets.

 

With regard to Lord Monckton's visions of Communist world government and the erasure of national sovereignty, legal experts say that this is completely unfounded and paranoid. On this issue the Truth-O-Meter at Pultizer-winning, fact-checking Politifact.com points to "Britches on Fire" for Monckton's McCarthy-like pronouncements.

 

In Copenhagen Lord Monckton confronted young protesters and called them Hitler Youth.  Even when one of the students identified himself as Jewish and said that his grandparents died in the Holocaust, Monckton continued to insult the protesters. This is certainly not a proper way for a British peer to conduct himself.  His lordship behaves far worse in public than the East Anglia researchers did in private e-mails.