The Stern report last week predicted dire economic and social effects of unchecked global warming. In what many will see as a highly controversial polemic, Christopher Monckton disputes the 'facts' of this impending apocalypse and accuses the UN and its scientists of distorting the truth
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Telegraph
There is a link here to a slightly flaky paper by Lord Monckton of Brenchley. It contains some impressive looking math. But it repeatedly refers to the measurement of irradiance (e.g., solar energy impinging on the earth' surface) in watts per square metre per second. This is nonsense, as a watt is a rate of energy flow (or of doing work) and so already embodies a unit of time (1 watt = 1 Joule per second). This makes one quite doubtful of his Lordship's grasp of the scientific concepts he so breezily discusses. (Most likely his remarks on the subject pass for profundity in the House of Lords smoking room, but nowadays many members of the public are better informed scientifically than you average grouse-shooting earl, so such scientific illiteracy among the elite does not pass unnoticed. What also does not go unnoticed is that the Telegraph, which in recent years readily loaned former owner Lord Black millions of pounds, is too cheap th hire a competent scientific editor.)
However, his Lordship's paper raises some interesting points. One is the widely discussed possibility that the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is guilty of propagating falsified or at least misrepresented data to create unreasonable alarm about climate change. In particular, the IPCC's abolition of the Mediaeval warm period and the little ice age, which makes the current warming look vastly more ominous than it would otherwise.
Quite apart from the climate proxies such as tree ring widths, sea shell isotope signatures and the like, there is the historical record to refute the IPCC. There is the fact that the 14th Century was a time of widespread misery in Europe in large part due to starvation -- suggesting a sustained period of poor crops due to cool weather following a more favorable climatic period (see Barbara Tuchman's "A distant mirror", a record of the calamitous 14th century).
There is also an abundance of historical evidence pointing to the reality of the Little Ice Age, the start of which marked the beginning of a severe decline in the prosperity Mediterranean civilization, as recorded, for example, in Fernand Braudel's "The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean world in the Age of Philip the Second," a decline that seems like that of the 14th Century to have been the result of climatic deterioration and declining crop yields.
Monckton's paper also touches on some of the important scientific uncertainties that the climate change research community has rarely been willing to discuss publicly, including the tremendous uncertainty about the role of periodic changes in the sun's brightness in determining the small 20th Century rise in global temperature, and about the degree to which the rather small direct effect on global temperature of a doubling in the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration is amplified by, so-called and poorly quantified, feedbacks.
On the whole, Lord Monckton's effort is a worthy one, providing a useful antidote to the certainties of the global warming alarmists, and political opportunists working to put the fear of global warming in everyone's heart. In fact it is hard not to wonder whether Al Gore, leader of the political wing of the Alarmist faction, is not now playing the role of America's Lysenko, inciting in the process, a warping and fundamental corruption of America's scientific establishment. All for the best idealogical reasons, of course, as with Lysenko in Russia.
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