COP: Lord Monckton Scolds House Democrats at Climategate Hearing

Connie Hair
Posted 05/10/2010 ET

Amid the aftermath of the failed Times Square terrorist attack and the lethal floods in Tennessee -- not to mention the president finally noticing there is a deep water drilling disaster in the Gulf of Mexico -- the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming held a hearing for Democrats to attempt to gloss over fatal flaws exposed in global warming “consensus science” by the Climategate scandal. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) last December formally issued a so-called “Endangerment Finding” declaring carbon dioxide, the very substance human beings exhale, is a danger to our health and the future of life on the planet as we know it.

The finding was designed to empower the EPA to regulate carbon emissions without Congressional authority. Of course, the administration tried to use this threat as a stick to force passage of the unpopular House-passed cap and trade national energy tax now stalled in the Senate. But it failed.

The political EPA finding relies heavily on the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports which in turn rely heavily on the same incestuous “consensus science” exposed as a hoax by the data and email leak now known as Climategate.

Rep. James Sensenbrenner (R-Wis.), top Republican on the select committee called into question in his opening statement (pdf) at Thursday''s hearing the EPA’s heavy reliance on fraudulent science and the IPCC flawed report findings.

“A citizens audit of the IPCC study found that 5,587 cited references, nearly a third of all sources, were not peer-reviewed publications, but rather ‘grey literature,’ such as press releases, newspaper and magazine articles, discussion papers, masters and PhD theses, working papers and advocacy literature published by environmental groups,” Sensenbrenner said. “These sources lack authoritative scientific rigor and are, more often than not, intended as propaganda.”

Sensenbrenner also released a Republican committee staff report -- EPA’s Endangerment Finding Relies Heavily on Flawed IPCC Report (pdf) -- to document the lack of scientific basis for the IPCC conclusions and the political nature of the EPA finding.

“If the EPA is going to claim authority to launch the largest regulatory program in history, it is not enough for the agency to accept wholesale the U.N.’s findings -- it has to develop an independent scientific record,” Sensenbrenner said. “Already there are efforts to whitewash the Climategate scandal and ignore the serious concerns about transparency and reliability that plague the U.N.’s work on climate science. Climategate has taught us that many of the U.N.’s climate findings are wrong, and some may even be fraudulent. This report shows that the U.N. panel’s work isn’t strong enough to support the global warming taxes being proposed by the EPA.”

Lord Christopher Monckton, Chief Policy Advisor at the Science and Public Policy Institute, was the lone global warming dissenter allowed on the panel. Video of a brilliant Q&A with Lord Monckton can be found at the link here along with other videos and all written testimony offered at the hearing.

I’m including here an excerpt from Lord Monckton’s written testimony (found in full here in pdf). Those without degrees in higher math (like me) can follow the logic if not the math formulas -- and the last three priceless paragraphs are well worth the read (the most thorough scoldings are always best delivered by the British):

Warming at the very much reduced rate that measured (as opposed to merely modeled) results suggest would be 0.7-0.8 K (1.3-1.4 F°) at CO2 doubling. That would be harmless and beneficial -- a doubling of CO2 concentration would increase yields of some staple crops by 40%.

Therefore, one need not anticipate any significant adverse impact from CO2-induced “global warming.” “Global warming” is a non-problem, and the correct policy response to a non-problem is to have the courage to do nothing.

However, ad argumentum, let us assume that the IPCC is correct in finding that a warming of 3.26 ± 0.69 K (5.9 ± 1.2 F°: IPCC, 2007, ch.10, box 10.2) might occur at CO2 doubling. We generalize this central prediction, deriving a simple equation to tell us how much warming the IPCC would predict for any given change in CO2 concentration.

ΔTS ≈ (8.5 ± 1.8) ln(C/Co) F°

Thus, the change in surface temperature in Fahrenheit degrees, as predicted by the IPCC, would be 6.7 to 10.3 (with a central estimate of 8.5) times the logarithm of the proportionate increase in CO2 concentration. We check the equation by using it to work out the warming the IPCC would predict at CO2 doubling: 8.5 ln 2 ≈ 5.9 F°.

Using this equation, we can determine just how much “global warming” would be forestalled if the entire world were to shut down its economies and emit no carbon dioxide at all for an entire year. The atmospheric concentration of CO2 is 388 parts per million by volume. Our emissions of 30 bn tons of CO2 a year are causing this concentration to rise at 2 ppmv/year, and this ratio of 15 bn tons of emissions to each additional ppmv of CO2 concentration has remained constant for 30 years.

Then the “global warming” that we might forestall if we shut down the entire global carbon economy for a full year would be 8.5 ln[(388+2)/388] = 0.044 F°. At that rate, almost a quarter of a century of global zero-carbon activity would be needed in order to forestall just one Fahrenheit degree of “global warming.”

Two conclusions ineluctably follow. First, it would be orders of magnitude more cost-effective to adapt to any “global warming” that might occur than to try to prevent it from occurring by trying to tax or regulate emissions of carbon dioxide in any way.

Secondly, there is no hurry. Even after 23 years doing nothing to address the imagined problem, and even if the IPCC has not exaggerated CO2’s warming effect fourfold, the world will be just 1 F° warmer than it is today. If the IPCC has exaggerated fourfold, the world can do nothing for almost a century before global temperature rises by 1 F°.

There are many urgent priorities that need the attention of Congress, and it is not for me as an invited guest in your country to say what they are. Yet I can say this much: on any view, “global warming” is not one of them.




Connie Hair is a freelance writer, a former speechwriter for Rep. Trent Franks (R-AZ) and a former media and coalitions advisor to the Senate Republican Conference.