Ian Bradford: Should We Put Any Trust in the IPCC?

The IPCC, (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), was formed in 1988 as the mouthpiece of the United Nations (UN), on climate change. The IPCC advises most governments on aspects of climate change, with a fixation on anthropogenic global warming which was changed to climate change to cover everything. Hardly any government bothers to check what the IPCC puts out to them. Governments take the words of the IPCC as gospel.

Chris Morrison: Net Zero is Dying Around the World.....

Net Zero is Dying Around the World But the Diehards Live on Helped by Vast Amounts of Chinese Coal

In 2021, President Xi Jinping promised that China would “strictly limit the increase in coal consumption over the 14th five-year plan period (2021-2025) and phase down in the 15th five-year plan period (2026-2030)”. Perhaps something got lost in the translation of “strictly limit” or should we just limit ourselves to the appropriate response – hahahahaha. Net Zero is dying around the world, no more so than in China where the appropriate lip service goes hand in hand with the full service manufacturing and sale of dud windmills and solar panels to subsidy-seekers reliant on dwindling bands of deluded politicians.

Barry Brill: Do atmospheric methane molecules live alone?

Or does cohabiting natural water vapour mask their warming efforts?

A rare public debate has broken out on a climate science question that really matters – the warming effects of methane molecules in the atmosphere.

The argument was kicked off by Allison & Sheahen (2018) (‘AS18’) which discussed the major greenhouse  gases (water vapour, carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide) and their respective theoretical  contributions to planetary warming.

Peter Williams: Give it a rest Rosemary

I see that Rosemary Penwarden has been at it again.

She’s the Dunedin grandmother who is a serial eco protestor, a woman who is actually on bail after being convicted of forgery and using a forged document. That was after a trial in Dunedin in June following her attempt to call off the Petroleum Exploration and Production conference in Queenstown in 2019.

Rosemary is due to be sentenced on that conviction next month, although up until today (August 29th) I wouldn’t have been surprised if she’d been discharged without conviction.

Mike Butler: Global warming ‘remedies’ damaging

In 1604, King James I of England published Counterblaste to Tobacco in which he condemned the smoking of this anti-social and health-destroying weed. He was correct, but it took 400 years for science to prove that it is harmful.

New Zealand scientist Dr Kelvin Duncan has written Global Warming: A Counter-blaste to the Man-made global warming hypothesis to clear away a psychosis created by repeated pronouncements that we humans are solely responsible for present climate change.

Mike Butler: Global warming ‘remedies’ damaging

In 1604, King James I of England published Counterblaste to Tobacco in which he condemned the smoking of this anti-social and health-destroying weed. He was correct, but it took 400 years for science to prove that it is harmful.

New Zealand scientist Dr Kelvin Duncan has written Global Warming: A Counter-blaste to the Man-made global warming hypothesis to clear away a psychosis created by repeated pronouncements that we humans are solely responsible for present climate change.

Dr Duncan is no lightweight. He has a PhD in biology from Canterbury University, taught biology and statistics and became Dean of Science there, was a member of the Royal Society New Zealand and of the New York Academy of Sciences, and has worked on developing products including a scar tissue repair, and a skin cancer cure.

Like a distinguished professor, in his new book Dr Duncan patiently goes through the science related to each aspect of the global warming hypothesis. He presents alarmist reasoning, shows the flaws, and hands out fail grades.

Christopher Monckton: Now They’re coming after the Roast Beef of Old England

At Harvard, there was once a University. Now that once noble campus has become a luxury asylum for the terminally feeble-minded. Walter Willett, one of the inmates (in his sadly incurable delusion he calls himself “Professor of Nutrition”), has gibbered to a well-meaning visitor from Business Insider that “eating a diet that’s especially high in red meat will be undermining the sustainability of the climate.” 

Farewell, then, to the Roast Beef of Old England. So keen are we in the Old Country on our Sunday roast (cooked rare and sliced thickish) that the French call us les rosbifs. But the “Professor” (for we must humor him by letting him think he is qualified to talk about nutrition) wants to put a stop to all that.

Dr. Tim Ball & Tom Harris: Geo-Engineering - Ignoring the Consequences

The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Report said we have only 12 years left to save the planet. It triggered the usual frantic and ridiculous reactions.

NBC News offered this gem: “A last-ditch global warming fix? A man-made ‘volcanic’ eruption” to cool the planet.” Its article proclaimed, “Scientists and some environmentalists believe nations might have to mimic volcanic gases as a last-ditch effort to protect Earth from extreme warming.”

Proposal like this are defined as geo-engineering – trying to artificially modify Earth’s climate to offset what are presented as unnatural events. The problem is, the events they are trying to offset are actually natural events. Any scientist or politician who doesn’t understand that will undoubtedly create worse problems than those they are trying to “fix.”

Ben Pile: Apocalypse Delayed

We should all be dead by now, thanks to overpopulation and resource depletion. The few of us remaining should be scavenging a landscape denuded of life by acid rains and UV rays. Thankfully, we are not. Also still standing are the scientific institutions and the global bureaucracies that predicted our premature demise. One of those is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The job of the IPCC is to provide a review of climate-change research to policymakers. The bulk of climate policymaking occurs under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), which meets yearly to try to wrangle a global agreement to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. At the 2015 UNFCCC meeting in Paris, a loose deal was struck. It aimed to limit global warming to 2°C, with a looser agreement to aim to limit it to 1.5°C. Subsequently, the UNFCCC asked the IPCC to compare global warming of 1.5°C and 2°C for a report to be published this year. So far, so boring.

Clive Bibby: A Fight Worth Having

The most recent IPCC summary of the world as they see it is a scary document.

It is meant to be!

We should all take the trouble to read what they are saying even if we think it is a load of cobblers. It is, after all, the considered opinion of a large group of eminent scientists who would appear to have all reached the same conclusion about the effects of climate change to the planet and the steps that should be taken in mitigation of this threat.

They deserve a response from all of us.

Richard A. Epstein: Our Latest Global Warming Scare

The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued a special report predicting apocalyptic environmental consequences if the nations of the world are unable to reduce the amount of warming to 1.5° C above pre-industrial levels in the next 12 years. 

The IPCC report insists that meeting this target requires “rapid and far-reaching” changes—all unspecified—in a wide range of areas including land, energy, industry, buildings, transportation, and cities. These changes, the report insists, must reduce carbon dioxide emissions to about 45 percent of 2010 levels by 2030 and to a neutral level of no new carbon dioxide emissions by 2050.

Matt Ridley from the UK: FIFA and other unaccountable international fiefdoms

The Fifa fiasco is not just about football. It is also emblematic of a chronic problem with international bureaucracies of all kinds. The tendency of supranational quangos to become the personal fiefdoms of their presidents or directors-general, and to sink into lethargy or corruption, followed by brazen defiance when challenged, is not unique to Fifa or sport. It is an all too common pattern.

Fifa is an extreme example mainly because of the enormous opportunity for bribery involved in granting the right to host a vastly lucrative tournament every four years. A similar corruption scandal befell the International Olympic Committee in 1998 over its practices when awarding the Winter Games to Salt Lake City, while under the 21-year presidency of Juan Antonio Samaranch. Reform followed.

Ron Smith: Scholarship and the 'end of days'

Over all of the last week, the airwaves and print media have been telling us that humanity faces an unprecedented challenge due to the increasing use of fossil-fuels.  The carbon dioxide produced by these carbon-containing materials is progressively accumulating in the atmosphere, where it causes the so-called ‘greenhouse effect’.  The inescapable consequence of this is destructive sea-level rise, an increasing incidence of weather calamities (hurricanes and floods), and particularly a rapid increase in average global temperatures.  

All this from the Secretary General of the United Nations, an internationally-celebrated railway engineer (Dr Pachauri), and numerous experts from home and abroad.  Interestingly, these experts did not include anybody who had any contrary opinion on the thesis as a whole, or on any particular claim.

The crucial question to ask about this most recent spate of claims about imminent climatic disaster is whether it is to be taken as an essentially scientific claim about how things are, or, rather, whether it simply reflects an essentially middle-class liberal unease, about the consequences of human civilisation on the global environment, which has coalesced into a political movement. 

Matt Ridley: Muting the alarm on climate change

First published on Monday, March 31, 2014. Even with exaggerated assumptions of sensitivity, the IPCC has to down-grade alarm.

The United Nations' Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will shortly publish the second part of its latest report, on the likely impact of climate change. Government representatives are meeting with scientists in Japan to sex up—sorry, rewrite—a summary of the scientists' accounts of storms, droughts and diseases to come. But the actual report, known as AR5-WGII, is less frighteningthan its predecessor seven years ago.

The 2007 report was riddled with errors about Himalayan glaciers, the Amazon rain forest, African agriculture, water shortages and other matters, all of which erred in the direction of alarm. This led to a critical appraisal of the report-writing process from a council of national science academies, some of whose recommendations were simply ignored.

Matt Ridley from the UK: The sceptics are right. Don't scapegoat them.

Floods and gales in the UK are not evidence of climate change. In the old days we would have drowned a witch to stop the floods. These days the Green Party, Greenpeace and Ed Miliband demand we purge the climate sceptics. No insult is too strong for sceptics these days: they are “wilfully ignorant” (Ed Davey), “headless chickens” (the Prince of Wales) or “flat-earthers” (Lord Krebs), with “diplomas in idiocy” (one of my fellow Times columnists).

What can these sceptics have been doing that so annoys the great and the good? They sound worse than terrorists. Actually, sceptics have pretty well all been purged already: look what happened to Johnny Ball and David Bellamy at the BBC. Spot the sceptic on the Climate Change Committee. Find me a sceptic within the Department of (energy and) Climate Change. Frankly, the sceptics are a ragtag bunch of mostly self-funded guerrillas, who have made little difference to policy — let alone caused the floods.

Matt Ridley: Global lukewarming need not be catastrophic

My luke-warming column in the Times on 28th September 2013, pleaded in vain for a moderate middle approach to climate change, and drew a parallel with the nature-nurture debate. Here's what I wrote:

In the climate debate, which side are you on? Do you think climate change is the most urgent crisis facing mankind requiring almost unlimited spending? Or that it’s all a hoax, dreamt up to justify socialism, and nothing is happening anyway?

Matt Ridley: Dialling back the alarm on climate change

Global warming could be a net benefit during this century. 
Later this month, a long-awaited event that last happened in 2007 will recur. Like a returning comet, it will be taken to portend ominous happenings. I refer to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's (IPCC) "fifth assessment report," part of which will be published on Sept. 27.

There have already been leaks from this 31-page document, which summarizes 1,914 pages of scientific discussion, but thanks to a senior climate scientist, I have had a glimpse of the key prediction at the heart of the document. The big news is that, for the first time since these reports started coming out in 1990, the new one dials back the alarm. It states that the temperature rise we can expect as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide is lower than the IPPC thought in 2007.

Matt Ridley: The perils of confirmation bias - part 2

What keeps scientists accurate is rivals' scepticism, not their own

If, as I argued in the first of these columns, scientists are just as prone as everybody else to confirmation bias to looking for evidence to support rather than test their ideas ­ then how is it that science, unlike cults and superstitions, does change its mind and find new things?

The answer was spelled out by the psychologist Raymond Nickerson of Tufts University in a paper written in 1998: "It is not so much the critical attitude that individual scientists have taken with respect to their own ideas that has given science the success it has enjoyed... but more the fact that individual scientists have been highly motivated to demonstrate that hypotheses that are held by some other scientist(s) are false."