The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), already under severe criticism for violating the requirements of academic peer review and relying on secondary sources, comes under question again in a new report coproduced by three nonprofit research organizations.
Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report states “natural causes are very likely to be [the] dominant” cause of climate change that took place in the twentieth and the start of the twenty-first centuries.
“We are not saying anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHG) cannot produce some warming or have not in the past. Our conclusion is that the evidence shows they are not playing a substantial role,” the study says.
The report goes on to state, “the net effect of continued warming and rising carbon dioxide concentrations in the atmosphere is most likely to be beneficial to humans, plants, and wildlife.”
Both conclusions contradict the widely cited reports of the IPCC.
Written by Scientists
The 430-page report was coauthored and edited by three climate science researchers: Craig D. Idso, Ph.D., editor of the online journal CO2 Science and author of several books and scholarly articles on the effects of carbon dioxide on plant and animal life; Robert M. Carter, Ph.D., a marine geologist and research professor at James Cook University in Queensland, Australia; and S. Fred Singer, Ph.D., a distinguished atmospheric physicist and first director of the U.S. Weather Satellite Service. Seven additional scientists and a policy expert on sustainable growth contributed to the volume.
The book is titled Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report because it precedes a comprehensive volume that is expected to be released in 2013. It focuses on scientific research released since publication of Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC).
Warming Beneficial to Mankind
Key findings, as outlined in the interim report’s executive summary, include:
• “Rising temperatures and atmospheric CO2 concentrations, by increasing crop yields, will play a major role in averting hunger and ecological destruction in the future.”
• “Global warming is more likely to improve rather than harm human health because rising temperatures lead to a greater reduction in winter deaths than the increase they cause in summer deaths.”
• “Even in worst-case scenarios, mankind will be much better off in the year 2100 than it is today, and therefore able to adapt to whatever challenges climate change presents.”
• “We find evidence that the models [relied on by the IPCC] over-estimate the amount of warming that occurred during the twentieth century and fail to incorporate chemical and biological processes that may be as important as the physical processes employed in the models.”
• “[T]he Medieval Warm Period of approximately 1,000 years ago, when there was about 28 percent less CO2 in the atmosphere than there is currently, was both global and warmer than today’s world.”
Jim Lakely ([email protected]) is communications director for The Heartland Institute.
Internet Info:
Climate Change Reconsidered: 2011 Interim Report, http://www.nipccreport.org/reports/2011/2011report.html
Climate Change Reconsidered: The 2009 Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), http://www.nipccreport.org/reports/2009/2009report.html
Jim Lakely is the Vice President and Director of Communications of The Heartland Institute.
