The Climate-Change Report the UN Failed to Write

Published June 2, 2009

WASHINGTON, D.C. — The 2009 report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change is the report on global warming the United Nations’ climate panel should have written–but didn’t.

The 880-page report, released today at an international meeting in Washington DC of scientists and policy experts, rigorously critiques the 2007 Fourth Assessment Report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which concluded that harmful global warming “very likely” has been due to human activity in the release of greenhouse gases.

The science behind that conclusion is soundly refuted in Climate Change Reconsidered, coauthored by Dr. S. Fred Singer and Dr. Craig Idso. In nine chapters citing thousands of peer-reviewed research papers and books that were ignored by the UN, plus new scientific research that became available after the UN report’s deadline, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) marks a new chapter in the debate over global warming.

Current legislative efforts in Congress to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gasses, backed by the Obama administration, are based on the UN document.

Dr. Singer, an atmospheric physicist and professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia, said, “The NIPCC report is the only document that responds comprehensively to the flawed claims of the UN’s document. We demonstrate the evidence that nature is the main cause of climate change–not human activities. Consequently, any efforts to control emissions of greenhouse gases are not only hugely expensive and ineffective but completely pointless. Carbon dioxide is not an atmospheric pollutant.”

Dr. Idso, a meteorologist and founder and chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, said, “The UN document claims to be based on the best available science. But that is not the case. Many of its conclusions far outstrip–or even contradict–the implications of a vast array of real-world data that should have informed its theoretical models, while other of its claims were reached without consideration of important scientific studies of which its authors were apparently unaware.

“Climate Change Reconsidered reviews these neglected papers, which come from a broad spectrum of the peer-reviewed scientific literature, and arrives at conclusions that are either much less ominous in their negative implications or actually positive in nature,” Dr. Idso said.

The NIPCC appendix lists the names of 31,478 American scientists–including 9,029 with Ph.D.s–who have signed a petition that states in part, “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing or will, in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of Earth’s climate.”

Joseph Bast, editor of Climate Change Reconsidered and president of The Heartland Institute, the book’s publisher, said, “Until now, the huge body of peer-reviewed science that contradicts the overheated claims of global warming alarmists hadn’t been brought together into a single authoritative document that challenges, point by point, the latest reports of the UN panel. Climate Change Reconsidered does this, and the effect is devastating.

“None of the UN document’s principal claims is left standing. No objective reader can walk away from the NIPCC report without realizing how weak the case is for alarm over global warming. Global warming simply is not the crisis so many politicians and activists claim it is. It never was,” Bast said.

The Heartland Institute released Climate Change Reconsidered at the Third International Conference on Climate Change, June 2 at the Washington Court Hotel in Washington, DC.

The Heartland Institute is a 25-year-old national nonprofit research and education organization based in Chicago and devoted to discovering, developing, and promoting free-market solutions to social and economic problems.