LORD MONCKTON ON ‘CONSENSUS’ IN CLIMATE SCIENCE
There is a consensus that some warming will result from anthropogenic enhancement of the natural greenhouse effect, but no consensus on how much.
There is a consensus - though not unanimous - that more than half of the warming of the past 50 years was anthropogenic, but no consensus on how much warming there has been, nor on how much more warming there will be.
There is a consensus that deforestation is imprudent, but no consensus that unchecked greenhouse-gas emissions will do more harm than good, and only one of 539 learned papers recently reviewed contained any reference to anthropogenic warming as "catastrophic".
There is a consensus among climate modelers that, in order to justify the IPCC's very high climate sensitivity, the rate of atmospheric warming in the tropical mid-troposphere must be two or three times that at the surface, but 50 years of careful atmospheric observations do not demonstrate this characteristic signature of significant anthropogenic greenhouse warming.
There is a consensus that if anthropogenic greenhouse warming is significant, there should be continuing stratospheric cooling, but little or none has been observed during the past decade, during which the anthropogenic fraction of atmospheric CO2 increased by one-fifth.
The official probability that humankind will have any influence on sea level is little better than 50:50, and the official consensus is that melting of the Greenland or West Antarctic ice-sheets, which Al Gore says threatens existing coastal populations with a 20ft sea-level rise, will contribute just 1.7 inches to sea level, in total, combined, over the whole of this century.
There is a consensus that the Furtwangler glacier at the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro has largely disappeared, but no consensus that the cause is anthropogenic, because the ablation of the glacier began 130 years ago; in the past 30 years, satellite monitoring of temperature in the vicinity of the summit has shown that it is broadly constant at minus 7 degrees Celsius, far too cold for melting; and the cause of the ablation of the glacier is known to be a long-term climatic shift towards dryer conditions in the region, exacerbated locally by imprudent post-colonial deforestation.
There is a consensus that Lake Chad and the Aral Sea have largely vanished, but no consensus that the cause is climatic warming, because the cause is known to be water-use changes in the vicinity.
There is a consensus that there are more diseases in warmer than in colder regions, but no consensus that malaria or yellow fever will spread because of anthropogenic enhancement of the greenhouse effect, because it is known that the Anopheles and Aedes Aegypti mosquitoes do not choose their habitat by reference to temperature. There is a consensus that warmer weather will cause some species to migrate poleward, but no consensus that this will do harm, and no consensus, for instance, that corals will suffer if the ocean becomes warmer - they have flourished since algal symbiosis was first achieved in the Triassic era 225 my ago. Nor are coral atolls threatened by rising sea levels, for corals can outgrow sea-level rises ten times what has been observed this century.
There is a consensus that we should be respectful of the environment, but no consensus that the climate would be appreciably altered by Kyoto or any conceivable successor treaty, because even if the West were to close down its economies entirely and go back to the Stone Age, without even the ability to light fires, the growth in emissions from China and India alone would entirely replace the entire CO2 footprint of the West within not more than a decade.
It seems, then, that there is much to debate, and that the only reason anyone might have for attempting to prevent both sides of the debate from being fairly and properly heard is a growing fear - well justified on the evidence in the recent peer-reviewed literature - that "global warming" is not, after all, a global crisis. The best way to oppose scientific opinions which one finds uncongenial is not to stifle them but to refute them.
- Monckton of Brenchley