The UN can’t prove we cause global warming

It’s beyond dispute

They have no evidence.

The Internet is now loud with doubt about man-made global warming. You can find articles all over the place sceptical of the idea, where once there was widespread accord on the UN climate narrative that accuses humanity of dangerous interference with the climate.

Thirty years since the first Assessment Report, science has certainly advanced. As it should, we’ve spent plenty on it: the 2015 Paris Agreement alone, according to Bjorn Lomborg, will increase global spending on climate change to one or two trillion US dollars a year by 2030.

We’ve learned more about the climate system and human emissions. For all their lack of skill, the inscrutable climate models have greatly improved. They have been adjusted downwards after every Assessment Report to avoid persistently high temperatures, but over 97% of them (111 of 114 models) still run too hot.

Mind you, the climate’s complexity would challenge a chess champion. As Dr Judith Curry explains:

There are literally thousands of different choices made in the construction of a climate model (e.g., resolution, complexity of the submodels, parameterizations). Each different set of choices produces a different model having different sensitivities. Further, different modeling groups have different focal interests, e.g., long paleoclimate simulations, details of ocean circulations, nuances of the interactions between aerosol particles and clouds, the carbon cycle. These different interests focus their limited computational resources on a particular aspect of simulating the climate system, at the expense of others.

Then she says, “no single model is the best at everything,” which seems at once enormously generous to the modellers and the century’s most sublime understatement.

It’s impossible to predict the climate

Worldwide, there are about 30 modelling teams and the fact that the AR5 studied over 50 climate models testifies that none are a completely accurate representation of Earth’s climate. If any were dependable, just one would be enough. We should remember that the IPCC told us years ago it is impossible to replicate the climate. They said it clearly in their third Assessment Report (TAR, p. 78) in 2001:

The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future exact climate states is not possible.

But they’re terribly persistent and keep trying, thinking that with more effort, predictions from an average of more than 100 model runs will become somehow more and more accurate. So a greater number of incorrect predictions will approach the truth? No, I don’t think so, either. Quite obviously they think we didn’t notice they said it’s impossible …

They’ve never managed to replicate the past. The main difficulty with that is predicting the ENSO (El Nino-Southern Oscillation), because we don’t know what causes it.

The UN socialist agenda …

Scientific errors continue, with the use of improper sources such as magazine and activist articles, serious procedural breaches by the IPCC, and the regular omission of significant contrary papers. Their reports, meant to be even-handed, contain deeply distorted descriptions of the climate system that emphasise mankind’s emissions of greenhouse gases. Far from being eliminated, flaws have proliferated over 30 years.

Scientists around the world write papers showing that climate is determined by much more than the radiative properties of a few trace gases. The IPCC don’t respond.

I had to ask them

Regular readers have followed my letter-writing campaign in recent years, asking for proof of a human cause of dangerous global warming. I had approached individual scientists, leading scientific organisations and institutes and had never been given proof. Without exception I was told to “read the IPCC reports”, “ask the IPCC” and, often hostile, “you know what the evidence is, you just don’t believe it.”

But whenever I challenged them, “ok, what’s the evidence?” they went silent. I had to know whether the IPCC actually had evidence. I had often been referred to “the Assessment Reports” consisting of 1000 pages or more, so I wasn’t letting the IPCC off the hook—I was asking for page numbers. On 13 January, 2019, I wrote to the Secretariat in Geneva (ipcc-sec@wmo.int) saying:

Two days later I received this reply from Dr Mxolisi Shongwe:

Notice that his phrase “you may take a look” is somewhat odd, he doesn’t refer to evidence, he doesn’t address my question and he doesn’t provide a page number. In my next reply I tried to insist:

I thought proudly that asking for a referral to “a knowledgeable scientist” was a good idea until I read his reply four days later:

Requesting a “knowledgeable” contact without specifying the area of knowledge now seemed a mistake. The local contact may or may not be a scientist and may or may not have the elusive evidence. I had already stated that an IPCC connection was important to us and why, so there was nothing to lose.

There was no further correspondence from Dr Shongwe.

I was astonished that he was trying to fob me off to someone else, just as those outside the IPCC had done. It’s pretty clear that, while allegations of man-made warming are endlessly repeated, and they’re centred squarely on the United Nations, nobody has evidence of it.

Downloads

• CCG June 2019 Press Release (pdf, 155 KB).
• Correspondence with the IPCC Secretariat (pdf, 500 KB).
• Scientific reviews of AR5, Chapter 8 (pdf, 717 KB), cited by the IPCC as containing evidence of man-made warming. It does not.
• Supplementary Information (SI, pdf, 1194 KB). Supplementary scientific material.

Lack of evidence

Here are ten recent CCG posts discussing the lack of evidence of a dangerous human interference in the climate system. Access these and more at any time by clicking “What is the evidence” in the Tag Cloud on the right-hand panel.

• Fight for climate evidence goes on … and on
• Everyone swears the IPCC have proof, but still nothing from the AR5
• Solid evidence the heart of science, blind faith its foe
• Elegant Lindzen logic
• Yes, it IS hard to believe there’s no evidence — so ask the IPCC yourself
• Global warming facts to calm your sobbing children
• Renwick’s alarmist climate claims
• Why you must heed this pathetic climate emergency
• What if we found no evidence for DAGW?
• It’s about time to review the evidence for man-made global warming

Bonus links to Royal Society query

I asked the Royal Society, London, for evidence of man-made warming in 2018. They provided none at all.

• Royal Society answers my inquiry
• Did the Royal Society prove that we cause dangerous global warming?

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