|
Science and Public Policy Institute (SPPI) and Lord Monckton updated June 2010
|
Lord Monckton is a former journalist and policy advisor to Margaret Thatcher. Though sometimes referred to as a scientist, he has no scientific credentials nor peer-reviewed publications in scientific journals. He is a major international campaigner and figurehead for the denialists, and the policy advisor for the SPPI. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Monckton,_3rd_Viscount_Monckton_of_Brenchley What follows is a series of responses to his web page at: http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/scarewatch/dangerous_climate_change_is_coming.html For a more thorough analysis please see John Abraham's deconstruction of Monckton.
Somehow I don't see Nature doing anything of the sort. There's no specific reference so it's hard to check, but it's most likely a distortion. Nature's editorial policy is available here.
No, Lorenz's work related to weather prediction, not climate prediction. Climate is the overall frequency of different types of weather over decades or longer. If you run a computer simulation for the weather over the next so many months over and over again with just slightly different starting points each time, you will get significantly different results in different runs. That's weather. But the totality of those results describes the climate, and another batch of runs will give much the same picture.
the tropical upper-troposphere "hot-spot" - has never been observed While more data would be useful, it has now been shown that existing data do not contradict the models.
Even before the apparent conflict was resolved, it only made the notion a little less certain. It was still a risk that needed addressing.
This is an outright lie. We have no direct measurements older than a century or so, but tree rings and ice cores provide the best guide. These show that during part of the last 10K years (the "climatic optimum") temperatures averaged marginally above the 20th century average. But the temperature in the 21st century has been persistently above even that. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Holocene_Temperature_Variations.png
Although this was contradicted by other evidence, it may well be true. Unfortunately, this may only be a temporary reprieve. Until the cause is understood we would be foolish to rely on it.
Correcting for an inversion here (he means it's lower in magnitude at 3.2Wm-2K-1 against a range of 3.3 to 7), this does seem to be an interesting issue. More research is needed: watch this space.
|
