On my return from a holiday in Brittany, Paris, and canoeing down the Wye, I was catching up with an old friend when I experienced the strangest phenomenon:
someone going on at length to tell me how absurd the idea of global warming was.
Apparently, whilst I had been away the so called “science” and technology committee had produced another quintessential British whitewash of the IPCC …. but according to my friend “the only scientists on the committee disagree”. And as a physicist he was quite irate upset that the politicians were ignoring the lack of warming, the failed predictions, the money, politics.
And, looking at the the GWPF commentary Peter Lilley and Graham Stringer and have clearly hit the nail on the head as this section shows:
However, the Summary for Policy Makers is far less balanced than the report it purports to summarise.
Its headline conclusion was that “evidence for human influence has grown since AR4. It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century”. It is hard to justify that increase in confidence that CO2 emissions are dominant given that: about one third of all the CO2 omitted by mankind since the industrial revolution has been put into the atmosphere since 1997; yet there has been no statistically significant increase in the mean global temperature since then. By definition, a period with record emissions but no warming cannot provide evidence that emissions are the dominant cause of warming!
The pause in surface warming does not invalidate the greenhouse effect. But it does mean that other factors – natural variations – can be of the same magnitude as the greenhouse effect over at least a decade and a half. Since such variations are presumed to cancel out over the long term variations in the opposite direction may have contributed a significant portion of the surface warming over the previous two and a half decades.
As for the rest of the committee – numpties, gullible idiots and political has-beens.
