An excerpt from Christopher Booker in the Telegraph below
As we are engulfed from all sides by suffocatingly one-sided coverage of the Copenhagen conference on climate change, three hugely important issues have been largely stuffed away from sight.
The first of these is the matter of cost: the scarcely believable bill our politicians wish to land us with as the price of their proposals to meet the supposed threat of global warming. Few people have even begun to take on board the astronomic scale of the sums involved — the International Energy Agency talks blithely of $45 trillion — because on this politicians and media have in recent days remained more than ever silent. . . .
The first thing any of us in the West need to be sure of, as we face by far the largest bill in the history of the world, is that the science being used to justify this is 100 percent reliable.
Ultimately the whole case for a Copenhagen treaty rests on the projections of the computer models relied on by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC). These show that, as CO2 levels continue to rise, so temperatures must follow, leading inexorably to catastrophe – unless mankind takes the most drastic action to cut down on its emissions of CO2.
But as more and more eminent scientists have recently been pointing out, the only reason why the computer models predict that rising CO2 must cause temperatures to rise is that this is what they were programmed to show.
What world-ranking physicists such as Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT and Professor Will Happer of Princeton have been arguing is that the models are fatally flawed because they do not take proper account of all sorts of other factors which play a key part in shaping the world’s climate – such as shifts in ocean currents, the effects of magnetic activity on the sun and the ‘feedback’ from clouds and water vapour, far and away the most important greenhouse gas in our atmosphere, which counteracts any impact from the rise in CO2.
The greatest ally this growing army of ‘sceptical’ scientists can point to is what has actually been happening to the climate in recent years. No one can predict with certainty where temperatures will be in 100 years time, But the one thing that is indisputable is that, as CO2 levels continue to rise, the trend in global temperatures has not recently been rising as the computer models predicted, but has been flattening out and even dropping.
In other words, it becomes increasingly clear that the models were wrong — because their programming was biased according to a theory which now looks ever more questionable. Yet it is on their projections that the world is now faced with by far the most expensive set of measures ever proposed by politicians in history. . . .
Despite our having for years been assured by politicians from Al Gore to President Obama that ‘the science is settled’, it is now obvious that it is nothing of the kind. Not least has this been confirmed by ‘Climategate’ and the leak of that ‘dodgy dossier’ from the East Anglia Climatic Research Unit, for years at the centre of driving the scare over global warming as the most influential source of temperature data in the world. Far from Copenhagen being the end of the debate, the real debate is only just beginning.
The full story here.