I thank Mr. Gough for his response to my critique of his initial letter on climate change. To examine his arguments in depth would require a thesis, not a letter to the editor, so I’ll have to ‘cherry pick’ a couple of points.
The cherry picking of disconnected and isolated facts is precisely the point my initial letter addressed. For example, the IPCC exists explicitly “… to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation ….” (a quote taken directly from the IPCC’s)
So, by the IPCC’s own admission, they exist to study ‘human-induced’ climate change, a study that can only carry scientific validity if one assumes that ‘human-induced’ climate change is already an established theory. The scientists contributing to the IPCC’s studies ran computer climate models from 1997 to 2013 and of the 117 computer models examined, 114 were completely wrong, and in the opposite sense to the recorded data for the same period (NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, Met Office Hadley Centre/Climatic Research Unit, NOAA National Climatic Data Centre, Japanese Meteorological Agency).
Therefore, judged by the data the contributors to the IPCC themselves published, adherents of ‘human-induced global warming’ do not yet have a theory, only a hypothesis and in any other field of scientific investigation, that would result in the hypothesis being either revised, or discarded. If you only consider evidence that supports the hypothesis being studied and disregard all evidence that contradicts the hypothesis, you have a textbook case of pseudoscience and claiming such studies constitute good ‘science’ denigrates, by association, scientific efforts in a multitude of other fields where the scientific method is robustly applied, hence the growing opposition by proper scientists, including Nobel Laureate Physicists.
The IPCC’s political direction is not a conspiracy, but an established fact that can easily be ascertained by reading the organization’s own material. That we’ve funded an organization specifically to collate pseudo-scientific research is utterly asinine. That policy decisions will be made on the assumption that their conclusions will match the empirical data collected, despite having been proven wrong thus far, is utterly insane but the media and political gears grind onward with little regard to real data and accurate science, much to the chagrin of serious scientists and common sense citizens/taxpayers everywhere.
Between 60 degrees south latitude and the South Pole, we have less than a dozen ground based stations measuring atmospheric temperature and I’ll leave the reader to explore how many were there in 1898. In fact, we’ve got no accurate historical temperature data for 75 per cent of the world’s surface yet we get blanket statements about ‘global average’ temperatures? The reality is that we have absolutely no accurate data on the Earth’s average temperature 100 years ago, only local and regional data. Our understanding of long term temperature trends comes out of the analysis of ice cores, geological evidence and paleontological evidence (geographical location of fossils of species known to have a narrow band of temperature sensitivity). There is absolutely no way of calculating temperature to a resolution that makes 0.8 degrees statistically significant, opening up a huge grey area in which politicians and the scientists competing for funding, can play their multi-billion dollar games.
Copernicus, Galileo, Newton, Kepler and Einstein are all rolling over in their graves!
Stewart Staudinger
Red Deer
BEng (HONS) Aeronautical Engineering