Yvo de Boer quits UN climate change body

The UN's top climate change official, Yvo de Boer, has resigned in the latest blow to the debate over global warming.

As Secretary General of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), Mr de Boer was in charge of negotiating a new international deal to stop global temperature rise.

However after four years in the post he has decided to step down to go and work for global accounting firm KPMG.

The former Dutch civil servant insisted he had been planning to stand down for some time but already there are questions over the nature of his departure and his possible replacement.

Many blamed Mr de Boer for the failure of the recent UN Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen that ended in a weak accord.

His departure will also be a blow to the UN at a time when the science behind climate change is increasingly under fire after a series of scandals.

But his resignation also led to hope that new blood may be able to reinvigorate the process in time for the next international meeting in Mexico next year, where it is hoped world governments will draw up a legally binding treaty on climate change.

Mr de Boer acknowledged that the failure of rich and poor nations to agree at the recent negotiations was frustrating. But he insisted that the Accord had at least begun the process of reducing greenhouse gases.

"We were about an inch away from a formal agreement. It was basically in our grasp, but it didn't happen ... so that was a pity," he said.

The science body set up to advise the UN on climate change, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is...

The AGW Smoking Gun

A key component of the scientific argument for anthropogenic global warming (AGW) has been disproven. The results are hiding in plain sight in peer-reviewed journals.

--snip--

The science behind the AGW hypothesis is that increased amounts of CO2 in the atmosphere (that humans produce by burning fossil fuels) will block more outgoing long-wave IR radiation (OLR) from exiting the atmosphere and thereby warm the surface.

--snip--

So the results of three different peer-reviewed papers show that over a period of 36 years, there is no reduction of OLR emissions in wavelengths that CO2 absorb. Therefore, the AGW hypothesis is disproven.

It should be noted that another paper written by Richard Lindzen and Yong-Sang Choi (both work at MIT's Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences -- Lindzen is a professor and Choi is a postdoctoral fellow) reveals the differences between the measured OLR and its impact on temperatures vs. climate models. In the paper, the data showed that OLR increased when sea surface temperatures increased, so this is in direct contradiction to the AGW hypothesis that less OLR should be emitted since more CO2 is absorbing it and warming the planet. Furthermore, in contradiction to the climate models, these results show that OLR is acting like a negative feedback (cooling the surface) instead of a positive feedback (radiative forcing). The Lindzen and Choi paper dealt in general with all OLR wavelengths and didn't show granularity with respect to specific wavelengths that were related to various GHG absorption, but the fact that the entire OLR emission spectrum didn't behave like the eleven climate models' predictions means that "the science isn't settled."

IMHO, the title should have been, "The Four Anti-AGW Smoking Guns."

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