"Climate Catastrophe Cancelled: What You're Not Being Told About the Science of Climate Change"

Climate Experts Speak Out in New Video - Science underlying Kyoto Protocol seriously flawed

OTTAWA, April 13 /CNW Telbec/ - Today, researchers at the University of Calgary, in cooperation with the Friends of Science Society, released a video entitled:

Climate Catastrophe Cancelled: What you're not being told about the science of climate change

At a news conference held in Ottawa, some of North America’s foremost climate experts provided evidence demonstrating that the science underlying the Kyoto Protocol is seriously flawed; a problem that continues to be ignored by the Canadian government. Scientists called on the Canadian government to delay implementation of the Kyoto Protocol until a thorough, public review of the current state of climate science has been conducted by climate experts. Such an analysis has never been organized in Canada despite repeated requests from independent, non-governmental climate scientists.

Carleton University Professor Tim Patterson (Paleoclimatologist) explains the crucial importance of properly evaluating the merit of Canada's climate change plans: “It is no exaggeration to say that in the eight years since the Kyoto Protocol was introduced there has been a revolution in climate science. If, back in the mid-nineties, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would not exist because we would have concluded it was not necessary.”

Contrary to claims that the science of climate change has been settled, the causes of the past century’s modest warming is highly contested in the climate science community. The climate experts presenting in the video demonstrate that science is quickly diverging away from the hypothesis that the human release of greenhouse gases, specifically carbon dioxide, is having a significant impact on global climate. “There is absolutely no convincing scientific evidence that human-produced greenhouse gases are driving global climate change”, stated climatologist, Dr. Tim Ball. He added that the Canadian government’s plan to designate carbon dioxide as a “toxic” under CEPA is irresponsible and without scientific merit. “Carbon dioxide is a staff of life, plain and simple. It makes up less than 4% of greenhouse gases and it is not a toxic.”

IPCC assertions about the unprecedented nature of the past century's warming, or the widespread beliefs that we are experiencing an increase in extreme weather, accelerated sea level rise and unusual warming in polar regions are also shown in the video to be wholly without merit.

The idea for the video was initiated by the Friends of Science Society, a registered not-for-profit group of geologists, environmental scientists and concerned citizens, “in an effort to make the science of climate change available and understandable to the general public”, stated Dr. Doug Leahey, President of Friends of Science Society. Commenting on his decision to get involved with the video project, University of Calgary’s Professor Barry Cooper stated, “Universities are in the education business. In a democracy like Canada, education and informed discussion of public policy are tightly linked. The public, media and government would benefit by hearing from all sides on this important issue in order to make as informed a decision as is possible.”

Professor Barry Cooper, University of Calgary, 403-874-8314, bcooper@ucalgary.ca

To book one-on-one interviews with climate science experts please contact Sheila Roy.

Friends of Science is a non-profit organization made up of active and retired engineers, earth scientists and other professionals, as well as many concerned Canadians, who believe the science behind the Kyoto Protocol is questionable. Friends of Science has assembled a scientific advisory board of esteemed climate scientists from around the world to offer a critical mass of current science on global climate and climate change to policy makers, and any interested parties.

We offer critical evidence that challenges the premises of the Kyoto Protocol and present alternative causes for climate change.

Friends of Science values your input, either on the science or policy of global warming. And, if you’re as concerned as we are about global policy based on weak science, please join us to spark a national and international debate on global warming.

Dr. Ball was the first Canadian Ph.D. in Climatology. He has an extensive background in climatology, especially the reconstruction of past climates and the impact of climate change on human history and the human condition. Dr. Ball has a B.A., (Honours), a M.A. (University of Manitoba) and a Ph.D, (Doctor of Science), University of London, England. He is currently an environmental consultant and for 32 years was a Professor of Climatology at the University of Winnipeg.

Dr. Sallie Baliunas, Research scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, Massachusetts

Dr. Baliunas serves as Senior Scientist at the George C. Marshall Institute in Washington, DC, and chairs the Institute's Science Advisory Board. She is also Visiting Professor at Brigham Young University, Adjunct Professor at Tennessee State University, and past contributing editor to the World Climate Report. She received her M.A. (1975) and Ph.D. (1980) degrees in Astrophysics from Harvard University.

Dr. Chris de Freitas, Associate Professor of Geography and Environmental Science, University of Auckland

Dr. de Freitas completed Bachelors and Masters degrees at the University of Toronto, Canada and PhD at the University of Queensland, Australia, as a Commonwealth Doctoral Scholar. During his time at the University of Auckland he has served as Deputy Dean of Science, Head of Science and Technology at the Tamaki Campus and four years as Pro Vice Chancellor. His academic interests are broad but the focus is mostly on climate. He was also a contributing reviewer to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Scientific Assessment Reports, 1995 and 2001.

Dr. Khandekar specializes in understanding extreme weather events in Canada and in other parts of the world. He holds B.Sc. in Mathematics and Physics, a M.Sc. in Statistics from India (Pune University) as well as both M.Sc. and Ph.D. degrees in Meteorology from Florida State University. As one of the world leaders in meteorology. Dr. Khandekar has worked in the fields of climatology, meteorology and oceanography for over 45 years and has published nearly 100 papers, reports, book reviews and scientific commentaries as well as a book on Ocean Wave Analysis and Modelling, published by Springer-Verlag (1989).

Dr. Tad Murty, Adjunct Professor in the Departments of Earth Sciences in The University of Ottawa

Dr. Murty specializes in the mathematical modeling of natural marine hazards under climate change. He holds a B.Sc degree in physics from Hindu College, Machilipatnam, India, a M.Sc degree in Meteorology, Oceanography and Hydrology from Andhra University, Visakhapatnam, India, and M.S. and Ph.D. degrees in Meteorology and Oceanography from the University of Chicago, USA. He published over 215 peer reviewed articles in scientific journals, and authored, co-authored and edited 15 books. He is also a specialist on tsunamis and is currently involved in several tsunami projects worldwide. In addition to his role at the University of Ottawa, he is Adjunct Professor in the department of Civil Engineering in the University of Ottawa. He is also associated with the Natural Resources Institute of the University of Manitoba in Winnipeg.

Dr. Tim Patterson, Professor of Geology and Paleoclimatology, Carleton University

Dr. Tim Patterson received both a B.Sc. in Biology (1980) and a B.A. in Geology (1983) from Dalhousie University, Halifax, N.S. and a Ph.D. in Geology from the University of California at Los Angeles (UCLA) in 1986. He is Canadian leader of the International Geological Correlation Program Project IGCP 495 “Quaternary Land-Ocean interactions" and is Principal Investigator of a Canadian Foundation For Climate and Atmospheric Sciences project studying high-resolution Holocene climate records from anoxic fjords and coast lakes in British Columbia.

FACT: Accurate satellite, balloon and mountain top observations made over the last three decades have not shown any significant change in the long term rate of increase in global temperatures. Average ground station readings do show a mild warming of 0.6 to 0.8Cover the last 100 years, which is well within the natural variations recorded in the last millennium. The ground station network suffers from an uneven distribution across the globe; the stations are preferentially located in growing urban and industrial areas ("heat islands"), which show substantially higher readings than adjacent rural areas ("land use effects").

MYTH 2: The "hockey stick" graph proves that the earth has experienced a steady, very gradual temperature increase for 1000 years, then recently began a sudden increase.

FACT: Significant changes in climate have continually occurred throughout geologic time. For instance, the Medieval Warm Period, from around 1000 to1200 AD (when the Vikings farmed on Greenland) was followed by a period known as the Little Ice Age. Since the end of the 17th Century the "average global temperature" has been rising at the low steady rate mentioned above; although from 1940 – 1970 temperatures actually dropped, leading to a Global Cooling scare.

The "hockey stick", a poster boy of both the UN's IPCC and Canada's Environment Department, ignores historical recorded climatic swings, and has now also been proven to be flawed and statistically unreliable as well. It is a computer construct and a faulty one at that.

MYTH 3: Human produced carbon dioxide has increased over the last 100 years, adding to the Greenhouse effect, thus warming the earth.

FACT: Carbon dioxide levels have indeed changed for various reasons, human and otherwise, just as they have throughout geologic time. Since the beginning of the industrial revolution the CO2 content of the atmosphere has increased from a rate of about 0.2% per year to the present 0.4% per year. But there is no proof that CO2 is the main driver of global warming. As measured in ice cores dated over many thousands of years, CO2 levels move up and down AFTER the temperature has done so, and thus are the RESULT OF, NOT THE CAUSE of warming. Geological field work in recent sediments confirms this causal relationship. There is solid evidence that, as temperatures move up and down naturally and cyclically through solar radiation, orbital and galactic influences, the warming surface layers of the earth's oceans expel more CO2 as a result.

MYTH 4: CO2 is the most common greenhouse gas. FACT: Greenhouse gases form about 3 % of the atmosphere by volume. They consist of varying amounts, (about 97%) of water vapour and clouds, with the remainder being gases like CO2, CH4, Ozone and N2O, of which carbon dioxide is the largest amount. Hence, CO2 constitutes about 0.037% of the atmosphere. While the minor gases are more effective as "greenhouse agents" than water vapour and clouds, the latter are overwhelming the effect by their sheer volume and – in the end – are thought to be responsible for 60% of the "Greenhouse effect".

MYTH 5: Computer models verify that CO2 increases will cause significant global warming.

FACT: Computer models can be made to "verify" anything by changing some of the 5 million input parameters or any of a multitude of negative and positive feedbacks in the program used.. They do not "prove" anything. Also, computer models predicting global warming are incapable of properly including the effects of the sun, cosmic rays and the clouds. The sun is a major cause of temperature variation on the earth surface as its received radiation changes all the time, This happens largely in cyclical fashion. The number and the lengths in time of sunspots can be correlated very closely with average temperatures on earth, e.g. the Little Ice Age and the Medieval Warm Period. Varying intensity of solar heat radiation affects the surface temperature of the oceans and the currents. Warmer ocean water expels gases, some of which are CO. Solar radiation interferes with the cosmic ray flux, thus influencing the amount ionized nuclei which control cloud cover.

FACT: In a 1996 report by the UN on global warming, two statements were deleted from the final draft. Here they are: 1) “None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to increases in greenhouse gases.” 2) “No study to date has positively attributed all or part of the climate change to man–made causes”

To the present day there is still no scientific proof that man-made CO2 causes significant global warming.

MYTH 7: CO2 is a pollutant. FACT: This is absolutely not true. Nitrogen forms 80% of our atmosphere. We could not live in 100% nitrogen either. Carbon dioxide is no more a pollutant than nitrogen is. CO2 is essential to life on earth. It is necessary for plant growth since increased CO2 intake as a result of increased atmospheric concentration causes many trees and other plants to grow more vigorously. Unfortunately, the Canadian Government has included CO2 with a number of truly toxic and noxious substances listed by the Environmental Protection Act, only as their means to politically control it.

FACT: There is no scientific or statistical evidence whatsoever that supports such claims on a global scale. Regional variations may occur. Growing insurance and infrastructure repair costs, particularly in coastal areas, are sometimes claimed to be the result of increasing frequency and severity of storms, whereas in reality they are a function of increasing population density, escalating development value, and ever more media reporting.

MYTH 9: Receding glaciers and the calving of ice shelves are proof of global warming.

FACT: Glaciers have been receding and growing cyclically for hundreds of years. Recent glacier melting is a consequence of coming out of the very cool period of the Little Ice Age. Ice shelves have been breaking off for centuries. Scientists know of at least 33 periods of glaciers growing and then retreating. It’s normal. Besides, glacier's health is dependent as much on precipitation as on temperature.

MYTH 10: The earth’s poles are warming; polar ice caps are breaking up and melting and the sea level rising.

FACT: The earth is variable. The western Arctic may be getting somewhat warmer, due to unrelated cyclic events in the Pacific Ocean, but the Eastern Arctic and Greenland are getting colder. The small Palmer Peninsula of Antarctica is getting warmer, while the main Antarctic continent is actually cooling. Ice thicknesses are increasing both on Greenland and in Antarctica.

Sea level monitoring in the Pacific (Tuvalu) and Indian Oceans (Maldives) has shown no sign of any sea level rise.

Baliunas, Dr. Sallie: "The Kyoto Protocol and Global Warming" http://www.hillsdale.edu/imprimis/2002/march/default.htm

Baliunas, Dr. Sallie: "Separating Climate Fact from Fiction" Testimony of March 13, 2002 provided to the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.

Chylek, Peter: "A Long Term Perspective on Climate Change" Fraser Forum, April, 2002, page 7.

Daly, John: "The 'Hockey Stick": A New Low in Climate Science" http://www.john-daly.com/hockey/hockey.htm

De Freitas, C.R. 2002, " Are observed changes in the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere really dangerous ?" Bulletin CPG, Vol. 50, #2.

Gagosian, R.B.: 2002, Abrupt Climate Change. The President of Woods Hole Oceanographic Institution discusses the Global Ocean Conveyer. Goldenberg, S. B., Landsea, C. W., Mestas-Nunez, A. M., and Gray, W. M. 2001. The Recent Increase in Atlantic Hurricane Activity: Causes and Implications. Science, v.223, p.474-479. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/293/5529/474.pdf

Hansen and Sato: Trends of Measured Climate Forcing Agents Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 98, Issue 26, 14778-14783, December 18, 2001

Hansen, Sato, et. al.: Global warming in the twenty-first century: An alternative scenario, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA, Vol. 97, Issue 18, 9875-9880, August 29, 2000

In May 1996, unannounced and possibly unauthorized changes to the latest United Nations report on climate change touched off a firestorm of controversy within the scientific community. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the science group that advises the United Nations on the global warming issue, presented the draft of its most recent report in December 1995, and it was approved by the delegations. When the printed report appeared in May 1996, however, it was discovered that substantial changes and deletions had been made to the body of the report to make it "conform to the Policymakers Summary." Read all about it in the IPCC Controversy.

M.L. Khandekar, Murty, T.S., and Chittibabu, P. 2005. The Global Warming Debate: A Review of the State of Science. Pure appl. geophys. 162, 1557–1586 Abstract—A review of the present status of the global warming science is presented in this paper. The term global warming is now popularly used to refer to the recent reported increase in the mean surface temperature of the earth; this increase being attributed to increasing human activity and in particular to the increased concentration of greenhouse gases (carbon dioxide, methane and nitrous oxide) in the atmosphere. Since the mid to late 1980s there has been an intense and often emotional debate on this topic. The various climate change reports (1996, 2001) prepared by the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), have provided the scientific framework that ultimately led to the Kyoto protocol on the reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (particularly carbon dioxide) due to the burning of fossil fuels.

Numerous peer-reviewed studies reported in recent literature have attempted to verify several of the projections on climate change that have been detailed by the IPCC reports.

The global warming debate as presented by the media usually focuses on the increasing mean temperature of the earth, associated extreme weather events and future climate projections of increasing frequency of extreme weather events worldwide. In reality, the climate change issue is considerably more complex than an increase in the earth’s mean temperature and in extreme weather events. Several recent studies have questioned many of the projections of climate change made by the IPCC reports and at present there is an emerging dissenting view of the global warming science which is at odds with the IPCC view of the cause and consequence of global warming. Our review suggests that the dissenting view offered by the skeptics or opponents of global warming appears substantially more credible than the supporting view put forth by the proponents of global warming. Further, the projections of future climate change over the next fifty to one hundred years is based on insufficiently verified climate models and are therefore not considered reliable at this point in time. Full Article Here Khare, S., and Jewson, S. 2005. Year-ahead prediction of US landfalling hurricane numbers. arXiv: Physics. http://citebase.eprints.org/cgi-bin/fulltext?format=application/pdf&identifier=oai%3AarXiv.org%3Aphysics%2F0507165

Lindzen, Richard S.: "The Press Gets It Wrong", WSJ.com Opinion Journal, 11 June 2001

Lindzen, Richard S.: Testimony of Richard S. Lindzen before the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee on 2 May 2001.

MacRae, Allan M. R.: " Kyoto Hot Air Can't Replace Fossil Fuels" , Calgary Herald, 1 September, 2002.

McBean, G., Weaver, A.,& Roulet, N.: "The Science of Climate Change What do We Know ?" http://isuma.net/v02n04/mcbean/mcbean_e.shtml

McKitrick, R. :"Asking the Right Questions About Climate Change and the Kyoto Protocol", Fraser Forum, February 2002 http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/FFarticle.pdf

McKitrick, R.: "Emission Scenarios & Recent Global Warming Projections", Fraser Forum, January 2003 http://www.uoguelph.ca/~rmckitri/research/scenarios.pdf Michaels, P. J., Knappenberger, P. C., and Davis, R. E. 2005. Sea-Surface Temperatures and Tropical Cyclones: Breaking the Paradigm. 15th Conference on Applied Climatology. http://ams.confex.com/ams/pdfpapers/94127.pdf Pielke, Jr., R.A., C. Landsea, K. Emanuel, M. Mayfield, J. Laver, and R. Pasch. 2005. Hurricanes and Global Warming. American Meteorological Society. http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/admin/publication_files/resource-1766-2005.36.pdf

Sarewitz, D. & Pielke, R.: "Breaking the Global Warming Deadlock" Atlantic Monthly, July, 2000 Full Article Here

Segalstad, Tom V., 1995 The Distribution of CO2 between Atmosphere, Hydrosphere, and Lithosphere, University of Oslo

Soon, W. and Baliunas, S.: The Varying Sun & Climate Change, Fraser Forum, January 2003

Spencer, R.W., and J.R. Christy, 2003: Global temperature report, 1978-2003. http://www.uah.edu/News/climate/25years.pdf

The Oregon Petition : signed by 2,660 scientists in related fields, and 12,140 others (as of May 2003).

Spencer, R.W., and J.R. Christy, 1990: Precise monitoring of global temperature trends from satellites. Science, 247, 1558-1562. Trenberth, K. 2005. Uncertainty in Hurricanes and Global Warming. Science, v.308, p.1753-1754. http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/reprint/308/5729/1753.pdf WEBSITES

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change: http://www.ipcc.ch ,where one can find the various Panel Reports and the notorious "Summaries for Policy Makers"

Various papers in the Special Publication "AAPG Studies in Geology #47" of the American Association of Petroleum Geologists (2001)

Imbrie, John & Katherine: Ice Ages, Solving the mystery, Harvard Un. Pr., 1979. A solid and well indexed and referenced compendium on paleoclimatology as well as the history of the science.

Croll, James: Climate and Time, Appleton & Co, New York, 1875 The man who first put the whole picture together more than a century ago.

Hoyt, Douglas V. & Schatten, Kenneth H., 1997: "The Role of the Sun in Climate Change" Oxford Un. Press, New York - Oxford 1997. ISBN 0-19-509414-X.

In the last decades, sunspot activity has remained stable, and warming due to emissions have increased.

You seem to use the phrase "warming due to emissions" as both evidence and conclusion.

Moreover your argument in this thread implies several premises that seem dubious, including:

1) Number of sun spots is closely proportional to solar output.

2) The global temperature of the Earth is well defined and consistently measured over the past 100 years or so.

3) The temperature graph you supplied is based on the best of these measurements available, and not just chosen to be most supportive of global warming (it wouldn't be derived from "Mann's hockey-stick" would it?)

4) The level of CO2 and sun spots are the only significant players in the scope of the graph shown, i.e. there are no signifigant confounding factors.

When I was in college in the early 1970s, I was taking a senior honors class in the newly "popular" science of ecology... the thrust of the class was the disturbing global cooling. The title of the honors class was "Global Cooling and the Coming Ice Age." EVerything taught in that class assumed that the pollution produced by humankind (specifically American humankind) was going to cause the planet to experience another ice age that would last for 10,000 years.

Look at your chart which is obviously based on the discredited "hockey stick" projections... Like the hockey stick, this chart is NOT science... it is speculation. Instead of being a forward projection of false assumptions, it is merely a backwards projection of similarly false assumptions.

The creators of this fiction even TELL you that is what it is... What part of "Reconstructed irradiance" do you fail to understand? The fact is that NO ONE was measuring the Watts per Meter² from 1860 through 1960.... that was something we started doing in the Geophysical year in 19556-1957. EVERYTHING before then is a guess based on a very short baseline between when we first started making the measurement and about 1980 when someone decided the declining temperatures of the last 20 years were going up again... and they had to change their scare stories.

The mere coincidence of the fairly steady minor decline in the measured surface irradiance and the completely UNSTEADY variations but averaging flat to slight decline in temperature (Measured where?) during that period gave rise to the hypothesis that there was a causal relationship. They then used the "effect" (change in temperature) to "reconstruct" what they assumed the "cause" (Surface Irradiance) would have been in the past WITH NO CONFIRMING DATA!

Gee, it looks like you've been Zotted while I was preparing this response...

The surface temperature records are made up of lots of speculation and estimation. Urban warming effect in land records, for instance, is often corrected for by linear regression referenced to area population - pure speculation. But acceptable by those who do their PC peer review - but clearly flawed. Consider the variables: increased energy use in the urban area, air conditioning, cars, heating, elevators, lighting, heat absorbing materials, suburban workforce, higher employee efficiency, etc., etc.

I've noticed that local weather reports often have my nearby city 5 degrees F warmer than my surroundings. Apply that to the temperature records, and you might find global cooling!

Consider the variables: increased energy use in the urban area, air conditioning, cars, heating, elevators, lighting, heat absorbing materials, suburban workforce, higher employee efficiency, etc., etc. I've noticed that local weather reports often have my nearby city 5 degrees F warmer than my surroundings. Apply that to the temperature records, and you might find global cooling!

Most "official" weather stations are located at airports or in the center of downtowns in major cities... surrounded by lots of concrete, i.e. major heat absorbers and retainers... as well as heat engines in airconditioners. Discount those from any "warming" scenarios and look at data from only rural sources and the findings are very different: any "warming" trend disappears.

I fear it'll be hotter in July......it was last year. Come to think of it, it's been hot in July and August every year of my life.......sometimes September too, in Indian summers.

When I went to grade school and all the way to high school, schools weren't air conditioned. It was hot in September and pretty warm in June. Once school let out in June, suddenly the weather was just fine. Kids sitting in an air conditioned classroom listening to bilge about 'Global Warming' are the targets of the 'climate clowns'. They just don't have enough summertime experiences.

'Global Warming ' is bogus. Climate change is normal. Climate, weather is a complex system, constantly changing and constantly in the news.The birds are chirping outside and the mongoose is cruising around without a care. So am I.

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