Courting The Climate

Courts Confront Climate Change January 24, 2008
S. Fred Singer
Washington Times
Late last year, the U.S. 9th Circuit Court of Appeals in San Francisco ruled that the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration must consider the “risks of global warming” when setting gas-mileage standards for light trucks, minivans and SUVs.
Central to the court’s ruling was the claim that NHTSA, in violation of the National Environmental Policy Act, had ignored the benefits of reducing emissions of the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide (CO2).
Whatever their legal acumen, Justice Betty Fletcher and her colleagues on the bench demonstrated they have little expertise in climate science. Tighter restrictions on CO2 emissions cannot produce the imagined benefits. Greenhouse gas emissions occur globally: The court’s mandate will not measurably curb CO2 levels or global warming.
The court also assumed that human activity is the main cause of global warming. This has yet to be demonstrated by hard evidence.
The U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) points to glacial melting, shrinking sea ice, and other consequences of global warming. But such “evidence” doesn’t tell us whether the causes are natural or manmade. Other evidence, such as the claimed correlation between temperature and CO2, is circumstantial; during much of the 20th century the climate was cooling while CO2 levels were rising.
A forthcoming report by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), of which I am the editor, may provide needed balance. An independent organization, not sponsored by the United Nations, national governments, or industry, NIPCC—which includes many IPCC authors and expert reviewers—was created to provide a second opinion on the IPCC’s official findings, much as a physician’s diagnosis may warrant a second opinion.
Drawing on peer-reviewed publications in major scientific journals, NIPCC examined the data used in IPCC’s May 2007 climate-change assessment, as well as research ignored in the IPCC report or published subsequent to its release. NIPCC concludes that “evidence” to support public hysteria about human-caused greenhouse warming does not hold up to scrutiny. Among the findings, expected to be published early this spring:
Human activities—such as transportation and industrial production—contribute little to global warming. The claim that greenhouse gas emissions are responsible for rising global temperatures is based on computer models. But as NIPCC confirms, key temperature readings contradict the models. For example, while all greenhouse models show temperature trends rising with altitude in the tropical troposphere—the lowest portion of the Earth’s atmosphere—weather balloon data show the opposite: a cooling trend. The models are wrong..... go here for the rest of the story
The models can't predict the weather next week, why would we believe they could predict something further out?