About 18 months ago, as soon as I heard of Dr. Richard Müller’s Berkeley Earth Temperature project, I sent an email to several skeptical scientists drawing their attention to his statement that he considered his team’s attempt to verify how much “global warming” had occurred since 1750 to be one of the most important pieces of research ever to be conducted in the history of science. This sounded too much like propaganda.
He was posing, I said, as a skeptical scientist; his results would broadly confirm the pre-existing temperature series; when his research ended, he would declare himself to have been converted from scepticism to the belief that merely because the world had warmed the warming must be our fault; and publication of his results would be exploited as a triumphant and final confirmation of the “global warming” orthodoxy.
My doubts about Dr. Müller’s motivation intensified after I met him at the Los Alamos Climate Conference in Santa Fe, New Mexico, late last year. We lunched. He was visibly disappointed when I said that I was happy to accept the official temperature record, at least for the sake of argument. And he subsequently seemed uninterested in getting to grips with the real divide between skeptics and true-believers, which has little to do with the accuracy of the temperature record and much to do with climate sensitivity – the question how much warming we will cause.
In this reply to Dr. Müller’s much-touted editorials in the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle, I shall demonstrate by Classical methods that his principal conclusion “that global warming is real, that the prior estimates of the rate were correct, and that the cause is human” is incorrect a priori.
Christopher Monckton, who is he?
I assume that his education qualifies him to be an authority on climate change.
No, wait. His degrees are in the classics, and journalism.
Well, at least he has strong opinions.
I didn’t have the heart to say,”Every Classicist Needs Some Scientific Training.”
But I managed to work myself up to it…
Harry, you do not need to be a tailor to see that a suit is ill fit, nor must you be a musician to know that someone has a tuning problem in the orchestra pit. With a mild training in music, you can tell what instrument is the problem and whether they are flat or sharp. Neither do you need to be at atmospheric scientist to see that the theory is an ill fit, and given basic instruction in the sciences, you can identify where the problems are.
That an English Viscount is one of the best speakers in the field of climate change is understandable. Training in the classics with a firm foundation in debate allows you to use logic and reason, and the purple prose of the British gentry is perfect for putting people in their place.
Besides, you don’t need much specific scientific instruction to understand the basics. Freshman level chemistry teaches you about equilibrium will let you know that ocean acidification is poppycock and casts serious doubt about the whole amplified warming nonsense. Freshman level physics will inform you about how complicated it is to mode even the most basic of systems (you cannot model a non-spherical cow until Junior level fluid dynamics). Freshman level biology informs you of the resilience of life and the sheer variety of biomes on this planet, and Freshman level statistics tells you how easy it is to mess up everything to come out how you want it to. All of these very basic classes can be used to refute the idea of catastrophic climate change without specific instruction in atmospheric science beyond what is readily available online.
“Freshman level chemistry teaches you about equilibrium will let you know that ocean acidification is poppycock…”
I think I understand about equilibrium, but I don’t understand how that lets me know that ocean acidification is ‘poppycock’. Would you take a moment and enlighten me, please?