Fred Singer writes at American Thinker:
The Second Assessment Report of the Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN’s climate-science panel (IPCC-AR2, 1996), invented the Hot-Spot in the tropical atmosphere about 10 km above the earth’s surface and assumed, mistakenly, it was proof of Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). But the hotspot has never been demonstrated observationally. The Fifth IPCC Report (AR5, to be released on Sept 27, 2013) conveniently ignores this inconvenient fact.
The consequences of the IPCC mistake were very serious — and are still with us. First, they concluded that the “balance of evidence” argued for AGW. This conclusion, in turn, provided the scientific basis for the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, which was designed to reduce emissions of carbon dioxide — but never did, while wasting hundreds of billions and raising prices for energy substantially. Kyoto applied only to industrialized (OECD) nations. After many inducements, Russia finally ratified Kyoto; the United States, under Clinton-Gore (yes!), never even submitted the Protocol to the US Senate for ratification…