Marko, Soon et al: To Put America First Is to Put Our Planet’s Climate First

The article below was contributed by Istvan Marko, J. Scott Armstrong, William M. Briggs, Kesten Green, Hermann Harde, David R. Legates, Christopher Monckton of Brenchley, and Willie Soon.

On June 2, 2017, in a Letter regarding US withdrawal from Paris climate agreement addressed to the MIT community, Professor Rafael Reif, president of MIT, criticized President Trump’s decision to exit the Paris Climate Accords. In this refutation, we propose to clarify the scientific understanding of the Earth’s climate and to dispel the expensively fostered popular delusion that man-made global warming will be dangerous and that, therefore, the Paris Agreement would be beneficial.

Professor Reif wrote, “Yesterday, the White House took the position that the Paris climate agreement – a landmark effort to combat global warming by reducing greenhouse gas emissions – was a bad deal for America.”

There is no science unambiguously establishing that CO₂ is the chief cause of the warming observed since the end of the Little Ice Age. The opposite has been repeatedly demonstrated. Ice cores have revealed that changes in CO₂ concentration follow, rather than precede, changes in temperature. During the last deglaciation, the latest high-resolution records show atmospheric CO₂ lagging temperature by 50 to 500 years. Our enterprises and industries return to the air some of the CO₂ that was formerly present there, and some warming may be expected. That warming will be small and beneficial.

Professor Humlum and colleagues have demonstrated that changes in CO₂ concentration follow changes in temperature after about 8-11 months. The time-lag between changes in temperature and consequent changes in CO₂ concentration are caused by outgassing of CO₂ from the oceans when they warm and uptake by the oceans as they cool. In addition, the growth rate of the atmospheric CO2 has been slowing recently, linked to an enhanced terrestrial biosphere uptake. Our contribution to atmospheric CO₂ adds to the effect of these fluctuations, but it does not add much. One of us (Harde 2017) has reached similar conclusions.

Professor Reif’s assertion that global temperatures can be regulated by an international agreement to atone for our sins of emission is, therefore, at odds with scientific knowledge regarding cause and effect. King Canute’s warning to his English courtiers in 1032 A.D. that even the divinely anointed monarch could not command sea level should be heeded by bombastic intergovernmental agencies a millennium later. The professor’s assertion is, moreover, logically invalid, since the Paris agreement permits China and India to industrialize without limit on their emissions.

Besides, the Paris agreement is not binding. Under its terms, no nation is compelled to sin no more, and many – even including Germany and Denmark, the leaders in renewable energies – now appear unlikely to meet the agreement’s targets. The Paris agreement is, in practice, a political tool for suppressing growth and redistributing wealth. Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, former chairman of the IPCC, said, in resigning in 2015, that the environment was his “religion,” and Ms. Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change until last year, openly stated in 2015 that the goal was to overturn capitalism — in her words, “to change the economic development model that has been reigning for at least 150 years, since the industrial revolution.”

Professor Reif writes, “The scientific consensus is overwhelming.”

The late author Michael Crichton, in his Caltech Michelin Lecture 2003, said, “In science consensus is irrelevant. … There is no such thing as consensus science. If it’s consensus, it isn’t science. If it’s science, it isn’t consensus. Period.” Doubt is the seedcorn of science. Consensus is a political notion which, when pleaded, indicates that the pleader is totalitarian. As Abu Ali ibn al-Haytham said in the eleventh century:

The seeker after truth [his splendid definition of the scientist] does not place his faith in any mere consensus, however venerable or widespread. Instead, he subjects what he has learned of it to his hard-won scientific knowledge, and to investigation, inspection, inquiry, checking, checking and checking again. The road to the truth is long and hard, but that is the road we must follow.

The alleged “consensus” is nothing more than an agreement that the weather has warmed in the past 300 years. Yet the quantum and attribution of warming are hotly debated among climatologists. Even today, measuring global temperature is subject to errors, biases, missing data, and subjective adjustments.

The estimation of global average temperature from satellite data is relatively new and employs a completely different temperature measurement method from the older methods. Nevertheless, the satellite data and balloon data have provided essentially identical estimates. Neither displays a worrying trend. Both are increasingly at odds not only with the surface temperature records, all of which have been adjusted ex post facto so as to show more warming than the original raw data showed, but also with the alarming projections of the serially unreliable computer models of climate on which the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change profitably but misguidedly relies.

Scientists agree that climate changes. It has done so since the first wisps of the Earth’s atmosphere formed, but they disagree on the causes of climate changes, including the mild warming since the Little Ice Age. Legates et al. (2015), for example, found that only 0.3 percent of 11,944 peer-reviewed articles on climate and related topics, published during the 21 years of 1991 to 2011, had explicitly stated that recent warming was mostly man-made.

Professor Reif wrote, “As human activities emit more greenhouse gases into the atmosphere, the global average surface temperature will continue to rise, driving rising sea levels and extreme weather.”

In the last 20 years, we have released more than a third of all the CO₂ produced since the beginning of the industrial period. Yet global mean surface temperature has remained essentially constant for 20 years, a fact that has been acknowledged by the IPCC, whose models failed to predict it. NOAA’s State of the Climate report for 2008 said that periods of 15 years or more without warming would indicate a discrepancy between prediction and observation – i.e., that the models were wrong. Just before the recent naturally occurring el Niño event raised global temperature, there had been 18 years and 9 months without any global warming at all.

The climate models relied upon by the IPCC and the politicians they advise have predicted warming at about twice the rate observed during the past 27 years, during which the Earth has warmed at 0.4 °C, about half of the 0.75 °C 27-year warming rate implicit in IPCC’s explicit 1990 prediction that there would be 1.0 °C warming from 1990-2025.