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There has been only limited reporting of the discussions on climate change at Doha in Qatar (a country with the highest per capita emissions of any), which is scheduled to finish this week. However the Fairfax press excelled itself by publishing a front page article headed “It's the end of the world as we know it”, with the environment editor justifying this by reference to the latest so-called “expert” analyses purporting to show that, unless action is taken very soon, the rate of emissions of greenhouse gas will cause temperatures to increase by 3.5oC to 6.2oC by 2100.

No mention was made in The Age of alternative expert views and Bill Kininmonth failed to persuade that paper to publish a letter pointing out that the rate of warming of less than 0.2oC per decade since 1990 has been well short of the 0.4 to 0.7oC needed to reach the predicted temperature range. I also failed (again) to have a similar letter published amongst the several supportive letters.

At this stage there seems no prospect of any meaningful agreement being reached at Doha on extending the Kyoto agreement. As Alan Oxley (who has been attending Doha) explains in this article in today’s AFR, a number of major countries had already indicated they would not agree to extend and, even though Australia has agreed, it and a number of others did not send ministers. “Many NGO booths were empty. Greenpeace did not engage in the usual shenanigans for the TV cameras. This was the smallest, quietest climate change negotiation in a decade. The mood in the conference halls was resignation”.

This does not mean that the alarmists will cease having conferences. Bob Carter reports that, as some countries have concluded that using the UN has been ineffectual (apparently the IPCC itself was not formally invited to the Dohar talks), they are seeking to move negotiations to a new body – the Major Economies Forum (this appears to be equivalent to the G20)- in the expectation that, with the re-election of Obama as US President and his undertaking to “do something” in this area, the US will participate. Perhaps this will be presented as the “outcome” of Doha!

Meantime, as far as I can discern no mention has been made in the media of the letter sent on 29 November to the UN Secretary General pointing out the serious factual errors made in statements by him on climate changes. A copy of that letter, signed by 129 climate scientists, is attached. The facts included in the letter make it difficult to see how any further conferences could be justified.

After my letter below (with some restorations from editing), I have included a graph compiled last February showing IPCC modelling since 1990 of likely future temperatures compared with the actual temperatures. I think it speaks for itself.

Des Moore


Doha alarmism
(Letter published in The Australian, 6 Dec 2012. Bracketed bits omitted by editor)

Reports from the Dohar climate meeting suggest that the [continuing] increases in greenhouse gas emissions are again leading to alarmist predictions of temperature increases of 4-5C by 2100.

By contrast, 125 climate scientists wrote to the UN Secretary General on November 29 saying that “[current] scientific knowledge does not substantiate (his) assertions” that recent extreme weather conditions reflect global warming as no statistically significant temperature increase has occurred during the past 16 years. The letter also said that the incidence and severity of extreme weather has not increased recently and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded [this year] that no attributable climate change signal came from recent extreme weather.

[Predictors of dangerous warming conditions need to re-assess the science and why increased greenhouse gas emissions have not, in several periods in the last 150 years, led to higher temperatures.]

Des Moore, South Yarra, Vic

IPCC Modelling Results (Published Feb 2012)
Some of the models predict higher or lower rates of warming, but the projections shown in the graph and their extensions into the distant future are the basis of most studies of environmental effects and mitigation policy options. Year-to-year fluctuations and discrepancies are unimportant; longer-term trends are significant.

Reality versus Alarm

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