India Tells Pro & Anti Kyotoistas to Buzz Off

And South African Engineering Columnist Agrees

India has issued a report challenging global warming fears. This is dramatic. The Indian Prime Minister's Council on Climate Change said that India would rather save its people from poverty than global warming, and would not cut growth in order to cut gases.
Referring to claimed changes in climate attributed to human activity, the report declares: "No firm link between the documented charges described below and warming due to an anthropogenic climate change has yet been established."
The report goes on to state: "It is obvious that India needs to substantially increase its per capita energy consumption to provide a minimally acceptable level of wellbeing to its people . . . India is determined that its per capita greenhouse-gas emissions will at no point exceed those of developed countries."
The Australian Herald noted that this declaration "means India won't stop its per capita emissions (now at 1,02 t) from growing until they match those of countries such as the US (now at 20 t)."
This Indian report was music to my ears. I have constantly said that developing countries cannot afford to let their school children do homework at night by candle light rather than by electric light, in an effort to save on electricity production, on the basis of the flimsy evidence presented in favour of man-induced climate change.
So we must ask ourselves: what is the main source of these claims that the Indian report referred to? The answer is that the claims mainly originate from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, commonly referred to as the IPCC.
Note the term 'governmental' – this is important. In July 1986, the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) established the IPCC as an organ of the UN.
The IPCC's key personnel, and lead authors, were appointed by governments. In addition, the IPCC regulations state that its most important documents, its Summaries for Policymakers (SPM) documents, have to be approved by UN member governments.
So when the SPMs are released to the public and the media, they are ‘government approved'.
From the start, the IPCC was more of a political entity rather than a scientific one. Frequently, the public is told of the thousands of scientists whose work forms part of the IPCC output. This is true. By far the majority of the scientists are good, competent folks. I know a few of them personally. But it is not their work that the public sees – the pubic is given the filtered version, which is published in the SPMs, and these SPMs are voted on, line by line, by representatives of the UN member governments.
The IPCC's second assessment report, of 1996, stated: "The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate." In fact, the scientists never said this; they said that it was too early to tell. The third assessment report of the IPCC, in 2001, used the now infamous Hockey Stick graph, which purported to show that there had been a steep rise in global temperature during the twentieth century.
This graph was later shown to be wrong, and the IPCC's fourth report, of 2007, no longer uses it.
This should make people think a bit about government representatives voting on what version of the science they want the public to see. Many scientists, like me, have been irritated by all this, particularly when a result can be the retardation of the economic growth of the world's poor people. A number of the scientists involved in the IPCC work have quit very publicly, over the years, stating that what they actually determined scientifically and what was subsequently fed to the media differed greatly.
In parallel to all this, there has been a substantial, but rather silent, undercurrent of scientists who have been upset by this distortion of the truth.
A recent result of the existence of this agitated scientific bloc has been the establishment of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change. This group was activated in early 2007, and was formalised at a climate workshop in Vienna in April 2007.
It is interesting to note that the president of the Czech Republic, Dr Vaclav Klaus, stated at the UN climate conference on September 24, 2007, that it would help the debate on climate change if the current monopoly and one-sidedness of the scientific debate over climate change by the IPCC were eliminated.
The NIPCC is a collection of eminent independent scientists directed by Dr S Fred Singer, the first director of the US Weather Satellite Service. He subsequently retired as chief scientist of the US Department of Transport. The founding core of scientists of the NIPCC came from a dozen countries, and all are totally independent. They state that their primary concern is the dissemination of scientific truth.
In accurately formulated scientific documents, the NIPCC rejects many of the claims of the IPCC, particularly the notion that man-induced climate change is upon us, and is causing great harm.
Keep your eyes open for good sense from the NIPCC.