We’re delighted that our friend Viscount Christopher Monckton, one of the leading critics of climate alarmism, allowed us to publish this letter to U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Scott Pruitt, with which we wholeheartedly agree. We encourage citizens to make their own opinions known to Administrator Pruitt.

By the way, what comes out of the “smokestacks” in the photo below is not smoke but water vapor (the white condensing steam) and carbon dioxide, not a pollutant but an odorless, colorless gas essential to life and with vanishingly small contribution to global warming.

January 5, 2018

The Hon. Scott Pruitt, Administrator
Environment Protection Agency
a-and-r-docket@epa.gov

Dear Administrator Pruitt,

EPA-HQ-OAR-2017-0355
Proposed repeal of the “Clean Power Plan”

It has been suggested that I should write to let you know of the results of my team’s scientific research establishing that worldwide concern about Man’s influence on global temperature arose from an elementary and substantial error of physics first perpetrated some decades ago when climate scientists borrowed feedback theory from its originators in electronic network analysis but without sufficiently understanding it.

In response to doubled CO₂ concentration global warming will not be up to 10 Celsius degrees, as some have suggested, and will not even be the 3.3 C° that is the current mid-range prediction of the fifth-generation models of the Climate Model Inter-comparison Project. We have formally demonstrated that it will be only 1.25 C°.

This result was reached by three distinct methods – one by measurement, two by mathematics. The empirical method and the two theoretical methods cohere in their results, which have also been confirmed by independent tests at the National Physical Laboratory.

For four decades since 1979, when Dr Jule Charney wrote a report for the U.S. National Research Council predicting that for every doubling of CO₂ concentration there would be 1.5 to 4.5 C° global warming with a best estimate of 3 C°, the error of physics has misled climatologists into exaggerating their predictions of global warming. The error was built into five generations of computer models of the climate. Fixing it slashes the official global-warming estimate. There will be some global warming, but it will be small, harmless and beneficial. Global-warming mitigation is now demonstrated to be entirely unnecessary.

The error arose because climate scientists mistakenly thought that the entire difference (usually estimated at 33 C°) between the Earth’s surface temperature with and without greenhouse gases was caused entirely by direct warming driven by greenhouse gases and by the knock-on effects of that direct warming, known as temperature feedbacks.

In reality, two-thirds of the 33 C° difference between what is called “emission temperature” and today’s surface temperature arose not from greenhouse gases but from feedbacks consequent upon the emission temperature itself. Climatologists had used a version of the feedback loop that omitted the emission temperature from the input to the calculation. As a result, the feedbacks induced by emission temperature had hitherto been wrongly counted as part of the feedbacks induced by the direct warming from greenhouse gases.

Our paper demonstrates that feedbacks (though mentioned 1000 times in IPCC’s 2013 Fifth Assessment Report) cannot add much more than about a sixth of a degree to the 1.1 C° global warming directly caused by doubling CO₂ concentration, so that the total warming of little more than 1.25 C° in response to doubled CO₂ concentration, little more than a third of the models’ mid-range estimate, will be small, harmless and beneficial. No action of any kind need be taken to prevent it.

I should also report an economic analysis of global-warming mitigation policy that I carried out for the World Federation of Scientists some years ago. You will recall that the Stern Review of the economics of mitigation conducted in 2006 for the then Socialist government in the U.K. concluded that, owing to the possibility that there might be as much as 11 C° warming in the 21^st century, there was a 10% probability that global warming would bring the world to an end by 2100 (Dietz et al., 2007). For this reason, Stern chose an artificially low discount rate of only 1.4% for the intertemporal investment appraisal of mitigation policies. Using that rate, and based on his mid-range estimate of 3 C° manmade warming by 2100, he concluded that the centennial welfare cost of global warming would be 3% of global GDP.

However, Stern’s notion of up to 11 C° warming by 2100 is now universally recognized as fanciful. Therefore, his assumption of a 10% probability of warming-driven extinction by 2100 and his derivation therefrom of his 1.4% intertemporal discount rate are unjustifiable. At the U.S. Treasury’s central discount rate of 7%, Stern’s welfare cost of 3% of GDP falls by nine-tenths to just 0.3% of GDP, even if Stern is right that there will be 3 C° warming this century rather than the 1.25 C° that is the current trend and that is consistent with our result.

Taking into account the fact that global warming in response to doubled CO₂ will not be 3.3 C° but only 1.25 C°, and that anthropogenic warming this century will be about the same, there is a considerable net welfare benefit in burning coal, oil and gas. Therefore, there was never any economic case for the Clean Power Plan and there is now no scientific case either.

The moral dimension should also be considered. Some 2 million of the 1 billion worldwide who have no electricity die of particulate emissions from smoke in their cooking fires. Many millions more die of other factors arising from lack of access to affordable, continuous, reliable, low-tech, base-load power from coal-fired power stations. It is very likely that a Holocaust of such deaths is occurring every year. Unnecessary global-warming mitigation policies are now the main reason for this invisible genocide.

Agree to send the attached papers to reliable scientists and economists outside the EPA for independent review, and to let the scientists and economists know that their reviews will be sent to me?

Yours truly,

Viscount Monckton of Brenchley

 

 

Featured image, “Big Bend Power Station and Manatee Viewing Center” (Tampa, FL), courtesy of Walter, Flickr Creative Commons.