Climate Expert Lord Monckton: Global Warming Ceased Over 18 Years Ago
Article audio sponsored by The John Birch Society

Lord Christopher Monckton (shown) — who was chief policy advisor to the Science and Public Policy Institute and former special advisor to former U.K. Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher from 1982 to 1986 — stated in an exclusive report for Climate Depot on June 3 that there has been no global warming at all for 18 years and six months, since December 1996. 

In his report, Monckton wrote that “the predictions on which the entire climate scare was based were extreme exaggerations.”

The British climate expert referred to data collected by a private research company called Remote Sensing Systems, founded in 1974 by Frank Wentz, who was a member of NASA’s SeaSat Experiment Team. Under a heading reading “Key facts about global temperature,” Monckton writes, in part:

The RSS satellite dataset shows no global warming at all for 222 months from December 1996 to May 2015 — more than half the 437-month satellite record.

The entire RSS dataset from January 1979 to date shows global warming at an unalarming rate equivalent to just 1.2 Cº per century.

Since 1950, when a human influence on global temperature first became theoretically possible, the global warming trend has been equivalent to below 1.2 Cº per century.

The global warming trend since 1900 is equivalent to 0.8 Cº per century. This is well within natural variability and may not have much to do with us….

The oceans, according to the 3600+ ARGO bathythermograph buoys, are warming at a rate of just 0.02 Cº per decade, equivalent to 0.23 Cº per century.

Recent extreme-weather events cannot be blamed on global warming, because there has not been any global warming to speak of. It is as simple as that.

In his report, Monckton discussed the effects of the naturally occurring warming of Pacific Ocean temperatures known as El Niño, a phenomenon that (along with its cooling counterpart, La Niña) is familiar to most people because it is mentioned frequently for its influence on global weather patterns.

“This month’s [satellite] temperature — still unaffected by a slowly strengthening el Niño, which will eventually cause temporary warming — passes another six-month milestone, and establishes a new record length for the Pause: 18 years 6 months.”

It is important to note that Monckton does not deny that warming will occur, since the Earth’s temperatures have always warmed and cooled periodically, naturally. However, he notes that the warming that will be caused by el Niño will be temporary, as it always is. Furthermore, the warming caused by El Niño is a natural phenomenon and not anthropogenic (caused by human activity).

Monckton’s assertion that global warming has been insignificant in recent years has been supported by major studies, including a 2013 report produced by the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which noted that “the rate of warming over the past 15 years [from 1998 to 2012], which begins with a strong El Niño, is smaller than the rate calculated since 1951.”

Another conclusion, from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report, completed in 2014, stated that the global surface temperature “has shown a much smaller increasing linear trend over the past 15 years [1998-2012] than over the past 30 to 60 years.” The more recent trend, noted the report, was “estimated to be around one-third to one-half of the trend over 1951-2012.”

Given the UN’s historic record of advocating greater governmental controls over human activity in the name of “environmentalism,” one would hardly expect these UN agencies to dispute the prevailing position among most government bureaucrats that global warming presents a severe and imminent threat that requires immediate intervention. However, that is exactly what these findings suggest.

However, a newly released report from a group of authors affiliated with the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), National Centers for Environmental Information (NCEI) purports to refute the previous studies indicating that there has been a hiatus in global warming. The authors presented what they claim is “an updated global surface temperature analysis that reveals that global trends are higher than reported by the IPCC, especially in recent decades, and that the central estimate for the rate of warming during the first 15 years of the 21st century is at least as great as the last half of the 20th century.”

Furthermore, assert the authors: “These results do not support the notion of a ‘slowdown’ in the increase of global surface temperature.”

The NOAA report bases the supposed superiority of its own study over those previously cited by the IPCC and others on different methodology used to collect the data. For example, they refer to “an increasing amount of ocean data from buoys, which are slightly different than data from ships” and  “an increasing amount of ship data from engine intake thermometers, which are slightly different than data from bucket sea-water temperatures.” Not only does the NOAA report admit that the difference among methods is slight, but it apparently gives greater credence to those methods indicating that global warmer is increasing than it does to other methods indicating it is not. For example, it notes that “ship data are systematically warmer than the buoy data.” Where is the proof, however, that ship data are more reliable than the buoy data?

But the NOAA report not only gave greater credence to methods showing more warming during the period of the global warming hiatus, it also adjusted the pre-hiatus temperature record downward. An article in the Daily Caller on June 4 cited climate expert Bob Tisdale and meteorologist Anthony Watts, who noted that to “manufacture warming during the hiatus, NOAA adjusted the pre-hiatus data downward.” “If we subtract the [old] data from the [new] data… we can see that that is exactly what NOAA did,” Tisdale and Watts wrote on the science blog Watts Up With That. “It’s the same story all over again; the adjustments go towards cooling the past and thus increasing the slope of temperature rise,” Tisdale and Watts added. “Their intent and methods are so obvious they’re laughable.”

It is also important to consider that the NOAA is a federal agency, part of the Department of Commerce, which is headed by Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker, who answers to the president. All it takes is a quick study of the White House website, which has an entire section dedicated to “Climate Change,” to determine that it is the official position of the Obama administration that global warming is not only worsening, but that human activity is responsible for it. A statement on the White House website reads:

The global annual average temperature has increased by more than 1.5 degrees F between 1880 and 2012. This interactive graph from the National Climate Assessment shows the concentration of atmospheric carbon dioxide over the same time period. Climate scientists say we need to avert an additional 2-degree temperature increase to avoid the most catastrophic impacts of climate change.

Naturally, the White House blames human activity for global warming, stating:

We’re still contributing to the problem.

Carbon Pollution is the Biggest Drive of Climate Change.

Of course, if “we” are responsible for the problem, the solution is to restrict “us” from activities that create carbon pollution, such as imposing strict environmental regulations on power plants and “cutting energy waste, in homes, businesses, and factories.”

Supposed “global warrming,” therefore, could provide an overzealous government with all the authority it needs to regulate every aspect of human activity.

No responsible individual advocates doing things that deliberately harm the environment. No one likes to breathe polluted air or to swim and fish in polluted rivers. But a common-sense approach to eliminating such proven and observable hazards, preferably by the private sector, should not include building a massive federal bureaucracy to counter “global warming” — an unproven threat that the scientific community has not reached a consensus on.

Photo: Lord Christopher Monckton

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