This report is produced by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), a joint project of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, Science & Environmental Policy Project, and The Heartland Institute. Three lead authors--Craig D. Idso, Robert M. Carter, and S. Fred Singer--assembled and worked closely with nearly 50 chapter lead authors, contributors, and reviewers from 15 countries. This volume was subjected to the common standards of peer-review.
This work provides the scientific balance missing from the overly alarmist reports of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which are highly selective in their review of climate science and controversial with regard to their projections of future climate change.
Although the IPCC claims to be unbiased and to have based its assessment on the best available science, we have found this to not be the case. In many instances conclusions have been seriously exaggerated, relevant facts have been distorted, and key scientific studies have been ignored. NIPCC authors paid special attention to contributions that were either overlooked by the IPCC or that contain data, discussion, or implications arguing against the IPCC s claim that dangerous global warming is resulting, or will result, from human-related greenhouse gas emissions.
Most notably, the authors of CCR-II say the IPCC has exaggerated the amount of warming they predict to occur in response to future increases in atmospheric CO2. Any warming that may occur is likely to be modest and cause no net harm to the global environment or to human well-being. A careful reading of CCR-II reveals thousands of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles that do not support, and indeed often contradict, the IPCC s alarmist perspective on climate change. This is not an exercise in cherry picking: There are simply too many articles by too many prominent scientists, reporting too much real-world data and not merely opinions. Either the IPCC purposely ignores these articles because they run counter to their predetermined thesis that man is causing a climatic crisis, or the IPCC s authors are incompetent and failed to conduct a proper scientific investigation. Either way, the IPCC is misleading the scientific community, policymakers, and the general public by telling only half the story about the science of climate change.
If the IPCC truly considered and acknowledged all pertinent science in its assessment reports, there would be no need for a NIPCC. Until such time as the IPCC changes its ways (or is dissolved), NIPCC will continue to inject balance into the scientific debate by finding and reporting the scientific research that the IPCC overlooks. Much of it deals with natural climate processes or variability, weaknesses in climate models and data sets used to measure temperatures or forecast future climate conditions, or with data that raise serious scientific questions about the IPCC s attribution of climate change to human greenhouse gas emissions.
Our sole goal in presenting this information is to enable fellow scientists, elected officials, educators, and the general public to make up their own minds about what the science says, to understand climate change rather than simply believe in it. Each of the seven chapters in this volume begins with a list of key findings that contradict those of the IPCC. These findings are then discussed in detail using in-depth reviews and analyses of literally thousands of scientific papers. Full citations to the work reviewed are presented at the end of each section.
Craig D. Idso, Ph.D., is founder, former president, and currently chairman of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, a nonprofit organization founded in 1998 dedicated to discovering and disseminating scientific information pertaining to the effects of atmospheric carbon dioxide enrichment on climate and the biosphere.
Dr. Idso s research has appeared in several peer-reviewed journals. He is the author or coauthor of several books and has contributed chapters to others.
Dr. Idso received a B.S. in geography from Arizona State University, an M.S. in agronomy from the University of Nebraska - Lincoln, and a Ph.D. in geography from Arizona State University, where he also studied as one of a small group of University Graduate Scholars. He was a faculty researcher in the Office of Climatology at Arizona State University and has lectured in Meteorology at Arizona State University.
Robert M. Carter, Ph.D., is a palaeontologist, stratigrapher, marine geologist, and environmental scientist with more than 30 years professional experience. He holds degrees from the University of Otago (New Zealand) and the University of Cambridge (England). He has held tenured academic staff positions at the University of Otago (Dunedin) and James Cook University (Townsville), where he was professor and Head of the School of Earth Sciences between 1981 and 1999.
Dr. Carter has served as chair of the Earth Sciences Discipline Panel of the Australian Research Council, chair of the national Marine Science and Technologies Committee, director of the Australian Office of the Ocean Drilling Program, and co-chief scientist on ODP Leg 181 (Southwest Pacific Gateways). He has acted as an expert witness on climate change before the U.S. Senate Committee of Environment & Public Works, the Australian and N.Z. parliamentary Select Committees into emissions trading and in a meeting in parliament house, Stockholm. He was also a primary science witness in the Hayes Windfarm Environment Court case in New Zealand and in the 2007 U.K. High Court case that identified major scientific errors in Al Gore s film An Inconvenient Truth.
Dr. S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric and space physicist, is one of the world s most respected and widely published experts on climate. He is professor emeritus of environmental science at the University of Virginia and directs the nonprofit Science and Environmental Policy Project.
Dr. Singer has held positions with the University of Virginia, the Institute for Space Science and Technology; U.S. Department of Transportation, the National Advisory Committee for Oceans and Atmosphere, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, and the U.S. Department of the Interior. He was founding dean of the School of Environmental and Planetary Sciences, University of Miami; first director of the National Weather Satellite Service; and director of the Center for Atmospheric and Space Physics, University of Maryland.
Dr. Singer has published more than 200 technical papers in peer-reviewed scientific journals. His accomplishments have been featured in front-cover stories appearing in Time, Life, and U.S. News & World Report. He is author, coauthor, or editor of more than a dozen books and monographs. He is an elected Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), American Geophysical Union, American Physical Society, and American Institute for Aeronautics and Astronautics. In 1997, NASA presented Dr. Singer with a commendation and cash award for important contributions to space research. Dr. Singer did his undergraduate work in electrical engineering at Ohio State University and holds a Ph.D. in physics from Princeton University.
