Italian Senate Hears Reality: World Federation of Scientists Report "Global Warming Is Not A Threat"

Watts Up With That ^ | 28 August 2013 | Lord Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
 

ERICE, SICILY – It’s official. The scare is over. The World Federation of Scientists, at its annual seminars on planetary emergencies, has been advised by its own climate monitoring panel that global warming is no longer a planetary emergency.

The President of the Italian Senate, Judge Pietro Grasso, who was the judge in Sicily’s first maxiprocesso, a class-action prosecution of dozens of Mafiosi who were sent to prison for a total of 2600 years, gave the magistral lecture at the opening plenary session of the seminars, which ended this week.

Both Judge Grasso and the President of the Federation, Professor Antonino Zichichi, said that care should be taken to examine carefully the basis for concern about CO2 emissions as well as the relevance and cost-effectiveness of proposed mitigation measures.

Last year’s magistral lecture to the Federation was by Professor Vaclav Klaus, then president of the Czech Republic, whose talk was entitled The manmade contribution to global warming is not a planetary emergency.

President Klaus had said: “Current as well as realistically foreseeable global warming, and especially Man’s contribution to it, is not a planetary emergency which should bother us. … My reading both of the available data and of conflicting scientific arguments and theories allows me to argue that it is not global warming caused by human activity that is threatening us.”

This year Dr. Christopher Essex, Professor of Applied Mathematics at the University of Western Ontario and chairman of the Federation’s permanent monitoring panel on climate, gave the Federation’s closing plenary session his panel’s confirmation that “Climate change in itself is not a planetary emergency.”

Professor Essex pointed out that history had shown illegitimate political movements inventing false emergencies to bypass democratic constraints on their quest for absolute power.

The Earth’s climate, he said, is a dynamic and continually-changing system. “Human societies have lived and thriven under every conceivable climate, and modern technology makes adaptation to changing weather conditions entirely routine.”

The increasing fraction of CO2 in the air could be expected to result in some warming, but it had been accepted that “the benefits of food production and the relief of starvation overwhelm concerns about the potential climate changes induced by land-surface modification.” He said the panel thought it essential to ask whether similar reasoning applied to global fossil-energy production.

On behalf of the climate monitoring panel, Professor Essex also spoke up for scientists who have been bullied, threatened or even dismissed for having dared to question the Party Line on climate. He said: “Our greatest concern at present is that the intellectual climate for scientific investigation of these matters has become so hostile and politicized that the necessary research and debate cannot freely take place.

“Political constraints take the form of declaring the underlying science to be settled when it clearly is not; defunding or denigrating research that is perceived to threaten the case for renewable energy; or the use of odious pejoratives like “denialist” to describe dissent from officially-sanctioned views on climate science.”

Professors Bob Carter and Murry Salby, who had questioned the severity of Man’s influence on the climate, were both ejected by their universities this year.

Professor Essex called for “free and open debate on all aspects of climate science, even where hypotheses are put forward for examination that openly contradict the official positions of political entities.”

He said the panel found persuasive indications that climate models systematically understated natural climate variability and significantly exaggerated the impact of CO2 emissions. Accordingly, past, present and proposed policy measures could be shown not to provide net benefits to society regardless of the rate at which the planet might warm. Limited resources would be better devoted to more pressing issues.