Invitation to Seminar on Climate Change

To be held in The Hague (Netherlands) on 3rd July 2007, 10.30 until 12.30 hours.
Venue: Club Nieuwspoort, Lange Poten 10 (section adjacent to Parliament Building). Information is available at h.labohm@freeler.nl

Programme Presentations
1. Welcome by Th. Richel, Groene Rekenkamer (The Green Audit)
2. Introduction by Prof. (emeritus) Dr. Ir. Arthur Rörsch, chairman
3. Warming is natural, not caused by man-made greenhouse gases, by Fred Singer
4. Climate change is produced by the Sun, by Bas van Geel
5. Is a warmer climate a worse climate?, by Gerd-Rainer Weber
6. Political and economic aspects of climate policy, by Hans Labohm
7. Followed by Q & A.

Background information about speakers and the chairman

- Prof. Dr. Ir. Arthur Rörsch has been active in various scientific fields, including Chemical Technology, Physics and Biochemistry. He was Vice-Chairman of the Board of the TNO (Netherlands Organization for Applied Scientific Research). Over the last few years he has focused on the issue of good scientific practice. More recently he has also published several articles in the field of climate science.

- Fred Singer is a climate physicist, internationally reknowned for his work on climate, energy and environmental issues. He is Professor Emeritus of Environmental Science at the University of Virginia, and currently serves as Distinguished Research Professor at George Mason University. He is also President of The Science & Environmental Policy Project, a non-profit policy research group he founded in 1990. His latest book, co-authored with Dennis Avery, is titled "Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1500 Years", subtitled "Natural climate cycles as seen in the geological record".

- Bas van Geel is Senior Lecturer in Paleo-Ecology at the Institute for Biodiversity and Ecosystem Dynamics, Universiteit van Amsterdam. Over the last ten years his paleo-climate research focused on late Glacial and Holocene lake deposits, fens, bogs and archaeological sites.

- Gerd-Rainer Weber, Ph.D., is a Consultant Meteorologist. He is affiliated to the German Coal Mining Association, but he will speak at the seminar as a private climatologist and will not be representing the association’s view.

- Hans Labohm is independent Economist and authour, former Deputy Foreign Policy Planning Adviser of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, former Adviser to the Board of the Clingendael Institute (Dutch Foreign Policy thinktank), and expert reviewer of the IPCC. Together with Dick Thoenes and Simon Rozendaal he co-authored: ‘Man-Made Global Warming: Unravelling a Dogma’.

Summary NIPCC Report The Science is Not Settled: Major Issues Remain Unresolved by the IPCC. Human Contribution to Warming is Insignificant: CO2 is Not a Pollutant.
The UN-IPCC Working Group-1 (Science) fails to consider important scientific issues - any one of which would upset its major conclusion that current warming is dominated by anthropogenic (human-caused) causes.

1. The IPCC does not apply generally accepted methodologies to determine what fraction of current warming is natural or how much is caused by the rise in greenhouse-gases. Yet a comparison of ‘fingerprints’ from best available observations with the results of state-of-the-art greenhouse-models leads to the conclusion that the (human) contribution is minor. This result, evidently, contradicts the major IPCC conclusion and therefore has important consequences for policy, including implications for the Working Group-2 and WG-3 conclusions and recommendations.

2. The IPCC continues to ignore the overwhelming evidence that, on decadal time scales, the sun is responsible for much of past climate change. It is therefore highly likely that the sun is also a major cause of 20th century warming.

3. The IPCC has not evaluated properly the ‘sinks’ for anthropogenic CO2 -and in particular, the role of a warming ocean. Yet basic physics and much empirical data suggest that both CO2 absorption from the atmosphere and release into the atmosphere of dissolved CO2 must play a role. Until these processes are better understood, one cannot reliably evaluate the effects of proposed CO2 emission controls.

4. The IPCC ignores, or addresses imperfectly, other science issues that call for discussion and explanation. This lack of understanding means that the science is far from settled. Costly efforts to mitigate climate change are misguided - and certainly premature.

Is this a meeting of mad men, stubbornly holding on to dead dogma while Al Gore and the IPCC have "settled the matter" beyond all scientific doubt, or are they apostates from the Universally Mandatory Religion for the Worship of the Ghastly Global Goddess Gaia, or just Proponents of Reality Based Scientific Method according to the Principle of the Primacy of Existence (as opposed to Consciousness)?