Joseph D’Aleo is likely not a household name.

However his bona fides when it comes to meteorology are such that when he suggests that “a [small] cadre of agenda-driven scientists and statesmen” inside the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provided a “more alarmist interpretation” of the facts concerning manmade global warming, and “the media took the most extreme of the messages to hype them further,” people should pay heed.

With that in mind, this former Director of Meteorology at The Weather Channel, and current Executive Director of the International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project, published an article at Energy Tribune Monday that should be required reading for all actually interested in the facts surrounding this controversial subject (emphasis added throughout):

Despite the 90 percent certainty that man is behind recent global warming trends, the word “uncertainty” appears 494 times in the recent “Summary for Policymakers,” produced by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Though the actual research scientists generally did a commendable job, the more alarmist interpretation was provided by a smaller cadre of agenda-driven scientists and statesmen. Then the media took the most extreme of the messages to hype them further.

Much of his article was highly technical in nature, but should be largely understandable for the layman willing to put in a little time:

The report’s final summaries had several failings. First, it blindly accepts a 20th-century carbon dioxide rise of 36 percent, when direct measurements(1) suggest the change is closer to 15 percent. Their models assume an annual increase of 1 percent, although over the last 50 years the long-term annual average consistently has been less than half that, 0.43 percent. Their models treat the oceans as distilled water when in reality they are an infinite buffer for atmospheric CO2. Burning all the earth’s fossil fuels would amount to no more than a 20 percent increase. It could never double(2). In any event, ice cores tell us carbon dioxide lags, not leads, the temperatures by as much as 800 years.

Certainly, this isn’t what folks like soon-to-be-Dr. Al Gore, and his sycophant devotees Crow, David, and DiCaprio are telling the masses. Of course, why should such a highly-credentialed scientist like D’Aleo be allowed to question a former vice president, a musician, an actor, and an activist who between them have absolutely no actual training in meteorology or climatology?

Regardless of his lack of credibility in comparison to outspoken, uneducated media members, D’Aleo continued:

The IPCC acknowledges no problems with the global data bases, stating urbanization has a negligible effect on global changes, and ignoring dozens of peer review papers that show urban contamination is significant (in diverse areas including China, central Europe, and even Barrow, Alaska). During the 20th century, the population of the world increased four-fold, from 1.5 billion to 6 billion. More and more areas are urbanized. Airports, once rural, find cities growing around them.

The report ignores the fact that total global stations decreased by 66 percent after 1990, and there was a ten-fold increase in months with no reported data from the remaining stations, mainly in the former Soviet Union and Africa. They also ignore the issue that the majority of world stations may not meet World Meteorological Organization standards for siting instruments, a problem that has also been widely documented in peer review journals. They ignore the half-dozen peer review papers suggesting that these problems could well account for 50 percent or more of the warming shown for the world data bases.

Once again, the potential for errors in collating and analyzing temperatures during the period when the IPCC claims the average has risen by about 0.7 degrees is totally ignored by these UN scientists, as well as the alarmists in the media. And, maybe even more astoundingly, the seemingly obvious global warming culprit – the sun – was downplayed:

Increased solar wind and geomagnetic activity has been shown by Svensmark(6) and others to lead to a reduction in cosmic rays reaching the ground. Cosmic rays have a cloud-enhancing property and their reduction during active solar periods leads to a reduction in low clouds, up to a few percent. Low clouds reflect solar radiation, leading to cooling. Decreased low cloudiness means more sunshine and warmer surface temperatures. Shaviv (7) found the cosmic ray and irradiance factors could account for up to 77 percent of the warming since 1900, and found the strong correlation extended back 500 million years

Though the IPCC acknowledged these indirect UV and cosmic ray effects may be important (although a source of considerable uncertainty), they latched onto the small 0.1 percent change in the 11-year cycle and a single paper by Lean with Wang,(8) which used a new untested model approach suggesting the sun’s longer-term role is not as great, to cut back solar forcing by a factor of 7 from the 2001 prior assessment. This, despite the slew of peer reviewed papers showing the sun as more important, not less. This is this current report’s “Hockey Stick,” the original of which in 2001 did away with the great detective work of hundreds of the world’s best climatologists, and wiped out the medieval warm period and subsequent Ice Ages, making the current warming seem more important and man’s role more plausible. The Hockey Stick has since been totally debunked in numerous peer review papers and did not appear in the latest IPCC report. I am confident that this recent assessment’s downgrading of the solar effect will meet a similar fate.

After addressing the role ocean temperatures play in impacting climate – especially the occurrences of El Niños and La Niñas -- D’Aleo stated that the planet may actually be entering a new cooling phase rather than extending the current warming cycle:

There are indications, given both the 80-year and 180-year cycles, that the sun will be much less active over coming decades. The majority of solar cycle methods suggest the next cycle will be less than the last one, which itself was 20 percent less than the prior cycles. NASA (Hathaway), based on the observed slowing of the sun’s plasma flow, predicts that cycle 25, which peaks in 2022, could be the quietest in centuries. Remember that quiet cycles are cool cycles.

Also, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation increasingly shows signs of descending back into its cold mode. This, too, should result in global cooling. The Atlantic may have another decade to go before it cools again.

These three factors suggest a cooling is about to begin. In fact, there are a number of measures, such as ocean heat content (which has not increased in the last 4 years), satellite-derived atmospheric temperatures, and ocean and land temperatures, which are all showing a cooling period over the last 5 to 8 years. It is possible either 1998 or 2001 will end up being the peak of this current warm cycle.

Not something Katie, Charlie, or Brian are likely to discuss any time soon, wouldn’t you agree? Nor would they want to address D’Aleo’s conclusion:

Lost in all of this is the fact that we have had an optimum climate the last 30 years – with warmer temperatures, more rainfall, and increased CO2 – that has enabled us to grow more food in more places, and consume less energy than had the cold weather of the 60s and 70s persisted. Descending back into a little Ice Age has far greater negative consequences than a slow and relative minor warming. Crop failures and famines are more common due to dryness and cold, and the world would consume more energy for heating. We may look back at the late 20th and early 21st centuries as the golden years.

Future generations will shake their heads over how we failed to recognize a good thing when we had it and how science was hijacked by politics, environmentalism, and greed. We would be better off spending all our dollars and efforts on maximizing energy sources, new and old, than trying to eliminate a gas that does far more good than harm.

How marvelous. Bravo, Joseph. Bravo.

—Noel Sheppard is the Associate Editor of NewsBusters.