Dr Benny Peiser is a social anthropologist at Liverpool John Moores University and the editor of the Cambridge Conference Network (CCNet). His research focuses on the effects of environmental change and catastrophic events on contemporary thought and societal evolution. In my 17/5 blog…posted to my climate blog as Majority Against Orthodoxy…I mentioned his analysis of scientific papers on Climate Change which Dr Dennis Bray of the German-based GKSS National Research Centre checked out and endorsed. The Peiser Analysis concluded that dissenters were in a healthy majority. Here is my edited version of the letter Peisner sent to Science Magazine for publication.

‘On December 3rd 2004, only days before the start of the 10th UN Conference on Climate Change, Science Magazine published the results of a study by Naomi Oreskes. For the first time, empirical evidence was presented that appeared to show a unanimous scientific consensus on the anthropogenic causes of recent Global Warming.

Oreskes claims to have analysed 928 abstracts she found listed on the ISI Database using the keywords "climate change". However, a search on the ISI Database using the keywords "climate change" for the years 1993-2003 reveals that almost 12 000 papers were published during the decade in question. What happened to the countless research papers that show that global temperatures were similar or even higher during the Holocene Climate Optimum and the Medieval Warm Period when atmospheric CO2 levels were much lower than today; that Solar Variability is a key driver of recent climate change; and that Climate Modelling is highly uncertain?

These objections were put to Oreskes by science writer David Appell. On 15 December 2004 she admitted that there was indeed a serious mistake in her Science essay. According to Oreskes her study was not based on the keywords "climate change" but on "global climate change". Her use of three keywords instead of two reduced the list of peer reviewed publications by one order of magnitude. On the UK ISI Databank the keyword search "global climate change" comes up with 1247 documents. Since the results looked questionable I replicated the Oreskes Study by analysing all abstracts listed on the ISI Databank for 1993 to 2003 using Oreskes’ keywords.

1117 of the 1247 documents listed included abstracts…130 listed only titles, author' details and keywords. The 1117 abstracts analysed were divided into Oreskes’ six categories plus two which I added: explicit endorsement of the consensus position; evaluation of impacts; mitigation proposals; methods; paleoclimate analysis; rejection of the consensus position; natural factors of global climate change and unrelated to the recent global climate change issues.

My results contradict Oreskes' findings and essentially falsify her study: Only 13 (1%) of the 1117 abstracts explicitly endorse the Consensus View. 322 abstracts (29%) implicitly accept the Consensus View but mainly focus on impact assessments of envisaged global climate change. 89 (less than 10%) focus on mitigation; 67 on methodological questions; 87 deal exclusively with paleo-climatological research unrelated to recent climate change; 34 reject or doubt the view that human activities are the main drivers of the ‘the observed warming over the last 50 years’ and 44 focus on natural factors of global climate change. 470 abstracts (42%) include the keywords "global climate change" but do not include links or reference to greenhouse gas emissions or anthropogenic forcing of recent climate change.

According to Oreskes, 695 of the 928 abstracts (75%) ‘either explicitly or implicitly accepting the Consensus View’. This claim is incorrect on two counts. Only 424 abstracts…less than a third…fall into Categories 1 to 3 and many abstracts on ‘evaluation of impact’ and ‘mitigation’ do not discuss the drivers of global climate change but concern themselves with the effects of elevated CO2 levels on plant growth and vegetation. Many do not include any implicit endorsement of the Consensus View but discuss hypothetical impact assessments or mitigation strategies.

Quite a number of papers emphasise that Natural Factors play a major if not the key role in recent climate change. There are almost three times as many abstracts that are sceptical of the notion of anthropogenic climate change as explicitly endorse it. In fact, the explicit and implicit rejection of the Consensus View includes distinguished scientific organisations. This is not to deny that a majority of publications go along with the view of anthropogenic climate change and apply models based on its basic assumptions. Yet it is beyond doubt that a sound and unbiased analysis of the full ISI Databank will find hundreds of papers…many by the world's leading experts in the field…that have raised serious reservations and outright rejection of the concept of a Scientific Consensus on climate change.’

On 18th February 2005 Peisner received the following reply from Etta Kavanagh, Associate Letters Editor at Science Magazine. ‘Dear Dr. Peiser, a couple of weeks ago you submitted a Letter to the Editor on Naomi Oreskes' Essay The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change. In its current form it is too long for a letter but we would consider a shorter version if you are willing to edit it. It should be 500 words or less, not counting the references. A correction dealing with the mistake in the search terms "global climate change" vs. "climate change" was published in our Jan. 14 issue.’ Well that’s all right then. My tip is to sell shares in companies trading in Carbon Emissions…or bet on their collapse.

Two centuries ago the astronomer William Herschel was reading Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations when he noticed that grain prices fell when the number of sunspots rose. Temperature tends to be warmer at solar maxima so grain grows faster. Better harvests. Lower prices. Farmers always complain of terrible harvests or ruinous prices. In the second half of the 20th century the sun has been at its hottest for over ten thousand years. This is a fact. The influence of this particular Forcing on the temperature of Planet Earth is the very stuff of Skulduggery and High Treason.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change dates its Temperature Forcings from 1750 when the sun was as warm as now. But its start-date for the increase in world temperature is 1900 when the sun was much cooler. This is just a little too contrived…Scientific Fraud in fact…because the warmer the air the more water vapour it holds.

Water is a very odd substance. School Physics has taught my generation that water expands when it freezes which is why unlagged pipes spray water everywhere in the thaw after The Big Freeze…and why there are fish to catch beneath the thin layer of air under the two feet of ice in which Swedish Sports Fishermen cut their holes in the depths of winter. Afterwards they pile into their saunas, drink beer…and sweat profusely before diving into the ice-cold lakes to join the fish they failed to catch. Sweating only makes sense because of the odd properties of water.

In the Climate Changelings’ Theology Carbon Dioxide is just one of several Greenhouse Gases. Methane is another. And Water another. Both Methane and Water have an impact many times greater than Carbon Dioxide. In scientific terms demonising Carbon Emissions means slaughtering cows and eradicating termites to reduce Methane Emissions. According to the Carbonistas the H2O molecule is four times better at destroying the planet than the humble CO2 molecule. But not even the IPCC has the nerve to ignore water vapour...though they have a damn good try.

The IPCC expresses Heat-Energy Forcings in watts per square metre per second. Twentieth Century warming from all sources is around two watts per square metre per second. Not only must IPCC get rid of the Medieval Warm Period they must also ensure that man-made Carbon Emissions are responsible for a significant proportion of this 2.0 watts. Otherwise there is no case to answer and its case would be thrown out of court. So IPCC fiddled the figures.

The first trick was to contrive 0.3 watts for the extent of Solar Temperature Feedback Forcings. The figure would have been 0.7 watts if the IPCC had adopted 1900 instead of 1750 for its start-date and…1.9 watts if it had adopted the Royal Society’s climate feedback 2.7 multiplier guideline. Next the IPCC slashed the Natural Greenhouse Effect by 40 percent from 33C in the climate physics textbooks to 20C making the man-made additions appear bigger.

Finally there is the Battle of the Lambdas…the factor converting Forcings to Temperature. The Stefan-Boltzman Law is to the thermodynamics of climate as Einstein’s equation E=mc2 is to astrophysics. Boltzman relates energy to the square of the speed of light but by reference to temperature rather than mass. It was derived experimentally 100-years ago by a Slovenian professor and proved by his Austrian student. Buried in the small print of IPCC’s third assessment report is the bizarre statement that its climate models had found lambda to be 0.5C per watt of Forcing. Lambda from the Boltzman Equation is half this…based on Experiments with Nature not Manipulations with Computers.

Lambda Inflation is in fashion because the bigger the value of lambda the bigger the temperature increase you can predict from any particular set of Forcings Data. James Hansen who invented Global Warming in his evidence to Senate Hearings in the middle of a Washington Heatwave offers lambdas of 0.67, 0.75 or 1.0. John Houghton who chaired the IPCC working group trumps this with 0.8 while IPCC’s computer models now use 1.0. But The Stern Report deserves an Oscar for its implied lambda of 1.9…between six and eight times the Boltzman lambda.

Multiply by Boltzman’s lambda and temperature rise this century is in line with observation at 0.44 to 0.6C. Stern’s lambda gives nonsense. The Hadley Centre had the same problem so they now have one lambda to predict with and another…lambda divided by three…to match actual 20th Century temperatures. My Texan artist friend Bob Stuart had a parrot in his studio. He had trained it to say ‘Get A Rope and Hang The Bastards!’ Hark! I hear it even now!