In Letter to UN, Scientists Say There Is No Climate Emergency

The United Nations logo seen in General Assembly at U.N. headquarters in New York City on Sept. 20, 2016. Drew Angerer/Getty Images

A group of scientists and professionals in climate and related fields sent a letter to the United Nations on Sept. 23 declaring that “there is no climate emergency.”

“The general-circulation models of climate on which international policy is at present founded are unfit for their purpose,” the letter, sent to Secretary-General António Guterres, states. “Therefore, it is cruel as well as imprudent to advocate the squandering of trillions of dollars on the basis of results from such immature models.”

The letter is signed by a number of prominent scientists and professionals from related fields, including atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen and applied geology professor Alberto Prestininzi. The effort is led by professor Guus Berkhout, a Dutch engineer who served as professor of acoustics, geophysics, and innovation management at Delft University of Technology.

Berkhout intends to release the full list of 500 signatories in Oslo on Oct. 18.

The letter states that current climate policies undermine the economic system and put lives at risk by denying countries affordable energy.

“We urge you to follow a climate policy based on sound science, realistic economics, and genuine concern for those harmed by costly but unnecessary attempts at mitigation,” the letter states.

The letter’s release coincided with the U.N. climate summit in New York. Exemplifying some of the alarmism that prompted the letter, teenage climate activist Greta Thunberg told the summit that the planet is in the beginning stage of a “mass extinction.”

At a press briefing accompanying the letter, the scientists point out that the warming projected by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) show temperature increases four times higher than the warming that was actually observed.

The IPCC has previously said its climate models can’t be used to accurately predict long-term changes in the climate.

“In sum, a strategy must recognize what is possible. In climate research and modeling, we should recognize that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible,” the IPCC’s 2018 report states.

The letter to the U.N. states that the earth’s climate has always varied. The recent increase in global average temperature is no surprise, it says in the letter, considering that the Little Ice Age ended in 1850. The letter also says that global warming hasn’t led to more natural disasters.

The Berkhout-led letter follows a petition by more than 90 Italian scientists, publicized in June, which challenges the assertion that humans cause global warming as a theory based on models that have failed to adequately predict climate changes.

“It is scientifically unrealistic to attribute to humans the responsibility for the warming observed from the past century to today,” the Italian petition states.

“The advanced alarmist forecasts, therefore, are not credible, since they are based on models whose results contradict the experimental data. All the evidence suggests that these models overestimate the [human] contribution and underestimate the natural climatic variability, especially that induced by the sun, the moon, and ocean oscillations.”