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http://www.thenewamerican.com/tech/environment/item/14426-un-report-
admits-solar-warming-may-be-greater-than-thought

Information leaked from a report compiled by the UN�s Intergovernmental 
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) indicates that heat from the sun may play a 
larger role in increasing the Earth�s temperatures than previously 
thought.

Fox News, which released the story, identified the source as Alec Rawls, 
who posts on a blog called StopGreenSuicide.com. Rawls told FoxNews.com, 
�Even after the IPCC acknowledges extensive evidence for ... solar forcing 
beyond what they included in their models, they still make no attempt to 
account for this omission in their predictions. ... It's insane.

Fox noted that Rawls blames the UN for burying its point about the effect 
of the solar energy on climate change in Chapter 11 of its report.

A visit to StopGreenSuicide.com reveals a post that Rawls made last 
December 13 in which he states that he participated in an �expert review� 
of the IPCC report, called �AR5, Working Group 1,� and that he believes he 
is fully justified in leaking the full draft of the report to the public. 

Rawls weighed the ethical pros and cons of leaking the report carefully, 
saying that �The ethics of leaking tax-payer funded documents requires 
weighing the �public's right to know� against any harm to the public 
interest that may result.�

In making his case, Rawls cited a statement from Christiana Figueres, 
Executive Secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate 
Change, that the UN�s climate agency was exerting considerable influence 
on national governments to engage in centralized transformation of their 
societal infrastructures. Said Figueres:

We are inspiring government, private sector, and civil society to [make] 
the biggest transformation that they have ever undertaken. The Industrial 
Revolution was also a transformation, but it wasn�t a guided 
transformation from a centralized policy perspective. This is a 
centralized transformation that is taking place because governments have 
decided that they need to listen to science.

To which Rawls comments:

So may we please see this "science" on the basis of which our existing 
energy infrastructure is to be ripped out in favor of non-existent "green" 
energy? The only reason for secrecy in the first place is to enhance the 
UN's political control over a scientific story line that is aimed 
explicitly at policy makers. Thus the drafts ought to fall within the 
reach of the Freedom of Information Act.

Rawls� greatest point of contention with the UN report is the relative 
weight it placed on two forces that may be held responsible for global 
warming: natural or anthropogenic (caused by man). He noted that the 
authors of Chapter 7 of the report admitted �strong evidence� for what is 
described as �enhanced solar forcing� (forcing beyond total solar 
irradiance, or TSI � i.e., the amount of solar radiation received at the 
top of the Earth�s atmosphere).

However, another group of authors in Chapter 8 of the report stated a 
conclusion that contradicted the previous findings: �There is very high 
confidence that natural forcing is a small fraction of the anthropogenic 
forcing.� In refuting the Chapter 8 authors� conclusions, Rawls wrote:

This analysis, where post-1980 warming gets attributed to the human 
release of CO2 on the grounds that it cannot be attributed to solar 
irradiance, cannot stand in the face of the Chapter 7 admission of 
substantial evidence for solar forcing beyond solar irradiance. Once the 
evidence for enhanced solar forcing is taken into account we can have no 
confidence that natural forcing is small compared to anthropogenic 
forcing. [Emphasis in original.]

Rawls continues:

The admission of strong evidence for enhanced solar forcing changes 
everything. The climate alarmists can't continue to claim that warming was 
almost entirely due to human activity over a period when solar warming 
effects, now acknowledged to be important, were at a maximum. The final 
draft of AR5 WG1 is not scheduled to be released for another year but the 
public needs to know now how the main premises and conclusions of the IPCC 
story line have been undercut by the IPCC itself.

Rawls asked openly in his article: �Will some press organization please 
host the leaked report?� While Fox News did not publish the entire report, 
by providing a URL for his blog (which itself is linked to the report) it 
did the next-best thing.

Fox presented a fairly balanced summary of the two arguments in its 
report, devoting 306 words citing Rawls or others validating his position 
and 424 words quoting those holding to the opposing position that most 
global warming is caused by carbon dioxide attributed to human activities.

One �expert� quoted by Fox taking a stand opposing Rawls is Aaron Huertas 
of the Union of Concerned Scientists. Said Huertas: �I see climate 
contrarians try this trick almost every time a big new solar study comes 
out. They somehow tend to neglect mentioning that solar variation is 
smaller than the heat-trapping power of carbon dioxide.�

Though he produced no evidence to prove his assertion, Huertas also 
attempted to connect the coastal flooding in the Northeast caused by 
Hurricane Sandy to �climate change.�

However, Fox also cited a NASA study attributing the �Little Ice Age� of 
1650-1715 to an absence of solar activity (sunspots) during that period.

An earlier Fox News report published on January 28 indicated that claims 
about global warming have been overestimated for 20 years, citing a chart 
found in the IPCC report leaked by Rawls that compared four temperature 
models. Fox interviewed Roy Spencer, a climatologist at the University of 
Alabama at Huntsville, who said: �Temperatures have not risen nearly as 
much as almost all of the climate models predicted�. Their predictions 
have largely failed, four times in a row ... what that means is that it's 
time for them to re-evaluate.

Spencer said of the information shown in the IPCC report charts, �It is 
evidence that CO2 is not nearly as strong a climate driver as the IPCC has 
been assuming. This is the possibility they do not allow to be considered, 
because it would end all of their policy-changing goals.�

As we observed earlier in the quote from the UN�s Christiana Figueres, 
those attempting to exploit climate change to further their agendas 
admittedly have policy-changing goals.

A February 1 editorial in Investors Business Daily stated that most global 
warming models are �hopelessly flawed.� As evidence, IBD quoted Terje 
Berntsen, project manager of The Research Council of Norway. By analyzing 
temperature statistics, the Nowegian group refuted projections made by the 
IPCC that global temperatures will rise by three degrees Celsius by 2050 
if, by then, carbon dioxide levels double from levels of the pre-
industrialized world of 1750. The Research Council of Norway, after 
plugging in real temperature data from 2000 to 2010 into its calculations, 
determined that an increase in temperature due to a doubling of CO2 would 
be only 1.9 degrees Celsius.

"Thus, when the researchers factor in the observations of temperature 
trends from 2000 to 2010, they significantly reduce the probability of our 
experiencing the most dramatic climate change forecast up to now," say the 
Norwegians.

Berntsen said, "We are most likely witnessing natural fluctuations in the 
climate system � changes that can occur over several decades � and which 
are coming on top of a long-term warming. The natural changes resulted in 
a rapid global temperature rise in the 1990s, whereas the natural 
variations between 2000 and 2010 may have resulted in the leveling off we 
are observing now."

The IBD writer summarized the problem with notable candor:

Predictions of doom have turned out to be nothing more than madness and 
there is no reason, none, to think that the fate we have allegedly 
determined for ourselves will ever happen. As we've learned over the last 
20 years, there are too many unknowns, too many variables. If there come 
adverse effects of climate, humanity will adapt as needed, as it has for 
many millennia.

�The U.N.'s Global Warming War On Capitalism: An Important History 
Lesson,� an article published online by Forbes on January 22, quoted a 
statement made by Christopher Monckton, the third viscount of Benchley and 
advisor to former Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, who is a skeptic 
concerning the manmade causes of �global warming.� Monckton told a 
somewhat startled audience at a UN-sponsored climate conference in Doha, 
Qatar, last December that �in the 16 years we have been coming to these 
conferences, there has been no global warming at all.�

Furthermore, said Monckton, �If we are to take action [of the sort the 
global-warming crowd proposes], the cost of that would be many times 
greater than the cost of taking adaptive measures later. So our 
recommendation, therefore, is that we should initiate very quickly a 
review of the science to make sure we are all on the right track.�

The article, which has much valuable insight too lengthy to review here, 
featured an important quote from former U.S. Senator Timothy Wirth (D-
Colo.), who represented the Clinton-Gore administration as U.S. 
Undersecretary of State for Global Issues at the first UN Earth Climate 
Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, in 1992. At that summit, Wirth made a 
revealing statement:

We have got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global 
warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic 
policy and environmental policy.

As the IPCC report leaked by Alec Rawls, and a wealth of evidence supplied 
by respected global warming skeptics such as Dr. S. Fred Singer, Bjorn 
Lomborg, Richard Lindzen, and others strongly indicates, it is very likely 
that the theory of human-caused global warming is wrong. If so, it seems 
highly illogical that implementing policies based on a wrong theory can 
benefit either our economy or the environment.