1. Two NY Times columnists appeared in the Bangkok Post days apart pushing the global warming agenda and challenging skeptics with temperature data from the heat wave (Our beaker is on the boil, Bangkok Post, July 21, 2010; and Who cooked the planet, Bangkok Post, July 27, 2010).
2. The real issues that separate climate science and its critics have little to do with heat waves or cold waves. They address the question of whether climate science has been faithful to science in making its case for catastrophic man-made climate change controllable by human intervention [LINK] ; that is, whether there is catastrophe in climate change and whether a scientific basis exists for the proposed policy to reduce carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuels.
3. The catastrophe part of the argument includes extreme weather, rising seas, water shortages, crop failures, deforestation, and desertification. In the wake the Climategate scandas climate science has withdrawn most of these claims. The slew of retractions leaves global warming without any claim to catastrophe and therefore with little leverage to influence policy.
4. Besides catastrophe, there are also serious questions about global warming theory that include the central question of whether it is possible to control temperature by making changes to our use of fossil fuels. Such policy implications are derived from relationships that are built into the the climate models on which climate science relies that are pre-programmed with the assumed relationships such that these assumptions predetermine the predictions of the models.
5. Climate science has not presented convincing evidence that changes in fossil fuel consumption will change temperature. Correlation alone does not tell us whether carbon dioxide causes temperature or whether temperature causes carbon dioxide or whether a third unobserved variable causes both temperature and carbon dioxide. Only some kind of intervention experiment or controlled laboratory experiment can determine cause and effect – particularly that the temperature effect of carbon dioxide exists in the magnitude needed for the proposed policy to work.
6. Your columnists seem convinced that the heat wave has proven the climate models to be correct. If they took a look at the predicted temperature curve against the data they would think otherwise as there is a wide divergence between prediction and reality [LINK] . In every case where their predictions could be checked against data, the models have failed. The only predictions that remain standing are the ones sufficiently in the future to evade verification.
7. The many humiliating retractions the IPCC were forced to make and the recent audit of their 2007 report by Dutch scientists have damaged their credibility possibly beyond repair. Aside from inexplicable school boy errors, the audit also found a systematic bias in the IPCC to link climate change with catastrophe. It will take more than a heat wave to get policy makers to trust them again.

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Press Conference at the Launch of the IPCC Synthesis Report (Tivoli Conference Center, Lumbye Room) (REMARKS, Q&A) (with Mrs. Ban) (Nesirky)