PLEA Network

1 October 2022, Real Climate, New misguided interpretations of the greenhouse effect from William Kininmonth. I have a feeling that we are seeing the start of a new wave of climate change denial and misrepresentation of science. At the same time, CEOs of gas and oil companies express optimism for further exploitation of fossil energy in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, at least here in Norway. Another clue is William Kininmonth’s ‘rethink’ on the greenhouse effect for The Global Warming Policy Foundation. He made some rather strange claims, such as that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate  Change (IPCC) allegedly should have forgotten that the earth is a sphere because “most absorption of solar radiation takes place over the tropics, while there is excess emission of longwave radiation to space over higher latitudes”. What he hasn’t understood is that the IPCC merely assesses published climate research, much of which is conducted with global climate models that indeed treat the earth as a sphere. This lack of knowledge is surprising from a man who, according to the biography, joined the Australian Bureau of Meteorology in 1960, and retired in 1998 as head of the National Climate Centre. Read more here