Michael Beanstock
GLOBAL warming is set to become global cooling this century, a leading analyst claimed yesterday.
Professor Michael Beenstock said theories of climate change are wrong. He warned climatologists have misused statistics, leading them to the mistaken conclusion global warming is evidence of the greenhouse effect.
He told London’s Cass Business School that the link between rising greenhouse gas emissions and rising temperatures is “spurious”, adding: “The greenhouse effect is an illusion.” The economics professor from The Hebrew University of Jerusalem said that just because greenhouse gases and temperatures have risen together does not mean they are linked.
He claims that the real cause of rising temperatures is the sun, which he says is at its hottest for over 1,000 years but is “beginning to stabilise”. Professor Beenstock said: “If the sun’s heat continues to remain stable, and if carbon emissions continue to grow with the rate of growth of the world economy, global temperatures will fall by about 0.5C by 2050.” Citing predictions by climatologists in the 1970s of a new Ice Age, Professor Beenstock said: “I predict that climatologists will look equally foolish in the years to come. Indeed, it may be already happening.”
The Met Office said the first decade of this century is the warmest since records began 160 years ago, and 2009 the fifth warmest year. It maintains that rising carbon dioxide levels increase temperatures. Since the Industrial Revolution CO2 levels have risen 37 per cent.
Michael Beanstock is currently Professor of Economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem
| Research Interests: Research interests: spatial econometrics, econometric evaluation, time series econometrics, economic geography, drug addiction Teaching Interests: Macroeconomics (2nd year), Project Appraisal and Evaluation (3rd year), Econometric Analysis of Time Series (MA) ,Financial Econometrics (MA). Public Activities: Pinchas Sapir Chair of Economics Professional Affiliations: Honorary Fellow, Institute for Economic Affairs, London |
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His paper that debunks the AGW scam can be found here
His lecture tour included Cardiff University where this article comes from.
Academics Fall Out Over Climate Change
Geraint Talfan Davies reports on another blast at climatologists delivered in Cardiff last night by economist Michael Beenstock .February 3rd, 2010
The current row over the alleged weaknesses in the some of the arguments advanced by the International Panel on Climate Change had an echo in Cardiff last night when Professor Michael Beenstock mounted a wholesale attack on climatologists while delivering the annual lecture of Cardiff University’s Julian Hodge Institute of Applied Macro-economics.In a talk that was a mixture of statistical argument and political polemic, Beenstock, a former UK Treasury official who is now Professor of Economics at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, attacked climatologists, and the International Panel on Climate Change in particular, for not being statisticians. This, he said, is what has led them to them making a ‘spurious correlation’ between greenhouse gases and global temperatures.
There is nothing like a row between different disciplines in the academic world, and there was certainly an edge to Beenstock’s lecture, entitled Global Warming: the Greenhouse Gas Illusion.
According to Beenstock climatologists are naïve data analysts and more volatile than the climate. “They don’t understand statistics,” he said. Global warming was “a fluke”. The panic about global warming was the result of a “doomwatch psychology” initiated by the Club of Rome 40 years ago. IPCC predictions are “unfounded” he declared, adding that there was “no need for carbon abatement”. The Stern report was “much ado about nothing”. It was “fortunate that Copenhagen had failed”. European carbon policy was a “white elephant”.
His argument was that data from the 20th Century does not support the greenhouse theory, but that when carbon emissions accelerate, global temperature increases temporarily, but not permanently. “Global warmers have made the simple error of confusing a temporary effect with a permanent one”.
He was asked why no-one else had spotted this fundamental statistical error. In response he referred to the “tendentious” nature of climatology, and claimed that he was “99.8 per cent” sure of his conclusions – always a dangerous contention. He said he had been attacked for his views “as a simple economist who had strayed out of his area”.
This was an altogether a more no-holds-barred, and political, performance, than Colin Robinson of Surrey University delivered at the same event in 2008, although even he spoke of the climate change lobby as a religious movement that regarded sceptics as heretics. Robinson even quoted the same 1975 Newsweek article that Beenstock cited, worrying about prevalent fears of a new ice age. Both espouse a benign view of the capacity of markets to deal with issues.
The Hodge lectures have often provided a valuable contrast to economic orthodoxy, especially valuable in social democratic Wales. But do I detect a trend in these lectures, and perhaps an orthodoxy of view within the Institute of Applied Macro-economics? Discuss.
Geraint Talfan Davies is Chair of the IWA.
Criticism of the paper was fairly limited at the time and a search produced this from RealClimate
http://economics.huji.ac.il/facultye/beenstock/Nature_Paper091209.pdf [Response: Somebody else who thinks that statistics triumphs over physics. Or in other words, someone who thinks that the planet has to respond in some neat statistical way to a forcing. It doesn’t. Since this appears to be a working paper, I would advise that they do some more work – for instance with the AR4 archive to demonstrate that their methodology is able to distinguish causes in much simpler (though realistic) cases. – Gavin
the Climate Denier List 
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