The Earth has shown an under-reported cooling trend for eight straight years, raising serious questions about the accuracy of the UN's climate projections, since not one of the computer models on which it relies had predicted so long and steep a cooling, says a new review paper -- Temperature Change and CO2 Change - A Scientific Briefing --from the Science and Public Policy Institute, a Washington, D.C. think tank.

The paper posits that "The chief reason for scepticism at the official position on "global warming" is the overwhelming weight of evidence that the UN's climate panel, the IPCC, prodigiously exaggerates both the supposed causes and the imagined consequences of anthropogenic "global warming"; that too many of the exaggerations can be demonstrated to have been deliberate; and that the IPCC and other official sources have continued to rely even upon those exaggerations that have been definitively demonstrated in the literature to have been deliberate.

"In short," writes Monckton, "science is being artfully manipulated to the point of what are in essence political and not scientific conclusions - a conclusion that is congenial to powerful factions whose ambition is not to identify scientific truth but rather to advance the special vested interests with which they identify themselves.

The paper demonstrates that if CO2 concentration continues to rise more slowly than the IPCC had predicted, and if climate sensitivity to CO2 concentration is in any event well below the IPCC's projected range, the likelihood of any "global warming" >2 °C/century to 2100 is vanishingly small.

Monckton also demonstrates that official sources have:
* relied upon questionable and occasionally downright dishonest methods to inflate the observed rate of temperature increase

* created the false impression that the rate of increase is itself rising when an identical argument can be used to demonstrate that it is falling

* diminished earlier and warmer temperatures in this century

* abolished the mediaeval warm period

* diverted attention away from the fact that throughout almost all of the Holocene, and throughout all four previous interglacial periods, surface temperatures were considerably warmer than they are today.
Says SPPI president, Robert Ferguson, "When the climate science is wrong, the policies are wrong, and then both people and the environment are harmed. It is past time that the media and elected officials stop treating "man-made global warming" as a religion and started asking some serious and pointed questions. This paper lays the ground work for that."