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John Coleman, meteorologist and co-founder of the Weather Channel, wrote a letter to the Hammer Forum – which held a climate change symposium Thursday night in Los Angeles – outlining his position on the topic of man-made climate change. The main points from the letter, which was picked up by the British publication The Express:

• There has not been man-made global warming in the past, is none in the present, and there’s no reason to fear that there might be any in the future.
• Efforts to prove the CO2 emissions cause climate change have failed.
• There has been no warming over the last 18 years.
• There is no climate crisis, the oceans aren’t rising, polar ice is increasing, polar bears are increasing, and heat waves and storms are not increasing.
• Climate change is a political and environmental agenda item without basis in science.

Princeton University climate expert William Happer added the following:

“The incredible list of supposed horrors that increasing carbon dioxide will bring the world is pure belief disguised as science.”

In 2010 a high-level inquiry by the InterAcademy Council found there was “little evidence” to support the IPCC’s claims about global warming.

It also said the panel had purposely emphasised the negative impacts of climate change and made “substantive findings” based on little proof.

Another related and interesting fact that came to light this week on this topic: the President’s assertion last month that the U.S. has cut greenhouse gases was proven to be wrong by data that show that greenhouse gas emissions actually increased last year.

Here’s the problem: CO2 emissions have increased dramatically over the last two-hundred plus years yet temperatures have varied. Or, in the case of the last 18 years, haven’t moved at all. Regardless of arguments about “climate sensitivity,” CO2 simply cannot be the driver of global temperatures with such fluctuations.

A 2013 NOAA article “Why did Earth’s surface temperature stop rising in the past decade?” hosted at Climate.gov poses:

“The most likely explanation for the lack of significant warming at the Earth’s surface in the past decade or so is that natural climate cycles—a series of La Niña events and a negative phase of the lesser-known Pacific Decadal Oscillation—caused shifts in ocean circulation patterns that moved some excess heat into the deep ocean.”

Yet here is NASA nearly one year later blowing that theory out of the water:

The cold waters of Earth’s deep ocean have not warmed measurably since 2005, according to a new NASA study, leaving unsolved the mystery of why global warming appears to have slowed in recent years.

This is the important point: the IPCC predicted that as CO2 level increases, temperatures will consistently increase as well, but they have not.

One thing seems to be certain among the many re-evaluations going on and that is that CO2 (and furthermore, manmade CO2) seems to not have the dramatic impact on global temperatures some scientists assert. Considering this, perhaps John Coleman has a point.

At the recent United Nations Climate Summit, Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon warned that “Without significant cuts in emissions by all countries, and in key sectors, the window of opportunity to stay within less than 2 degrees [of warming] will soon close forever.” Actually, this window of opportunity may remain open for quite some time. A growing body of evidence suggests that the climate is less sensitive to increases in carbon-dioxide emissions than policy makers generally assume—and that the need for reductions in such emissions is less urgent.

According to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change, preventing “dangerous human interference” with the climate is defined, rather arbitrarily, as limiting warming to no more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above preindustrial temperatures. The Earth’s surface temperatures have already warmed about 0.8 degrees Celsius since 1850-1900. This leaves 1.2 degrees Celsius (about 2.2 degrees Fahrenheit) to go.

In its most optimistic projections, which assume a substantial decline in emissions, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) projects that the “dangerous” level might never be reached. In its most extreme, pessimistic projections, which assume heavy use of coal and rapid population growth, the threshold could be exceeded as early as 2040. But these projections reflect the effects of rising emissions on temperatures simulated by climate models, which are being challenged by recent observations.

Human-caused warming depends not only on increases in greenhouse gases but also on how “sensitive” the climate is to these increases. Climate sensitivity is defined as the global surface warming that occurs when the concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere doubles. If climate sensitivity is high, then we can expect substantial warming in the coming century as emissions continue to increase. If climate sensitivity is low, then future warming will be substantially lower, and it may be several generations before we reach what the U.N. considers a dangerous level, even with high emissions.

The IPCC’s latest report (published in 2013) concluded that the actual change in 70 years if carbon-dioxide concentrations double, called the transient climate response, is likely in the range of 1 to 2.5 degrees Celsius. Most climate models have transient climate response values exceeding 1.8 degrees Celsius. But the IPCC report notes the substantial discrepancy between recent observation-based estimates of climate sensitivity and estimates from climate models.

Nicholas Lewis and I have just published a study in Climate Dynamics that shows the best estimate for transient climate response is 1.33 degrees Celsius with a likely range of 1.05-1.80 degrees Celsius. Using an observation-based energy-balance approach, our calculations used the same data for the effects on the Earth’s energy balance of changes in greenhouse gases, aerosols and other drivers of climate change given by the IPCC’s latest report.

We also estimated what the long-term warming from a doubling of carbon-dioxide concentrations would be, once the deep ocean had warmed up. Our estimates of sensitivity, both over a 70-year time-frame and long term, are far lower than the average values of sensitivity determined from global climate models that are used for warming projections. Also our ranges are narrower, with far lower upper limits than reported by the IPCC’s latest report. Even our upper limits lie below the average values of climate models.

Our paper is not an outlier. More than a dozen other observation-based studies have found climate sensitivity values lower than those determined using global climate models, including recent papers published in Environmentrics(2012),Nature Geoscience (2013) and Earth Systems Dynamics (2014). These new climate sensitivity estimates add to the growing evidence that climate models are running “too hot.” Moreover, the estimates in these empirical studies are being borne out by the much-discussed “pause” or “hiatus” in global warming—the period since 1998 during which global average surface temperatures have not significantly increased.

This pause in warming is at odds with the 2007 IPCC report, which expected warming to increase at a rate of 0.2 degrees Celsius per decade in the early 21st century. The warming hiatus, combined with assessments that the climate-model sensitivities are too high, raises serious questions as to whether the climate-model projections of 21st-century temperatures are fit for making public-policy decisions.

The sensitivity of the climate to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide is a central question in the debate on the appropriate policy response to increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Climate sensitivity and estimates of its uncertainty are key inputs into the economic models that drive cost-benefit analyses and estimates of the social cost of carbon.

Continuing to rely on climate-model warming projections based on high, model-derived values of climate sensitivity skews the cost-benefit analyses and estimates of the social cost of carbon. This can bias policy decisions. The implications of the lower values of climate sensitivity in our paper, as well as similar other recent studies, is that human-caused warming near the end of the 21st century should be less than the 2-degrees-Celsius “danger” level for all but the IPCC’s most extreme emission scenario.

This slower rate of warming—relative to climate model projections—means there is less urgency to phase out greenhouse gas emissions now, and more time to find ways to decarbonize the economy affordably. It also allows us the flexibility to revise our policies as further information becomes available.

Ms. Curry, a professor and former chairwoman of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, is the president of Climate Forecast Applications Network.