Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi has sensibly declined to attend yet another climate summit — this time called by Ban Ki-moon for Tuesday in New York under the auspices of the United Nations — which profits handsomely from much-exaggerated climate scares. Chinese President Xi Jinping and German Chancellor Angela Merkel likewise intend to skip the event.
Environmentalists have complained about Mr. Modi's decision. They say rising atmospheric carbon dioxide will cause droughts, melt Himalayan ice, and poison lakes and waterways in the Indian subcontinent.

However, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has already had to backtrack on earlier assertions that Himalayan glaciers would be gone within 25 years, and the most comprehensive review of drought trends worldwide shows the global land area under drought has decreased throughout the past 30 years.

The spiritual yet down-to-earth Mr. Modi knows that 300 million Indians still have no electricity. His priority is to turn on the lights all over India. In Bihar, four homes in five are still lit by kerosene.

Electric power is the quickest, surest, cheapest way to lift people out of poverty, disease, subsistence agriculture and childhood death — thereby stabilizing India's population, which may soon overtake China's.

The world's governing elites, however, no longer care about poverty. Climate change is their new focus.

For instance, in late August, the Asian Development Bank predicted that warmer weather would cut rice production, rising seas would engulf Mumbai and other coastal megacities, and rainfall would decline by 10 percent to 40 percent across in many Indian provinces.

Garbage in, gospel out. In truth, rice production has risen steadily, sea level is barely rising, and even the U.N.'s climate panel has twice been compelled to admit that there is no evidence of a worldwide change in rainfall.
Subtropical India will not warm by much. Advection would take most of any additional heat poleward. Besides, globally there has been little or no warming for almost two decades. Climate models did not predict that, casting doubt on all of the U.N. climate panel's "projections." The panel, on our advice, has recently all but halved its central estimate of near-term warming.

Sea level is rising no faster than for the past 150 years. From 2004 to 2012, the Envisat satellite reported a rise of one-tenth of an inch. From 2003 to 2009, gravity satellites actually showed sea level falling. Results like these have not hitherto been reported in the mainstream news media.

More than two centuries of scientific research have failed to make the duration or magnitude of monsoons predictable. Monsoons depend on sea and surface temperatures and wind conditions in the Indian and Western Pacific oceans, the timing of El Ninos in the equatorial Pacific, variations in Eurasian and Himalayan winter snow cover, and even wind direction in the equatorial stratosphere.

In 1906, forecasts depended on 28 unknowns. By 2007, scientists from the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology were using 73. So insisting that just one variable — atmospheric carbon-dioxide levels — will drive future monsoons is unscientific.

IPCC climate models said monsoons would become more intense. Instead, they have weakened for 50 years.
Models also failed to replicate the 60-year and 200-year cycles in monsoon rainfall linked to solar cycles that are reflected in studies of ocean sediments from the Arabian Sea.

A new study led by K.M. Hiremath of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics shows a strong, possibly causative correlation between variations in solar activity and in monsoon rainfall.Governments also overlook a key conclusion from the world's modelers, led by Fred Kucharski of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics: "The increase of greenhouse gases in the 20th century has not significantly contributed to the observed decadal Indian monsoonal rainfall variability."

Not one climate model predicted the severe Indian drought of 2009, followed by the prolonged rains the next year — a one-year increase of 40 percent in most regions. These natural variations are not new. They have happened for tens of thousands of years.

A paper for the scientific journal Climate Dynamics co-authored by B.N. Goswami, recently retired director of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, shows why the models relied upon by the U.N. climate panel's recent assessments predict monsoons inaccurately.

All 16 models examined have the same fatal flaw: They predict rain too easily, by artificially elevating air and water masses in the atmosphere.

Models are not ready to predict the climate. Misusing computers to spew out multiple "what-if" scenarios is unscientific. This approach simply means "if all our unproven assumptions are correct, this could happen."
Most of the fundamental problems in our still immature understanding of climate have remained unresolved for decades. Some cannot be resolved at all. The U.N.'s climate panel admitted in 2001 what has been known for 50 years: Because climate is a "coupled, non-linear, chaotic object," reliable long-term climate prediction is impossible.

Misuse of climate models as false prophets of doom is costly in lives as well as treasure.

To condemn the poorest of India's poor to continuing poverty is to condemn many to an untimely death. Mr. Modi is right to have no more to do with such murderous nonsense. It is time to put an end to climate summits. On the evidence, they are not needed.

Willie Soon is a solar physicist and climate scientist based in Cambridge, Mass. Lord Monckton is a former expert reviewer for the Fifth Assessment Report of the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (2013) of the U.N.'s climate panel.