Be Scared and Give Us More Funding
by Pater Tenebrarum
The IPCC recently released its 'boo!' report,
which is supposed to scare us into accepting a great deal more government
control over our lives as well as much higher taxes on account of global
warming – which allegedly industrial civilization is responsible for.
You can read what we would refer to as the
'professional scaremongers perspective' in this article in the Atlantic. It's 5 minutes to midnight!
We can no longer delay! Taxes must be raised immediately! Cars? Forget it, they
are poison! Actually, all of humanity is really a virus on the face of the
planet, right? Especially what is generally referred to as civilization is
apparently just too ghastly to contemplate.
Somehow, the IPPC report completely neglects to
mention that the earth has not warmed since 1998, in spite of CO2
concentrations in the atmosphere increasing by about one third since then, from
one totally negligible value to another totally negligible value. But why
quibble over such details? We are supposed to be scared after all! And see,
there are giant killer hornets in China, whose presence, just as about 5
million other things that are ailing humanity, is clearly traceable to global warming. The same warming that
stopped almost 16 years ago, but why should one engage in such fruitless
debates in the face of killer hornets! If they don't scare you, what will?
Hide the women and children! Evil killer hornets
are about to descend on us!
The Professional Doomsayer
Class
One must keep in mind that professional
doomsayers have made a living from their prophecies for as long as there have
been human societies. The IPCC in particular is a bureaucracy that would lose
its raison d'être if it were not pushing an ever more impressive sounding scare
story. Thus its utter silence on the embarrassing absence of warming since
1998.
Contrary to the portrayal in the media, it is by
no means an unbiased arbiter of scientific thought free of conflicts of
interest. It is in fact the exact opposite. As Donna Laframboise wrote in the WSJ shortly prior to the
report's release:
“The IPCC's 2007 climate findings were rather vague. In the opinion of the 60 individuals who wrote the chapter "Understanding and Attributing Climate Change," "most" of the rise in global average temperature since the mid-20th century was "very likely" caused by human-generated greenhouse-gas emissions. Recent leaks suggest that the 2013 report will twirl the knob a little further: The world will apparently be advised that the (entirely subjective) certainty level among IPCC experts that their above opinion is correct has risen to 95% from 90%. Whether the IPCC will acknowledge and address the recent, 15-year pause in global temperatures remains to be seen.
When the IPCC issues a report, it assures the world that the organization bases its conclusions on reputable, peer-reviewed scientific literature, and that its members are comprised of the world's top experts and best scientists. Yet when IPCC personnel answered a 2010 questionnaire sponsored by the Inter Academy Council (a network of national science academies), there were repeated complaints about unqualified individual members. For example, one individual (the responses to the questionnaire were anonymized) said there are "far too many politically correct appointments" involving people with "insufficient scientific competence to do anything useful."
Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC's chairman since 2002, has repeatedly said that the IPCC bases its conclusions solely on peer-reviewed source material. Yet many of the sources cited by the 3,000-page 2007 IPCC report were press releases, news clippings, discussion papers and unpublished master's and doctoral-degree theses. The IPCC's highly embarrassing, since-retracted claim that the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 came from a 2005 World Wildlife Fund publication.
The U.N. has charged the IPCC with weighing the evidence on climate change in an objective manner. The problem is that numerous IPCC personnel have ties to environmental groups, many of which raise funds by hyping the alleged dangers of climate change. This relationship raises a legitimate question about their objectivity.
[…]
In late 2011, Mr. Pachauri told the Guardian newspaper that an independent review of the IPCC "found our work solid and robust." This is not so. The review, conducted in 2010 by a committee of the Inter Academy Council identified "significant shortcomings in each major step of [the] IPCC's assessment process." It said "significant improvements" were necessary— and criticized the IPCC for claiming to have "high confidence in some statements for which there is little evidence."
(emphasis added)
In the article, a number of the more prominent
people in the IPCC are listed – all of whom are properly assessed by this
sentence from the article: “The problem is that numerous IPCC personnel have
ties to environmental groups, many of which raise funds by hyping the
alleged dangers of climate change.”
In other words, if this scare story dies its
long overdue death, a major gravy train will be derailed for the very people
who allegedly bring us this 'objective report'. Including IPCC head honcho Mr.
Pachauri, although we are pretty sure he would land on his feet after having
played such an admirable role in erecting vast bureaucracies and creating
endless possibilities to extract rents from wealth producers and consumers the
world over.
An Inconvenient Pause
As Howard Winn writes in the South China Morning Post, the 'inconvenient pause' in
global warming is 'causing ructions' in the IPCC, as apparently there are a few
governments insisting on an explanation. However, as you will see further
below, Winn was misinterpreting what the 'ructions' consisted of.
“The IPCC is due to issue its fifth major report – the Fifth Assessment Report – since 1992 on the state of the earth's environment and climate. According to leaked documents, the governments that finance the IPCC want a more adequate explanation for the 17-year "pause" in global warming than is currently to be found in the massive three-volume report. The dispute centres on the extent temperatures will rise in the future, and how much of the rise over the past 150 years – a total of 0.8 degrees Celsius – is due to human activity and how much to natural causes such as sun spot activity or ocean cycles. The IPCC's draft report says it is 95 per cent confident that global warming is due to human activity, compared with 90 per cent in its 2007 report. Many scientists believe that level of confidence is unwarranted.
One of the more obvious difficulties to resolve is that although there has been an enormous production of carbon dioxide over the past 17 years, the temperature hasn't changed. The Economist noted in a recent piece, "The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO2 put there by humanity since 1750."
Then there is the inconvenient truth that the sea ice in the arctic is 60 per cent greater than this time last year when it stood at a record low. And this is before the winter freeze starts. When the Northwest Passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific opened up in August 2007 it caused headlines around the world. In 2007 Wieslaw Maslowski, a researcher at the Naval Postgraduate School, Monterey, California, famously predicted the Arctic would be free of ice by 2013. But the Northwest Passage has been closed all this year by pack ice, trapping some 20 yachts whose owners presumably believed it would be open for years to come.”
(emphasis added)
Maybe those yacht owners (if they are ever able
to leave the pack ice) should consider a class action suit. So what is the
problem? Why do all those predictions of imminent doom once again fail to pan
out? Winn helpfully provides the answer:
“Much of the difficulty in this debate is to do with the models that scientists use. Most of them don't seem to work, and they don't even work backwards. Maybe the earth and its climate are too complex for current models to handle.”
(emphasis added)
And this, dear readers is precisely what Professor
von Storch in Germany also says – a lifelong supporter of the AGW theory. In
his opinion, the 'inconvenient pause' implies that the current models have only
a 2% chance to be correct, and it will decline to 0% if the pause in warming
continues for another 5 years. You can read about Professor von Storch's
reluctant but thoroughly professional assessment in our previous article “Politicized Science Leads to Impoverishment”
Coming back to the above mentioned 'concerns' by
governments over the 'pause', they were not about what one might expect (or
rather, they unfortunately were).
“But leaked documents seen by the Associated Press, yesterday revealed deep concerns among politicians about a lack of global warming over the past few years.
Germany called for the references to the slowdown in warming to be deleted, saying looking at a time span of just 10 or 15 years was ‘misleading’ and they should focus on decades or centuries.Hungary worried the report would provide ammunition for deniers of man-made climate change.
Belgium objected to using 1998 as a starting year for statistics, as it was exceptionally warm and makes the graph look flat – and suggested using 1999 or 2000 instead to give a more upward-pointing curve.
The United States delegation even weighed in, urging the authors of the report to explain away the lack of warming using the ‘leading hypothesis’ among scientists that the lower warming is down to more heat being absorbed by the ocean – which has got hotter. [it actually hasn't, ed.]
Obviously the AGW meme is regarded as immensely
valuable by the political class. They don't want any pesky facts to get in the
way of the rent-seeking possibilities it creates.
Sorry, US delegation – sea surface temperatures
have gone sideways as well over the past 15 years – via NCDC.
And darn it, the polar bears are
thriving too. There are more of them around today than in the 1950s.
An Non-Model Based Prediction
Here is our prediction, made without the use of
a model: within the next two decades, the planet will not only continue to fail
to exceed the temperature record of 1998, but it will probably get noticeably
colder. The reason for believing so is two-fold: for one thing we have
experienced a sun-spot minimum (i.e., the sun is slightly less active), and for
another, it seems possible that there is a short term climate cycle at work.
This is what caused the scientific consensus to warn of an 'impending ice age and
widespread famines' in 1975. The world had been cooling down since about
1940, the height of the previous 'global warming' craze (yes indeed, assorted
scaremongers were exercised over global warming throughout the 1930s, before
being replaced by 'ice age' doomsayers 40 years later).
Oh, by the way, if you read the Newsweek article
'The Cooling World' from 1975 we linked to above, you may notice the following
passage:
“Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars’ worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.
To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world’s weather. The central fact is that after three quarters of a century of extraordinarily mild conditions, the earth’s climate seems to be cooling down.”
That would of course be the very same inclement
weather that the media nowadays routinely blame on 'global
warming'. What do the French say?
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