Wednesday 2 October 2013

Thinning Crowds

Burgeoning Doubt

As expected, there has been much ado about very little.  The UN IPCC report on global warming, and the faithful troops are trying to gin up the crusade once again.  Most acknowledge that the drive to save the planet and humankind had become desultory and distracted, to say the least.  One might even say the febricity has cooled off.  But now, at last, an event.  The IPCC is about to publish. The news media, the chattering classes, the halls of academia have something to trumpet forth once again. 

Except that it is all empty theatre.  You can sense it.  Our own politicians betray the cause as lost.  John Key, the current Prime Minister of New Zealand, once was very public about our need to "play our part" so that we did not lose access to our vital trading markets.  Being good climate citizens was necessary to maintain open and free trade with other countries.  Now, nary a peep.  Now there is strong global demand for New Zealand's agricultural exports.  No-one cares a fig about our carbon dioxide emissions.  The economic idiocy of "food miles" has now been thoroughly debunked.  Concern over global warming is passe.

But that will not stop the true believers having another go.  They remind us of rabid fans trying to re-capture the glory of a once-dominant sports team.  Out come the chants and the cheerleaders, only to be overwhelmed by their own echoes reverberating in a near deserted stadium. 

Below are a couple of pieces illustrating the actual situation in the public sphere.  Firstly, James Delingpole, writing in The Telegraph:

On Friday the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change delivers its latest verdict on the state of man-made global warming. Though the details are a secret, one thing is clear: the version of events you will see and hear in much of the media, especially from partis pris organisations like the BBC, will be the opposite of what the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report actually says.

Already we have had a taste of the nonsense to come: a pre-announcement to the effect that “climate scientists” are now “95 per cent certain” that humans are to blame for climate change; an evidence-free declaration by the economist who wrote the discredited Stern Report that the computer models cited by the IPCC “substantially underestimate” the scale of the problem; a statement by the panel’s chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, that “the scientific evidence of… climate change has strengthened year after year”.

As an exercise in bravura spin, these claims are up there with Churchill’s attempts to reinvent the British Expeditionary Force’s humiliating retreat from Dunkirk as a victory. In truth, though, the new report offers scant consolation to those many alarmists whose careers depend on talking up the threat. It says not that they are winning the war to persuade the world of the case for catastrophic anthropogenic climate change – but that the battle is all but lost.

At the heart of the problem lie the computer models which, for 25 years, have formed the basis for the IPCC’s scaremongering: they predicted runaway global warming, when the real rise in temperatures has been much more modest. So modest, indeed, that it has fallen outside the lowest parameters of the IPCC’s prediction range. The computer models, in short, are bunk.

To a few distinguished scientists, this will hardly come as news. For years they have insisted that “sensitivity” – the degree to which the climate responds to increases in atmospheric CO₂ – is far lower than the computer models imagined. In the past, their voices have been suppressed by the bluster and skulduggery we saw exposed in the Climategate emails. From grant-hungry science institutions and environmentalist pressure groups to carbon traders, EU commissars, and big businesses with their snouts in the subsidies trough, many vested interests have much to lose should the global warming gravy train be derailed.

This is why the latest Assessment Report is proving such a headache to the IPCC. It’s the first in its history to admit what its critics have said for years: global warming did “pause” unexpectedly in 1998 and shows no sign of resuming. And, other than an ad hoc new theory about the missing heat having been absorbed by the deep ocean, it cannot come up with a convincing explanation why. Coming from a sceptical blog none of this would be surprising. But from the IPCC, it’s dynamite: the equivalent of the Soviet politburo announcing that command economies may not after all be the most efficient way of allocating resources.

Which leaves the IPCC in a dilemma: does it ’fess up and effectively put itself out of business? Or does it brazen it out for a few more years, in the hope that a compliant media and an eco-brainwashed populace will be too stupid to notice? So far, it looks as if it prefers the second option – a high-risk strategy. Gone are the days when all anybody read of its Assessment Reports were the sexed-up “Summary for Policymakers”. Today, thanks to the internet, sceptical inquirers such as Donna Laframboise (who revealed that some 40 per cent of the IPCC’s papers came not from peer-reviewed journals but from Greenpeace and WWF propaganda) will be going through every chapter with a fine toothcomb.

Al Gore’s “consensus” is about to be holed below the water-line – and those still aboard the SS Global Warming are adjusting their positions. Some, such as scientist Judith Curry of Georgia Tech, have abandoned ship. She describes the IPCC’s stance as “incomprehensible”. Others, such as the EU’s Climate Commissioner, Connie Hedegaard, steam on oblivious. Interviewed last week by the Telegraph’s Bruno Waterfield, she said: “Let’s say that science, some decades from now, said: 'We were wrong, it was not about climate’, would it not in any case have been good to do many of the things you have to do in order to combat climate change?”

If she means needlessly driving up energy prices, carpeting the countryside with wind turbines and terrifying children about a problem that turns out to have been imaginary, then most of us would probably answer “No”.
The second is by Patrick J Michaels, from National Review Online
. . . . The IPCC is really in a pickle. Not only can it be blamed for the lack of any effective (unnecessary) national climate policy, but it is about to produce a report that is going to be obsolete the minute it is published.

Over the years, the IPCC has behaved like a treed cat. Instead of closing its eyes and scurrying to the ground, it climbs onto even higher and thinner branches, while yowling ever louder. How does it back down from a quarter-century of predicting a quarter of a degree (Celsius) of warming every decade, when there’s been none for 17 years now?

In fact, as I demonstrated in a recent presentation to the American Geophysical Union, the reigning suite of climate models has now officially failed, with the difference between them and reality now statistically significant at the 1-in-20 level.

Since the beginning of 2011, at least 16 separate experiments published by nearly 50 researchers show that the “sensitivity” of temperature to carbon dioxide that is characteristic of the IPCC’s climate models is simply too high. “Sensitivity” is the amount of temperature change expected for a nominal doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide.

The new IPCC assessment calls sensitivity “the single most important measure of climate response” because changes in global mean surface temperature are what drive other changes, like sea-level rise. If you blow the sensitivity, you also blow every forecast of what is supposed to happen because of climate change.

Historians tell us scientists are reluctant to abandon their overarching worldviews. The New York Times’ Andrew Revkin wrote in February that there is even greater than normal reluctance to admit to a lower sensitivity “because the recent work is trending towards the published low sensitivity findings from a decade ago from climate scientists best known for their relationships with libertarian groups.” Call me nameless.

So the IPCC has three options:

1. Vote at week’s end to “not accept” the latest report and start over;
2. Note the recent findings and include a prominent disclaimer directing readers to substantially discount anything they say about the effects of future climate change; or
3. Do nothing and mislead the world. Again.

Bet on Door No. 3, with the corollary that whoever legislates or promulgates climate policies based upon the new report will be putting his political career in very serious jeopardy.

— Patrick J. Michaels is the director of the Center for the Study of Science at the Cato Institute.
 

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