Washington Examiner

The age of climate alarmism is coming to an end

You can be forgiven for not noticing that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a summary of its Fifth Assessment Report late last month.

The report landed with a thud, criticized and even mocked by many leading climate scientists. The distinguished science journal Nature editorialized that this should be the last report issued by the UN body.

This is just the latest signal that the age of climate alarmism is over. Given five tries to convince the world that human activity is causing catastrophic warming of the planet, runaway sea-level rise and various weather disasters, the public still doesn’t buy it.

We’re all skeptics now because the science simply does not back up the hypothesis. For starters, there’s been no rise in global temperatures for 15 years.

The IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report concedes for the first time that global temperatures have not risen since 1998, despite a 7 percent rise in carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions.

To put that into perspective, global human CO2 emissions in the last 15 years represent about one-third of all human CO2 emissions since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and yet temperatures didn’t budge.

Nearly all of the UN-approved climate computer models were wrong. The IPCC finally admitted as much.

http://m.washingtonexaminer.com/the-age-of-climate-alarmism-is-coming-to-an-end/article/2537417

—

Global Warming as a 21st Century Religion

Posted: 22/06/2013 00:00

G.K. Chesterton said that “when people stop believing in orthodox religion, rather than believe in nothing, they will believe in anything”. One of the ersatz religions which fills the void in recent years is belief in Catastrophic Man-Made Global Warming. It claims to be based on science. But it has all the characteristics of an eschatological cult.

It has its own priesthood and ecclesiastical establishment – the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; they alone can interpret its sacred scriptures – the Assessment Reports; it anathematises as ‘deniers’ anyone who casts doubt on its certainties; above all it predicts imminent doom if we do not follow its precepts and make the sacrifices it prescribes.

What most clearly distinguishes the Catastrophic Global Warming cult from science is that it is not refutable by facts. As Parliament enacted the Climate Change Bill, on the presumption that the world was getting warmer, it snowed in London in October – the first time in 74 years. Supporters explained “extreme cold is a symptom of global warming”!

The Met Office – whose climate model is the cult’s crystal ball to forecast centuries ahead – has made a series of spectacularly unreliable short term forecasts: “Our children will not experience snow” (that was 2000, before the recent run of cold winters), a barbecue summer (before the dismal 2011 summer), the drought will continue (last spring before the wettest summer on record). Now they say that rain and floods are the new normal. But – hot or cold, wet or dry – global warming is always to blame.

Alarmists are reluctant to admit that the global surface temperature has not increased for 16 years, despite CO2 emissions rising far more than predicted. They wave this inconvenient truth away with the non-sequitur that this decade is the hottest since records began, so the world is still warming. If you climb a hill and reach a flat plateau you are higher than before – but the plateau is flat, not rising. When cornered, global warming alarmists assert that the current pause is simply the result of unspecified ‘natural variations’. That implies that the pronounced warming over the previous 25 years may have been amplified by ‘natural variations’ in the other direction. In which case, the likely temperature rise for a given increase in CO2 may be less than previously estimated or required to produce the threatened doom.

In 2006 I asked how long the pause in warming would have to persist before the Met Office would revise its model. They replied that, since it is based on known laws of physics, they would never adjust it. Just like the German philosopher Hegel, who claimed to derive the laws of nature from first principles: when told that the facts did not agree with his theories, Hegel replied: “So much the worse for the facts”! Climate models do incorporate some established physical laws including the basic greenhouse effect which, having studied physics at Cambridge, I accept. This implies that doubling the concentration of CO2 will raise the temperature by a fairly harmless 1.2ºC. But the models amplify this several fold using assumptions about complex phenomena which cannot yet be reduced to simple physical laws.

This cult enables adherents to feel morally superior at little personal cost. Buy a Prius or vote Green and save the planet. Unfortunately, costly renewables are driving many into fuel poverty and manufacturing jobs overseas. Action by Britain is pointless unless China, India and Africa join in. They are most vulnerable to climate change. But they are vulnerable because they are poor. They will remain poor until they harness energy like us. Requiring them to forego fossil fuels in favour of renewables costing several times more condemns them to remain poor. The cult requires sacrificing the poor to Gaia. As Professor Bruckner concludes: “save the earth, punish mankind” .

Peter Lilley was a speaker at this year’s HowTheLightGetsIn festival

——–

Scott Thong Yu Yuen

Poor Martin Khor, Still Desperately Pushing Global Warming Which No One Else Believes in Anymore

October 31, 11

Poor Martin Khor, Still Desperately Pushing Global Warming Which No One Else Believes in Anymore

October 31, 11

I admit that I will gleefully engage in plenty of schadenfreude and I toooooooollllld you so when the global warming hysterians and hucksters are finally forced to eat their words. Especially Martin Khor.

Floods and global climate chaos

Global Trends
By MARTIN KHOR

…

Climate scientists are reluctant to link each of the floods directly to climate change, as this is hard to prove. But there is a general belief that global warming contributes to the increased incidence of flooding.

A scientist at the World Meteo­rological Organisation last year explained how the warming of the oceans increased cloud formation and contributed to the devastating Pakistan floods.

Dublin was affected by flash floods earlier this year. An Irish newspaper, linking it to climate change, cited a flood risk management report of the Office of Public Works in 2009 which claimed that “the frequency, pattern and severity of flooding are expected to increase as a result of climate change.”

Meanwhile, a United Kingdom government-linked report released last week described how climate change is likely to create hundreds of millions of refugees around the world as they try to escape from areas affected by global warming.

The refugees may have to move from their homes as climate change induces events such as floods, droughts, storms and heatwaves, according to the Foresight group, part of Britain’s Office for Science.

However, many of these refugees may move into even worse affected areas, such as coastal areas that are vulnerable to floods from storms and sea level rise.

The floods and the sobering predictions on climate refugees are sober reminders that political leaders need to take global warming more seriously. The interest to act globally on climate change has waned in the past two years.

So global warming causes more flooding, including the curent Thailand floods.

…Even though the globe didn’t warm in the past 15 years:

And maybe, just maybe, the world is yawning about climate change action because of the ever-mounting evidence that Anthropogenic Global Warming is bunk.

Or maybe it is semi-regular revelations of faked ‘science’ supporting AGW.

Or it could be that more and more scientists are refuting AGW:

– 900+ peer-reviewed papers skeptical of AGW.
– 31,000 prominent scientists deny AGW
– Another 1000 scientists reject AGW
– 230 signatories from the American Physical Society skeptical of AGW
– Nobel Prize for Physics winner quits the American Physical Society to protest its belief in AGW

But don’t tell that to Martin Khor, the tears of grief he sheds may cause another localized flood.

Posted in Global Warming Fears, Malaysiana | 3 Comments »