Desperate times in climate alarmism

Computer models, scare stories and ad hominem rants underscore the alarmists’ desperation

Guest essay by Paul Driessen

Al Gore is in full attack model, employing his ridiculous “Climate Reality Project” to “Draw the Line on Denial,” even as he laid off 90% of the staff at his “Alliance for Climate Protection.” Greenpeace has joined the fray, launching a “Dealing in Doubt” campaign that blames ExxonMobil for funding the “global warming denial machine.”

ClimateProgress.org blogger Joe Romm faithfully echoes “Goreacle” and Greenpeace hysterics and blame-casting. To serve his partisan propaganda, he completely ignores the reality that the climate cataclysm cabal outspends the “deniers” by at least $1,000 to $1; ExxonMobil hasn’t supported skeptic groups for years; and the real Big Oil money has gone to extreme green groups.

Chesapeake Energy alone gave $25 million to the Sierra Club, to advance the radical organization’s anti-coal campaign. That one grant is ten times more money than the Heartland Institute received from all fossil fuel energy companies in its entire 29-year history, notes Heartland president Joseph Bast.

Meanwhile, President Obama continues to blame CO2-driven climate warming for tornadoes, hurricanes, wildfires and droughts that are at the same level as, or lower than, they have been for many decades. His State Department is orchestrating climate treaties with island nations that contribute perhaps 0.1% of global carbon dioxide emissions – knowing the treaties could obligate the United States to severe and costly CO2 emission reductions that will drive up energy costs and strangle job creation and economic growth.

His Environmental Protection Agency is already killing jobs and growth. And newly proposed rules would require that all new coal-fired power plants slash carbon dioxide emissions to 1,100 pounds per megawatt hour, some 700 pounds below what advanced modern units do today. The only way to do that is with expensive experimental technology that captures CO2 – and then figure out where to bury it.

Not to be outdone, some in Congress still want “carbon taxes” that the Energy Information Administration says will slash the average American family’s income by some $1,500 per year, on top of the $2,200 per year that the Washington Post says they’ve lost in buying power since 2008.

To help promote this agenda, a Canadian producer has recruited arch-environmentalist David Suzuki, “coal trains of death” climate catastrophist James Hansen, and former Haida Nation Council President Miles Richardson, to present “the wisdom of our elders” on “the global climate crisis.” Her film’s title, “Wakan Tanka,” means “great spirit” or “great mystery” in Lakota, the language of Dakota (Sioux) Indians. Further fanning the flames, a ClimateWire story absurdly claims that “a warming climate has allowed blood-borne tropical diseases to flourish where once they were unheard of” – in European countries where malaria was endemic for centuries and was not wiped out until the early 1970s.

A more accurate description of all this Climate Armageddon storm and fury would be another Lakota phrase, tatonka chesli, meaning “big bull excrement.” Indeed, Australia’s newly elected Prime Minister, Tony Abbot, has said claims that humans are causing dangerous climate change are “complete crap.”

Mr. Abbot intends to scrap his country’s carbon dioxide cap-tax-and-trade law. EU industry leaders worry that Europe’s climate change and “green” energy policies are threatening “a systemic industrial massacre,” as soaring electricity and natural gas prices make companies less and less competitive in international markets. They want those policies changed and hydraulic fracturing to move forward. China, India and other major CO2 emitters absolutely refuse to set binding targets for reducing those emissions.

The real climate change deniers

We “skeptics” and “deniers” have never questioned the reality of climate change. We know global warming, global cooling and climate change are “real,” and have been throughout Earth’s history. What we deny are assertions that human CO2 emissions have replaced the complex solar, planetary and cosmic forces that caused previous changes, and that what we are experiencing now is unprecedented and likely to be catastrophic. What we insist on is solid evidence that alarmist claims have merit.

We believe in the scientific method. Hypotheses, assertions, models and scary scenarios must be supported by actual evidence, data and observations – before we acquiesce to demands that we hogtie our energy system, economy, jobs and living standards. Up to now they have presented no such evidence.

The Real Climate Change Deniers are the alarmists who deny that natural forces still dominate weather and climate events, and refuse to acknowledge that thousands of scientists do not agree with IPCC proclamations and prescriptions.

31,500 American scientists have signed the Oregon Petition dismissing fears of “catastrophic” global warming and climate disruption; over 1,000 international scientists dissent from manmade global warming claims. Claims of a “97% consensus” with the IPCC are pure baloney.

No wonder climate alarmists are so angry, desperate and vicious. Now they have two more reasons.

Two new scientific reports obliterate the supposed justification and urgency for economically devastating anti-fossil fuel policies. One is by the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC); the other, incredibly, was written by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change itself.

The new NIPCC report – Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science – makes a compelling case that the IPCC hypotheses, models and scares have no basis in reality. The 1,018-page report convincingly and systematically debunks IPCC claims that carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gas emissions are causing “dangerous” global warming and climate change – and that its computer models can be relied on as a credible basis for alarming climate forecasts and scenarios.

The NIPCC Summary for Policymakers is illuminating and easy to understand; its 14 pages should be required reading for legislators, regulators, journalists and anyone interested in climate change science.

The report makes it clear that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has greatly exaggerated the amount of warming that is likely to occur if atmospheric CO2 concentrations were to double, to around 800 ppm (0.08%). Moreover, moderate warning up to 2 degrees C (3.6 degrees F) would cause no net harm to the environment or human well-being. Indeed, it would likely be beneficial, lengthening growing seasons and expanding croplands and many wildlife habitats, especially since more carbon dioxide would help plants grow faster and better, even under adverse conditions like pollution, limited water or high temperatures. By contrast, even 2 degrees C of cooling could be disastrous for agriculture and efforts to feed growing human populations, without plowing under more habitats.

The NIPCC also destroys the false IPCC claims that computer models “prove” recent global warming is due to human CO2 emissions, and can forecast future global temperatures, climates and events. In reality, the models greatly exaggerate climate sensitivity to carbon dioxide levels; assume all warming since the industrial revolution began are due to human carbon dioxide; input data contaminated by urban heat island effects; and rely on simplistic configurations of vital drivers of Earth’s climate system (or simply ignore them), such as solar variations, cosmic ray fluxes, winds, clouds, precipitation, volcanoes, ocean currents and recurrent phenomena like the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (El Nino and La Nina).

This is GIGO at its worst: Faulty assumptions, faulty data, faulty codes and algorithms, simplistic analytical methodologies and other garbage in – predictive garbage out.

The NIPCC authors conclude that existing climate models “should therefore not be used to guide public policy formulation, until they have been validated [by comparison to actual observations] and shown to have predictive value.” And yet, the deficient models are being used: to justify policies, laws and regulations that stigmatize and penalize hydrocarbon use, promote and subsidize wind and solar energy, and have hugely negative effects on jobs, family energy bills, the overall economy, and people’s lives.

Countries are spending countless billions of dollars annually on faulty to fraudulent IPCC climate models and studies that purport to link every adverse event or problem to manmade climate change; subsidized renewable energy programs that displace food crops and kill wildlife; adaptation and mitigation measures against future disasters that exist only in “scenarios” generated by the IPCC’s GIGO computer models; and welfare, food stamp and energy assistance programs for the newly unemployed and impoverished. Equally bad, they are losing tens of billions in royalty, tax and other revenue that they would receive if they were not blocking oil, gas and coal development and use – and destroying manufacturing jobs that depend on cheap, reliable energy, so that companies can compete in international marketplaces.

The latest IPCC report will be released soon. However, Ross McKitrick and other analysts have already reviewed and debunked a leaked semi-final draft. That draft reveals that even the IPCC has had to acknowledge problems with its models, temperature forecasts and predictions of planetary disaster. As McKitrick observes in a hard-hitting Financial Post article, “Everything you need to know about the dilemma the IPCC faces is summed up in one remarkable graph.”

The graph dramatically shows that every UN IPCC climate model over the past 22 years (1990-2012) predicted that average global temperatures would be as much as 0.9 degrees C (1.6 degrees F) higher than they actually were! This is hardly surprising, considering how defective the models are, and how heavily they depend on the notion that carbon dioxide is the primary driver of global warming.

Notes McKitrick, chair of graduate studies at the University of Guelph (Ontario) Department of Economics: “What is commonly dismissed as the ‘skeptical’ or ‘denier’ view coincides with real-world observations.” That is the key point.

We IPCC skeptics want evidence and observations to back up the hypotheses and predictions. Instead, when the observations don’t conform to the predictions, the IPCC ignores the data and trumpets the models, assertions and scary disaster scenarios.

Indeed, says McKitrick, the IPCC is in “full denial mode.” Despite its own graph screaming the opposite, the IPCC continues to insist that it has “very high confidence” that its models correctly represent the effects of rising atmospheric CO2 levels on global surface temperature trends; that it is “extremely likely” that “more than half” of the increase in global average surface temperatures between 1951 and 2010 were due to human influences; and that the planet will “continue” to warm catastrophically unless drastic actions are taken to curb greenhouse gas emissions.

Put another way, considering the 17-year pause in global temperature increases, the abject failure of the models, and the lower confidence levels expressed about other findings in the full IPCC report, increasing the confidence levels attributed to the models and human influences is “incomprehensible,” says Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology.

The UN IPCC claims are patently ridiculous. It is commonly acknowledged that fully half of planetary warming during the twentieth century came during the first half, 1900-1950, which includes the 1930s and Dust Bowl years, when so many high temperature records were set, and before atmospheric carbon dioxide levels really began to climb. The period 1951-2010 includes not just two warming periods, but also the period when average global temperatures were falling, and scientists were “almost unanimous” that the cooling trend would reduce agricultural output for the rest of the century.

Moreover, the planet can hardly “continue” to warm catastrophically if there has been no warming at all for 17 years, following a decade of cooling and a mere twenty years of mild warming.

It gets even worse. Confronted with all this truly disastrous news on the eve of their upcoming global warming summit, IPCC politicians, bureaucrats and eco-activists are trying to figure out how to cover up the bad news. Germany wants all references to the absence of warming deleted from the IPCC report. Whereas 20 years of mild warming were enough to demand immediate drastic action to avoid a climate cataclysm, now the Germans say 17 years of no warming is “too short” and thus “misleading.”

Hungary doesn’t want the IPCC to give “deniers” more ammunition. Belgium wants the “world’s most authoritative climate body” to manipulate the data and graphs, by using a different starting year that cleverly creates a more noticeable upward temperature trend. The Obama Administration wants the IPCC to explain away the absence of warming, by saying the mysteriously missing atmospheric heat was somehow absorbed by the upper 1.2 miles of oceans waters, which have not actually warmed, according to ARGO project data, or perhaps somehow in the really deep ocean, where we have no data.

In other words, if the models and evidence disagree, the evidence must be wrong. The IPCC is infallible.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power – Black death.