Guest essay by Marlo Lewis
Okay, they don’t do so in as many words. But in addition to being more confident than ever (despite a 16-year pause in warming and the growing mismatch between model projections and observations) that man-made climate change is real, they are also more confident nothing really bad is going to happen during the 21st Century.
The scariest parts of the “planetary emergency” narrative popularized by Al Gore and other pundits are Atlantic Ocean circulation shutdown (implausibly plunging Europe into a mini-ice age), ice sheet disintegration raising sea levels 20 feet, and runaway warming from melting frozen methane deposits.
As BishopHill and Judith Curry report on their separate blogs, IPCC now believes that in the 21st Century, Atlantic Ocean circulation collapse is “very unlikely,” ice sheet collapse is “exceptionally unlikely,” and catastrophic release of methane hydrates from melting permafrost is “very unlikely.” You can read it for yourself in Chapter 12 Table 12.4 of the IPCC’s forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report.
But these doomsday scenarios have always been way more fiction than science. For some time now, extreme weather has been the only card left in the climate alarm deck. Climate activists repeatedly assert that severe droughts, floods, and storms (Hurricane Sandy is their current poster child) are now the “new normal,” and they blame fossil fuels.
On their respective blogs Anthony Watts and Roger Pielke, Jr. provide excerpts about extreme weather from Chapter 2 of the IPCC report. Among the findings:
- “Current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin.”
- “In summary, there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale.”
- “In summary, there is low confidence in observed trends in small-scale severe weather phenomena such as hail and thunderstorms because of historical data inhomogeneities and inadequacies in monitoring systems.”
- “Based on updated studies, AR4 [the IPCC 2007 report] conclusions regarding global increasing trends in drought since the 1970s were probably overstated.”
- “In summary, confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extra-tropical cyclones since 1900 is low.”
Pielke Jr. concludes:
“There is really not much more to be said here — the data says what it says, and what it says is so unavoidably obvious that the IPCC has recognized it in its consensus. Of course, I have no doubts that claims will still be made associating floods, drought, hurricanes and tornadoes with human-caused climate change — Zombie science — but I am declaring victory in this debate. Climate campaigners would do their movement a favor by getting themselves on the right side of the evidence.”
For further discussion, see my post “Global Warming: Planet’s Most Hyped Problem” on this week’s National Journal Energy Insiders blog.
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See also: Global warming is ‘no longer a planetary emergency’
Please no!
(“Don” is bad enough!)
Thanks, Roger Knights, for coming to the rescue of the English language, once again. LOL, that’s pretty bad. I hope it wasn’t Freudian (it CERTAINLY was not intentional!). “Don we now our gay apparel, … fa, la, la, laaaaaaaaaaaaaa!” You’d think I’d remember, having such a clue as that in my memory. Meh, closer to December and I’d have nailed that one. Glad you piped up.
Janice
DirkH says:October 5, 2013 at 4:21 am
WW II’s two most diabolical regimes, one of them an ally of the USA, were US creations.
rogerknights says: October 5, 2013 at 9:54 pm
Who enabled Lenin to get to Russia?
“The Germans took a somber decision. Upon the western front they had from the beginning used the most terrible means of offense at their disposal. They had employed poison gas on the largest scale and had invented the ‘Flammenwerfer.’ Nevertheless, it was with a sense of awe that they turned upon Russia the most grisly of weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed train like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.”
-Winston Churchill- The World Crisis, Volume 5
I am seeing more of this stuff about 15, 16, or 17 years of lack of warming. The 1997-1998 El Nino was a spike, not the beginning of the hiatus. Global temperature smoothed by a few years continued to warm into 2001.
@ur momisugly Janice
Therein lies the difference between the European view and the American view. The Europeans knew that it was the Soviets who destroyed the German Army, and they knew they had paid a terrible price for that. So they didn’t think the Soviets would be keen to start another war. They didn’t think the Soviets needed any terrifying. The Americans, on the other hand, seemed far less reluctant, and the Europeans noted that the Mid-West senators were religious. Europeans feared that they meant what they said, and that would mean another war in Europe.
The Marshall Plan was undeniably both a wise and generous move on the part of the United States.
However, the US squandered a lot of the moral credit by adopting a policy of supporting any dictator, however murderous, who proclaimed that he was “anti -Communist”. And the Zippo lighter, once the symbol of American liberators (even outside those parts of the world which were actually liberated by the US), became the implement used to burn down Vietnamese houses.
True, but the rate of warming before 2001 slowed down.
So basically the IPCC, the UN panel that all the global warming poeple pointed to as their honest broker, now admits that every one of the doomsday scenarios that Al Gore told us about in An Inconvenient Truth is now complete crap.