Guest essay by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Once upon a time, the meetings of the World Economic Forum in Davos were gatherings of free-market economists and entrepreneurs. Not any more. Predatory corporatism and pietistic étatisme have moved in and captured the Davos event. Their dismal handmaiden, the Thermageddon cult, was not slow to follow.
This year’s WEF annual “insight report” on global risks bizarrely rates “climate change” and “extreme weather events” as two of the three global threats with the greatest combined impact and likelihood (Fig. 1).
Figure 1: As the “climate crisis” fades to a record low, the imagined threats from “climate change” and “extreme weather” have soared to a record high (top right) among the profiteers of doom in Davos.
As climate science becomes frozen in record Antarctic ice, as The Pause grows ever longer, and as the IPCC (another international bunch of crooks for which the racketeer-influenced criminal organization that is modern Switzerland provides a jurisdiction-free safe haven) slashes its near-term predictions of global warming to a record low, the Thermageddon cult has silently captured the World Economic Forum.
Remarkably, the date of the capture is highly visible (Fig. 2). Before 2011, environmental “threats” did not figure among the WEF’s top five global risks by impact (top) and likelihood (bottom). From 2011 onward, the green panels marking supposed environmental “risks” startlingly proliferate.
Figure 2. The WEF’s top five global risks by impact (top) and by likelihood (bottom) have been dominated by imagined environmental catastrophes (green panels) since 2011. Diagram based on the WEF’s 2014 Global Risks report.
Yet there was no particular reason for alarm about our effect on the climate in 2011. What had happened? Perhaps the usual suspects, having failed in their big push for a total shutdown of the West at Copenhagen in 2009, looked around for new international bodies to capture and eventually lit upon the politically-naïve World Economic Forum.
I use the word “naïve” advisedly. For the Davos risk report, even by the low standards set by climate-change bed-wetters everywhere, is an exceptionally hysterical and overblown document. The WEF has gone full stupid.
Its pompous global-risks report says: “Environmental risks also feature prominently in this year’s list, appearing as three of the top 10 global risks of greatest concern.
“Water crises, for instance, rank as the third highest concern. This illustrates a continued and growing awareness of the global water crisis as a result of mismanagement and increased competition for already scarce water resources from economic activity and population growth. Coupled with extreme weather events such as floods and droughts, which appears sixth on the list, the potential impacts are real and happening today.
“Climate change, ranked fifth on the list, is the key driver of such uncertain and changing weather patterns, causing an increased frequency of extreme weather events such as floods and droughts.”
Now, the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report makes it quite plain that one cannot yet attribute any extreme-weather event to “global warming”. It specifically states that there is no discernible additional risk of cyclones, storms, droughts, and floods. And analyses such as Dr. Ryan Maue’s Accumulated Cyclone Energy Index confirm this. Yet the report wails, “Typhoon Haiyan took a heavy toll on the Philippines, even as global leaders debated climate change in Warsaw in November 2013.”
It moans on: “Climate change features among the five most likely and most impactful risks. Among other environmental risks, extreme weather events are considered the second most likely, and water crises also appear high on the list.”
And the solution? “This suggests a pressing need for better public information about the potential consequences of environmental threats, given that collective action will need to be based on common understanding.”
Here we go again. The Davos Thermageddonites blame the continuing failure of the West to shut itself down on insufficient propaganda to convince the public that global warming that has not happened caused extreme weather that has.
The fashionable nonsense continues with a whine about third-world countries being most at risk: “Drought and flood could increasingly ravage the economies of poorer countries, locking them more deeply into cycles of poverty.”
The report winds itself up into the usual mannered frenzy with a panel luridly entitled “An Emerging Spectrum of Catastrophic Risks: Existential Threats”, contributed by the “Global Agenda Council on Catastrophic Risks”, of which more in a moment
“Climate change”, says the Global Armageddon Commissariat, “could tip into a self-reinforcing, runaway phase of rising temperatures.”
Er, no, it can’t. I’m not sure that even the holy books of IPeCaC have ever suggested that runaway temperature feedback is even a possibility. In any event, elementary considerations in the mathematics of feedback amplification make runaway feedback an impossibility.
Figure 3 shows the plot of the IPCC’s 2007 estimates of climate sensitivity at CO2 doubling: y axis) against loop gain γ (x axis). The IPCC’s 3.26 [2.0, 4.5] K interval of estimated sensitivities is marked, showing its implicit loop gain values 0.64 [0.42, 0.74].
Figure 3. Climate sensitivity at CO2 doubling (y axis) against feedback loop gains γ = λ0f on the interval [–1, 3] (x axis), where λ0 is the Planck sensitivity parameter 0.31 K W–1 m2 and f is the sum in W m–2 K–1 of all unamplified temperature feedbacks. The interval of climate sensitivities given in IPCC (2007) is shown as a red-bounded region; a more physically realistic interval, consistent with Lindzen & Choi (2009, 2011) is bounded in green. In electronic circuitry, the singularity at γ = +1 has a physical meaning: in the climate, it has none. In the climate, therefore, the feedback-amplification equation requires a damping term that is absent in the models.
Process engineers designing electronic circuits intended not to oscillate adopt a maximum value γ = 0.1 for the loop gain (and usually an order of magnitude below this). Thus, in a stable circuit, everything to the right of the blue line is designed out.
For the past 750 million years, the climate has behaved as a stable circuit. The temperature-feedback loop gain cannot much have exceeded +0.1, for throughout that time, according to Scotese (1999) (and see Zachos, 2005), global mean surface temperature has varied by only 8 K, or 3%, either side of the long-run mean.
In the past 420,000 years the near-constancy of global temperature has been still more impressive (Fig. 4). Absolute global temperature reconstructed from the Vostok ice cores fluctuated by less than 3 K, or 1%, either side of the mean.
Figure 4. Global temperature reconstruction over the past 420,000 years derived from δ18O anomalies in air trapped in ice strata at Vostok station, Antarctica. To render the anomalies global, the values of the reconstructed anomalies (y axis) have been divided by the customary factor 2 to allow for polar amplification. Diagram based on Petit et al. (1999). Note that all four previous interglacial warm periods, at intervals of 80,000-125,000 years, were at least as warm as the current warm period. Data source: Petit et al. (1999).
Indeed, the feedback-amplification may be the wrong equation altogether. For in an electronic circuitry the striking singularity at γ = +1 describes a physical reality. At that point, the voltage – which had been striving to reach positive inifinity – flicks from the positive to the negative rail. In the climate, however, no such transition is possible. Temperature feedbacks that have been as strongly net-positive as the IPCC fancifully imagines they are cannot suddenly drive global temperature down rather than up. Besides, there is such a thing as negative voltage, but there is no such thing as negative temperature.
In short, a damping term is necessary to permit the Bode feedback-amplification equation to be applied to the climate at all. But any value sufficient to keep the loop gain well shy of the singularity would limit climate sensitivity to the interval marked “Probable” in green on Fig. 3, implying little more than 1 K global warming per CO2 doubling. There is, therefore, no climate problem: and, even if there were, the runaway feedback eagerly imagined by the WEF cannot exist, does not exist, and has shown not the slightest sign of having existed in the past 750 million years.
The WEF rants on to blame the war in Syria on global warming: “For example, while there is no doubt a number of reasons caused the devastating civil war, recent research is unearthing the hidden role that climate change, extreme weather events and a water crisis also played in Syria. Between 2006 and 2011, up to 60% of Syria’s land experienced one of the worst long-term droughts in modern history. Together with the mismanagement of water resources, this drought led to total crop failure for 75% of farmers, forcing their migration and increasing tensions in urban cities that were already experiencing economic insecurity and instability.”
That passage nicely illustrates the problem posed by the lack of anything that our ancestors from the late Middle Ages to the Second World War would have recognized as an education on the part of the “world leaders” who flatter themselves by attending the Davos junket.
For if every drought is blamed on global warming, and every flood is blamed on global warming, and every heatwave is blamed on global warming, and every circumpolar-vortex cold snap is blamed on global warming, two conclusions follow. First, that global warming has been relentlessly increasing for 4567 million years, entirely accounting for every climatic event that has ever occurred, is now occurring, or will ever occur. Yet if global warming has been increasing for that long, how can we tell whether the small warming that ceased 17 years 4 months ago was anything much to do with us?
Secondly, if every change in the weather is held to be our fault, how can the hypothesis that manmade warming is a problem be falsified? A hypothesis that cannot be falsified is little more than a curiosity. It is not science, and no policy action may legitimately be taken on the basis of unless and until it is first modified to make it testable and is then tested and not disproven.
At least the Davos dirge admits, albeit in a roundabout way, that its take on climate science goes beyond even that of the generally extremist IPCC: “The risk multiplier that climate change presents to water shortages, biodiversity loss, ocean damage and deforestation also creates a complex ‘heterarchy’, rather than a simple hierarchy, of environmental risks, often with non-linear patterns of change and self-fuelling feedback mechanisms. This heterarchy is not contained within IPCC models, but could encompass the greatest economic risk of all from climate change.” Runaway feedbacks again.
The report maunders on: “Climate change could tip into a self-reinforcing, runaway phase of rising temperatures”. Runaway feedbacks for the third time. It ain’t gonna happen. Back to Process Engineering 101, boys!
But the Wild Extremists and Fanatics are not done yet. They go on to talk of climate change as threatening “to make the Earth increasingly uninhabitable”. Oh, pur-leaze! Some 90% of the world’s species of flora and fauna live in the tropics, where the last time I looked (on a recent visit to the avian paradise that is Colombia) the weather is somewhat warmer than at the poles, where around 1% of the world’s species live.
An elementary knowledge of high-school geography ought to have been enough to make the Davos dunderheads think twice before musing that the Earth would become “increasingly uninhabitable” as it warmed.
The “Global Agenda Council on Climate Change” contributes a second box to the report, this time entitled “Poor Countries Are Losing Ground in the Race to Adapt to a Changing Climate”
It says: “The year 2014 is likely to be crucial for addressing climate risks, a point made by United Nations (UN) climate chief Christiana Figueres at the Warsaw Climate Change Conference. Countries made only limited progress on issues such as emissions reduction, loss and damage compensation, and adaptation. Greater progress is urgently needed to create incentives and mechanisms to finance action against climate change while efforts are made to keep temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius.”
There is no scientific basis for the notion that global temperature in 1750 was ideal and that anything more than 2 Celsius degrees above that temperature is less than ideal. What is the ideal global temperature interval, and on what scientific basis is that interval determined? The WEF fails to enlighten us on either question.
Who has captured the World Economic Forum? One clue lies in the membership of the “Global Agenda Council on Climate Change”, a title that sounds uncannily like one of the thousands of KGB-funded front groups furtively set up throughout the West by the Soviet Union as its sock-puppets to peddle disinformation in the bad old days.
The members of the Commissariat are Swiss Re (a reinsurance broker as notorious as Lloyds of London for exploiting non-existent global warming to talk up premiums); Notre Dame Global Adaptation Institute (taxpayer-funded me-too academic rent-seekers); Yvo De Boer, KPMG International Cooperative (he once ran the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change); Yara International (“sustainable agriculture”); Connecticut Department of Energy and Environmental Protection (taxpayer-funded); Carnegie Institution for Science (me-too); Christiana Figueres, United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (’nuff said); Connie Hedegaard, European Commission (’nuff said); Tokyo Institute of Technology (taxpayer-funded); HSBC Asia Pacific (me-too); Deutsche Bank (long-term global-warming fanatics); Aecom Technology Corporation (architects and builders “Dedicated To Making The World A Better Place”); Qatar Foundation (they hosted the 2012 UN climate summit at which I inadvertently represented Burma); Ministry of Water and Environmental Affairs, South Africa (taxpayer-funded); Federal Ministry of Germany for the Environment, Nature Conservation and Nuclear Safety (taxpayer-funded); Baker & McKenzie (“Global Corporate Sustainability” law firm); World Bank (unelected international racket profiteering from every fashionable scare); and Climate Group (the usual suspects, including New York State).
This rogues’ gallery is a revealing illustration of the convergence of large corporations and taxpayer-funded groups who have adopted an extremist stance on the climate question not because it is scientific but because it is fashionable.
Finally, Fig. 5 gives the list of the Top Ten Global Risks as imagined by the World Economic Forum.
Figure 5. The WEF’s Top Ten Global Risks. Its report says: “Climate change, ranked fifth on the list (see Box 1.4), is the key driver of such uncertain and changing weather patterns, causing an increased frequency of extreme weather events such as floods and droughts. It is important to consider the combined implications of these environmental risks on key development and security issues, such as food security, and political and social instability, ranked eighth and 10th respectively.”
It is difficult to decide whether the authors of this childishly extreme document genuinely believe the anti-scientific fantasies and fatuities they peddle or whether the global classe politique has at last realized that global warming is never going to occur at anything like the previously-predicted rate. If CO2 goes on rising and the temperature goes on not rising, everyone will know the governing class was wrong when it told us it was 95% confident it was right. So its best escape route is to bully scientifically-illiterate governments into vastly reducing global CO2 emissions and then to claim that the continuing failure of the world to warm is their noble achievement rather than what would have happened anyway.
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DirkH says: @ur momisugly January 24, 2014 at 2:22 am
Yeah, you can always vote for a party that is not member of
http://www.globeinternational.org/
Good luck finding one.
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Oh, MY!
I knew it was bad but I didn’t realize it was THAT BAD.
Thanks for the information.
Abe had the guts to tackle the real threat. Nuclear armed illiberal totalitarian states can actually kill directly. The world is barking up the wrong tree.
blackadderthe4th says…..
You link to the William Connelly aka The Stoat’s WIKI as a fair and even bio?
HAHAHA… ROTFLMAO
blackadder you sure are a British sitcom!
Michael:
re your post at January 24, 2014 at 4:51 am.
Yes, climate change is happening. Climate always has changed and always will change.
If you and/or your supervisor manage to find a way to alter how climate changes then please do all possible to avoid your finding being reported to those meeting at Davos. It would provide them with the most powerful weapon of mass destruction ever imagined.
Richard
I fogot, despite the Soviet Union being NO MORE, the “Harvard Soviet Economists” still have a yearly orgy to celabrate their ill gotten riches, where they all get drunk and spew more vile stuff than Linda Blair in Exorcist One!
Michael says: @ur momisugly January 24, 2014 at 4:51 am
I don’t know where this motivation comes from to state that climate warming would not be a major thread. I am a climate researchers and my supervisor one of the IPCC lead authors. I can tell you for sure that climate change is already a major thread which links to and reinforces numerous global conflicts…..
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I will agree that ‘climate change’ can be a threat but the threat is NOT GLOBAL WARMING, the threat as many have identified is the descent into another Ice age. And if, as is becoming more probable that is where we are headed then wiping out cheap sources of energy is criminally insane.
Here is a recent paper from fall 2012.
As Dr Brown has mentioned many times climate is a chaotic open bistable/multistable dynamical system
WHERE THE REAL DEBATE IS:
1.) Most scientists on both sides of the debate agree with the Milankovitch cycles. Gerard Roe did a recent modification that took care of the objections SEE: http://motls.blogspot.com/2010/07/in-defense-of-milankovitch-by-gerard.html and http://culter.colorado.edu/~saelias/glacier.html
2. ) Most scientists on both sides agree we are near the half precession point and solar energy at the earth surface in high summer at 65N is declining.
3.) The sticking point is what minimum level of solar energy in summer at 65N is the threshold for the descent into an ice age. The latest I have seen is “Comparison [of the Holocene] with MIS 19c, a close astronomical analogue characterized by an equally weak summer insolation minimum (474Wm−2) and a smaller overall decrease from maximum summer solstice insolation values, suggests that glacial inception is possible despite the subdued insolation forcing, if CO2 concentrations were 240±5 ppmv (Tzedakis et al., 2012) “ link
4.) The fourth point that no one is talking about is how unstable the weather becomes near that threshold. The general point of view is the climate has two stable states, warm and cold. That is it is bi-stable like a sail boat that is right side up or upside down. When it is in the in-between state the climate can swing wildly. This means approaching that threshold point can be as bad as crossing it. Note the steep inclines and declines in temperature in the geologic record. – graph
Even Woods Hole Observatory warned about wide temperature swings a few years ago and that politicians maybe barking up the wrong tree.
Even your side of the debate can see glaciation is possible.
it at ten times the current concentration for the entire period the ice age lasted….”
Nice post Me Lud. Yet there is a ray of hope penetrating the BS.
http://joannenova.com.au/2014/01/dont-miss-the-eu-transformation-on-renewable-energy/
Actually, if we interpret the value of feedback as corresponding to deviation of the slope of outgoing radiation from what it would be if emissivity and albedo were constant with temperature (that is, independent of temperature, not changed by temperature). f>1 corresponds then to negative slopes. If we then interpret the sensitivity as some reference forcing divided by the slope of outgoing radiation, we discover the surprising result that a sufficiently “strong feedback” actually results in negative sensitivity. This surprised me to when I found it, but it arises as a result of the way f is defined. Why? Think of it this way. With in the positive x postive y quandrant of a graph, you have a straight line with positive slope that corresponds to f=0. The way we define f, rotation of that line about the origin clockwise corresponds to slopes of “positive feedbacks,” and rotation of that line about the origin counterclockwise corresponds to lines of “negative feedbacks.” But that line rotated far enough counterclockwise will correspond to the same slope as if it had be rotated clockwise a certain amount: this is just rotational symmetry. It turns out that as long as the slopes remain in the positive x positive y quandrant, the notation definition of f is intuitive, but outside of that (that is, when slopes become negative) the definition of f becomes rather counter-intuitive.
Of course, this is largely a moot point since the slope is clearly positive in reality.
A portion of Mr. Monckton’s argument assumes the existence of the climate sensitivity aka the equilibrium climate sensitivity (TECS). TECS is a ratio in which the numerator is the change in the global surface air temperature at equilibrium. The denominator is the change in the logarithm of the CO2 concentration. That TECS exists implies this ratio to be a constant. However, as the global surface air temperature at equilibrium is not an observable feature of the real world, when a numerical value is assigned to TECS, there is not a way in which this assignment can be tested. It follows that TECS does not exist as a scientific concept. Another shortcoming of TECS is that it provides no information to a policy maker about the outcomes from his/her policy decisions; this follows from the definition of the mutual information as the information theoretic measure of a relationship between observables.
A science of global warming would have to be built upon observables. The global average surface air temperature when averaged over a specified finite interval in time is one candidate.
Related to this interesting posting, I have noticed that there has been a large number of items in recent weeks on the CBC (radio and probably TV), Globe and Mail (newspaper and their monthly “Report on Business Magazine”), our local newspaper, and probably other news outlets that I don’t recall on the subject of insurance companies and recent “extreme weather”. The message has always been that the insurance companies are carefully analyzing our weather and “extreme weather” events have led to increasing losses for them; it looks to me like a clever way of preparing us for increased insurance rates (or refused policies).
I don’t recall any articles dealing with the fact that increasingly expensive construction has been undertaken on the coasts, where Man meets Ocean. Nor for the fact that there has been no increase in the number of hurricanes and cyclones, etc., in recent years. Of course Sandy is always portrayed as a strong hurricane and the fact that a blocking high prevented an “ordinary” storm from moving eastward, the way most of them have done, is rarely mentioned. (There is also little mention of Hurricane Hazel, which was also forced west- and north-ward; how often do we hear about the similarities between Hazel and Sandy?)
Ian M
Et tu, Coca Cola?
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/01/24/science/earth/threat-to-bottom-line-spurs-action-on-climate.html?ref=world
Ed Mertin says:
January 24, 2014 at 6:01 am
…. Billionaires are on their way to becoming trillionaires because Conservatives are ‘Perfectly Okay’ with it.
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Ed, you completely missed the point. America’s Rulling Class is not on our side no matter what sheepskin they are hiding under.
You forget that the present financial mess can be laid at Clinton’s door. He signed the five banking laws that among other things did away with the depression era laws design to prevent another depression while allowing the market for credit default swaps to go unregulated. This set of laws gave the USA “Too Big To Fail” banks, unqualified buyers and the AIG/Bank bailout.
Clinton also pushed the ratification of the World Trade Organization and then worked tirelessly to bring China into the WTO and gave China “most Favored nation” trade status. He changed how the government reports unemployment and therefore hid our present 23% unemployment rate caused by shipping of US jobs overseas, again leading to the present and continuing financial crisis in the USA.
Do not make the mistake of Republicans = Conservatives. The dislike of both parties is why the Tea Party came into existence. Remember that Ron Paul, the darling of the tea party is rabidly anti-banker. Sen. Daniel Webster, during the debate over the reauthorization of the Second National Bank of the U.S. in 1832, summed up why.
The Tea Party beat the Occupy Wall Street crowd to this understanding by a couple of years. Interesting that despite this general agreement of USA voters, NO ONE IN CONGRESS HAS KILLED THE FED. Heck Ron Paul could not even get Congress to pass a bill to AUDIT the Fed. A list of the Democrat and Republicans who voted and the story of the bill is HERE.
The Fed was finally made to show where the bank bailout money went after years of fighting. Seems it went to Europe to bailout EU banks.
Judicial Watch Sues Federal Reserve for Records Detailing U.S. Taxpayer Bailout of European Banks
The US Federal Reserve bailout of Europe: Who knew?
“Michel” says, “it’s somehow disappointing that an argument ad anecdotum is being used: ‘I’ve had one bad experience with one Swiss bank therefore the whole country is full of racketeers.’
The correct name for the logical fallacy of which “Michel” accuses me is the argumentum a dicto secundum quid ad dictum simpliciter, or in English the argument from converse accident, where the perp argues inappropriately from the particular to the general.
I respond thus to the charge. The opening of a Swiss bank account in my name, albeit that it was almost 25 years ago, was not the sole episode. There was the subsequent failure of one of Zurich’s leading banks to provide information to the authorities at my request, and the further failure of the authorities to require the bank to respond. That triple error is evidence of a systemic failure, further compounded by the more recent refusal of the appropriate authorities in Switzerland, the splendidly-named but useless Bureau de l’Escroquerie, to respond to my well-evidenced complaint that the IPCC has committed the criminal offense of obtaining a pecuniary advantage by the deception of pretending that the rate of global warming has been accelerating over the past 150 years on the basis of a bogus statistical technique.
The unfortunate truth is that the Swiss make a great deal of money by allowing international rackets like the IPCC to be headquartered there. In the UK I’d have had the IPCC in court by now, for England and Wales (unlike Scotland or the United States) allow private prosecutions of public authorities: but the IPCC, safely headquartered in the one jurisdiction that can be absolutely relied upon not to lift a finger however much money the IPCC makes by those of its climatic findings that are outright falsehoods, knows that it can get away with any amount of deception with total impunity.
This is a symptom of a growing problem. As more and more power and wealth are transferred from elected hands in those countries still fortunate enough to have democracy to unelected hands in various international unelected bodies, the growing influence and power of these bodies is untrammelled either by any law or by any electorate. Switzerland, in providing cover for a goodly proportion of such organizations, and in simply ignoring the pleas of those who wish to draw its attention to criminalities perpetrated by such organizations, is doing the world a serious disservice and will, in due course, be punished for its aiding and abetting organized crime worldwide.
PaulH says: @ur momisugly January 24, 2014 at 6:27 am
When they say “Global governance failure” is the no. 5 risk, are they acknowledging that the idea of global governance is always destined to fail?
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Pascal Lamy, former Director-General of the World Trade Organization Answers that question.
The key is the word Interdependence based on this Clinton handed China US trade and military secrets. If Clinton and the other Globalists are wrong we could be in more trouble than anyone could imagine. China BTW is NOT interested in interdependence.
China’s Agricultural Engagement in Latin America: As has been the case since the Mao era, self-sufficiency in staple foods is a primary objective of the Chinese Communist Party.
Chinese Farms Go Global: China is buying up land around the world.
China is also not interested in curbing their economic growth: How do I know China wrecked the Copenhagen deal? I was in the room
Back to Interdependence
Of course that without a free-market you can’t have a free-market gatherings . It is not snow but freedom that is something from the past.
Mr. Oldberg misunderstands the mathematics of feedback amplification. He assumes that my argument assumes the existence of equilibrium climate sensitivity. It assumes no such thing. It is the IPCC, not I, that assumes there is such a thing as equilibrium, and hence such a thing as equilibrium sensitivity.
Nor is Mr. Oldberg correct to say that (in the IPCC’s understanding) equilibrium sensitivity is a ratio. It is instead the product of the logarithmic CO2 radiative forcing, the Planck parameter, and the overall feedback gain factor, which increases over time as the IPCC’s imagined net-positive feedbacks gradually come to bear, canceling the logarithmic effect of the CO2 forcing at the sub-centennial scale and producing a near-strictly linear temperature response.
However, Mr. Oldberg is correct to imply that, since equilibrium sensitivity is not observable, any hypothesis as to its eventual value is untestable and purely speculative and is, therefore, of no interest either to science or to policy-makers. There is no scientific basis for doing anything at all about global warming, and no small reason for the absence of that scientific basis is the modelers’ incorrect use of the inapplicable Bode feedback-amplification equation in their attempts to determine climate sensitivity.
@Monckton of Brenchley on Switzerland allowing criminal racket.
As you speak so badly of my country you may understand that I don’t like this type of wide accusations, even if instead of one anecdote you have three to tell. But this is a side issue, of little interest for this blog. Que chacun balaye devant sa porte.
Neither don’t I like what IPCC is promoting.
But let’s remember that IPCC is a governmental institution (UN) funded by public money from various UN members. So if a complaint needs to be made it needs to be addressed to your government. A prosecutor in Switzerland or in any other place will not move one finger against an institution on which he has no jurisdiction. And if individuals are committing criminal activities then the complaint needs to be made against these persons.
If everytime that a UN institution is twisting the truth or outwardly lying a criminal prosecution would be opened then the New York and the Geneva Prosecutors offices would have an extremely intense biusiness.
Robertv says: @ur momisugly January 24, 2014 at 9:48 am
Of course that without a free-market you can’t have a free-market gatherings . It is not snow but freedom that is something from the past.
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Like everything else the politicians and bureaucrats touch. The meaning is opposite that of the dictionary meaning.
Free Market? What a laugh.
You can not have a free market when entrepreneurs are strangled by red tape and international corporations are writing the regulations and stuffing the bureaucracies that enforce them with their puppets. You do not have ‘capitalism’ when banks print money out of nothing and hand it to their friends who use it in ‘Leveraged Buyouts’ to gain control of well run mid-sized corporations. these Corporate Raiders then dismantle and sell off the assets that at times took generations to accumulate. It is called eating the seed corn not capitalism and it has totally wrecked the industry in the USA.
Statistics (courtesy of Bridgewater) showed in 1990, foreign ownership of U.S. assets amounted to 33% of U.S. GDP. By 2002 this had increased to over 70% of U.S. GDP. http://www.fame.org/HTM/greg%20Pickup%201%2010%2003%20report.htm
étatisme! I learned a new word so it is a good day. And étatisme sounds classier than the expression a friend of mine’s old Swiss grandfather used: social-ee-sta sons a beech-ah.
Don’t ask me what that means, I don’t speak any Swiss language.
“This year’s WEF annual “insight report” on global risks bizarrely rates “climate change” and “extreme weather events” as two of the three global threats with the greatest combined impact and likelihood (Fig. 1).”
Hm….
From economic point of view that makes perfect sense. Only the EU budget has hundreds of billions of euros dedicated to combat these two. That makes billions of lost money = opportunity lost. As if the EU would have too much of those…
On the other side of the Atlantic I hear that the EPA is closing the coal plants, further down there Australia has billions as carbon tax still there, but they seem to want to remove those.
So I guess, “they” are right, even if “they” come from the wrong reasons, “they” still get the right result.
However, with all their efforts, these loses do not yet compensate for the natural benefits of climate change:
http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/the-probable-net-benefits-of-climate-change-till-2080.aspx
“Overall, Prof Tol finds that climate change in the past century improved human welfare. By how much? He calculates by 1.4 per cent of global economic output, rising to 1.5 per cent by 2025. For some people, this means the difference between survival and starvation.”
Lubos calculates that the additional food due to CO2 so far is about 15% – which in numbers means food for 1 billion of the 7 billion of earthlings.
(He calculates it as to what the removal of 30% CO2 would cause for a drop in food production)
http://motls.blogspot.com/2014/01/ipcc-wg3-plans-to-suck-excess-co2-and.html
“If we use k=0.7 i.e. the decrease of CO2 by 30 percent, it is a tolerable estimate to say that the total yield would decrease by 15 percent; note that 0.7−−−√≈0.84. Now, the humans don’t really produce “too much excess food”. This is particularly true in the poor countries. Such a decrease of available food will mean that 15 percent of the population can’t be fed. Simple arithmetics implies that if the yields are reduced by this coefficient, about 1 billion out of 7 billion on the Earth will starve to death.”
GB_Dorset says:
January 24, 2014 at 12:32 am
Gordon brown is in attendance – talk about dummying down.
Hahaha! Genuinely made me laugh out loud! And so true.
Hijacking in Davos is going a bit overboard on word choice. That over-priced carbon fest with opinion mongering should not be confused with democracy or work ethic. There has never be a recorded instance of hijacking a ship of fools. Well, there was that recent incident of nature doing it in Antarctica, but not a human-caused case.
Reading various blogs I get the impression that the main problem in the world is Corruption. This is where the elite of many [many] countries syphon off the wealth and become billionaires. Just the sort of people at Davos.
Sorry what I meant to say is : ‘THE WORLD IS DOOMED, GIVE US YOUR MONEY, GIVE US COMPLETE CONTROL, AND WE MAY BE ABLE TO SAVE YOU’.
Wow; what a lot of information to absorb; sounds like the termites have been pretty busy, judging by your report, Lord Monckton. I really like your figure 4. If I stand back and look at it, I get the distinct impression, that I can see some kind of regular pattern developing. Have you noticed that Christopher; or am I just seeing things ?
I was a trifle disappointed though that you did not let us in, on what kind of caper, you were able to pull during this festival. Were you dis-invited, or did security remove all the vacant and open microphones ?
Well thanks again for an extensive report; a lot to digest and contemplate.
anticlimactic says: @ur momisugly January 24, 2014 at 11:40 am
Reading various blogs I get the impression that the main problem in the world is Corruption….
>>>>>>>>>>>>
And the lust for power.