By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
I often get emails asking me to comment in detail on an article on global warming that pretends the “problem” is worse than it is. Here is my reply to one such request.
Earth is a wilder [no], warmer [no] place since last climate deal made in 1997
By SETH BORENSTEIN, November 29, 2015 [At least he got the date right]
PARIS (AP) — This time, it’s a hotter [Satellites show no global warming for the 223 months (i.e., 18 years 7 months) since April 1997], waterier [Water vapour is difficult to measure, but some records show no change in water vapour except in the vital mid-troposphere, where it has actually declined], wilder Earth [The IPCC, both in its 2012 Special Report on Extreme Weather and in its 2013 Fourth Assessment Report, says there has been no particular overall trend in storminess, floods or droughts] that world leaders are trying to save [They are not trying to save the world: Bjorn Lomborg has reliably calculated that the effect of honouring all nations’ Paris pledges will be to reduce global temperature by 0.05-0.17 C° by 2100 compared with having no pledges, and the cost of getting that reduction will be $1 trillion].
The last time that the nations of the world struck a binding agreement to fight global warming was 1997, in Kyoto, Japan [It wasn’t binding: any nation had the right to give a year’s notice and just walk away, and one or two have done so]. As leaders gather for a conference in Paris on Monday to try to do more, it’s clear things have changed dramatically over the past 18 years [But according to the mean of the RSS and UAHv6 satellite records there’s been no global warming in all that time, so none of the changes that have occurred could have been caused by warming].
Some differences can be measured: degrees on a thermometer [a zero trend since April 1997], trillions of tons of melting ice [global sea-ice shows little change in extent or trend since satellite monitoring began 37 years ago], a rise in sea level of a couple of inches [the ENVISAT satellite showed that sea level is rising at a rate equivalent to 1.3 inches per century]. Epic weather disasters, including punishing droughts [declining for the past 30 years globally], killer heat waves [but killer cold snaps kill far more] and monster storms [nothing unprecedented], have plagued Earth [But no more than usual].
As a result, climate change is seen as a more urgent and concrete problem than it was last time [on no evidence: the rate of global warming since 1990, on all datasets, is well below the least rate predicted with “substantial confidence” by the IPCC in that year, and is only half to one-third of its central prediction].
“At the time of Kyoto, if someone talked about climate change, they were talking about something that was abstract in the future,” said Marcia McNutt, the former U.S. Geological Survey director who was picked to run the National Academies of Sciences. “Now, we’re talking about changing climate, something that’s happening now. You can point to event after event that is happening in the here and now that is a direct result of changing climate.” [The climate has been changing for 4 billion years: time to get used to it. Since there has been no global warming for 18 years 7 months, the extreme-weather events that are now occurring must be of natural and not manmade origin].
Other, nonphysical changes since 1997 make many experts more optimistic than in previous climate negotiations [for instance, Professor Richard Tol has said no net harm will occur unless there is at least 3.5 C° warming, but modellers’ reductions in their estimates of how the climate responds to direct warming caused by CO2 imply that not more than 0.5 C° of global warming will occur by 2100, even if we do very little to mitigate warming].
For one, improved technology is pointing to the possibility of a world weaned from fossil fuels, which emit heat-trapping gases [But the gases don’t trap anything like as much heat as was originally thought]. Businesses and countries are more serious about doing something, in the face of evidence that some of science’s worst-case scenarios are coming to pass [There is no evidence that worst-case scenarios are coming to pass, for the good and sufficient reason that for almost two decades, despite a considerable increase in Man’s emission of greenhouse gases, there has been no global warming at all to trigger those “worst-case scenarios”].
“I am quite stunned by how much the Earth has changed since 1997,” [except that global temperature has not changed since 1997, so any other changes were not caused by rising temperature] Princeton University’s Bill Anderegg said in an email. “In many cases (e.g. Arctic sea ice loss [which has been more or less matched by gains in Antarctic sea ice], forest die-off due to drought) [The most comprehensive recent drought survey, conducted just last year, found that the fraction of the Earth’s land surface suffering drought has declined throughout the period of record], the speed of climate change is proceeding even faster than we thought it would two decades ago.”[In 1995 the IPCC had issued predictions of warming that were in some respects even more extreme than those it had made in 1990: but there has been no statistically-significant global warming since 1990, and none at all since 1997]
Some of the cold numbers on global warming since 1997 [There has been no global warming since 1997]:
—The West Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets have lost 5.5 trillion tons of ice, or 5 trillion metric tons, according to Andrew Shepherd at the University of Leeds, who used NASA and European satellite data [Even if this were true, and there is plenty of evidence that it is not, it was not caused by global warming because there has not been any, and the analysis omits the 80% of global land-based ice that is on the East Antarctic ice sheet, and the ice there has been growing].
—The five-year average surface global temperature for January to October has risen by nearly two-thirds of a degree Fahrenheit, or 0.36 degrees Celsius, between 1993-97 and 2011-15, according to the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration [The correct statistical approach is to maximize degrees of freedom by using as many data points as possible, and the monthly NOAA global temperature data from 1995 to the present show a warming of less than 0.3 C°, equivalent to just 1.6 C°/century; however, until two years ago the NOAA data showed no warming since the late 1990s, just as the satellite data did, but NOAA tampered with the record in preparation for Paris and suddenly a warming trend has appeared: Congress is investigating, as is the former vice-chancellor of Buckingham University in the UK].
In 1997, Earth set a record for the hottest year, but it didn’t last. Records were set in 1998, 2005, 2010 and 2014, and it is sure to happen again in 2015 when the results are in from the year, according to NOAA [Its results have been tampered with in a manner that, when set against the satellite record, seems suspicious: hence the Congressional investigation. The satellites do not show 2014 as the warmest year, and will not show 2015 as the warmest year either. Besides, the weather was warmer in the mediaeval, Roman, Minoan, Old-Kingdom, and Holocene warm periods, so there is nothing special about today’s temperatures].
—The average glacier has lost about 39 feet, or 12 meters, of ice thickness since 1997, according to Samuel Nussbaumer at the World Glacier Monitoring Service in Switzerland [but that organization has taken measurements of mass balance at only 230, or one-seventh of one per cent, of the world’s 160,000+ glaciers. It has done very little work in Antarctica, which contains about 90% of the world’s ice mass, and which, except for a small area of West Antarctica, has not warmed or lost ice mass throughout the satellite era].
—With 1.2 billion more people in the world, carbon dioxide emissions from the burning of fossil fuels climbed nearly 50 percent between 1997 and 2013, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. The world is spewing more than 100 million tons of carbon dioxide a day now [and yet, 265 years after the Industrial Revolution began, to the nearest tenth of one per cent there is no CO2 in the atmosphere at all, for the atmosphere is big and our emissions are small by comparison].
—The seas have risen nearly 2 1/2 inches, or 6.2 centimeters, on average since 1997, according to calculations by the University of Colorado [However, the GRACE gravitational-anomaly satellites showed no sea-level rise at all from 2003-2008, and the ENVISAT satellite showed sea level rising at a rate equivalent to 1.3 inches/century from 2004 to 2012, and the sea-level rise found by the University of Colorado is smaller than the intercalibration errors between the series of laser-altimetry satellites it relies upon; the sea level rise comes chiefly from an artificial and unjustifiable “glacial isostatic adjustment”; and Professor Mörner’s best estimate is that sea level is rising no faster this century than last – i.e., at about 20 cm/century].
—At its low point during the summer, the Arctic sea ice is on average 820,000 square miles smaller than it was 18 years ago, according to the National Snow and Ice Data Center. That’s a loss equal in area to Texas, California, Montana, New Mexico and Arizona combined [But, compared with the large annual summer-to-winter fluctuations, the loss is quite small, and it is largely compensated by an increase in Antarctic sea-ice extent].
—The five deadliest heat waves of the past century — in Europe in 2003, Russia in 2010, India and Pakistan this year, Western Europe in 2006 and southern Asia in 1998 — have come in the past 18 years, according to the International Disaster Database run by the Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disaster in Belgium [The centre, inferentially for political reasons connected with its funding, has not made any studies of loss of life caused by extreme cold, which, however, kills roughly 20 times as many people as extreme heat. Warmer weather would actually bring about fewer deaths than colder weather. In a single cold winter in just one country, the UK, four years ago, there were 31,000 excess deaths; the European heatwave may have killed 35,000-70,000 across Europe as a whole. The centre’s website returns only one search result for the word “cold” on its database, and that is a reference to the “Cold War”].
—The number of weather and climate disasters worldwide has increased 42 percent, though deaths are down 58 percent [This increase, to the extent that it exists, for no reference is provided, is likely to be attributable to better reporting: the IPCC is quite clear that there is no evidence for increased extreme weather in almost all categories]. From 1993 to 1997, the world averaged 221 weather disasters that killed 3,248 people a year. From 2010 to 2014, the yearly average of weather disasters was up to 313, while deaths dropped to 1,364, according to the disaster database [In fact, the annual number of deaths from extreme weather worldwide is at its lowest point in the satellite era, according to the Global Warming Policy Foundation: and that is what we should expect, given better forecasting of individual extreme events and a small increase in warmer weather, which reduces temperature-related deaths].
Eighteen years ago, the discussion was far more about average temperatures, not the freakish extremes. Now, scientists and others realize it is in the more frequent extremes that people are truly experiencing climate change [The reason why mean temperatures were the topic 18 years ago is that they had increased for 20 since 1976, largely influenced by the phase-change in that year from the cooling to the warming phase of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation Index, and the reason why Mr Borenstein does not want to focus on mean temperatures now is that they have not increased, and, since they have not increased, there is no reason to blame Man for any consequential increase in extreme temperatures].
Witness the “large downpours, floods, mudslides, the deeper and longer droughts, rising sea levels from the melting ice, forest fires,” former Vice President Al Gore, who helped negotiate the 1997 agreement, told The Associated Press. “There’s a long list of events that people can see and feel viscerally right now. Every night on the television news is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation.” [But Al Gore is no scientist and, when his claims of disaster were subjected to court scrutiny in the London High Court in 2007 Mr Justice Burton said, “The Armageddon scenario that he depicts is not based on any scientific view.”]
Studies have shown that man-made climate change contributed in a number of recent weather disasters. Among those that climate scientists highlight as most significant: the 2003 European heat wave that killed 70,000 people in the deadliest such disaster in a century [even if one accepts the tampering by which the original estimate of 35,000 deaths (probably an exaggeration in itself) was doubled, just three typical British winters will cause more excess deaths than that one-off Europe-wide heatwave, which is known to have been caused not by global warming but by a blocking high]; Hurricane Sandy, worsened by sea level rise, which caused more than $67 billion in damage and claimed 159 lives [Sandy was also not caused by global warming but by a rare coincidence of three storms from different directions over a major population centre, and sea level at the New York Battery tide-gauge shows just 11 inches’ increase in 100 years, most of that before Man could have had any influence]; the 2010 Russian heat wave that left more than 55,000 dead [such events are neither new nor more commonplace now than formerly: the great multi-decadal drought in the Great Plans of the US before 1950 was far worse]; the drought still gripping California [the IPCC has repeatedly said one should not assign blame for individual weather events to global warming, and Hao et al. 2014 showed that the fraction of the globe under drought has been declining for 30 years]; and Typhoon Haiyan, which killed more than 6,000 in the Philippines in 2013 [but recorded history shows many far worse storms: in 1881, for instance, more than 20,000 corpses were recovered from the shoreline near Manila after a typhoon, and in those days the population was far smaller than today].
Still, “while the Earth is a lot more dangerous on one side [except that, on the evidence it isn’t: and, to this day, the believers have been unable or unwilling to state what the ideal global mean surface temperature is, and what variance either side of that temperature is net-beneficial], the technologies are a lot better than they were,” said Jeffrey Sachs, director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute. Solar and wind have come down tremendously in price [but they are still up to 20 times costlier per MWh generated than coal], so much so that a Texas utility gives away wind-generated electricity at night [That is because every wind turbine has to be backed up by a fossil-fuelled power station running at inefficient, highly-CO2-emitting idle-speed, so that, according to Professor Hughes of Edinburgh University, under most operating conditions wind power actually emits more CO2 than a coal-fired power station: accordingly, a grid surplus arises every time the wind blows, particularly when electricity demand is low at night-time].
Another big change is China. In Kyoto, China and developing countries weren’t required to cut emissions. Global warming was seen as a problem for the U.S. and other rich nations to solve. But now China — by far the world’s No. 1 carbon polluter — has reached agreement with the U.S. to slow emissions and has become a leader in solar power. [In fact, China has made no definite commitment of any kind; has absolutely refused to allow any international monitoring or control of its emissions; already emits one-third of all CO2 worldwide; has recently been found to have understated its emissions by as much as one-sixth; has built hundreds of surplus coal-fired power stations so that in a few years it can get the kudos for announcing a halt to its building programme; and is a “leader” in solar power only to the extent that, at huge environmental cost and using rigged low wages, it manufactures cheap and often unreliable solar panels for export].
“The negotiations are no longer defined by rich and poor,” Gore said. “There’s a range of countries in the middle, emerging economies, and thankfully some of them have stepped up to shoulder some of the responsibility.” [That’s as may be, but the “countries in the middle” will make little difference to global emissions either way, and in any event there will be no cuts in global CO2 emissions before mid-century at the earliest because China and India, the world’s two largest populations, will continue to burn cheap coal in ever-larger quantities, and have already begun to gain a massive commercial advantage by supplying coal-fired electricity at prices not more than one-third of the mean Western electricity price].
U.N. climate chief Christiana Figueres said there’s far less foot-dragging in negotiations: “There is not a single country that tells me they don’t want a good Paris agreement.” [And I want motherhood and apple pie too, but whatever happens in Paris will, on Bjorn Lomborg’s calculations, and on those of Professor Tol, make a barely measurable difference at a huge cost, and will not be necessary even if the predicted warming actually occurs, which on the record of the past couple of decades it will not].
Figueres said that while the Kyoto agreement dictated to individual nations how much they must cut, what comes out of Paris will be based on what the more than 150 countries say they can do. That tends to work better, she said. [Yeah, right: translate this as “The questioners have won, the consensus is absent, the science isn’t there, even if it was it would be cheaper to let warming happen and adapt the day after tomorrow than to try to prevent it today, and we can’t get a binding agreement anyway”].
It has to, Figueres said. “The urgency is much clearer now than it used to be.” [No, it isn’t. How can it be, given that on all terrestrial and satellite temperature records there has been at most half the warming that the IPCC originally predicted in 1990? The IPCC itself has been compelled almost to halve its predictions of medium-term warming, so there is far less “urgency” than there was. Indeed, there is now no urgency at all. The climate scare has died, but it will not be given a decent burial until the corpse smells so foul that the profiteers of doom can no longer make any money out of it at taxpayers’ expense].
As an ugly hypothesis collides with a beautiful fact, it rarely destroys the hypothesis.
Initially the facts are stretched to fit.
In the end, inconvenient facts are described as paradoxes.
This has happened in the case of the former consensus that a high fat diet leads to CHD.
The French eat a high saturated fat diet and have a lower incidence of CHD relative to much of the rest of Europe.
Consequently this situation is described as the “French Paradox”.
The most obviously conclusion would be that the hypothesis is seriously flawed.
We can expect that soon we will be told about the Antarctic Paradox, the Greening Paradox, the Sea Level Paradox etc. Tediously…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_paradox
Good point. The paradox exists because the theory doesn’t fit the facts which is impossible if the theory is correct. And the theory must be correct because science says so and science is like the Pope, infallible.
Thanks Ferd
I’ll try that. I wasn’t born with an abundance of patience and of course your technique requires that I be so, but I have to find a better way and if improving my impatience is part of the deal, then it’s worth it.
Seth Borenstein -serial liar
Joe Romm – serial liar
Al Gore – serial liar
Barack Obama – serial liar.
Serial liars gonna lie. Capisce?
Lying to save the world isnt lying. It is a Nobel deed. Thus the large number of climate scientists with Nobel prizes.
How many climate scientists have Nobel prizes?
A Nobel Lie.
Svante Arrhenius received 1903Nobel in Chemistry for his equation describing chemical reaction rate dependence on temperature. But not for his theory of CO2 warming.
http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/chemistry/laureates/1903/
Elephant in the room http://www.express.co.uk/news/science/622910/Global-warming-farce-majority-Britons-climate-change-fake-UN-summit
Eliza
Glad to see a glimmer of hope in that poll.
Perhaps costly energy is waking the people up.
While one sees a glimmer of light there on another front it gets worse. In a move that befuddles the imagination and shocks the senses, many in the EU have convinced themselves in an upside down world that to be selective about who comes in to their countries is akin to being racist. It’s a similar group mental illness akin to embracing a carbon tax because some feel false guilt as a first tier nation for their lifestyle.
Women in the EU will suffer a great deal as infidels are prime targets for rape culture. Rape culture is promoted among many of the young men who are part of the migration. It doesn’t have to be this way, yet it is this way. The common person both in the first world and in the third world does not have to scrounge around for expensive unreliable energy. It will retard their lifestyles.
Both symptoms of the common illness of false guilt.
Reblogged this on The GOLDEN RULE and commented:
An overview, directly relevant to the Paris “climate change” meeting, which destroys the substance of all of the IPCC and associated claims demanding immediate political and financial sacrifices intended to prevent catastrophic global environmental changes.
No such changes are occurring, there are no proven scientifically valid supporting facts, lies have been exposed, a political agenda is clear.
It is past time that leaders and the people woke up to reality.
What’ are Borensteins’s qualifications to write and comment on science? Does he have a BS/MS in chemistry, physics, biology or geology, or else a professional degree in medicine or engineering.
If this crapweasel Borenstein is going to write about carbon and global warming, I want to know that he has at least taken a university level sequence of courses in general and organic chemistry, physics, biology and calculus/statistics. What is his education? Psychology. communication, sociology, journalism LOL. What?
It’s good to see scare stories rebutted with facts.
However, one nit-pick on the facts.
Antarctic sea ice is no longer way above the satellite-era average, and has been close to average for the last few months (0.12 million sq, km above as of today)
Arctic ice has been below the satellite-era average for several years (1.2 million below average today), so global sea ice is about 1.1 million sq km (or about 5 per cent) below average
“so global sea ice is about 1.1 million sq km (or about 5 per cent) below average”
Really?
See: http://www.climate4you.com/images/NSIDC%20GlobalArcticAntarctic%20SeaIceArea.gif
Yep. Really.
You have linked to a graph which goes to the end of October, with “anomalies” only up to the end of June. At that time there was indeed an excess of Antarctic sea ice of about 1.2 million sq km, roughly balanced by the Arctic shortfall.
It illustrates how one should use up-to-date figures when making claims, and how quickly the near-record Antarctic sea ice has disappeared
The ‘balance’ of nature was a sacred cow in ecology and the early decades of the field never questioned it at all but studied and tried to model it with increasingly complex models. The problem however became increasingly apparent that as researchers examined data from the field on predator and prey populations or plants and foliage in very diverse eco-systems the dominant characteristic they found was not balance and stasis but constant dynamic change that, while bounded, could only be described as unpredictable and chaotic. In the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, and apparently with only the younger generation of ecologists, did the sacred cow of ‘static balance’ in nature eventually give way. However, the balance concept seems to suit our way of thinking about nature and we don’t give it up easily as the public still clings religiously to it and regards any rise or fall in tree or animal numbers as evidence of unbalance (and usually man’s nefarious contribution to the ‘problem’). No doubt whatsoever man has had measurable impacts in eco systems but in the context of unpredictable change they are harder to isolate. This whole issue is covered well by Adam Curtis in the 2nd part of his documentary ‘All watched over by machines of loving grace’ and covers other areas (such as economics) that we similarly mis-project or misunderstand ‘balance’.
It seems that most climate scientists are under the same delusion that ecologists were under in the early years of ecology – as clearly the journalist here in question is too. The difference here is timescale and as Longhurst asserts in his new book ‘Doubt & Uncertainty in Climate Science’ it is next to impossible to characterise the global climate on such short timescales of measurements that we have available to us. Unluckily for us skeptics, it seems the pro-GW climate community have time on their side before they are eventually ‘found out’ by unassailable and ineluctable data.
On the Copenhagen experience of 2009 I predict that Paris will be a resounding success … for taxi drivers and workers in the physical entertainment professions.
Well done. A timely look behind the facade of that case for alarm made by one of the more notorious of the many climate clowns in the mass media. They are modern builders of virtual Potemkin Villages for CO2 Alarm. The lack of substance behind their constructions is there for all to see. But too few look. Fortunately for us all, Christopher Monckton of Brenchley likes to get out and about, and examine their confections for himself.
Christopher–Here’s a typo. Insert “years” in the following:
“they had increased for 20 since 1976”
Also see lee’s typo-fix near the top of the thread.
The true ecological disaster is human population expansion which cannot go to infinity. The Pope who is screamingly freaked about ‘climate change’ also wants unlimited population growth to infinity. This is impossible.
Europe, which (until the flood of foreigners from anti-birth control countries) had near zero population growth is being pushed into energy poverty to fix ‘global warming’ which is crazy. The US which has higher population growth and millions of illegal aliens, is supposed to strangle itself, too, while also taking on millions of refugees from anti-birth control countries.
The US right wing is against the concept of ‘global warming’ but also wants to have unlimited population growth and attacks people who want birth controls. So the world’s true danger, overwhelmed by great population growth mainly in hot climate countries, is being ignored as liberals focus on ‘global warming’.
This means that both sides of this debate are confused.
I think you are the one who’s confused. Population growth may be a problem in parts of the world, but it is a local one, and up to those particular governments to decide how to address it. It is a completely different issue, having nothing to do with “global warming”. Eyes on the prize.
emsnews:
You fail in your attempt to deflect this thread onto Malthusian nonsense.
The fallacy of overpopulation derives from the disproved Malthusian idea which wrongly assumes that humans are constrained like bacteria in a Petri dish: i.e. population expands until available resources are consumed when population collapses. The assumption is wrong because humans do not suffer such constraint: humans find and/or create new and alternative resources when existing resources become scarce.
The obvious example is food.
In the 1970s the Club of Rome predicted that human population would have collapsed from starvation by now. But human population has continued to rise and there are fewer starving people now than in the 1970s; n.b. there are less starving people in total and not merely fewer in percentage.
Now, the most common Malthusian assertion is ‘peak oil’. But humans need energy supply and oil is only one source of energy supply. Adoption of natural gas displaces some requirement for oil, fracking increases available oil supply at acceptable cost; etc..
In the real world, for all practical purposes there are no “physical” limits to natural resources so every natural resource can be considered to be infinite; i.e. the human ‘Petri dish’ can be considered as being unbounded. This a matter of basic economics which I explain as follows.
Humans do not run out of anything although they can suffer local and/or temporary shortages of anything. The usage of a resource may “peak” then decline, but the usage does not peak because of exhaustion of the resource (e.g. flint, antler bone and bronze each “peaked” long ago but still exist in large amounts).
A resource is cheap (in time, money and effort) to obtain when it is in abundant supply. But “low-hanging fruit are picked first”, so the cost of obtaining the resource increases with time. Nobody bothers to seek an alternative to a resource when it is cheap.
But the cost of obtaining an adequate supply of a resource increases with time and, eventually, it becomes worthwhile to look for
(a) alternative sources of the resource
and
(b) alternatives to the resource.
And alternatives to the resource often prove to have advantages.
For example, both (a) and (b) apply in the case of crude oil.
Many alternative sources have been found. These include opening of new oil fields by use of new technologies (e.g. to obtain oil from beneath sea bed) and synthesising crude oil from other substances (e.g. tar sands, natural gas and coal). Indeed, since 1994 it has been possible to provide synthetic crude oil from coal at competitive cost with natural crude oil and this constrains the maximum true cost of crude.
Alternatives to oil as a transport fuel are possible. Oil was the transport fuel of military submarines for decades but uranium is now their fuel of choice.
There is sufficient coal to provide synthetic crude oil for at least the next 300 years. Hay to feed horses was the major transport fuel 300 years ago and ‘peak hay’ was feared in the nineteenth century, but availability of hay is not a significant consideration for transportation today. Nobody can know what – if any – demand for crude oil will exist 300 years in the future.
Indeed, coal also demonstrates an ‘expanding Petri dish’.
Spoil heaps from old coal mines contain much coal that could not be usefully extracted from the spoil when the mines were operational. Now, modern technology enables the extraction from the spoil at a cost which is economic now and would have been economic if it had been available when the spoil was dumped.
These principles not only enable growing human population: they also increase human well-being.
The ingenuity which increases availability of resources also provides additional usefulness to the resources. For example, abundant energy supply and technologies to use it have freed people from the constraints of ‘renewable’ energy and the need for the power of muscles provided by slaves and animals. Malthusians are blind to the obvious truth that human ingenuity has freed humans from the need for slaves to operate treadmills, the oars of galleys, etc..
And these benefits also act to prevent overpopulation because population growth declines with affluence.
There are several reasons for this. Of most importance is that poor people need large families as ‘insurance’ to care for them at times of illness and old age. Affluent people can pay for that ‘insurance’ so do not need the costs of large families. These effects are completely isolated from refugee migration.
The result is that the indigenous populations of rich countries decline. But rich countries need to sustain population growth for economic growth so they need to import – and are importing – people from poor countries. Increased affluence in poor countries can be expected to reduce their population growth with resulting lack of people for import by rich countries. These effects are also completely isolated from refugee migration.
Hence, the real foreseeable problem is population decrease; n.b. not population increase.
All projections and predictions indicate that human population will peak around the middle of this century and decline after that. So, we are confronted by the probability of ‘peak population’ resulting from growth of affluence around the world.
Also, declining population implies fewer Einsteines, fewer Beethovens, fewer Shakespeares, and fewer & etc..
The Malthusian idea is wrong because it ignores basic economics and applies a wrong model; human population is NOT constrained by resources like the population of bacteria in a Petri dish. There is no existing or probable problem of overpopulation of the world by humans.
So, now please ignore the non-issue of overpopulation and return the thread to its subject.
Richard
Thanks Richard for a well argued explanation of another non-problem. Nota bene, all!
emsnews,
There is an a large set of interesting observations about your concepts and thinking. Here are several.
First, of course “human population expansion which cannot go to infinity” is trivially true. The Earth is finite so human population on Earth cannot become infinite.
Second, while it is trivially true that “human population expansion which [on Earth] cannot go to infinity” it is also trivially true that human population can expand by magnitudes over current population and at the same time reduce the actual net ecological impact below the current level of ecological impact that the current human population has.
Third, to be fair one should give equal weight to the ecological disasters caused by all other earth based life’s which has significant impact on man. So then we can decide about the relative important (or unimportance) of human caused ecological disasters impacting on all the other earth based life forms. Fair for one life form is fair for all others wrt causing ecological disasters. Let’s be impartial.
Lastly, your term “The true ecological disaster” is trivially incorrect. There is not ”The true” ecological disaster”, instead there are many true ecological disasters, most of them caused by non-human life forms here on Earth; including ones that impact humans.
John
Why worry? A few “super bugs” can control the earth’s population anyway. Lost a young relative due to a “super bug” a couple of years ago.
Barbara
Sorry for your loss.
The whole super bug thing is real and scary.
Gives me the willies to have to go to a hospital.
Barbara on November 30, 2015 at 5:34 pm,
Medical science still has a lot of knowledge to pursue.
John
The estimate of a trillion dollars reads as if that will be the cost by 2100. Lomborg’s estimate in his WSJ op ed, quoted in Judith Curry’s recent post about climate policy likely being iatrogenic, is a trillion dollars each year until 2100. Serious money for stalling a fraction of a degree rise over the next 80 odd years.
I find the Lord’s rebuttal to the “5 trillion tons” of ice loss to be somewhat apples/oranges.
Mass comes from volume, but the counterpoint statements above deal only in area and extent. You can’t compare area/extent in km2 to volume in km3.
Here are some references which, if totalled, claim an annual trillion tons of ice melt per year, so Lord Monckton must discuss and rebut these papers before being able to dismiss the “5 trillion” claim with a wave of the “plenty of evidence that it is not” hand.
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2013GL059010/abstract
http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/2014GL060111/abstract
http://www.sciencemag.org/content/340/6134/852.abstract
http://journals.ametsoc.org/doi/abs/10.1175/JCLI-D-13-00301.1
http://psc.apl.uw.edu/research/projects/arctic-sea-ice-volume-anomaly/
Indeed, given the _enormous_ amount of energy taken to melt ice, this could be claimed to be where some of the “missing heat” has gone.
None of the above says Lord Monckton is wrong, it just says he’s been vague at best, and misdirecting at worst.
Dermot when you can explain this to me Greenland Melting I will switch to the dark side that the world is ending.http://www.nytimes.com/1988/08/04/us/world-war-ii-planes-found-in-greenland-in-ice-260-feet-deep.html now 400ft deep
Oh yes – I can just imagine someone swapping their position on the basis of one data point in the discussion on one objection to one aspect of one blog post.
Anyhow… I can’t explain it any more than I can explain why some glaciers grow and some glaciers shrink. I am not surprised by it, even in the context of a supposedly warming world.
It has been stated many many times here on WUWT and mainstream science that glaciers aren’t shrinking everywhere, and indeed that many glaciers are growing. On that basis alone, how could the existence of one artifact buried in ice prove one theory over the other?
This lost squadron was news to me, so Googling got me some education. Turns out it’s been discussed here before: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/12/30/the-ice-in-greenland-is-growing/
The squadron was lost in South East Greenland, 1942. Another flight was lost in North West Greenland, in 1947 – a B-29, found about the same time “near the surface”. So here we have two similar objects lost and found in similar timescales. Apologies for assuming on your behalf, but I suspect you would not propose that the lack of burial of the B-29 is evidence of a warming world.
It turns out that the two locations have wildly different levels of precipitation – see observational data image here: http://websrv.cs.umt.edu/isis/images/e/eb/Greenland_precip_countours.gif
Looks to me like South East pinnacle gets nearly 10 times more precipitation that North West. Thus if there’s any area of the world where something gets buried in ice, it’s going to be somewhere damn cold with a high level of snow.
For a fantastic map showing the spatial distribution of “anomalous” precipitation, here’s a lovely image from NSIDC showing Greenland snowfall anomaly in one year: http://nsidc.org/greenland-today/files/2015/08/Fig3_SMB_Snow_anom.png
On the South East corner, it shows many small patches with -600mm anomaly alongside zones of +600mm anomaly. “Unpredictable” is one way of putting it.
What I’m trying to say is that evidence of large accumulation in one spot is not evidence of an absence of melt on a wider scale.
Now, back to my comment.
Is Lord Monckton comparing apples to oranges and dismissing many peer-reviewed published papers with a blithe “plenty of evidence” assertion to the contrary? As engineers put it – “In God we trust. All others bring data.”
Dermot Thank you for your response I fully accept the science. However to me this is weather I lived in Montreal for 70 years the last few winters have been extreme to me this is weather.
They could, and have tried all kinds of claims vis a vis the “missing heat”, all laughable failures. That’s why they’ve switched tactics to denying the “Pause” ever existed.
Even to someone from a non scientific background like me it is becoming abundantly clear that the Alarmist narrative is based on falsehoods that are demonstrably and obviously false. This leads to two alternative conclusions: either those propagating the narrative are dumb as rocks or, more worryingly, they are deliberately propagating a narrative they know to be false.
I feel sorry for the people and holy life on the planet, which Vissi believe some models, the wrong mathematical predictions and political manipulation, but what we allow laws of nature and our consciousness, which is related through intuition with all causes of phenomena in the universe.
Climate change on the planet, not just on our own, depend exclusively, from the mutual influence of the planets and the sun. When you take science as the basis of research, everything will go right through.
I again, as anonymous in science, I must warn you, at least those who use their consciousness and intuition, not politicized erroneous theory that the human factor is so small compared to the relationship of the planet, as well as a man smaller than planets.
In previous worthless and false works of all kinds, spent so much money, in vain, that it may resolve the matter in the right way, and that throughout the planet could equalize the impact of these changes.
My proof, that no one so far refused to publish it, without my payment is:
Four influential planets causes the sunspot cycle, every 11.2 years .This are only indicators of climate change on the planet, while the rest cycles and other planets in relation to the sun, are much longer and more intense and causing changes inside the planet that making changes in the behavior of all the planets.
I draw the attention of all scientists of the impact of that, if you have the will, to this way of thinking is applied and will see that they made a mistake, because it will come to amazing results, which so far has not been the case. NUDIM correspondence: !!!
Download this in Paris, let them know that all their decisions and agreements have nothing to do with the true causes of phenomena around us and in us.
The only thing that has changed since 2009 is that they have ramped up the rhetoric and in complete desperation have nailed their Klimate Kolors to the mast of “extreme weather” or some variation thereof. Yes indeed, after years of screaming that “weather is not climate” they are now screaming just the opposite. And True Believers like our friend Leland, in mindless lockstep go along with it. Amazing.
Lord Monckton should be invited to the Paris CO2/Global Warming Conference by the IPCC to present his above succinct and excellent paper thereby bringing some much needed perspective to the proceedings. By the way who is Seth Borenstein?
A great debunking. Thank you Lord Monckton.
The rest of this post may be considered off-message but Seth Borenstein has to earn a living and to give a feel as to how AP only prepared to print news that supports its bias, I attach a link to an article by the journalist Mark Lavie, who worked for AP for 15 years.
http://www.tabletmag.com/…/missed-opportunity-olmert-abbas-and-media-bias
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Lavie
Other than this, however, the article was accurate.
I concluded some years ago (maybe 10) that increases in CO2 from 380 to 400 ppm, the present situation, would have negligible effect on atmospheric temperatures. I carried out spreadsheet calculations incorporating Planck’s Law, absorption bands for CO2 and water vapour and emissivities for both ‘gases’ and had to conclude that for even higher cocentrations of CO2 there would be no discernible temperature rise and from Lord Monckton’s analysis of satellite data there does not appear to have been any. However with the avalanche of propaganda from the BBC, the Met office, all UK scientific institutions, the government (particularly the Lib Dems’ 5 year tenure of the department of energy and climate change, in coalition, when they went to extraordinary lengths to reduce CO2 emissions), the newspapers except for Christopher Booker who all contend that the planet is getting hotter every year, the ice caps are melting the sea levels are rising, Peking is enveloped in a perpetual thick smog etc etc. I am beginning to believe that as there is very little counter propaganda except a balanced blog from wattsupwiththat, I must be wrong and catastrophic global warming is rapidly taking place.
One thing to note:
Seth says, “The world is spewing more than 100 million tons of carbon dioxide a day now.”
I have noticed most, if not all, statements by the enviro NGO’s say “spew” when referring to any emissions from a fossil fueled power plant. It used to be they would say “belch.” Obviously, the playbook has been altered to say “spew” and Seth has been reading it.
Seth is an expert on spewage. 🙂
Guess who wrote this.
http://www.dispatch.com/content/stories/insight/2015/11/29/01-graded-a-to-f.html
Seth Borenstein has loosed on the not-so-gullible public a vast host of less than midge-like intellectualizations of the pseudo-knowledge kind.
It is good that someone like Christopher Monckton has the Herculean patience to fatally swat each of Borenstein’s less than midge-like intellectualizations . . . . : )
John
John
A pattern to the writing. Climate Depot perhaps made it a tad easier for the Lord to unleash his wrath.
http://www.climatedepot.com/2009/08/21/long-sad-history-of-ap-reporter-seth-borensteins-woeful-global-warming-reporting/
On another note, if WUWT ever really wanted to get a top of the line real reporter in the information loop they could do no better than Sharyl Attkinson. She’s a very bright, tenacious and deliberate person. Pretty darn good writer too. Ya never know if ya don’t ask.
knutesea,
Thanks.
John
Thank you for blowing Seth Boringstein’s “chicken little” nonsense out of the water!
Sick and tired of these lies!!!
“The climate scare has died, but it will not be given a decent burial until the corpse smells so foul that the profiteers of doom can no longer make any money out of it at taxpayers’ expense.”
Very well said.