Originally posted at ClimateREALISM
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published the final part of its sixth assessment report (AR6) on Monday, March 20. Predictably, the media rushed to repeat the claims made in the report with their own scary, woefully overwrought, headlines. Here is a sample: The Washington Post – World is on brink of catastrophic warming, U.N. climate change report says; NBC News – Now or never: One of the biggest climate reports ever shows time is running out; The Guardian – Scientists deliver ‘final warning’ on climate crisis: act now or it’s too late; and finally Inside Climate News, with inarguably the worst headline New IPCC Report Shows the ‘Climate Time Bomb Is Ticking,’ Says UN Secretary General António Guterres.
Each of mainstream media outlets predict that “climate doom” is just around the corner, and they’re all wrong.
The reason? The newest IPCC report laments the fact that Earth will soon pass the 1.5°C level of temperature rise, seen in the projection in Figure 1. The current extrapolation is to reach 1.5°C by April 2035.
Based on that projection, the IPCC and the media predict very bad things will happen if we don’t “act now before it’s too late.” The most recent report in the AR6 series contains no new information, rather it reiterates the warnings made the physical science portion of the report issued in the summer of 2021, which also mentioned approaching 1.5°C.
Interestingly, the “before it’s too late” language has been used since 2005, when worry about just 1°C was the big doomsday news:
NASA scientist Jim Hansen introduced the “too late” language about climate change in 2005, arguing that “We have to stabilize emissions of carbon dioxide within a decade, or temperatures will warm by more than one degree [C]… we don’t have much time left”.
We heard the same type of language in 2007, when the IPCC released their Fourth Assessment Report. The headlines in The Guardian said “time is running out” and warming “could be irreversible.”
Sound familiar?
Back to the present, the data used to generate Figure 1 above, indicates that the Earth has already experienced a temperature rise of 1.21°C, with none of the doomsday predictions made in 2005 having occurred. In fact, what the IPCC and media all don’t realize, is that Earth already surpassed that 1.5°C threshold, and it and society are doing just fine. As seen in Figure 2, an analysis of Berkeley Earth global surface temperature data by Willis Eschenbach shows that not only has Earth passed the arbitrary 1.5°C threshold set by the IPCC, we’ve actually warmed from 4.0°C since 1750.
Bottom line, as documented by Willis Eschenbach, Earth has already warmed well past 1.5°C and nothing terrible has happened.
In addition, virtually all of the claims made by media in the past about the dire future we can expect with a modestly warming world have been disproven by time, actual data, and events. For example, claims of crop failures due to warming are common in the media, but looking at actual data in Global Temperatures vs. Global Crop Yields, “Yields have been increasing, in fits and starts, despite increasing temperatures over the period of that record.”
Another common claim, that global warming has worsened floods and droughts, has proven equally untrue. The fact is, almost any media claim of worsening weather or the human condition related to warming one examines, be it hurricanes, tornadoes, sea level rise, food production, coffee, maple syrup, apples, atmospheric rivers, or other apocalyptic predictions made over the past 50 years has failed to materialize.
Most telling is the fact that the human condition has actually improved; deaths from extreme weather events are down dramatically in the last century, approaching zero, as seen in Figure 3, below.
It is also a fact that temperature related deaths have declined dramatically as the climate has warmed, as discussed on Climate Realism, here and here, for example.
All of this evidence clearly refutes what the IPCC climate alarmists are shouting about, indeed its own physical science report refutes the hyperbolic claims made by IPCC representatives that have been uncritically parroted by the mainstream media, since Monday. Rather than a climate change induced doomsday being in the offing, data show the human condition has actually improved amid global warming.
With all this contrary evidence of a doom-laden present and future, isn’t it time we simply stop listening to these unproven claims?
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
It’s unfortunate that the media is not open to being reminded of the history of catastrophic promises. Or the decreasing risk of death both because we can warn people of imminent threat and because severe weather is decreasing, if anything.
These are objective observations that don’t require advanced degrees to understand. The media should be able to grasp them.
I’m reminded of a rather poor science fiction novel I read recently, I think it was called Silo. The gist of it was (and skip the rest of this post if you don’t want a major spoiler) that humanity had been stored in these massive 100-story silos due to some Armageddon-like event (I’d guess nuclear war) and the ruling party wanted to keep control, so it constantly broadcast the image of a desolate landscape in the windows of its one level that had a view of the outdoors while in reality, there was nothing dangerous about the outside world at that point.
A neat allegory. Rather poor execution, however. I know there are several other novels in the series and I might be explaining the first one poorly, but I didn’t move on. Hits too close to home these days, reading about abusive, controlling governments that do their best to keep their people ignorant and under control.
The media and the world of education should be what protects us from governments gone bad. These days, they’re the establishment’s enablers. We’re in a lot trouble, and it has nothing to do with the weather.
Line 10 That’s what I’ve been saying since I first ventured into here
The Trouble is multi faceted in its symptoms & manifestations but all really boils down to one thing:
What we call “Food” these days: Simply isn’t
We are starving. And those who imagine that ‘Things Are Never Better’ are in fact the worst affected.
Such is the nature of the beast and so it becomes self reinforcing/perpetuating – those worst-affected set about doing all the wrong things
I’ve now come ‘full circle’
I initially thought that Climate Change was a manifestation of ‘over enthusiastic’ alcohol consumption – the correlation of people/places/climate/alcohol was and still is impressive.
(Apart from what was the USSR)
I dropped for a while that idea but having ‘lived a bit more’ and listened a few more doctors, nurses and watched a lot of ordinary (and not-so ordinary) folks, when it comes to alcohol and your mind,
There Is No Safe Limit. None At All
The very same applies to sugar in its various guises.
Sugar doesn’t have many ‘guises’ but, Magical Thinkers take epic delight in making them and arguing over trivia/minutia until the cows come home
While convicing themselves that they ‘can handle alcohol’.
No, the alcohol is telling them that.
See how Cause & Effect errors creep in. Also Mendacity)
Just One Tiny Example:Vast numbers of (especially) elderly folks are now being given injections of Vitamin B12.
And everyone (magically) thinks: “Oh how great and how clever we are, now we’ve cured dementia
No, the doctors are lying.
If they had a shred of honesty, decency and ethics in them they’d tell that they’ve covered over the symptoms of a chronic deficiency of dietary Cobalt – because that is effectively what’s in those injections.
And there goes ‘the starvation’ and the real question to be answered here – why isn’t there any Cobalt in people’s food any more? Not even just one microgram daily?
Is there anything else missing that we should maybe know about?
Contrary to magically-conceived Popular Opinion, the answer is not= More Sugar
Or cannabis for that matter yet more & more Governments are legalising that sh1t.
True Insanity.
GOTO 10
A glass of red wine, loaded with resveratrol, is a part of the Mediterranean diet, which still appears to be the best diet for human health currently known. Besides, a glass of red wine helps me tolerate looney ideas.
By far the greatest threat to socoiety are the hunoingous amounts of coke snorted by the elites, who like the Aztec priests,now think that they are messengers of the gods and can make stuff happen by simpley saying ‘we all say it, so it becomes true’.
There Is No Safe Limit. None At All
What absolute tosh.
For most of history man drunk nothing but alcohol because it killed bacteria making it the safest drink around, and it was also a good source of calories.
cheers! (hic)
For almost all of the past 2000 years, mankind drank beer and wine instead of water, because the surface water tasted bad and was polluted, and well water required increasingly deeper wells.
All monasteries had income-producing breweries.
Towns did not have public water systems, except in parts of Rome.
The water from present water treatment plants is filtered and chlorinated to kill bacteria, but many harmful chemicals are untouched.
The water LOOKS clear, but detailed testing reveals the presence of many cancer causing chemicals.
Bottled water has been run through filters to remove the chlorine.
In Vermont, we have our own well, which is almost 500 ft deep.
The water tastes good
Distilled water is very clean. Filtration can only remove particulate larger than the smallest aperture,
That was a great article in the April edition of Scientific American oh so many years ago.
Actually, it split neatly into alcoholic drinks in Europe and boiled drinks in “the East”.
There is nothing accurate, scientific or medically correct in your post. It. belongs in the same trash bin as the whole global warming/climate change fairytale. People are healthier, live longer and function better at advanced age than they ever have in the past few million years of human development. There remains a significant burden of avoidable disease related to our lifestyle that manifest through trauma, excess cancer and cardiovascular risk, and habitual substance use but, evidence shows some alcohol is better than none and of course too much is too much. Sugar is not a poison – it is a fundamental energy compound essential to our metabolism. Excess calories in the form of sugar, carbohydrates or fats of course have negative health effects as does being too sedentary but there is no magic to healthy living – it is basic common sense.
Sounds vaguely like “Logan’s Run”.
A lot of recent science fiction has its roots in Logan’s Run. You can’t create a socialist utopia (Wikipedia calls it Malthusian dystopia) without the concept of brainwashed masses kept happy by a ruling elite. And I’m sure the writers of Logan’s Run were inspired by Brave New World (if not Farrah Fawcett). Assuredly, Huxley drew some inspiration from Genesis.
We love the idea of the one enlightened hero (Silo has this, too) discovering the illusion and refusing the opiate or challenging the confinement.
It’s sad that, these days, the media celebrates the inspiration for confinement instead of the spirit of enlightenment. Greta Thunberg, perhaps the biggest orchestrated media creation of the last decade, is a model for denying ourselves a taste of the apple of knowledge. I see nothing heroic in what they’re doing.
‘Rather than a climate change induced doomsday being in the offing, data show the human condition has actually improved amid global warming
Not quite right. The IPPC antics have caused millions of ignorant children to develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. That is probably the only catastrophic effect of possible man-made climate change. Blame the activist scientists.
Without the stress of the trauma.
Headlines we’d like to see:
“TIME IS RUNNING OUT ON TERRIFYING THE PEASANTS WITH HOKUM”
or
“TIME IS RUNNING OUT ON FUNDING FOR DOOMSDAY SCENARIOS”
or
“LEADING SCIENTISTS WARN, ‘SCARE TACTICS ARE LOSING EFFICACY BECAUSE THE HOI POLLOI ARE GETTING WISE'”
Ahem! It’s not the οἱ πολλοί, its just οἱ πολλοί.
οἱ is Greek for ‘the’.
Even at nearly 72, it’s always nice to learn something
Next thing, you’ll be telling us they aren’t ATM machines or RAT tests 🙂
The urgency is because the folks behind the curtain know things will be cooling naturally in the near future. If they can get their Draconian political measures in place soon, they can assume credit for avoiding catastrophic warming and insist they have continued political control over everyone’s lives.
When CO2 the Planet Destroyer first started to get traction I’d tell people two things
The climate isn’t doing anything it hasn’t done before without CO2 (something I still think)
The government will use it as a reason to raise taxes, which you’ll be happy to pay
In recent years I’ve added that very thing to the reasons governments like Man Made Climate Change, especially after the Covid dry run worked so well
Media-made climate scare?
Media-made COVID scare?
Perhaps the continued political control you mention results from a pitchfork shortage.
And there is not the vestige of a chance that we will be able to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide
They have a story to tell/sell
The clocks go forward tonight, spring is in the air. Alarmism is up a creek without a paddle
Nice tie, Anthony
Scientists say…
https://extinctionclock.org
With Hadcrut4 it is barely 1K, on average, since 1850
Wood for Trees: Interactive Graphs
I think the reality is that no one knows what if any global changes there have been.
It’s certainly not as warm in N Europe as it was in the MWP or RWP. It certainly is warmer than the LIA. It is manifestly warmer than it was in the Younger Dryas. And sea levels did rise by around 150 metres post that.
Neither the planet nor humanity was destroyed by that.
The UK and Ireland became islands, after the land bridge to the mainland was breached, which ultimately led to having the NORTH SEA, and the CHANNEL, and the IRISH SEA
Many communities living in the North Sea area had to move to higher lands.
Before the breach, you could walk from Spain, etc., to Ireland and the UK, and from Denmark, etc., to the UK
That was in the time of the giants. In fact, I think that was Atlantis.
The IPCC should be abandoned, rejected, forgotten, ignored, junked, discarded and cast-off . It is a cancer that must be cut out, excised. Cease to exist….Terminated.
The absurd “time is running out” messaging appeals to unfounded fears of temperature-based “tipping points” and a “point of no return” arising from emissions of otherwise harmless non-condensing greenhouse gases.
From NASA, January 14, 2009:
“The amount of heat a surface radiates is proportional to the fourth power of its temperature. If temperature doubles, radiated energy increases by a factor of 16 (2 to the 4th power). If the temperature of the Earth rises, the planet rapidly emits an increasing amount of heat to space. This large increase in heat loss in response to a relatively smaller increase in temperature—referred to as radiative cooling—is the primary mechanism that prevents runaway heating on Earth.” (emphasis mine)
They knew better than to ever expect a runaway climate outcome. What else did they know?
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/05/16/wuwt-contest-runner-up-professional-nasa-knew-better-nasa_knew/
Maybe the time is running out for the climate coverup, and that’s why the claims of doom are being amped up so urgently.
According to Roy Spencer, land-based temp stations are temperature-biased regarding location, and the readings are adjusted upwards,
The too-high temp results provide fodder for scaring, and a double whammy windfall to the fourth power
I’ve noticed, like just this morning, that snow accumulates first on the lawn, as opposed to the street and sidewalks for similar reasons.
On the first morning of spring break here it’s snowing like a bitch.
According to UAH v6 TLT, a dataset of the satellite-measured lower troposphere produced by Christy & Spencer, the satellite-measured lower troposphere over land has had a warming rate of .18 degree/decade since January 1979. https://www.drroyspencer.com/2023/03/uah-global-temperature-update-for-february-2023-0-08-deg-c
Berkeley Earth only publishes the global average temperature since 1850.
That article is concerning the land-only temperature since 1750.
A global average temperature construct is arrant nonsense.
No practical, real-world use to anyone living their day-to-day lives anywhere on this planet.
I’m going to let you pick that fight with Anthony Watts alone.
See, with me this isn’t a fight.
Just dealing with reality.
And Anthony as a meteorologist learned his craft by dealing with actually experienced regional temperatures and forecasts for the next few days based on observed weather patterns, not adding the ‘anomaly’ constructs of London and Miami and dividing by two, then presenting this folly as “science”.
My interpretation of what Anthony does here is to debunk the nonsense I just described.
From the article: “As seen in Figure 2, an analysis of Berkeley Earth global surface temperature data by Willis Eschenbach shows”
Nothing. If you use a bogus temperature record like Berkeley Earth,you get bogus results.
Berkeley Earth is a bogus, bastardized Hockey Stick, which distorts the historic temperature record.
A legitimate chart would show the Early Twentieth Century to be just as warm as today. If you look at a temperature chart and it does not show the Early Twentieth Century as being as warm as today, then you are looking at a bogus, bastardized Hockey Stick chart.
I don’t understand why someone would use data that is made up out of thin air, in a computer, and claim it represents reality. And then you are going to make comparisons with the bogus data and come to a valid conclusion? I don’t think so.
People in the Know, know it was just as warm in the Early Twentieth Century as it is today. They have seen all the unmodified regional surface temperature charts that show this clearly, yet they pretend that a bogus Hockey Stick represents reality. I just don’t understand it. The Hockey Stick Lie is obvious, yet this Lie keeps getting perpetrated by people who should know better.
There’s no Hockey Stick “hotter and hotter” profile in the U.S. chart (Hansen 1999):
You ought to do your comparisons with this data.
The mid 1900’s in Central Europe also show similar temps to 2000 but a n increase after that. That increase of course has nothing at all to do with carbon dioxide.
There are two issues with this graph of US temperature, that has the last year in it being 1998:
1) US temperature does not go lockstep with global temperature. Global temperature was not significantly affected by the Dust Bowl heatwaves, while US temperature was.
2) Older versions of US land temperature as determined by NASA GISS and by NOAA have part of the cooling from the 1930s to around 1970 being caused by official temperature measuring locations being moved from downtowns to airports. Older versions of these don’t have an adjustment for that. For that matter, I found a comparison of UAH and RSS determinations of the satellite-measured lower troposphere and NOAA determination of USA surface temperature up to and including 2015, and during the satellite era NOAA’s determination of USA48 surface temperature did not outpace UAH and RSS determination of warming of the satellite-measured lower troposphere over USA48. First graph in https://19january2021snapshot.epa.gov/climate-indicators/climate-change-indicators-us-and-global-temperature_.html And, that August 2016 graph surely shows lack of denial of USA48 cooling from the 1930s to the late 1970s.
Correct. The graph Tom Abbott posted does not contain the corrections for known biases. In addition to the station relocation bias there are the time-of-observation change bias and instrument package change bias which are actually the two biases that cause the most error.
As far as temperatures go, NASA Climate and NOAA claim that the temperature highpoint in 2016, was either 1.1C or 1.2C above their baseline.
So according to NASA Climate and NOAA, we have not reached the 1.5C “tipping point” yet.
And since 2016, the temperatures have cooled by about 0.6C, so we have a ways to go to get back up to the 1.5C “tipping point”.
The UAH satellite chart:
Same temp today as it was in 1988. When does the climate change thing start?
I have to confess confusion here. I’d always assumed the 1.5C, was based on an increase from the current average temperature. But apparently not.
So, what is the baseline timescale from which they’re basing their increase?
Thanks all.
Check here.
https://www.reuters.com/business/cop/how-close-are-we-passing-15-degrees-celsius-global-warming-2022-11-14/
Thanks, Mac, that explains it clearly. But also now informs me that 99% of the public have no idea of what the 1.5C threshold really means. I didn’t know, even though I’ve looked at many articles. If I was confused, what are they?
Cheers
It is confounding, confusing, and conflating that “Anomaly” graphs abound. Essentially a “deviation from the norm” without saying what the “norm” was. Very amateur. Notice Spencer properly labels his y-axis, but even he doesn’t state the absolute temperature that “zero” represents.
The IPCC baseline is from 1850-1900 which is considered the “pre-industrial period”.
Thanks Renee
“Bottom line, as documented by Willis Eschenbach, Earth has already warmed well past 1.5°C and nothing terrible has happened.”
Whether we have passed the 1.5°C by now or not depends on your starting baseline year.
Willis’ >1.5°C started in 1750, not the IPCC baseline year 1850, so 1750 is a bit disingenuous.
However the point is well taken that the human condition has improved since either year.
I predicted in my 2018 AGU poster a solar warming period through 2027/28, and in my 2022 AGU presentation that the 1.5°C would be exceeded during this solar cycle due to the sun.
We entered the solar warming period last year and are now warming steadily. Whenever their 1.5°C is breached, it will be because of solar activity above the warming threshold I established.
The summaries of the latest IPCC report many times do not agree with the body of the report, ie the actual study results. The summaries tend to only include bad new, not good news. For example, no mention is made that the 40 year flood trend is less flooding. Another is that there is no mention that Tropical Cyclone travel speed is trending faster. The summaries tend to exclude good news.
The Science of Doom guy is documenting this in detail. He’s on Substack now.
Insincere Propagandists for Climate Calamity – IPCC
That was an utterly nonsensical and unfounded claim even back then (just read through the comments), and time has not done it any favours.
The total warming since 1850 is calculated by linear regression; not by drawing a line from one point to another with a crayon, as a child might do.
We have gained 4 degrees since 1750?
Central Europe shows only 2. (take away UHE and it’s probably zero) But yes, we have already survived the terrible 1.5 C increase. I assume life is better in CE now than back then too….
Climate alarmists are bad people and I don’t like them. They are the personification of the ends justifies the means.
The 1.5 Celsius increase in temperature is a fiction, the climate crisis is a fiction and disparaging CO2 is plain stupid. Wake up people.
Regarding: “As seen in Figure 2, an analysis of Berkeley Earth global surface temperature data by Willis Eschenbach shows that not only has Earth passed the arbitrary 1.5°C threshold set by the IPCC, we’ve actually warmed from 4.0°C since 1750”: I see three issues with this:
1) The statements of how many degrees C it was cooler at specific amounts of time into the past are about short term temperature dips too short to be considered climate. This graph has a red smoothed curve, that has its lowest point at 2.6 degrees C below the temperature of recent years, at 1750.
2) Pre-industrial baseline is usually considered as the 1850-1900 average, which in this graph is about 1.9 degrees C cooler than warmer recent years. Cooler times before 1850 are Little Ice Age, not baseline.
3) This graph is not of global temperature, which IPCC said should not go more than 2 degrees C preferably no more than 1.5 degrees C above pre-industrial baseline. This graph is of temperature of the land subset of the globe, which varies more in temperature than global temperature does. Even the satellite-measured lower troposphere has warmed significantly more over land than over ocean.
Regarding ‘NASA scientist Jim Hansen introduced the “too late” language about climate change in 2005, arguing that “We have to stabilize emissions of carbon dioxide within a decade, or temperatures will warm by more than one degree [C]… we don’t have much time left”’: I did some web searching about this, and saw that Hansen was talking about global temperature warming by one degree C from where it was when he said that, when global temperature according to smoothed HadCRUT4 was already about .8-.85 degree C warmer than its 1850-1900 average.
“Final Warning”
If only that were true.
That was my thought too
So we never need to hear from them again?
It’s about time.