The comic cries of climate apocalypse — 50 years of spurious scaremongering

by B. Lomborg, Nov 30, 2021 in NewYorkPost


The recent UN climate summit in Glasgow was predictably branded our “last chance” to tackle the “climate catastrophe” and “save humanity.” Like many others, US climate envoy John Kerry warned us that we have only nine years left to avert most of “catastrophic” global warming.

But almost every climate summit has been branded the last chance. Setting artificial deadlines to get attention is one of the most common environmental tactics. We have actually been told for the past half-century that time has just about run out.

This message is not only spectacularly wrong but leads to panic and poor policies.

Two years ago, Britain’s Prince Charles announced that we had just 18 months left to fix climate change. This wasn’t his first attempt at deadline-setting. Ten years earlier, he told an audience that he “had calculated that we have just 96 months left to save the world.”

Why We Must “Quit Worrying About Uncertainty in Sea Level Projections”

by K. Hansen, Dec 2, 2021 in CO2Coalition


It is an interesting read but not because it presents good advice to the scientific community.  Rather, it presents the case that climate and ice models, which are used to make projections, are not up to the task.  While those who program climate models have been trained in what we know about the basic physics involved in the biggest sea level rise issue – ice sheet dynamics – the actual projections by those models depend on parameters that are loose guesses about things we don’t know.  As a result, Bassis says “…recent studies using climate and ice sheet models are, more and more often, coming to very different conclusions about future rates of sea level rise and even about the sensitivity of ice sheets to future warming…”  and because of that, he tells us:

“Large discrepancies among model projections of long-term sea level rise have spawned calls among the scientific community for scientists to work on reducing uncertainty. However, focusing on uncertainty is a trap we must avoid. Instead, we should focus on the adaptation decisions we can already make on the basis of current models and communicating and building confidence in models for longer-term decisions.”

Kip Hansen is an expert on sea level and sea-level rise. Prolific author of numerous articles on the subjects. WUWT lists 445 commentaries and articles.

He has spent much of his adult life at sea, first as an officer on a merchant ship, and later as a USCG-licensed captain in the Caribbean, where he sailed with his wife while doing humanitarian work (mostly Dominican Republic).

He is a proud member of the CO2 Coalition.

 This commentary was first published by the CO2 Coalition, December 3, 2021