by M. Phillips, February 25, 2020 in ClimateChangeDispatch
A few commentators have begun to stumble towards the fact that the policy of becoming “carbon neutral” by 2050, as adopted by the UK and the EU, would undo modernity itself.
On Unherd, Peter Franklin observes that, if carried through, the policy will have a far greater effect than Brexit or anything else; it will transform society altogether.
“It will continue to transform the power industry, and much else besides: every mode of transport; how we build, warm and cool our homes; food, agriculture and land use; trade, industry, every part of the economy”.
Franklin is correct. Even so, he seems not to grasp the full implications of the disaster he intuits – because he thinks there’s some kind of middle way through which the imminent eco-apocalypse can be prevented without returning Britain to the Middle Ages.
In a similar vein, he quotes Rachel Wolf, a co-author of the 2019 Conservative manifesto, who is prone to the same kind of magical thinking. She wrote:
“Government has committed to ‘net zero’ greenhouse gas emissions because it does not want the side effects of the energy sources we have used for centuries to destroy the planet. At the same time, we do not want to return to an era where children (and their mothers) regularly died, and where the majority of people lived in what would now in the UK be considered wholly unacceptable poverty. This is a staggering challenge.”
This is what we might call an understatement. What is truly staggering is, first, that any sentient person thinks this can be done and, second, that it should be done.
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Professor Ole Humlum, Emeritus Professor of Physical Geography, University of Oslo, has said that the World Meteorological Organisation is misleading the public by suggesting that global warming and its impacts are accelerating. He wrote:
Reading the WMO report, you would think that global warming was getting worse. But in fact, it is carefully worded to give a false impression. The data are far more suggestive of an improvement than a deterioration.
After the warm year of 2016, temperatures last year continued to fall back to levels of the so-called warming “pause” of 2000-2015. There is no sign of any acceleration in global temperature, hurricanes or sea-level rise. These empirical observations show no sign of acceleration whatsoever.
…The temperature variations recorded in the lower troposphere are generally reflected at higher altitudes also, and the overall temperature ‘pause’ since about 2002 is recorded at all altitudes, including the tropopause and into the stratosphere above.
In the stratosphere, however, the temperature ‘pause’ had already commenced by around 1995; that is, 5–7 years before a similar temperature ‘pause’ began in the lower troposphere near the planet’s surface. The stratospheric temperature ‘pause’ has now lasted without interruption for about 24 years.”
Paul Homewood wrote here that the Met Office’s Central England Temperature Record shows that temperatures have barely changed in 20 years and that there has been no increase in extremely hot days either:
The summer of 2018 had just one day over 30 degrees, while 1976 had six. The Met Office’s data show that hot days are just not becoming more common.
And there seems to be little to worry about on bad weather front either. There has been a gentle decline in storminess, and in most of the UK, there has been no change in either average rainfall or rainfall extremes.
A leading climatologist, Professor John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, has said that the computer simulations used to predict global warming are failing on a key measure of the climate today and cannot be trusted.
They all have rapid warming above 30,000 feet in the tropics – it’s effectively a diagnostic signal of greenhouse warming. But in reality, it’s just not happening.
It’s warming up there but at only about one-third of the rate predicted by the models.
Professor Ray Bates of University College Dublin says the IPCC’s Special Report on a Global Warming of 1.5°C (SR1.5), which makes a “costly and highly disruptive recommendation” that carbon emissions be reduced to zero by mid-century, lacks the scientific rigor to support such a proposal.
There is much recent observational and scientific evidence that the IPCC report has failed to include and which supports a more considered mitigation strategy than the extreme and unrealistic measures called for in the SR1.5 report.
A review of Met Office weather data found the UK climate was more stable than was being suggested.
“The review, which examines official temperature, rainfall, drought, and other weather data shows that although temperatures increased slightly in the 1990s and 2000s, there is no evidence that weather has become more extreme.
And intriguingly, extreme heat is, if anything, slightly less common than in previous decades. In particular, heatwaves have not become more severe and nor have droughts. Data also suggest that recent warming has had little effect on the severity of flooding in the UK”.
Richard Lindzen, formerly Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, is the author of over 200 papers on meteorology and climatology and is a member of the US National Academy of Sciences.
He has consistently drawn attention to the fact that AGW theory is a sham and a scam.
In a lecture in 2018, he ridiculed the core premises of AGW theory that the climate, a complex multifactor system, could be summarised in just one variable – the globally averaged temperature change – and that it was primarily controlled by the 1-2 percent perturbation in the single variable of carbon dioxide.
This, he said, is:
…an extraordinary pair of claims based on the reasoning that borders on magical thinking.
Turning to the issue of temperature extremes, is there any data to even support concern? As to these extremes, the data shows no trend and the IPCC agrees… At the heart of this nonsense is the failure to distinguish weather from climate.
Thus, global warming refers to the welcome increase in temperature of about 1°C since the end of the Little Ice Age about 200 years ago. On the other hand, weather extremes involve temperature changes of the order of 20°C. Such large changes have a profoundly different origin from global warming.
This has also been the case with sea-level rise. Sea level has been increasing by about 8 inches per century for hundreds of years, and we have clearly been able to deal with it. In order to promote fear, however, those models that predict much larger increases are invoked.
As a practical matter, it has long been known that at most coastal locations, changes in sea level, as measured by tide gauges, are primarily due to changes in land level associated with both tectonics and land use.
Moreover, the small change in global mean temperature (actually the change in temperature increase) is much smaller than what the computer models used by the IPCC have predicted.
Even if all this change were due to man, it would be most consistent with low sensitivity to added carbon dioxide, and the IPCC only claims that most (not all) of the warming over the past 60 years is due to man’s activities. Thus, the issue of man-made climate change does not appear to be a serious problem.