OnTheWeb: Bob Carter
March 25, 2008
http://canadafreepress.com/index.php/article/2352
QUOTE: "To avoid acknowledging the recent flat-lining of global
temperature, IPCC alarmists have another favourite pea and thimble - or
is it elephant and circus tent - trick, which is to assert some
variation on the statement that "eleven of the last twelve years
(1995-2006) rank among the twelve warmest years in the instrumental
record". Given the cyclicity of the climate record, and that the planet
is probably now poised near the peak of an ascending temperature cycle,
this statement is no more useful than observing that over an annual
cycle the hottest days each year cluster around midsummer's day. "
UN climate body in panic mode as satellite temperatures turn down and a
hard winter lashes both hemispheres
A soprano thrillingly hits her top-A, sighs with relief at achieving the
desired effect, and moves on. But not the Intergovernmental Panel on
Climate Change (IPCC) whose climate alarmism started to crescendo in
2001 in the Third Assessment Report (3AR) with the statement that "most
of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely (>66% probable)
to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations".
Recently, in their Fourth Assessment Report (4AR), and faced with their
failure to convince the public that the sky is falling, the IPCC
delivers even more preposterous advice in ever shriller tones, saying
that "Most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since
the mid-20th century is very likely (>90% probable) due to the observed
increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations".
The wobble around top-A is clearly discernible.
The press, most of whom have firmly identified with the alarmist cause,
continues to appease the Green gods by faithfully running IPCC's now
unrealistic scientific propaganda, thereby stoking public alarm; the
science is a done deal, they say, and the time has come to stop talking.
According to UK journalist, Geoffrey Lean, all that is lacking to solve
the global warming "crisis" is political will from governments.
Well, thank the Lord for that lack. For the IPCC's 2007 final Summary
for Policymakers shows that the climate alarmists are at last on the
run. Their evidence for dangerous, human-caused global warming, always
slim, now lies exposed in tatters for all to see.
In contrast, the alternative, persuasive and non-alarmist view of
climate change is well summarized in two recently issued and readily
available documents.
The first is a letter to the Secretary General of the United Nations,
which was released at the UN's Bali conference last December, supported
by the signatures of 103 eminent professional persons.
The second is the Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change, the release
of which coincided with the launch of the International Climate Science
Coalition at a major climate rationalist conference in New York in early
March.
The evidence for dangerous global warming adduced by the IPCC has never
been strong on empirical science. Endless circumstantial scare campaigns
have been run about melting glaciers, more droughts and storms and
floods, sea-level rise and polar bears, but all founder on one
inescapable problem - as does Mr. Al Gore's over-hyped science fiction
film. And that is that we live on a naturally variable planet. Change is
what planet Earth does on all scales, and so far not one of the alleged
effects of human-caused global warming has been shown to lie outside
normal planetary variation. Sea-level rising? Sure, it happens. And the
appropriate response is adaptation, as the Dutch have known for
centuries.
Stuck with the absence of empirical evidence for dangerous warming or
abnormal change, in 2001 the IPCC turned to graphmanship, giving
prominence in its 3AR to the so-called "hockey-stick" record of
temperature over the last 1000 years. The hockey-stick graphic, which
appeared to show dramatic increases of temperature during the 20th
century compared with earlier times, has now been exposed as statistical
chicanery and, thankfully, is nowhere to be seen in the 4AR.
No hockey-stick and no empirical evidence, what is a man to do? Well,
obviously, turn to virtual reality rather than real reality: PlayStation
4 here we come.
The IPCC's expensive and complex computer models can be programmed to
produce any desired result, and it is therefore not surprising that they
uniformly predict warming since 1990. Meanwhile, the real-world global
average temperature has stubbornly refused to obey this stricture. It
exhibits no significant increase since 1998, and the preliminary 2007
year-end temperature confirms the continuation of a temperature plateau
since 1998 to which is now appended a cooling trend over the last 3
years.
GRAPH:
Is global cooling next?
"Best fit" of yearly average temperature
Lower atmosphere global temperature differences (0C) from 1979 - 1998
average
"Global warming theory indicates that temperature rise due to increasing
carbon dioxide emissions should be most prominent at heights of 5-10 km
in the lower atmosphere; instead, more warming is occurring at the
surface. For the lower atmosphere, the satellite data indicate that,
since the 1998 El Nino when temperatures spiked 1C due to a rise in
water vapour emissions (the principal "greenhouse gas"), global
temperatures dropped sharply, then stabilized and now show signs of
continuing down - is global cooling next? (data courtesy of Professors
John Christy and Roy Spencer, University of Alabama, Huntsville; a
best-fitted spline curve represents longer term temperature trends)."
That there is a mismatch between model prediction and 2007 climate
reality is again unsurprising. For as IPCC senior scientist Kevin
Trenberth noted recently: ". . . there are no (climate) predictions by
IPCC at all. And there never have been"; instead there are only "what
if" projections of future climate that correspond to certain emissions
scenarios. Trenberth continues, "None of the models used by IPCC is
initialized to the observed state and none of the climate states in the
models corresponds even remotely to the current observed climate".
Knowing that their models are non-predictive and that despite their
exhortations world temperature isn't currently increasing, the IPCC has
the effrontery to argue in 4AR that a decline in the sun's activity and
increased eruptions from volcanoes would "likely have produced cooling"
of the planet were it not for offsetting human-caused warming. And this
when there have been no recent volcanic eruptions of global import, and
after 15 years during which the warming alarmists have consistently
denied that solar activity is a significant cause of recent climate
change. The self-serving nature of these arguments is breathtaking, and
transparently the alarmists are now positioning themselves to explain
away any continuation of the downturn in temperature that is now
underway short-term.
Such stunts deny scientific method, because they fly in the face of
Occam's Razor, or the principle of parsimony. Of course volcanic dust or
other aerosols might have affected the global temperature over the last
few years. But only persons who are searching desperately to save a
favourite hypothesis make such assertions in the absence of reliable
evidence.
To avoid acknowledging the recent flat-lining of global temperature,
IPCC alarmists have another favourite pea and thimble - or is it
elephant and circus tent - trick, which is to assert some variation on
the statement that "eleven of the last twelve years (1995-2006) rank
among the twelve warmest years in the instrumental record". Given the
cyclicity of the climate record, and that the planet is probably now
poised near the peak of an ascending temperature cycle, this statement
is no more useful than observing that over an annual cycle the hottest
days each year cluster around midsummer's day.
Having failed to convince the world that human-caused warming of the
atmosphere is dangerous, IPCC has been casting around for new causes to
espouse. A Royal Society of London report in 2005 on "Ocean
acidification due to increasing atmospheric carbon dioxide" has proved
to be good feedstock, because of its claim that the average pH of the
oceans will fall by 0.5 units by 2100 if global emissions keep rising at
their current rate. That this estimate is known to be exaggerated by a
factor of about 3 has not prevented the IPCC and others from recently
publicizing the ocean acidification legend. Clearly, they now seek to
move the epicentre of the climate scare from the atmosphere, which
stubbornly refuses to warm, to the ocean, whose depths doubtless still
contain many scientific surprises.
The roughly 50 computer experts and scientists who form the core
advisory group for the IPCC's stance must have realized for several
years now that the game was up. There is indeed copious evidence that
climate is changing, as it always has; and that natural biological and
physico-chemical systems - again as always - are changing in response.
But as to human causation - the evidential cupboard is bare.
For the last three years, satellite-measured average global temperature
has been declining. Given the occurrence also of record low winter
temperatures and massive snowfalls across both hemispheres this year,
IPCC members have now entered panic mode, the whites of their eyes being
clearly visible as they seek to defend their now unsustainable
hypothesis of dangerous, human-caused global warming.
To try to top "The Ring of the Niebelung", composers after Wagner
abandoned classical key structures and turned to the apparent aural
chaos of atonalism. Similarly, to pursue the higher cause of saving the
planet, the IPCC has now largely abandoned classical (empirical) science
and adopted the sophistry of deterministic computer modelling. The
result is neither melodious nor meaningful, let alone useful for
sensible environmental planning. The time has surely arrived for the New
Zealand government to commission an independent reassessment of the UN's
hysterical global warming scare.
Dr. Bob Carter is a Research Professor at James Cook University,
Queensland, Australia, who studies ancient environments and climate, and
whose website is at http://members.iinet.net.au/~glrmc/new_page_1.htm
--
Warmest Regards
Bonzo
". researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Solar Research in Germany
report the sun has been burning more brightly over the last 60 years,
accounting for the 1 degree Celsius increase in Earth's temperature over
the last 100 years."
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