Climate Experts Wrong.... as usual.

[Rorschach]

Is climate policy doing more harm than good?
Matt Ridley
The Australian
October 22, 2016

After covering global warming ­debates as a journalist on and off for almost 30 years, with initial credulity, then growing scepticism, I have come to the conclusion that the risk of dangerous global warming, now and in the future, has been greatly exaggerated while the policies enacted to ­mitigate the risk have done more harm than good, both economically and environmentally, and will continue to do so. And I am treated as some kind of pariah for coming to this conclusion. Increasingly, many people would like to outlaw, suppress, prosecute and censor all discussion of what they call “the science” rather than engage in debate. We’re told that it’s impertinent to question “the science” and that we must think as we are told. But ­arguments from authority are the refuge of priests.

These days there is a legion of climate spin doctors. Their job is to keep the debate binary: either you believe climate change is real and dangerous or you’re a denier who thinks it’s a hoax. But there’s a third possibility they refuse to ­acknowledge: that it’s real but not dangerous. That’s what I mean by lukewarming, and I think it is by far the most likely prognosis.

I am not claiming that carbon dioxide is not a greenhouse gas; it is. I am not saying that its concentration in the atmosphere is not increasing; it is. I am not saying the main cause of that increase is not the burning of fossil fuels; it is. I am not saying the climate does not change; it does. I am not saying that the atmosphere is not warmer today than it was 50 or 100 years ago; it is. And I am not saying that carbon dioxide emissions are not likely to have caused some (probably more than half) of the warming since 1950. I agree with the consensus on all these points.

Some of my scientific friends accuse me of inconsistently agreeing with the scientific consensus that genetic modification of crops is safe and beneficial, but refusing to agree with the scientific consensus that climate change is dangerous. I agree with the scientific consensus on GM crops not because it is a consensus but ­because I’ve looked at sufficient evidence. There is no consensus that climate change is going to be dangerous. Even the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says there is a range of possible outcomes, from harmless to catastrophic. I’m in that range: I think the top of that range is very unlikely. But the IPCC also thinks the top of its range is very unlikely.

Besides, consensus is a reasonable guide to data about the past but is no guide to the future and never has been. In non-linear systems with feedbacks, like economies or atmospheres, experts are notoriously bad at forecasting events. There is no such thing as an expert on the future.

It is undeniable that the ­climate models have failed to get global warming right. As the IPCC has confirmed, for the period since 1998, “111 of the 114 available climate-model simulations show a surface warming trend larger than the observations”. That is to say there is a consensus that the ­models are exaggerating the rate of global warming.

The warming has so far resulted in no significant or consistent change in the frequency or intensity of storms, tornadoes, floods, droughts or winter snow cover. The death toll from droughts, floods and storms has been going down dramatically. Not because weather has got safer, but because of technology and prosperity.

As two climate scientists, Richard McNider and John Christy, have put it, “We might forgive these modellers if their forecasts had not been so consistently and spectacularly wrong. From the ­beginning of climate modelling in the 1980s, these forecasts have, on average, always overstated the ­degree to which the Earth is warming compared with what we see in the real climate.”

In 1990, the first IPCC assessment predicted a temperature ­increase of 0.3C per decade (with an uncertainty range of 0.2C to 0.5C). In fact in the 2½ decades since, even though emissions have risen faster than in the business-as-usual scenario, the temperature has risen at an average rate of about 0.15C per decade based on surface measurements, or 0.12C per decade based on satellite data; that is, less than half as fast as ­expected and below the bottom of the uncertainty range!

What about 2015 and 2016 both being record hot years? Well, because of the massive El Nino, the HADCRUT4 surface temperature line just about inched up briefly in early 2016 into respectable territory in among the lower half of the model runs for a few months before dropping back out again. That’s all.

So why is the atmosphere not doing what it is told? Actually it is. These results are precisely in line with the physics of the greenhouse effect. A doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere cannot on its own produce dangerous warming. The sensitivity of the atmosphere to CO2 is about 1.2C per doubling. That is the consensus, spelled out clearly (if obscurely) by the IPCC several times over the years. And that’s what we are on course for at the moment.

So what is the problem? Well, the theory of dangerous climate change depends on a whole extra step in the argument — the ­supposed threefold amplification of carbon dioxide’s warming ­potential, principally by extra water vapour released into the ­atmosphere by a warming ocean, and accumulating at high altitudes. And the evidence for that is much more shaky.

Recent attempts to measure the sensitivity of the climate system to carbon dioxide using real data nearly all find that it is much lower than the models assume. So, if it’s consensus that floats your boat, there is an emerging consensus from observational estimates that climate sensitivity is low.

What’s more, all the high estimates of warming are based on an economic and demographic scenario called RCP 8.5, which is a very unrealistic one. It assumes that population growth stops decelerating and speeds up again.

It assumes that trade and innovation largely cease. It assumes that the ability of the oceans to ­absorb CO2 fails. It assumes that despite all this the income of the average person trebles. And most absurd of all, it assumes that we go back to using coal for almost everything, including to make motor fuel, so that by 2100 we are using 10 times as much coal as we are today. In short, it is a barking mad scenario.

It is beyond question that global warming has generated enormous research funds, measured in many billions, that this has stimulated all sorts of scientists, from botany to psychiatry, to link their work to climate change, and that almost none of this money flows to those with sceptical views.

As the distinguished NASA climate scientist Roy Spencer has written, “If you fund scientists to find evidence of something, they will be happy to find it for you. For over 20 years we have been funding them to find evidence of the human influence on climate. And they dutifully found it everywhere, hiding under every rock, glacier, ocean, and in every cloud, hurricane, tornado, raindrop, and snowflake. So, just tell scientists 20 per cent of their funds will be targeted for studying natural sources of climate change. They will find those, too.”

Suppose I am right and our grandchildren find that we were greatly exaggerating the risks, and underestimating the benefits of CO2. Suppose they do indeed ­experience carbon dioxide levels of 600 parts per million or more, but do not experience dangerous global warming, or more extreme weather, just a mild and decelerating increase in global average temperatures, especially at high latitudes, at night and in winter, accompanied by spectacular ­global greening and less water stress for both people and crops.

Does it matter that our politicians panicked in the early 2000s? Surely better safe than sorry? Here’s why it matters. Our current policy carries not just huge economic costs, which hit the poorest people hardest, but huge environmental costs too. We are encouraging forest destruction by burning wood, ethanol and ­biodiesel. We are denying poor people the cheapest forms of ­electricity, which forces them to continue relying on wood for fuel, at great cost to their health. We are using the landscape, the rivers, the estuaries, the hills, the fields for making energy, when we could be handing land back to nature, and relying on forms of energy that nature does not compete for — fossil and nuclear.

But there is a further reason why it matters. Real environmental problems are being neglected. The emphasis on climate change as the pre-eminent environmental threat means that we pay too little attention to the genuine ­environmental problems in the world, things like overfishing and invasive species.

And here is the maddest thing of all. Current policy is not even achieving decarbonisation. In 2012 Bjorn Lomborg calculated that 20 years of climate policy had reduced global emissions by less than 1 per cent. During that time the world had spent more than a trillion dollars to subsidise wind and solar power, yet between them they had still not achieved 1 per cent of world energy ­provision, and had cut emissions by even less.

[Outlaw Yogi]

Read that in the Australian several days back.
Also read a feature on One Nation's Malcolm Roberts. An avowed GW/CC denial activist.
He reckons GW/CC is a scam run by international bankers to usher in a global socialist new world order.
And has been criticised as being anti-semitic for daring to slag off Rothschild bank and the US Fed Reserve (who the skin head movement call King Jew).

Technically you're only anti-semite if you slag off real Jews (middle Easterners) who originate like the Arabs from the Semitic tribes of North Africa. And migrated to the Mid-East (invading the Kurds) and took up sheep herding after they over grazed the Sahara forest with goats, creating the world's largest desert.

Most people identifying as Jews are actually Ashkenazi Eastern Euro-wogs who speak Yiddish rather Hebrew, and these are the mammon worshippers running the banks, who wrote The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion and generally make the term Jew a dirty word.

Anyway, I thought about writing to Malcolm Roberts to help him clean his theory up.
Of all the theories circulated claiming to explain GW/CC only 2 can't be debunked - GHGs and axial precession/Precession of the Equinoxes.

Now the dominant theory concerning GHGs blames CO2.
But if CO2 is the cause, why aren't we exterminating phyto-plankton?
Seeing as phyto-plankton is responsible for up to 90% of the CO2 in our atmosphere.

Veg nazis/Vegan fundamentalists claim CH4 (methane) from cow farts and burps is the major cause of GW/CC. In a 2007 debate on this topic I did the numbers. 20mT of CH4 released annually by all the wild and domestic cattle globally, X 24 (CH4 24 X more heat holding than CO2) = to 480mT of CO2.
But (2007 figures) coal burning power stations alone release 4,700mT of CO2.
While CH4 does have the potential to cause run away GW as it has in the past at least twice, clearly the global cattle population is not to blame. But if it was, then we should be exterminating termites, who are responsible for 70% of global CH4 emissions, and most of the rest coming from rotting vegetation in bogs and swamps.


Meanwhile everyone in this debate seems to be ignoring N2O (nitrous oxide) which is 10 X more heat holding/trapping a GHG than CH4, thus 240 X more a potent GHG than CO2. Conservative estimate.
Wiki correction ...

When compared to carbon dioxide (CO 2), N2O has 298 times the ability per molecule of gas to trap heat in the atmosphere

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nitrous_oxide

According to ...

http://www.globalagriculture.org/report ... rming.html
via
https://www.google.com.au/?gws_rd=ssl#q ... s+on+Earth

There are more than 570 million farms in the world.

... and each one is releasing N2O every time they fertilise with nitrogen based fertilisers.

Assuming we need most of these (vegetable growing) farms to feed 7.5 billion people (and live stock?)
and N20 is the most likely culprit in the GHG blame game, it seems pretty obvious the planet is over populated and we need to do a global cull.

Regarding the Axial precession/Precession of the Equinoxes theory, it's un-debunk-able.
It also explains why one side of Antarctica (a continent) is thawing and the other side is freezing over.
One side of the continent is moving in to a warmer climate and the other side to a colder climate.

A while back Tim Flannery claimed the weight of GHGs was causing the Earth to tilt, and I scoffed with "what a load of bullshit". But according to my science dictionary this phenomena is not only feasible but is normal.

In which case, considering the Earth's axis is shifting constantly, this was going to happen anyway regardless of what humans do or have done. Thus GW/CC may be effected by human activity but certainly is not the cause of GW/CC, unless N2O from vegetable farms is the cause.

Maybe we should exterminate vegetarians ... and hope for the best.

[Rorschach]

ENVIRONMENT
More pseudo science from climate
by Peter Westmore
News Weekly, September 24, 2016

One of the central claims of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is that inexorable global warming, now described as “climate change”, will lead to more droughts and floods, crop failures and starvation, and rising sea levels which will make the world virtually uninhabitable by 2100.

The fact that none of these events has come to pass over the past two centuries of the world’s industrialisation is ignored by the IPCC’s scientists, who have decided that the future will be radically more dangerous than the past.

The predictions of food shortages and widespread starvation – a failed prediction by Thomas Malthus from around 1800 – were revived in the 1960s by American etymologist Paul Ehrlich, and popularised by the Club of Rome, a self-styled global think tank that preceded the IPCC.

The IPCC has taken up the claims, and given them a global reach. However, despite claims that 2016 is the “hottest year in history”, the quantity of food being produced continues to rise.

The Financial Times recently reported: “Extensive planting and benign weather have forced analysts to repeatedly raise crop outlooks.

“The International Grains Council last week increased its global wheat production forecast to a record
743 million tonnes, up 1 per cent from last year …

“The recent U.S. winter wheat harvest was 45 million tonnes, up 21 per cent from 2015, according to the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Merchants who have run out of room in silos are piling wheat outdoors.

“Storage concerns are also growing in Russia, which is this year set to become the largest wheat exporter after hauling in more than 70 million tonnes.

“In Canada, the government anticipates the second-largest wheat crop in 25 years, of 30.5 million tonnes. Australia’s imminent wheat harvest is forecast at 26.5 million tonnes, the most in five years.”

Rising sea levels

According to the IPCC, sea levels are rising at an alarming rate, and by 2100 will have risen by up to a metre around the world, with even faster rises subsequently.

An IPCC working group report from 2013, signed by Professor Jonathan Gregory, concluded that average sea levels could be predicted to rise by at least half a metre “with medium confidence”.

It added: “The collapse of marine-based sectors of the Antarctic Ice Sheet, if initiated, would add no more than several 10ths of a metre during the 21st century (medium confidence).

“It is very likely that sea-level will rise in more than about 95 per cent of the ocean area.

“It is very likely that there will be a significant increase in the occurrence of future sea-level extremes. It is virtually certain that global mean sea-level rise will continue for many centuries beyond 2100, with the amount of rise dependent on future emissions.”

Not to be outdone, Professor Stefan Rahmsdorf, a German oceanographer and climatologist who in 2007 predicted that sea levels would rise by up to 1.4 metres by 2100, more recently upgraded the rise to 1.8 metres in his latest paper.

Unfortunately for Rahmsdorf, Gregory and their cohort, the measured sea-level rises around the world are relatively small, and nothing to worry about.

Tom Moriarty, senior scientist at the United States Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory, has put together the actual measured sea-level rises from stations around the world, and published the conclusions on his blog, Climate Sanity.

He said: “You can see all kinds of sea-level rise predictions for the 21st century, with over-wrought images of houses and buildings under water. One of the favourite predictions of the hand wringers is ‘1.8 metres’ of sea-level rise for the 21st century.”

He then pointed out that:

• Seventy-five per cent of atmospheric anthropogenic carbon dioxide arrived after 1950.

• There has been no obvious acceleration in sea-level rise rates since 1950 as seen from tide gauges.

• Extrapolating tide gauge time series to 2100 would give about 15 centimetres of sea-level rise between 200o and 2100.

He said projections of one, 1.8 or two metres of sea-level rise between 2000 and 2100 would require “extraordinary rate-rise accelerations”.

There has been no significant change in the three factors that might contribute to rising sea levels.

Although there has been a slight heating of the top layer of the seawater, almost all the seawater is located in the deep ocean, at temperatures just above freezing point.

Because mixing of the deep ocean is a very slow process, there is no possibility of sudden large changes to the ocean water temperature.

Contrary to claims by climate alarmists, satellite measurements show that there has been no significant increase in the area of sea ice around the world, despite the enormous season changes that take place in both hemispheres.

Finally, there has been an increase in the amount of ice on the Antarctic continent, more than compensating for any reduction in Greenland.