Party Line right, climate science wrong
By Paul Homewood
Guest Post by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley.
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley responds to the above piece by Ryan Cooper:
Ryan Cooper (left below), an innumerate journalist writing for The Week, asks (alongside the obligatory picture of a cuddly polar bear, right below) the tendentious question, “Have conservatives noticed their favorite climate talking point has been obliterated?
“Conservatives”, says Cooper, “have long been searching for a reason to do nothing about climate change … Several years ago, it seemed like that crowd had a perfect argument to justify inaction on climate: the global warming ‘pause’ … But lo and behold, two years later warming has surged back with a vengeance.”
Well, actually, it was the unlamented “Dr” Pachauri, railroad engineer turned climate guru, who gave the Pause its name in a speech in Melbourne more than three years ago. Oh, and the Pause was present until its peak length of 18 years 9 months just eight months back:
Cooper obediently trots out the Party Line that most of the missing global warming had gone into hiding in the oceans (no original thinker he). He adds that the el Niño that has now ended was nature’s way of putting the heat back into the atmosphere – except that it’s been doing that naturally for tens of thousands of years.
He says, “You should never hang an entire view of a chart on the last few data points” – and then hangs his entire view of the following chart on the last few data points, which show a spike in global warming caused by the more than usually active but now declining el Niño.
Cooper carefully cuts off the observed-temperature trend line just at the peak, concealing the inconvenient truth that in the past two months global temperatures have plummeted as the el Niño comes to an end.
Next, we are treated to a not particularly scary prediction that there is a 99% chance the world will be warmer this year than last (maybe it will, maybe it won’t, but even if it is it won’t be by much, and it won’t be a bad thing).
No Clim-Comm piece would be complete without the usual catalogue of lurid supposed disasters: “Coral bleaching has reached epidemic proportions” (well, that natural defense mechanism happens whenever there is a severe el Niño, such as 1998 or two further great El Niños before that over the past 300 years, and the corals survive it just fine: they’ve faced a lot worse in the past 175 million years).
“The Arctic just had its warmest winter on record” (and a good thing too).
“The ocean level has increased 36.5 mm since April 2011” (except that Cooper carefully chose the satellite data, which have serious calibration problems, rather than the less excitable tide gauges, and he also carefully cherry-picked his period by starting it at a local nadir in global sea level and ending it at the el-Niño-driven apex).
“Extreme drought and extreme precipitation are happening all over the place” (they always were and they always will, but the trend in extreme droughts, as in all droughts, has been downward for 30 years, and even the IPCC, both in its Fifth Assessment Report and in its Special Report on Extreme Weather, says there is no evidence for systemic change in precipitation, and still less evidence that such patterns of change as have occurred are driven by global warming).
Cooper ends with a traditional Marxstream-media rant: “Will they [the non-Marxists] come around and admit their previous mistake, and join in advocating for immediate, aggressive climate policy? The world is waiting.”
Well, it can wait a little longer, just like Cooper’s grasp of grammar (“advocate” is transitive, so “for” after it is superfluous) and of climate science. The IPCC’s First Assessment Report predicted that in the first 15 years of the 21st century the world would warm at a rate equivalent to 2.8 [1.9, 4.2] Celsius degrees per century.
Observed global warming measured by satellites and taken as the mean of the RSS and UAH monthly temperature anomalies from January 2001 to June 2016, including the dramatic recent spike in temperatures but not yet including the la Niña that may follow the now-departed el Niño, is well below 0.6 C°/century:
Observed warming over the period, then, is about one-fifth of the IPCC’s originally-predicted central rate.
Before the usual suspects whine that it’s not fair to consider only the past 15 years, and that one should go back to 1990 itself, I say this. The IPCC, following the computer models, predicted in 1990 that, as business-as-usual CO2 concentration increased, the rate of global warming after 2000 should be somewhat greater than the rate of global warming before it.
Global warming since 1990, at 1.2 C°/century equivalent, is more than double the warming rate since 2001, suggesting that the ever-increasing CO2 concentration in the air is causing less and less global warming, contrary to official predictions.
I cannot tell you whether there will be a la Niña later this year and into next year. But if there is, and if it is anything like as noticeable as it was following the 1998 temperature spike, then by this time next year the Pause will have reappeared, and will be close to 20 years in length.
As the discrepancy between prediction and observation continues to widen beyond all hope of concealment by further data-tampering, it will eventually become impossible to bury the now well-established scientific truth that, even though CO2 emissions are above the business-as-usual forecast made by the IPCC in 1990, the rate of global warming is a small fraction of what had then been predicted.
How, then, has the scare been maintained for so long? The chief reason is that the climate extremists readopted an unpleasant tactic first developed by the totalitarians of the 20th century: organized, paid, structured vilification of anyone who dared to oppose them.
In the end, politicians know that climate skeptics won’t screech at them and won’t spend tens of billions on front groups whose sole purpose is to trash their reputations. But climate extremists do that, and it works. It frightens off ordinary folk, who would otherwise have seen through the climate scam far more quickly and completely than they have.
In the end, though, the world won’t warm at anything like the predicted rate. By the time even the extremists have realized that scientifically illiterate pieces like Cooper’s can no longer sweep the growing discrepancy under the carpet, how many tens of millions will their cruel policies of opposing affordable electric power have killed in third-world countries?
Mr Cooper should be ashamed of himself. But he won’t be. One needs a conscience first.
Comments are closed.
NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Perhaps that’s why you get silence when you ask the alarmists for which predictions have happened.
Next, we are treated to a not particularly scary prediction that there is a 99% chance the world will be warmer this year than last
I’m not a betting man but, if those are the odds he’s offering, I’d take a piece of the action.
You might not have made a good bet, assuming the data cannot be manipulated sufficiently to produce warming. Things are cooling off rapidly after El Nino. Warmists may have been taken in by their own admonished error—they tried to sell El Nino warming as the real thing. Funny how in 1998 El Nino was an anomaly but in 2015 it’s a sign of apocalypic warming. Cherry pie, anyone?
Because I am older than most of the readers here, I feel I have to say how surprised I am to hear the coral reefs are in danger.
I have been told every generation or so that they are on the verge of extinction because of the contemporary fashionable leftist cause. First it was nuclear testing, then it was acid rain, then atmospheric pollution in general blocking the sunlight, then pollution in fresh water ocean input changing the balance of the eco system, then global warming, then just climate change (in case anybody shows that the waters haven’t actually warmed up where any given reef is)
Now every time I hear about a new threat certain to extinguish coral reefs my reaction is……..my god, are they still here. I thought that they had been wiped out several times over …….
Maybe they are zombie reefs, completely dead but still there refusing to accept their demise. Maybe we should attack and kill them before they destroy humanity with their ability to still live even though they have died many times. Certainly we have seen some Polar bear populations return from their claimed death and they actually are attacking humans during their increasingly frequent interactions. Luckily, we have the world wide center for information about Polar bears, the University of Arizona, ready to advise us to ignore the locals from where Polar bears actually live, while those in the desert inform us about the bears’ status and activities.
The movies have got it all wrong. It is not zombie people we should fear. It is back from the dead zombie reefs, and refusing to die like they are supposed to polar bears, disproven climate theories and a whole range of climate refusing to die no matter how many times it has been killed evidence, advanced to support the conclusion that it is actually people who are causing all the problems and we just need to figure out how to get rid of large numbers of said people in as many subtle ways as possible.
We can take some comfort in knowing that eating brains is the last thing these zombies want to do. In fact brain power is the only defense against the modern zombies.
You left out the reef crunching crown-of-thorns starfish. I think that “scare” was in the ’70’s when pundits decreed that there would be no more coral reefs when these voracious nibblers got done.
You mean the coral reefs are still here?
The crown of thorns starfish doing the invasion were described as genetic mutants, a sub genre of zombies popular at the time, produced by nuclear device testing carried out by the West. The only solution available to rid the world of the mutants and thereby save the reefs and thus the world was for the West to unilaterally disarm.
Concerns about needing everyone else to disarm being as essential were judged irrelevant and an indication of someone’s low intellectual capacity. As was wanting some evidence of a connection between the testing and the starfish and whether stopping testing would have any bearing on the reefs themselves. (or even that the Crown of Thorns starfish were different in any way from what always had been)
Fans of the cartoon South Park t.v. show will be familiar with every episode having a character called Kenny killed off usually very dramatically, and someone yelling ….you killed Kenny you bastards…..
The eco activists are always yelling ….you killed the coral reefs, you bastards….and, just like South Park, never having to explain how they could be back to be killed again in a new episode.
As we sailed in the tropics a few years ago, we saw coral growing quite happily (supporting lots of pretty coloured fish and other marine life too) just about everywhere it was possible to grow, including what could be described as the heavily polluted waters in and around fuel docks etc.
I remember when at loose times between term times at Aberdeen Uni I’d access to the non-exhibited zoological basement collections. From leatherback turtles to abyssal ratfish to part bones of blue whales, albatross etc. The then lecturer (1988, name withheld -ends in h) was at pains throughout a number of lab works in extolling Gaia and Anderson as requisited follow up. And the Antarctic was in severe danger – post Montreal – and we, as science students – if successful within our careers – should best see the world as an evolving, rotating hydrosphere in imminent danger.
Back then, of course, there were the first mutterings then successive internationally generated grand eco scares – ozone/AIDS/famine/drought you name it affliction. All anthropogenic.The journals and subsequent media have not relented since, despite overwhelming contradictory evidence. It’s thanks to folks like Paul, and Ron, rud and Judy etc., in keeping the real world/real time actuality in some focus.
Christopher Monckton of Brenchley,
this Cooper guy is just another over-exposed idiót who should be ignored. You are feeding this tróll and his self-important egó, an egó that stops him checking his so called ‘facts’ for accuracy, and veracity in the piece he authored. How could Cooper ever understand the science is a process and not statements of so called facts. How could he realize that there has been about 240 scientific papers since 2014 questioning the AGW orthodoxy.
Still, who ever expected an accuracy from a political piece of writing?
These latest warming claims are all on the back of the strong El Nino. Therefore they are nothing to do with supposed man-made effects.
Do warmists not even notice the absurdity of complaining about natural variation and demanding ‘action’ against it?
Will be HILARIOUS to watch them as the coming La Nina and sullen sun start to cool the planet. 🙂
Watching the recent see-saw NA temps over time, it’s not a given that its flipped. Post 2007 it cooled then bumped upwards/down to now what appears to be a slide. As we know, ARGO / intake data adjustments are NASA-derived propaganda.
Reblogged this on Patti Kellar.