The IPCC - on the run at last
d....@hotmail.com
Tuesday, 22 April 2008
By Bob Carter
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
per cent 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 per cent 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 summarised 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 1,000 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 three years.
Is global cooling next?
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
initialised 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 publicising 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 realised 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
sovereign governments to commission an independent reassessment of the
UN’s hysterical global warming scare.