If you still believe in 'climate change' read this

[Stephanie]

links in article at site

SNIP:

By James Delingpole Environment Last updated: September 3rd, 2013

2768 Comments Comment on this article at site



Put him in the Special Punishment wing. He's earned it

If any business were to submit a prospectus as patently false and deliberately dishonest as the ones used to advance the cause of the global warming industry, its directors would all be in prison by now. (C Jeff Randall)

Does that mean Ed Davey should have followed Chris Huhne into the slammer for his claim to Andrew Neil on BBC Daily Politics the other day that in "a recent analysis of 12,000 climate papers…of the scientists who expressed a view 97 per cent said that climate change was happening and that it was human-made activity."?

Not quite, unfortunately, because nothing Davey has said there is technically untrue. A better candidate for prison, actually, would be whoever tweets under the name @BarackObama. When he Tweeted: "Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: #climate change is real, man-made and dangerous" he was promulgating a demonstrable untruth.

No one has ever doubted that climate changes.

Pretty much everyone – probably more than 97 per cent, even – agrees that there is a degree of anthropogenic input, even it's just the barely measurable contribution of beef cattle farts or the heat produced by cities.

But the dangerous bit? No one has come even close to demonstrating it, there is no reliable evidence for it, and very few scientists – certainly far, far fewer than 97 per cent of them – would ever stake their reputations on such a tendentious claim.

The background to all this – and the "97 per cent of climate scientists say…." meme – is expertly covered in a new paper for the Global Warming Policy Foundation by Andrew Montford.

In a sane world it wouldn't have needed writing. An obscure green political activist called John Cook and a few of his eco-cronies produced a pseudo-scientific paper so riddled with flaws that it ought to have been tossed straight in the bin. Instead, it was bigged up by a compliant mainstream media, a desperate and propaganda-hungry green industry, and by the US President as a vitally significant meta-analysis offering indisputable proof of the scientific "consensus" on "climate change."

Montford concludes:


The consensus as described by the survey is virtually meaningless and tells us nothing about the current state of scientific opinion beyond the trivial observation that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that human activities have warmed the planet to some unspecified extent. The survey methodology therefore fails to address the key points that are in dispute in the global warming debate."

So how do the bastards go on getting away with it? Jamie Whyte provides a fascinating, erudite and original answer in his new paper for the Institute of Economic Affairs – Quack Policy.

(And for a summary of the lefty reaction so far, see here)

In it, he exposes the "rhetorical bluster" used, inter alia, by the climate alarmist establishment to make their case sound stronger and more trustworthily "scientific" than it really is. He is especially sceptical of those who try to advance their cause with the weasel phrase "evidence-based" policy.


"They are partial in their accounting for costs and benefits; they ignore substitution effects; they pretend that mathematical precision is evidence; they confound risk and uncertainty; and they exaggerate the certainty warranted by the available evidence. Having committed such errors, they obscure them with grandiose irrelevancies about peer-reviewed publication, consensus among scientists and the proclamations of official scientific committees."

For Whyte – an economist as well as a philosopher – the fundamental flaw in the warmist argument is its failure to a use a realistic discount rate.

None of the projected disastrous effects of climate change exists in the present but only in an imaginary future (which may never come to pass: these are only unverifiable computer model "projections", remember). So we ought, when considering our expensive prevention/mitigation policies, factor in the key point that "future generations" are going to be richer than we are and therefore better able to pay for any problems that "climate change" may cause them.

But the alarmists cannot afford to admit this, for to do so would be fatally to weaken their case that the time for action is now and that any delay will be fatal. Their emphasis on their imminence of catastrophe is designed to preclude rational analysis, so as to railroad through policies before more temperate heads notice their flaws.

In order to give this catastrophism more credibility, alarmists are wont to appeal to the authority of the "consensus.' (Which is why, of course, the warmist establishment made such a meal of the Cook paper above).

Again, Whyte finds a fatal flaw in this line of argument:


The climate models that predict AGW have not been tested and they are not mere entailments of well-known physics and chemistry. Why, then, do scientists have such high levels of confidence in them? In other words, if a scientific consensus really does exist, this is what needs to be explained. It cannot explain itself, nor justify itself.

Good point. And I'd love to hear a convincing answer to this from the numerous well-known scientists who have used their prestige or their celebrity or their presumed expertise to help push the great climate change scare. I'm thinking here of everyone from Lord Winston and Sir Paul Nurse to science-background celebs such as Ben Goldacre, Simon Singh and Dara O'Briain, all of whom on various occasions have purported to know that "climate change" is a major problem because apparently there is some kind of "consensus" among scientists.

Whyte elucidates further:

all of it here with comments
If you still believe in 'climate change' read this? ? Telegraph Blogs

 

[waltky]

Uncle Ferd says dat's why it been so hot `round here lately - `cause o' dat climate change...

Extreme Weather Linked to Climate Change
September 09, 2013 ~ No evidence has linked extreme weather events to climate change, until now. New research suggests devastating floods, droughts and storms were exacerbated by human-induced climate change caused by the burning of fossil fuels in our cars, factories and homes.

The new report, released by British and American climate agencies, analyzes a dozen extreme weather events which occurred worldwide in 2012. “What they find is [with] about half of the events," said Thomas Karl, director of the NOAA National Climatic Data Center, "the analyses reveal compelling evidence that human-caused change was a factor contributing to the extreme event.” The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and Britain’s Met Office Hadley Centre edited the report. Co-editor and NOAA scientist Thomas Peterson says natural weather patterns and human induced climate change are factors in the intensity and evolution of events.

While last year’s spring and summer heat waves in the United States are attributed to normal atmospheric dynamics, climate scientists found that is not the entire story. “They estimated that human caused climate change contributed about one-third of the magnitude of that warmth," Peterson said. "Or in terms of risk, greenhouse warming had already made very large seasonal departures from normal, like the temperatures in the spring in the Eastern U.S. about 12 times more likely to occur.” The report also blamed human-caused climate change for the warmer ocean and atmosphere that drove the loss of sea ice in the Arctic.

Heavy rains in southeastern Brazil caused a dam in the town of Campo de Goytacazes to burst and flood the area, January, 2012.

That was not the case with Hurricane Sandy, the devastating storm that hit New Jersey and New York last October. Karl says the rare event might have occurred anyway. “What the analysis was saying with the added increase of sea level, that just makes that kind of event incrementally worse," Karl said. "And in some of these events that is the kind of result that we are seeing. However, in a number of these other events we could not detect a human influence.”

High rainfall in Britain, the United States, China and Japan were mainly due to natural variability, while the report detected a warming-climate connection in precipitation in Australia and New Zealand. “We are making great strides in our ability to understand these events," Karl said. "We attribute this to increased computational resource [and] improved quality of data sets. With these tools we continue to gain more insights into the many factors that affect the frequency and intensity as well as the spatial and temporal patterns of the extreme events.” And, Karl adds, the more accurate information collected by climate scientists can help policy makers and the public better understand and manage the impact of climate change.

Extreme Weather Linked to Climate Change

See also:

NASA launches drones from Va. to study storms
September 11, 2013 ~ NASA scientists are using former military surveillance drones to help them understand more about how tropical storms intensify, which they say could ultimately save lives by improving forecast models that predict a hurricane's strength.

The unmanned Global Hawk aircraft were designed to perform high-altitude, long-endurance reconnaissance and intelligence missions for the Air Force. Two of the original Global Hawks built in the developmental process for the military have found new life as part of NASA's research mission, studying storms that form over the Atlantic Ocean. NASA planned to launch one of the drones from its Wallops Flight Facility on Wednesday to study Tropical Storm Gabrielle, which re-formed in the Atlantic on Tuesday. "The biggest scientific question we're trying to attack is why do some hurricanes intensify very rapidly and why do others not intensify at all? In the last 20 years, we've made terrific progress in forecasting where hurricane tracks will go," said Paul Newman, deputy project scientist for the research mission. "But we've made almost no progress in the past 20 years in forecasting intensity."

More accurately predicting a storm's intensity would help government officials and coastal residents decide whether an evacuation is needed, as well as avoid developing a false sense of security among residents who frequently cite failed storm expectations as a reason not to leave their homes when warned to do so. There are two questions on which NASA scientists primarily want the drone research to focus. One is what role thunderstorms within a hurricane play in its intensification. Researchers aren't sure if the thunderstorms are a driver of storm intensity or a symptom of it.

NASA's Global Hawk 871 departed from the runway at NASA's Wallops Flight Facility in Wallops Island, Va. This was the first takeoff of GH 871 from Wallops for this aircraft, since it was not here last year. The aircraft is flying to the Caribbean to study a low pressure area that could become a tropical cyclone in a few days. NASA is using former military surveillance drones to help study how tropical storms intensify. The unmanned Global Hawk aircraft are taking off from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility on the Eastern Shore of Virginia, where they’re studying storms that form over the Atlantic Ocean. NASA officials say while forecasting models predicting a storm’s path have improved greatly over the past few decades, there hasn’t been much progress producing models that predict a hurricane’s strength. - See more at: NASA Tropical Weather | CNS News

The other is what role the Saharan Air Layer plays in the tropical storm development. The Saharan Air Layer is a dry, hot, dusty layer of air from Africa. Scientists have been at odds with each other over whether it helps hurricanes strengthen or does the opposite. One school of thought is that the Saharan Air Layer provides energy for storms to grow, while others have suggested it is a negative influence on storm growth because of the effect the dry air has on wet storms. "There's a bit of a debate in terms of how important it is, one way or the other," said Scott Braun, a research meteorologist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md., who is the drone project's principal investigator.

This is the second year NASA has launched Global Hawks from the Eastern Shore of Virginia, a strategic location that allows drones to spend plenty of time studying storms shortly after they form off the coast of Africa or as they approach the Caribbean Sea or Gulf of Mexico. This year's mission will end later this month, and the third and final year of the project's flights will start again next August. NASA officials hope three years of flights will give them enough data to begin answering their questions. The drones are considered advantageous over manned aircraft because they can fly for much longer periods of time than traditional research aircraft and at much greater altitudes. Global Hawks can spend up to 28 hours in the air at a time and reach altitudes up to 12.3 miles, or roughly twice that of a typical commercial airliner.

More NASA launches drones from Va. to study storms - U.S. - Stripes

Related:

'La Nada' Could Lead to Severe, Unpredictable Weather
September 10, 2013 ~ Unpredictable and extreme weather is likely to persist until the spring of 2014 because of the lack of El Niño or La Niña patterns in the Pacific Ocean, according to new sea height data collected from NASA's Jason-2 satellite.

The so-called “La Nada” event has stubbornly persisted for 16 months and indicates “near normal sea-surface height conditions across the equatorial Pacific Ocean.” During El Niño episodes, the water level rises because of warmer water temperatures. During La Niña periods, the opposite is true. "Without an El Niño or La Niña signal present, other, less predictable, climatic factors will govern fall, winter and spring weather conditions," said climatologist Bill Patzert of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California. "Long-range forecasts are most successful during El Niño and La Niña episodes.

The latest image of sea surface heights in the Pacific Ocean from NASA's Jason-2 satellite shows that the equatorial Pacific Ocean is now in its 16th month of being locked in what some call a neutral, or "La Nada" state.

The 'in between' ocean state, La Nada, is the dominant condition, and is frustrating for long-range forecasters. It's like driving without a decent road map -- it makes forecasting difficult."

For the past several decades, about half of all years have experienced La Nada conditions, compared to about 20 percent for El Niño and 30 percent for La Niña, according to NASA. Patzert noted that some of the wettest and driest winters occur during La Nada periods. "Neutral infers something benign, but in fact if you look at these La Nada years when neither El Niño nor La Niña are present, they can be the most volatile and punishing. As an example, the continuing, deepening drought in the American West is far from 'neutral,'" he said.

'La Nada' Could Lead to Severe, Unpredictable Weather

 

[mamooth]

The OP was rambling nonsense. It never approached making a point, other than that the author really hated those dirty environmentalists.

Oh wait. It's from Delingpole, the whiniest little tosser in the UK. Never mind.