Bad weather has always been around. We have records and newspaper archives going back many years. The further back we go the spottier the records. It only stands to reason that even if the weather doesn’t change at all we will end up in its path more often and suffer more destruction of our stuff as our population and property grow. Hence it may appear that the weather is getting worse but it may not necessarily be so.
People who want to blame us for the apparent change in climate need to present evidence that the weather is becoming more extreme more often and that something we are doing is the reason for the change. Our burning of fossil fuels and its byproduct, CO2, have been singled out as the demon seed.
Hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, temperatures and droughts are the most often cited examples of extreme weather that are used to frighten people about impending climate doom. But are they getting more frequent or more severe?
Temperatures have been rising as the Earth has cycled out of the Little Ice Age (LIA). The claim is that the warming of the late 20th century was more rapid and hence unprecedented than any previous run up for which we have data. This runup happened to take place as humans were also increasing their consumption of fossil fuels and thus placing more CO2 into the air. CO2 is a GreenHouse Gas(GHG) whose properties allow it to trap heat in the atmosphere. This fact lead people to the assumption that it is the extra CO2 in the air that was driving the more rapid rise in temperatures in the 1980s and 1990s. And so an organization called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change was established under the auspices of the UN to gather and report on the science of Anthropogenic Global Warming so that the nations of the world could form a united front when it came time to tackle the issue. The IPCC has published four assessment reports(ARs) each one more frightening than the previous one in its analysis of how quickly and to what extent that the climate was deteriorating. Global Climate Models (GCMs) are computer simulations incorporating the best guesses of the modellers as to how the climate will respond to various variables that affect how the climate changes. These GCMs provide the basis for the ARs. The reports have warned of huge temperature and sea level rise, more extreme weather and various other nefarious effects of increasing CO2 in the air if we continued to do nothing to curtail our emissions of CO2 by switching to alternative energy sources. Temperatures would rise to levels that would make a large part of the planet uninhabitable, kids wouldn’t know what snow is, the ice caps would melt and sea level would rise to flood our coastal cities displacing millions.
But a funny thing happened on the way to the apocalypse.
Mother Nature slowed the warming. In fact, she stopped it. Its has now been 15+ years since there has been any global warming. None of the GCMs anticipated this development and this calls the other predictions of the models into question. If the models have gotten the temperature track wrong what else have they got wrong? This is creating a crisis prior to the publication of the AR5 report on Friday, September, 27, 2013.
If that isn’t enough of a contradiction to deal with, extreme weather isn’t behaving according to plan either. Hurricanes and tornadoes are both trending down and 2013 is a weak year for both types of severe weather. Peer reviewed research in the journals report that floods are no worse nor more frequent now than they have been in the past. Droughts have been shorter and less severe since the dry periods of the 1930s and 1950s.
When an example of severe weather does make an appearance such as the whopper of a tornado that tore through Moore, Oklahoma earlier this year(2013), it may appear that the weather is getting more destructive simply because there are more of us and more of our property that can line the path of the twister. Economists who calculate the cost of the event have to normalize their data to do a proper comparison between occurrences in different decades. These comparisons do not manifest an increasing trend.
The apocalyptic nature of the IPCC ARs is out of sync with the path that Mother Nature has chosen. She has become the leading denier of man made climate change. This is an embarrassment for the IPCC who have hung their hat on the urgent need to reorganize all of society to wean us off of fossil fuels and onto alternative carbon neutral energy sources like wind and solar.
Governments have already been passing laws to force reductions in CO2 emissions which have turned out to be very expensive and may now be totally unnecessary but damaging.
When predictions fail science says: modify or abandon the theory. As it stands, the theory is wrong.
It will be tough to admit error and walk back the apocalyptic talk that has been such an integral part of past ARs. It will be interesting to see if the IPCC admits reality into their final AR5 report or if they continue to warn of the dangers of continued emissions of CO2 which more people are suspecting are imaginary.
Drafts of the AR5 report have been leaked to the media and while they are dialing back their projections of temperature rise to 2100, strangely, they are claiming even more certainty about their belief that the warming is due primarily to human activity. Don’t expect that to change.
To admit they really don’t know what they are doing would acknowledge the complete waste of billions of dollars that governments have invested in expensive alternative energy that was totally unnecessary. It would reduce the credibility of climate science, the IPCC and the UN in the eyes world governments and perhaps result in the disbanding of the organization.
In essence, Mother Nature has exposed the arrogance and conceit of an organization that has gotten the scientific story incorrect and has needlessly worried the people of the world about their emissions of an invisible trace gas essential to life on Earth. Gore wants deniers to pay a price for their denial. What price should be paid by snake oil salesmen, Al?
Club of Rome: "In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill....All these dangers are caused by human intervention....and thus the “real enemy, then, is humanity itself....believe humanity requires a common motivation, namely a common adversary in order to realize world government. It does not matter if this
common enemy is “a real one or….one invented for the purpose."
This pogo apocalyptic vision has been laid bare and the climate alarmists revealed for the control freaks that they are.
AGW is all about politics. It has nothing to do with truth or science. The issue of AGW is but a means to an end and the end is for rich people to wrest control of the resources of the world from private hands and hand them over to government. And who controls government? Rich people. AGW is the rich man’s ruse to ensure resources are available to continue their elaborate lifestyles in the form to which they have become accustomed.
If you don’t think this is the goal take a look at a night time satellite photo of N. Korea. The pinprick of light, Pyongyang, is where the leaders live. The common people, the chattel, live in the dark. There is your future if AGW ‘solutions’ are implemented to ‘save the Earth’ as a wealthy playground with citizens allowed out during the day to tend to the needs of the rich and famous.
On 14 November 2010, Otto Edenhofer, co-chair of IPCC Working Group III, said,
“The climate summit in Cancun at the end of the month is not a climate conference, but one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War…. one must say clearly that de facto we redistribute the world’s wealth by climate policy…. One has to rid oneself of the illusion that international climate politics have anything to do with environmental concerns.”
And they will redistribute from poor to rich.
