Scaring Children about Climate - some good news, and some bad news at the end of 2013.

As can be seen in numerous posts and pages on this site, there are people willing to do horrible things in order to bolster their own political and/or financial prospects, or to flatter their egos as saviours of the world, or to damage industrialised economies or to suppress development opportunities in the less-industrialised ones.  I refer in particular to the deliberate intention of frightening children with horror stories about climate.  The frail notion that rising levels of CO2 are dominating the climate system to the imminent danger of life on Earth is the intellectual underpinning that seems to be required for such inhumane behaviour.  The good news is that there have been many scientific papers published in the past year which could help undermine the glib assurance of those who enjoy and benefit from standing on or around this dreadful platform.

The Good News

The good news which I want to feature here is the many setbacks this year in the scientific underpinnings for alarm over human impact on climate.  When the threadbare nature of the scientific case for such alarm, and the inevitable scaremongering which it encourages, are more widely exposed for what they are, the political support will surely weaken further, and then in due course our schools may become freer to concentrate on the education and on the pastoral care of their pupils and be less vulnerable to those who view them as potential recruits for sundry political causes such as ‘sustainable development’ and ‘carbon reduction’.  

There are a great many papers to choose from.  To provide an illustrative selection, I have chosen one for each month from just one blog, a blog which published dozens of reports every month, usually with a direct link to a scientific paper, or to a meta-analysis based on scientific papers.  Readers might like to take a look themselves by scrolling through the archives there:  THE HOCKEY SCHTICK             .

January: ‘Inconvenient truth: Sea level rise is decelerating’  

February: ‘Clouds/aerosols control the climate, not man-made CO2’   

March: ‘Analysis finds warming leads to less extreme storms’  

April: ‘New paper demonstrates temperature drives CO2 levels, not man-made CO2’  

May: ‘Global warming caused by CFCs, not carbon dioxide, study says’  

June: ‘New paper predicts a decrease in tropical cyclones in the future’   

July: ‘New paper finds climate change over decades primarily determined by the oceans'  

August:  ‘The skeptics were right: Climate changes naturally & these natural changes outweigh any man-made influences’  

September:  ‘New paper finds another amplification mechanism by which the Sun controls climate’   

November: ’ New paper finds evidence of Svensmark's cosmic ray theory of climate on a regional scale’

December: ‘Observations show IPCC exaggerates anthropogenic global warming by a factor of 7’ 

 

These are a somewhat arbitrary selection from the dozens of relevant posts in each of these months at that blog.  I make no claims that this selection includes the best papers, nor even that the source blog is the best or only place to find such links.  It is an encouraging aspect of the disparate resistance to scaremongering over climate that there are a great many sites and blogs around which can provide entries into the scientific literature, and often helpful summaries and commentaries as well.  

A major contribution of the year was, in my view 'Climate Change Reconsidered II', and I will say a little more about it at the end of this post.  (I helped it along in one of the most modest of ways one can contribute to such a venture:  by reviewing one of the chapters ahead of publication.).

The Bad News

The bad news is, in essence, that the production of materials and the creation of initiatives to win children over to causes underpinned by climate-scaremongering continues  The pressure on children remains relentless and widespread.  Some may be due to hard-hearted activists, some may be due to decent people duped by the relentless propaganda they themselves have been subjected to, in some cases all their lives.  Here are a few recent examples:

UNICEF:  they have a new campaign, and a new catchphrase ‘A Climate Fit for Children’   In the UK, they run a schools network pushing children into political actions, and it wants to get into this new campaign as well:  ‘Children and young people have a powerful voice and it’s one our decision-makers should be listening to.’

University of Leeds (and others):  they think it a wheeze to rope children into preparing feel-good propaganda about a low-carbon future by getting them to work with deep greens such as Derrick Jensen to produce cartoons for the cause.  (I wonder how they cover the suffering and waste due that cause) 

The product of this cartooning is a graphic novel which ‘is being circulated to schools and museums throughout the UK, as well as selected comics shops.’

Greenpeace plays the Santa card.  Every year it seems some eco-loon or other spots this opportunity. Suzuki has tried it for example.  Now the bourgeois hooligans of Greenpeace have had a shot at it: Santa under threat from disappearing ice.  A miserable effort from miserable people determined to darken all our lives. It won them a Bah Humbug Award from ACM, but it really deserves deeper contempt than that conveys.

ColdPlay soundtrack for a junk video aimed at kids.  A video described on the rtcc site as having had the support of the Foreign Office (something I hope someone will investigate).  The video contains a doom-laden future thanks to 'climate change' - the classic CAGW stuff.  Designed to keep children awake at night.  Awake and screaming for help perhaps.[6 Jan: Climate Science has highlighted the Foreign Office connection]

‘Common Core’  in the USA. That’s the official name for sweeping changes proposed in developing a national curriculum in the States. It doesn’t look good for the children.  For example, in Colorado ‘Fifth grade students at Fremont Elementary School in Colorado were assigned a reading passage that describes global warming as a dangerous, man-made phenomenon that will destroy civilization in a few hundred years.'  Everyone wants to do their bit to disturb the young, even teachers of English it would seem.  Another report entitles this 'Students Receive Doomsday Climate Propaganda' and that seems about right.

UNESCO deep in planning for ESD next year.      (ESD = Education for Sustainable Development.)  By which they mean 'suppressed development', and which of course is driven by the usual set of climate fears, and buttressed by any other eco-scare you care to mention.  The banner of sustainable development is the big vehicle for the political and financial ambitions for many taking advantage of the climate scaremongering.  Who could possibly be against 'sustainable' they must suppose.  Anyone who has given it more than a moment's thought would be my response.  Anyway, there is to be an ESD conference in Japan in November, 2014.  I'd like to think it will be cancelled for lack of interest, but that would require a lot of wishful thinking to be sustainable for very long, sad to say.

[Note added 12 Oct 2017:  Good news. USA to quit UNESCO in 2018.  Not before time.  https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-nation/wp/2017/10/12/u-s-withdraws-from-unesco-the-u-n-s-cultural-organization-citing-anti-israel-bias/?utm_term=.d79a39b9fdb2]

Looking Ahead

The hapless shipload of climateers currently stuck in the Antarctic ice provides a fittingly allegorical end to 2013 for the CAGW movement as captured by Josh (hat-tip: Bishop Hill):

http://cartoonsbyjosh.com

Let us hope that they are all brought to safety in due course, but let us also hope that their cause continues to be morally and intellectually and economically and politically in trouble next year as well, and in every successive year until it is dismissed forever as an awful aberration.  One that nevertheless caused a great deal of harm while it lasted.  

Loss of respect for science may well be one of the longer-lasting effects, but it will take more and more scientists to lift their attention from their own studies and devote some serious attention to what has been done in their name if this aberration is to end sooner rather than later.  The Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change has been doing sterling work in building up a body of research .  Its report 'Climate Change Reconsidered II' was for me one of the most important events in 2013, not least because this report could be of value for years to come for scientists intent on getting more information about what we know and don't know about the climate system, and who have realised that they cannot trust the IPCC, nor those who embellish and exaggerate what it has chosen to publish..  I hope that more and more teachers, educational leaders and administrators, and interested politicians will come to the same realisation sooner rather than later.

[hat-tip: Dave W for some of the links used in this post, and for general encouragement]

A Merry Christmas to all my readers!

Not being blessed, if you like, with religion myself I still find a great deal to admire in Christianity: the compassion, and generosity to be found in the texts and amongst so many of its followers, and the beauty-that-can-make-you-gasp to be found in some of its buildings, large and small, and also in some of the music.  The above singing and the building it is taking place in, are fine examples of this.  

More usual posts will resume before the New Year - I have a bit of a backlog of ideas and notes, but most of them are about matters that invoke the opposite of the cheerful spirit of this coming week in much of the world.  So I'll leave them to one side for a few more days.  

Cringing Teacher, Bold Pupils - Australian youngsters strike a blow against climate dogma in their classroom

Jo Nova has an inspiring report up on her blog:

A reader Russell writes in to tell me his Year 9 son Jordan and his friend, Tom, took on their teacher’s sacred belief in man-made global warming. Given no warning, and called insulting names in front of the class, they took up the challenge with gusto and stayed up til 1am that night to put the presentation together. Not surprisingly the teacher tried to pull out the next day, but the class would not let her.

Jo continues:

From reader Russell:

The other week at school my eldest son (15) was challenged by his teacher to present to the class why he is a ”climate change denier”. He had to do this presentation the next day.

At the start of his class the next day he advised the teacher he was ready.  She told him she wasn’t interested now, maybe another day. His classmates started heckling her saying ”You Chicken Miss”. She eventually agreed and got another teacher to sit in as well. Before my son spoke she showed the class the promo to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. After his presentation the class gave him a standing ovation. There is a lot more to this story, the above overview sort of explains what occurred.

To start his talk he read out five quotes from the ”US Senate Minority Report” below, then his power point. She made him stop the Prof Carter video 3min into it, the Prof Ball podcast about 5min in and let the class watch the other 10min video all the way through.

'May there be a thousand young rebels following in their footsteps', says Jo.

Amen to that! 

See Jo's post for more details: http://joannenova.com.au/2013/12/two-high-school-students-take-on-teacher-over-climate-and-win-standing-ovation/





Footnote 1.  The presentation which the pupils only had a few h ours to put together, begins with this statement signed by Edward Teller, one of the world's most distinguished physicists:

Footnote 2. WUWT has an informative report on how one mass media outlet in the States chose to obscure  Teller's signature in a broadcast featuring the 'Oregon Petition', and he notes there another extremely distinguished physicist had also signed the same statement: Freeman Dyson -

Indoctrination in Suppressed Development in New Zealand Schools

“The indoctrination of high school students as a directive of the UN’s Agenda 21 and common core global education standards has shown up in New Zealand exam papers.”

 Thus writes Ian Wishart* in an article published last week on the NZ website Investigate Daily.  He continues:

“Two exam papers from different students in the 2008 year are clearly wrong on the facts, but nonetheless gained “Excellence” in New Zealand’s National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) exams and are paraded on the Ministry of Education website as “exemplars” to measure up to.

The two exams show children were brainwashed with inaccurate information on New Zealand history, and caricatures of modern worldviews reflecting curriculum bias.

You can read the offending exam papers here exemplar-3-2008-exam”

One of the questions required the pupil to compare and contrast ‘capitalist’ with ‘indigenous’ world views.  A caricature of each seems to have been taught to the pupils, and these caricatures are admired in the examples. 

Now, given that capitalism has led to the most dramatic improvements ever in the quality of life of people (e.g. with respect to air, water, food, and shelter quality), of domesticated animals (modern husbandry practices), and indeed to great strides forward in helping conserve wild animals and wild lands, and that primitive lifestyles have made no such progress, you would be astonished to learn that remarks such as the following seem to have received high marks in these New Zealand exams:

Source

‘[The capitalist world view] is that the economy, society and the environment are in no way connected and therefore not affecting one another.”

‘[The indigenous world view is that] the environment, society and economy are linked and each individually important and highly significant to the other.’.

‘Culturally the capitalists behaviour is to live in the present, with little reverence of interest in their ancestory [sic] and their traditions are selectively upheld.’

‘The indigenous people place a lot of emphasise [sic] on tradition and pass it on orally through generations so their history is ‘alive’.  This benefits these later generations significantly as they can learn skills such as hunting, fishing and harvesting.’

 ‘The capitalists practise exploitation against [sic] the environment.  They are production and resource based.  They use the natural resources of the land to turn a profit..  When the resources in that particular area are used up they simply move on, destroying that land for future generations.’

 ‘The indigenous people work in harmony with the land.  They act as stewards of the land, without enforcing their power over it as they are spiritually connected to it.  They practise subsistence production, taking enough and no more from the land.’

See the exam papers for more examples: http://www.investigatemagazine.co.nz/Investigate/wp-content/uploads/2013/10/exemplar-3-2008-exam.pdf

Now this simplistic romanticisation of ‘indigenous’ societies and equally simplistic demonisation of ‘capitalist’ societies is so widespread, that the poor teachers and pupils can scarcely be blamed for replicating it.  Yet where is the success?  Where are people healthier, better fed, better sheltered, and so on?  Where do people live longer?  Where are slash and burn agricultural practices most discouraged?  Where is air quality, indoors and out, higher? Where is environmental improvement and conservation more strongly supported?  

The gross simplifications are of course part and parcel of the promotion of 'sustainable development' - a notion that would be more informatively described as 'suppressed development'.

It would be better if both pupils and teachers were less dogmatic here.  Capitalism is at heart, the simple matter of free trading amongst individuals and communities, and the accumulation of surpluses with which to try for more and better things.  As Adam Smith pointed out long ago, the pursuit of individual self-interest that this seems to imply is highly conducive to societal improvement.  Others have noted that this also thrives best under conditions of intellectual and political freedom.  To merely disparage one caricature, and look at the other through rose-tinted spectacles is not good for education.  Good for indoctrination though.  Perhaps essential for that.

*Ian WIshart has just published a book called ‘Totalitaria’:

‘An explosive new book says the United Nations has rolled out a global education policy designed to indoctrinate children to accept a planned world government regime.

Revelations are made in the new book “Totalitaria: What If The Enemy Is The State?” by award-winning investigative journalist and bestselling author Ian Wishart.

The book reveals the policy is part of Agenda 21 and also the UN’s world education curriculum, and it has been implemented in New Zealand as part of NCEA national standards and will underpin the controversial “Common Core” education standards in the USA.

Journalist Ian Wishart says the agenda actually stretches back almost to the inception of the United Nations:

“Back in the 1950s the top officials in the United Nations came up with a very long term plan to change the world to accept a global ruler. They felt the only way to bring world peace was to bring in some form of global government based on new spiritual values of peace and love. In the book I quote the UN officials and their documents on this.

“They figured out the most strategic way to force this change was to build up public fear about different world problems, so that eventually people would practically beg for global government – which, of course, the UN was perfectly placed to provide.”

Among the crisis opportunities they seized on was climate change.’

More details here: http://www.investigatemagazine.co.nz/Investigate/4657/climate-change-and-global-governance-linked-to-green-religion/

Looks very promising... 

Kindle edition available here: http://www.amazon.co.uk/Totalitaria-What-Enemy-State-ebook/dp/B00GAN74WS

[Note added later: I've skimmed through the Kindle edition, and I must warn readers that it is a rather frantic, lively account of Lucifer-worshipping people of influence in the UN and elsewhere.  That makes it a bit hard to take seriously, but it does contain a lot of information as well as provocative comments.]

More on the IPCC Summary for Policy Makers: multiple retreats disguised and spun for PR at the expense of science

Leading authors from the NIPCC have reviewed the IPCC’s  ‘Summary for Policy Makers’.   They were not impressed.  Who would be?  It is a mix of tawdry spin and feeble science.  Here are some extracts from their review, with the review headings shown in bold:

Introduction

The IPCC has retreated from at least 11 alarmist claims promulgated in its previous reports or by scientists prominently associated with the IPCC.  The SPM also contains at least 13 misleading or untrue statements, and 11 further statements that are phrased in such a way that they mislead readers or misrepresent important aspects of the science.

…

1. IPCC Retreats

Eleven statements made in the 2013 SPM apparently retreat from more alarmist positions struck in earlier Assessment Reports or in related research literature. These repositionings are to be welcomed when they move the IPCC’s commentary closer to scientific reality.

[see the full review, linked to above, for details of each of these 11 retreats – none of which are recognised as such in the IPCC materials.]

…

2. Misleading or Untrue Statements

The following 13 statements by the IPCC are written in such a way that although they may be technically true, or nearly true, they are misleading of the actual state of affairs.

[see the full review, linked to above, for details of each of these 13 statements – all presumably spun to assist the political wishes of those driving the IPCC, wishes which require there to be a climate crisis caused by industrial development.]

…

3. Deceptive Language that Misrepresents the Science

The following 11 statements by the IPCC create an unjustifiable impression of either scientific certainty or false alarm, or appear to have been chosen to evade conclusions that run counter to the IPCC’s belief in dangerous human-caused warming.

[see the full review, linked to above, for details of each of these 11 statements – once again all presumably spun to assist the political wishes of those driving the IPCC]

…

4. Advice for Policymakers

Between 1988 and 2001 (the span of preparation of its first three Assessment Reports), the United Nation’s IPCC was the sole international body able to provide advice to governments on the global warming issue. With the formation of the Nongovernmental Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) in 2003, a second and independent team of scientific assessors began to emerge.

Now, with the release of new 2013 reports by both the IPCC and NIPCC, due-diligence analysis, such as that contained in this briefing paper, is finally possible. The IPCC’s “Green Team” scientific advice can now be weighed against the views of a “Red Team” of independent scholars.

With the same set of peer-reviewed scientific papers available to them, the scientists of the IPCC and NIPCC have come to diametrically opposing conclusions. IPCC scientists remain alarmist about the threat of human-caused global warming, even while they admit observations increasingly invalidate their model-based predictions. They are reluctant to acknowledge past errors and new research that challenge their hypothesis of human-caused dangerous climate change.

In stark contrast, NIPCC scientists find no hard evidence for a dangerous human-caused

warming. They find the null hypothesis – that observed changes in climate are due to natural causes only – cannot be rejected. NIPCC scientists remain open to new discoveries and further debate.

In 2013, any engaged policymaker or commentator has a responsibility to be fully familiar with the arguments and conclusions adduced by both of these teams of climate advisors. Towards this end, we present the primary conclusions of NIPCC’s latest report as they are stated in its Summary for Policymakers:

1. We conclude neither the rate nor the magnitude of the reported late twentieth century surface warming (1979-2000) lay outside normal natural variability, nor was it in any way unusual compared to earlier episodes in Earth’s climatic history.  Furthermore, solar forcings of temperature change are likely more important than is currently recognized, and evidence is lacking that a 2C increase in temperature (of whatever cause) would be globally harmful.

2. We conclude no unambiguous evidence exists for adverse changes to the global environment caused by human-related CO2 emissions. In particular, the cryosphere is not melting at an enhanced rate; sea-level rise is not accelerating; no systematic changes have been documented in evaporation or rainfall or in the magnitude or intensity of extreme

meteorological events; and an increased release of methane into the atmosphere from

permafrost or sub-seabed gas hydrates is unlikely.

3. We conclude the current generation of global climate models are unable to make accurate projections of climate even 10 years ahead, let alone the 100 year period that has been adopted by policy planners. The output of such models should therefore not be used to guide public policy formulation until they have been validated and shown to have predictive value.

[this final section has been reproduced here, above, in full, but with italics and bold added].

Any parents or teachers or other responsible adults wishing to tackle the hyperbole, the assurance, and the deceptions of those intent on misleading children about our impact on climate have to do their own studies to highlight what is going on, and to be in a position to argue for reform.  This might seem an impossible task for non-specialists, but that need not be the case.  Many people around the world are working to expose this scandal and bring it to a wider audience.  See the list of blogs on the right-hand side of the screen for examples.  Amateurs and professionals are involved.  Subject-matter specialists are too, as are many who bring general analytical and/or communication skills to the task in hand.  There is little by way of organisation. This is more of a spontaneous, scattered uprising against an establishment of vested or political interests whose policy and other interventions have already caused great harm.  Most of us will have something to contribute to help replace the exaggerations and other excesses of that establishment with calmer, more soundly-based perspectives about what is going on and what may happen in the future.  The NIPCC reports, to which I have recently contributed in a very modest way as a pre-publication reviewer, are at the more technical end, but even there, there is much that is readily accessible.

Background Briefing for Teachers: moral and scientific bankruptcy of the IPCC

This post is in two parts: the first is a reblogging of an essay by Richard Lindzen, published earlier this month on WUWT; the second is an extract from a recently published summary by Vincent Gray of some of the shenanigans in the IPCC's sorry history.

(1) Lindzen: Understanding the IPCC AR5 Climate Assessment

'Each IPCC report seems to be required to conclude that the case for an international agreement to curb carbon dioxide has grown stronger. That is to say the IPCC report (and especially the press release accompanying the summary) is a political document, and as George Orwell noted, political language “is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder respectable, and to give an appearance of solidity to pure wind.”

With respect to climate, we have had 17 years without warming; all models show greater tropical warming than has been observed since 1978; and Arctic sea ice is suddenly showing surprising growth. And yet, as the discrepancies between models and observations increase, the IPCC insists that its confidence in the model predictions is greater than ever.

Referring to the 17 year ‘pause,’ the IPCC allows for two possibilities: that the sensitivity of the climate to increasing greenhouse gases is less than models project and that the heat added by increasing CO2 is ‘hiding’ in the deep ocean. Both possibilities contradict alarming claims. 

With low sensitivity, economic analyses suggest that warming under 2C would likely be beneficial to the earth. Heat ‘hiding’ in the deep ocean would mean that current IPCC models fail to describe heat exchange between surface waters and the deep ocean. Such exchanges are essential features of natural climate variability, and all IPCC claims of attribution of warming to man’s activities depend on the assumption that the models accurately portray this natural variability.

In attempting to convince the public to accept the need to for the environmental movement’s agenda, continual reference is made to consensus. This is dishonest not because of the absence of a consensus, but because the consensus concerning such things as the existence of irregular (and small compared to normal regional variability) net warming since about 1850, the existence of climate change (which has occurred over the earth’s entire existence), the fact that added greenhouse gases should have some impact (though small unless the climate system acts so as to greatly amplify this effect)over the past 60 years with little impact before then, and the fact that greenhouse gases have increased over the past 200 years or so, and that their greenhouse impact is already about 80% of what one expects from a doubling of CO2 are all perfectly consistent with there being no serious problem. Even the text of the IPCC Scientific Assessment agrees that catastrophic consequences are highly unlikely, and that connections of warming to extreme weather have not been found. The IPCC iconic statement that there is a high degree of certainty that most of the warming of the past 50 years is due to man’s emissions is, whether true or not, completely consistent with there being no problem. To say that most of a small change is due to man is hardly an argument for the likelihood of large changes.

Carbon restriction policies, to have any effect on climate, would require that the most extreme projections of dangerous climate actually be correct, and would require massive reductions in the use of energy to be universally adopted. There is little question that such reductions would have negative impacts on income, development, the environment, and food availability and cost – especially for the poor. This would clearly be immoral.

By contrast, the reasonable and moral policy would be to foster economic growth, poverty reduction and well being in order that societies be better able to deal with climate change regardless of its origin. Mitigation policies appear to have the opposite effect without significantly reducing the hypothetical risk of any changes in climate. While reducing vulnerability to climate change is a worthy goal, blind support for mitigation measures – regardless of the invalidity of the claims – constitutes what might be called bankrupt morality.

It is not sufficient for actions to artificially fulfil people’s need for transcendent aspirations in order for the actions to be considered moral. Needless to add, support of global warming alarm hardly constitutes intelligent respect for science.'

Richard S. Lindzen, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, October 5th, 2013

[I have added the emboldening above - JS]

(2) Vincent Gray on some IPCC history

'...The IPCC ran into a problem that does not affect an organisation such as Greenpeace, Scientists are usually trained to think for themselves, and some of those who have been recruited to support the “climate change” programme find if difficult not to insert their reservations into the opinions that are proscribed for them.

The main mechanism for ensuring uniformity of thought is applied by the presence in all of the IPCC Reports of a “Summary for Policymakers” at the beginning. This is really a Summary BY Policymakers, because it is dictated, line by line by the government representatives who control the IPCC to a group of reliable “Drafting Authors” It is published before the main Report, to emphasize the need for conformity. In addition they try to exert pressure in the choice of “Lead Authors”, and in the treatment of comments made by the “reviewers” who receive drafts of the Reports.

Despite all this pressure, complete uniformity of thought has, so far, never been achieved. The First IPCC Report “Climate Change´(1990) stated plainly:

“The persons named below all contributed to the peer review of the IPCC Working Group I Report. Whilst every attempt was made by the Lead Authors to incorporate their comments, in some cases these formed a minority opinion which could not be reconciled with the larger consensus. Therefore, there may be persons below who still have points of disagreement with areas of the Report.”

But it still stated, even in the “Summary for Policymakers” of the 1990 Report and in its 1992 Supplement:

“The size of this warming (which they claimed) is broadly consistent with predictions of climate models but it is also of the same magnitude as natural climate variability.”

Climate observations, which appear only in the last chapter of the 1990 report, are not “broadly consistent with the predictions of climate models.” Also all subsequent Reports had to admit that they are actually incapable of making “predictions” but only “projections” dependent on whether you believe the assumptions of the models.

The Second IPCC Report “Climate Change 1995: The Science of Climate Change” had to confront a series of opinions in the Draft of the Final Report which disagreed with the greenhouse theory. It included the following statements:

 "None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases."

"Finally we come to the most difficult question of all: 'When will the detection and unambiguous attribution of human-induced climate change occur?' In the light of the very large signal and noise uncertainties discussed in this Chapter, it is not surprising that the best answer to this question is 'We do not know’. Few if any would be willing to argue that unambiguous attribution of this change to anthropogenic effects has already occurred, or was likely to happen in the next several years."

One of their scientists (Ben Santer) was given the job of eliminating all the offending passages, or changing them to give a more favoured opinion. But after all that they ended up with this equivocal conclusion:

“The balance of the evidence suggests a discernible human influence on the climate.”

This is something everybody can agree on. Humans spend all of their efforts in trying to influence the climate. The statement says nothing about 'greenhouse gases' or of carbon dioxide. It supports the offending passages that were deleted.

The Third Report “Climate Change 2001: The Scientific  Basis” was the one for which I did a detailed analysis  called “The Greenhouse Delusion.”

The following statement appeared in Chapter 1:

“The fact that the global mean temperature has increased since the late 19^th century and that other trends have been observed does not necessarily mean that an anthropogenic effect on the climate has been identified. Climate has always varied on all time-scales, so the observed change may be natural”.

In the Policymakers Summary we get another equivocal opinion:

“in the light of the new evidence and taking into account the remaining uncertainties, most of the observed warming over the last 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations”.

Here they change tack. Once again they do not claim that there is evidence that this is so, merely that it is the opinion of their paid “experts":  They seem to think that if they assign to the opinion “likely” as meaning greater than 60% probability that this makes it any other than merely an opinion.

.And so we come to IPCC Science Report No 4 “Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis”

Now we get a slight amendment to the previous equivocal statement:

“Most of the observed increase in globally averaged temperature since the mid-20^th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations.”

Again it is not evidence but opinions of their paid experts who are now 95% certain they are right, but it only applies to "most” of the evidence and it only applies to their highly inaccurate temperature series, but not to the more accurate satellite and radiosonde series which began in 1978 and 1958 respectively.

Despite all this they were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize together with Al Gore....'

Dr Vincent Gray, 15h October 2013.

[The italics and emboldening above were added by me, apart from that of the 'BY' in the second paragraph - JS]

See the original post for more before and after the above extract: http://principia-scientific.org/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=343

(hat-tip Greenie Watch)

Serial Demolition of Some Eco-Nuttery - an 18 minute video by Ivo Vegter

Watch this 18-minute video for serial demolition of one piece of eco-nuttery after another by Ivo Vegter in South Africa:

The 'environmental exaggerations' of which he speaks are so mainstream now, and such a distortion of reality, that it would be wonderful if every high school teacher in the world decided to show this, or a subbed /dubbed version, to their senior pupils.  Maybe as an antidote to all the eco-guff they will have been exposed to in their schooldays. Maybe as a last chance to steer them towards helping humanity rather than harming it with facile 'environmentalism', and the curse of 'sustainable development' - both examples of what Vegter would call 'excessive risk aversion'.  They harm the poor.  They harm the planet.  They diminish our humanity.

I'm hoping he'll do a sequel on climate alarmism and more of the associated 'solutions' commonly promoted by 'environmentalists'.  'Solutions' which have already caused a great deal of harm.  Whether he does or not, this video affirms rationality and that is what will eventually protect us from the CAGW virus.


Hat-tip: Bishop Hill

More Climate Junk Launched into the Biosphere: a concerned citizen spots it, but not in time to prevent widespread dispersal

The headline is bad enough, since it is not true, but the first words of the article are even worse: 'The oceans are more acidic now than they have been for at least 300m years, due to carbon dioxide emissions from burning fossil fuels, and a mass extinction of key species may be almost inevitable as a result ...'

These are words to delight the activist.  What campaigner for hearts, minds, and wallets on the climate bandwagon could fail to be moved by them.  Another scare!  Yippee!!  Let's get it out there!!!

But, but, ... said a concerned citizen, noting the nonsense, it is just not true.  Ruth Dixon wrote it up on her blog, contacted the journalist and newspaper involved, and a few days later both the headline and the first sentence were changed to make them less misleading.  So that's good.  That was relatively quick.  Similar nonsense over ice disappearing on Kilimanjoro, glaciers disappearing in the Himalayas, polar bears disappearing in the Arctic, snow being a thing of the past in the UK, New York City streets soon to be under sea level, and such like all attributed to 'burning fossil fuels' took months or years to get corrected.  Even now, who would bet against finding some or all of them being found in materials intended for use in schools?

So the question is, how long before we see this latest one there as well?  It is well-suited for scaremongering after all: acid is scary, the entire ocean is dramatic, the threat of 'mass extinctions' ideal for getting the attention of the young.  Ruth Dixon has noted that the original spin by the journalist has been twittered round the world, as well as being studied by Guardian readers.  It is interesting to note some of the gushing tweets she has captured were from scientists, including this one who describes himself as 'a deepsea biologist, passionate about the oceans'.

As noted by Dixon, the Guardian did eventually edit both the headline and the offending first sentence to reflect the reality that the source of all this was referring to the rate of acidification.  Or, more accurately, to the rate at which the oceans are becoming slightly less alkaline.  Whether that rate is really remarkable is another matter, but one thing seems agreed at the source linked to by Dixon (loc cit): the oceans have been appreciably less alkaline for much of the past 300 million years:

And, as illustrated in a well-known graphic reproduced here, CO2 levels were typically over 1,000ppm for much of that time:

Whatever, we now have another piece of climate junk in circulation.  Keep an eye out for it coming your way.  If you see it being aimed at children or teachers, please let me know and I'll add the details here.

Hat-tip re the Dixon post: Bishop Hill, http://www.bishop-hill.net/blog/2013/10/7/oceans-are-unprecedentedly-alkaline.html

Straight Fs for the IPCC at Mother Nature's School of Climate Modelling

As the teacher's 'Notes' state, the climate models relied on by the IPCC 'show no skill' when it comes to the processes that dictate temperature and precipitation.  In other words, they add nothing at all when it comes to forecasting.

'Climate Models FAIL' is the title of a new book by Bob Tisdale, one which is aimed at a wide range of readers, and in particular those who may be unfamiliar with technicalities:

'Climate Models Fail is intended for readers without technical or scientific backgrounds. There are introductory chapters that provide basic information.'

and

'Climate Models Fail has been proofread and edited by someone without a technical background. She has taken the content of this book, originally written in my technical/scientific style, and made it much easier to read and understand, while leaving the content intact.'




A preview pdf is available here: http://bobtisdale.files.wordpress.com/2013/09/preview-climate-models-fail.pdf  The two quotes shown in italics are from this preview, as is this one summarising some of the hopes and fears of the author:

'Growth in climate science has been stunted by the IPCC’s politically-driven addiction to conjectures about anthropogenic climate change. Decades after it began, climate science is still in its infancy. Yet, it is portrayed as a well-established, noble, bastion of solid research, the flawless jewel of Earth sciences that can do no wrong. Worse, climate science has been ruthlessly exploited by environmental groups and politicians and even by many of the scientists themselves. 
The primary obstacles for the climate science community in the years and decades to come are: (1) the expectations of government funding agencies, which are obviously tied to political agendas; and (2) the anchoring effect of the fanatical beliefs of those members whose careers and funding skyrocketed as a result of their drum beating for the IPCC.
The people of the world rely on the findings of the climate science community, and in order for climate science to move forward, that community will have to be honest within itself and with the public. Hopefully, that will occur in my lifetime, but I’m not holding my breath.'

The book can be bought as a pdf ($9.99) (here) or as a file for Kindle ($10.29) (here).

I wonder if the 'people of the world' will trust the climate science community much longer?  Or will that 'community' be assigned to the dustbin of history where the IPCC itself belongs?  Donna Laframboise has studied the IPCC's behaviour and contrasted it with their claims and aspirations, and has found such large discrepancies that her two books on it justify their provocative titles 'The Delinquent Teenager', and 'Into the Dustbin'.  Read them to be convinced, like I was, that the IPCC is not to be trusted.  I have not yet read Bob Tisdale's new book, but it sure looks like it will not serve to improve my view of that organisation and those scientists who have actively supported the sorry saga of alarm over CO2 that it was formed to promote.  An alarm for which computer models of climate have provided the mainstay.  The very same computer models that FAIL according to Tisdale, and according to anyone else who chooses to compare their predictions with the observations.

'Climate Change Reconsidered II': a more realistic appraisal than the IPCC will ever be able to provide

Teachers wanting to dig more deeply into the study of climate variation have a new resource available for free download: the latest NIPCC reports entitled 'Climate Change Reconsidered II'.

Unlike the faith-based tone of the IPCC reports, in which marshalling of evidence to buttress their heartfelt and walletfelt beliefs in CO2 as a major driver of climate variation dominate, the NIPCC is free to be more scientific.  That means being sceptical of high-blown claims, being on guard against superficial reasoning, and ready to share counter-examples and failings of current models and theories.  The frontiers of science are usually ragged and untidy, and the genuine scientist working there should be willing to follow leads and go where the data takes them.  Their job is not to construct palaces in the sky that happen to suit powerful political and financial interests.  Their job is not to provide a front of respectability for the disgraceful campaigns of scaremongering that have suited so many individual and organisations in recent decades.  Their job is to speculate, to dig into the data, to entertain theories in an objective, semi-detached manner, and to seek new ideas and new observations that look the most promising for clarifying our understanding.  But when so many politicians have been misled, or are being misleading, about what is known about the causes of climate variation, some scientists will feel duty-bound to draw their attention to a broader view, and to contrary evidence.  Here is how they see themselves:

'The Red Team Reports 
A technique frequently used in industry, government, and law when dealing with complex or controversial matters is to deploy competing Green and Red Teams to pursue alternative approaches (e.g., Sandoz, 2001; Nemeth et al.,2001). A Red Team provides a kind of “defense counsel” to verify and counter arguments mounted by the initial Green Team (the “prosecution”) as well as discover and present alternatives the Green Team may have overlooked. 
 For many years, one team has dominated the global debate over climate change, the Green Team of the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). In 2003, however, at a meeting in Milan, a Red Team started to emerge composed of independent scientists drawn from universities and private institutions around the world. Since 2008 that team, the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), has been independently evaluating the impacts of rising atmospheric concentrations of CO2 on Earth’s biosphere and evaluating forecasts of future climate effects (Singer, 2008; Idso and Singer, 2009; Idso, Carter, and Singer, 2011).'

Here are their main conclusions as presented in Figure 1 of the Summary for Policy Makers:

'• Atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2) is a mild greenhouse gas that exerts a diminishing warming 
effect as its concentration increases. 
• Doubling the concentration of atmospheric CO2 from its pre-industrial level, in the absence of 
other forcings and feedbacks, would likely cause a warming of ~0.3 to 1.1°C, almost 50% of 
which must already have occurred. 
• A few tenths of a degree of additional warming, should it occur, would not represent a climate 
crisis. 
• Model outputs published in successive IPCC reports since 1990 project a doubling of CO2 could 
cause warming of up to 6°C by 2100. Instead, global warming ceased around the end of the 
twentieth century and was followed (since 1997) by 16 years of stable temperature. 
• Over recent geological time, Earth’s temperature has fluctuated naturally between about +4°C 
and -6°C with respect to twentieth century temperature. A warming of 2°C above today, should it 
occur, falls within the bounds of natural variability. 
• Though a future warming of 2°C would cause geographically varied ecological responses, no 
evidence exists that those changes would be net harmful to the global environment or to human 
well-being. 
• At the current level of ~400 ppm we still live in a CO2-starved world. Atmospheric levels 15 times 
greater existed during the Cambrian Period (about 550 million years ago) without known adverse 
effects. 
• The overall warming since about 1860 corresponds to a recovery from the Little Ice Age 
modulated by natural multi-decadal cycles driven by ocean-atmosphere oscillations, or by solar 
variations at the de Vries (~208 year) and Gleissberg (~80 year) and shorter periodicities. 
• Earth has not warmed significantly for the past 16 years despite an 8% increase in atmospheric 
CO2, which represents 34% of all extra CO2 added to the atmosphere since the start of the 
industrial revolution. 
• CO2 is a vital nutrient used by plants in photosynthesis. Increasing CO2 in the atmosphere 
“greens” the planet and helps feed the growing human population. 
• No close correlation exists between temperature variation over the past 150 years and human-related CO2 emissions. The parallelism of temperature and CO2 increase between about 1980 
and 2000 AD could be due to chance and does not necessarily indicate causation. 
• The causes of historic global warming remain uncertain, but significant correlations exist between 
climate patterning and multi-decadal variation and solar activity over the past few hundred years. 
• Forward projections of solar cyclicity imply the next few decades may be marked by global 
cooling rather than warming, despite continuing CO2 emissions. 
Source: “Executive Summary,” Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science (Chicago, IL: The Heartland Institute, 2013).'

But whatever you do, don't just take their word for any of these - check them out for yourself.  Reproduced below are direct links to the set of pdf-files available in which their evidence is presented.  These deserve careful study in their own right, and may also prove to be worth having nearby when studying the next IPCC reports:

The Summary for Policymakers 

Chapter 1. Global Climate Models
Chapter 2. Forcings and Feedbacks
Chapter 3. Solar Forcing of Climate
Chapter 4. Observations: Temperature
Chapter 5. Observations: The Cryosphere
Chapter 6. Observations: The Hydrosphere
Chapter 7. Observations: Extreme Weather