Climate Scare Stories Cost Lives: teach yourself and your children how to see through them

It’s time to stop the climate scare stories

Guest opinion by Dr. Willie Soon and Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

India Prime Minister Narendra Modi sensibly refuses to attend yet another climate summit – this one called by UN Secretary General Ban Ki-Moon in New York for September 23, under the auspices of the United Nations, which profits handsomely from the much-exaggerated climate scare.

Environmentalists have complained at Mr. Modi’s decision not to attend. They say rising atmospheric CO2 will cause droughts, melt Himalayan ice and poison lakes and waterways in the Indian subcontinent.

However, the UN’s climate panel, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, has already had to backtrack on an earlier assertion that all the ice in the Himalayas would be gone within 25 years, and the most comprehensive review of drought trends worldwide shows the global land area under drought has fallen throughout the past 30 years.

Mr. Modi, a spiritual man and thus down-to-earth, knows that a quarter of India’s people still have no electricity. His priority is to turn on the lights all over India. In Bihar, four homes in five are lit by kerosene.

Electric power is the quickest, surest, cheapest way to lift people out of poverty and so to stabilize India’s population, which may soon overtake China’s.

The Indian-born Nobel laureate in economics, Professor Amartya Sen, recently lamented: “There would appear to be an insufficient recognition in global discussion of the need for increased power in the poorer countries. In India, for example, about a third of the people do not have any power connection at all. Making it easier to produce energy with better environmental correlates (and greater efficiency of energy use) may be a contribution not just to environmental planning, but also to making it possible for a great many people to lead a fuller and free life.”

The world’s governing elite, however, no longer cares about poverty. Climate change is its new and questionable focus.

In late August the Asian Development Bank, for instance, based on UN IPCC rising carbon dioxide (CO2) scenarios, predicted that warmer weather would cut rice production, rising seas would engulf Mumbai and other coastal megacities, and rainfall would decline by 10-40% in many Indian provinces.

Droughts and floods have occurred throughout India’s history. In the widespread famine caused by the drought of 1595-1598, “Men ate their own kind. The streets and roads were blocked with corpses, but no assistance can be given for their removal,” a chronicler in Akbar’s court reported.

Every Indian knows that too much (or too little) monsoon rainfall can bring death. That is why the latest computer-generated doom-and-gloom scenario by the Asian Development Bank is not merely unwelcome – it is repugnant. Garbage in, gospel out.

In truth, rice production has risen steadily, sea level is barely rising and even the UN’s climate panel has twice been compelled to admit that there is no evidence of a worldwide change in rainfall.

Subtropical India will not warm by much: advection would take most additional heat poleward. Besides, globally there has been little or no warming for almost two decades. The models did not predict that. The UN’s climate panel, on our advice, has recently all but halved its central estimate of near-term warming.

Sea level is rising no faster than for 150 years. From 2004-2012 the Envisat satellite reported a rise of a tenth of an inch. From 2003-2009 gravity satellites actually showed sea level falling. Results like these have not hitherto been reported in the mainstream news media.

More than 2 centuries of scientific research have failed to make the duration or magnitude of monsoons predictable. Monsoons depend on sea and surface temperature and wind conditions in the Indian and Western Pacific Oceans, timing of El Niños in the equatorial Pacific, variations in Eurasian and Himalayan winter snow cover, even wind direction in the equatorial stratosphere.

Earlier this year, the Indian Meteorological Department predicted a 1 in 4 chance that the 2014 monsoon rainfall would be below the long-term average, leading to a year of drought

The prediction was wrong. Widespread floods in northwestern India and Pakistan have killed several hundred people. Many environmentalists and governmental officials are now insisting that rising atmospheric CO2 is the culprit. Yet the one cause of the recent floods that can be altogether ruled out is global warming, for the good and sufficient reason that for 18 years there has not been any warming.

Worse still for CO2 alarmists: 20th and 21st century warming did not occur in the western Himalayas, and paleo-temperature records from for the last millennium confirm no exceptional recent warming in this region, although the Medieval Warm Period was warmer than today almost everywhere else.

Regardless of the numerous political manipulations of fact and reality, the scientific problems of forecasting monsoon self-evidently remain unsolved.

In 1906 the forecasts depended on 28 unknowns. By 2007 scientists from the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology were using 73. So insisting that just one variable – CO2 concentration – will drive future monsoons is unscientific.

Professor Nandakumar Sarma, vice-chancellor of Manipur University, recently confirmed that “even supercomputers cannot predict what will happen due to climate change within 10-20 years, since there are millions of variable parameters.”

Models said monsoons would become more intense. Instead, they have weakened for 50 years.

As for the floods in the north-west, a study of three major rivers floods in Gujarat by Dr. Alpa Sridhar confirmed that past floods were at least 8 to 10 times worse than recent floods such as that of 1973. CO2-based climate models have been unable to “hindcast” or recreate those floods.

Models also fail to replicate the 60-yr and 200-yr cycles in monsoon rainfall linked to solar cycles detected by studies of ocean sediments from the Arabian Sea.

A new study led by Professor K.M. Hiremath of the Indian Institute of Astrophysics shows the strong, possibly causative correlation between variations in solar activity (red curve) and in monsoon rainfall (blue curve) in Figure 1.

The red curve is actually the result of a simulation of the Indian monsoon rainfall for the past 120 years using solar activity as a forcing variable. The sun is visibly a far more likely influence on monsoon patterns than changes in CO2 concentration.

Governments also overlook a key conclusion from the world’s modelers, led by Dr. Fred Kucharski of the Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics: “The increase of greenhouse gases in the twentieth century has not significantly contributed to the observed decadal Indian monsoonal rainfall variability.”

Not one climate model predicted the severe Indian drought of 2009, followed by the prolonged rains the next year – up by 40% in most regions. These natural variations are not new. They have happened for tens of thousands of years.

A paper for Climate Dynamics co-authored by Professor Goswami, recently-retired director of the Indian Institute of Tropical Meteorology, shows why the models relied upon by the UN’s climate panel’s recent assessments predict monsoons inaccurately.

Figure 1. There is a possibly causative correlation between variations in solar activity (red curve) and in monsoon rainfall (blue curve).

All 16 models examined had the same fatal flaw: they made rain too easily by artificially elevating air and water masses in the atmosphere.

Models are not ready to predict the climate. Misusing computers to spew out multiple “what-if” scenarios is unscientific.

Most fundamental problems in our immature understanding of climate have remained unresolved for decades. Some cannot be resolved at all. The UN’s climate panel admitted in 2001 what has been known for 50 years: because the climate is a “coupled, non-linear, chaotic object,” reliable long-term climate prediction is impossible.

Misuse of climate models as false prophets is costly in lives as well as treasure.

To condemn the poorest of India’s poor to continuing poverty is to condemn many to an untimely death. Mr. Modi is right to have no more to do with such murderous nonsense. It is time to put an end to climate summits. On the evidence, they are not needed.

______________

Willie Soon is a solar physicist and climate scientist at Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. Lord Monckton was an expert reviewer for the Fifth Assessment Report (2013) of the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC.

To news and opinion websites September 22, 2014

Note  The above text is quoted verbatim from WUWT, based on my understanding that this is intended for widespread dissemination.  It certainly deserves to be widely read, not least by teachers and parents. 

Note Here is a useful reprise of a report published in 2010, a report which is a useful document to have to hand to help with the task of 'seeing through' the facile stories of climate alarm campaigners:  http://www.globalresearch.ca/more-than-1000-international-scientists-dissent-over-man-made-global-warming-claims/5403284
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Climate Cult Marches in New York and elsewhere on 21st September: the ill-informed and the ill-intentioned will call for more destruction

Cornwall Alliance

Climate policies such as the subsidising of renewable energy are destructive. They destroy lives in the developing world by raising the price of food. They destroy development prospects by raising the price of energy.

ConservationBytes

Climate alarm campaigners destroy morale in the young and other vulnerable groups by raising the spectre of imminent doom. They destroy educational ideals by turning classrooms into indoctrination centres. They destroy childhood innocence by demanding 'action' by the young, and using them as their political tools.

Grist

Some campaigners are ill-intentioned because of their hatred of society. The hard left, the deep greens, the bigoted and the malevolent. The climate scare merely gives them a new platform for their poisons.

(hat-tip for pic: Greenie Watch)

GreenieWatch

Some are surely innocents who want to good. They have heard that our CO2 is disrupting the climate and driving us towards disaster, and some may even think the disaster is already underway when they hear claims that droughts, floods, hurricanes, tornadoes, and other harmful phenomena are much worse than they used to be.  They are too easily led.  They are being taken advantage of.

It would be a whole lot healthier if we had marches and protests against what Paul Driessen has called the 'climate change scientist-government-environmentalist-industrialist climate complex'. 

Not a very snappy label, but as he notes,this 'complex' is 'well funded and powerful. But it is also arrogant and dishonest, and its assertions are so far removed from reality that they can no longer survive scrutiny and challenge.'

'The time has come to end its attempt to control our lives, livelihoods, liberties, living standards, and life spans.'

Amen to that.

Notes added 22 September 2014   A sensible chap call Alex Epstein had his very own counterflow march in New York:

Here is another glimpse into his experiences there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bcgH62jiocA

Part 1 of his video clips: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mojiBJ55G2g&feature 

Here is an example of a child being used as a political weapon on the march in New York:

This pic and many more at: http://grist.org/climate-energy/meet-a-climate-marcher/

Desmo

And another example of this exploitation of kids:







If you really want insight into just about anything at all, get a statistician to take a look at it.  Here are some insights from Matt Briggs who took a look at the march in New York, and tried to engage with some of the marchers: http://wmbriggs.com/blog/?p=13644  Basically, he found a lot of people who did not really know what they were supporting, but came along anyway.

For the hard-left (and billionaires) at the march, see: http://donsurber.blogspot.co.uk/2014/09/commies-and-billionaires-march-against.html
and: http://www.theblaze.com/stories/2014/09/21/f-the-police-communists-radicals-spotted-throughout-climate-march-in-new-york-city-demand-revolution-nothing-less/

A report on the London march, and the mess the marchers left behind them: http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-London/2014/09/22/Climate-March-London-Piles-of-Placards

Note added 24 September 2014 Report from the San Francisco Oakland rally on 21 Sep (hat-tip WUWT) The hard-left dominated this event.  How sad to see such a spectacle in the land of the free! Lots of picture here: http://pjmedia.com/zombie/2014/09/23/climate-movement-drops-mask-admits-communist-agenda/  For example:

and 'Children were encouraged to hang out in the protest’s kid-friendly zone, where they could draw their own signs promoting “revolution.”'

Inspiration for the Climate Teacher: a call for compassion for the world's poor

As a non-believer, but nevertheless a great admirer of Christianity, I have been puzzled by the number of evangelical Christians who are prominent in the promotion of alarm over our impact on the climate.  Names that come immediately to mind are John Houghton, Bill McKibben, Katharine Hayhoe, and John Cook.  Puzzled because raising alarm with the scope and scale of CAGW is a shockingly irresponsible thing to do when the case for it is so weak and so speculative, and the policy consequences emerging from it are so dreadful for people and the environment all over the world.

But a group called the Cornwall Alliance has reassured me a lot about by publishing a far more compassionate and in my opinion, far better founded perspective on climate variation and climate policies.  It is called 'Protect the Poor: Ten Reasons to Oppose Harmful Climate Change Policies'.

Here are the core elements of it:

1. As the product of infinitely wise design, omnipotent creation, and faithful sustaining (Genesis 1:1–31; 8:21–22), Earth is robust, resilient, self-regulating, and self-correcting. Although Earth and its subsystems, including the climate system, are susceptible to some damage by ignorant or malicious human action, God’s wise design and faithful sustaining make these natural systems more likely—as confirmed by widespread scientific observation—to respond in ways that suppress and correct that damage than magnify it catastrophically.
2. Earth’s temperature naturally warms and cools cyclically throughout time, and warmer periods are typically more conducive to human thriving than colder periods.
3. While human addition of greenhouse gases, particularly carbon dioxide (CO2), to the atmosphere may slightly raise atmospheric temperatures, observational studies indicate that the climate system responds more in ways that suppress than in ways that amplify CO2’s effect on temperature, implying a relatively small and benign rather than large and dangerous warming effect.
4. Empirical studies indicate that natural cycles outweigh human influences in producing the cycles of global warming and cooling, not only in the distant past but also recently.
5. Computer climate models, over 95% of which point toward greater warming than has been observed during the period of rapid CO2 increase, do not justify belief that human influences have come to outweigh natural influences, or fears that human-caused warming will be large and dangerous.
6. Rising atmospheric CO2 benefits all life on Earth by improving plant growth and crop yields, making food more abundant and affordable, helping the poor most of all.
7. Abundant, affordable, reliable energy, most of it now and in the foreseeable future provided by burning fossil fuels, which are the primary source of CO2 emissions, is indispensable to lifting and keeping people out of poverty.
8. Mandatory reductions in CO2 emissions, pursued to prevent dangerous global warming, would have little or no discernible impact on global temperatures, but would greatly increase the price of energy and therefore of everything else. Such policies would put more people at greater risk than the warming they are intended to prevent, because they would slow, stop, or even reverse the economic growth that enables people to adapt to all climates. They would also harm the poor more than the wealthy, and would harm them more than the small amount of warming they might prevent.
9. In developed countries, the poor spend a higher percentage of their income on energy than others, so rising energy prices, driven by mandated shifts from abundant, affordable, reliable fossil fuels to diffuse, expensive, intermittent “Green” energy, will in effect be regressive taxes—taxing the poor at higher rates than the rich.
10. In developing countries, billions of the poor desperately need to replace dirty, inefficient cooking and heating fuels, pollution from which causes hundreds of millions of illnesses and about 4 million premature deaths every year, mostly among women and young children. To demand that they forgo the use of inexpensive fossil fuels and depend on expensive wind, solar, and other “Green” fuels to meet that need is to condemn them to more generations of poverty and the high rates of disease and premature death that accompany it.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The first point above is a bit too mystical for my tastes, but it is gentle and positive, and I imagine people of many other faiths could go along with it. The other 9 points deserve to be studied by anyone who teaches climate topics to schoolchildren, with a view to finding ways to get these key insights across to them.

The statement continues with direct appeals to Christians to take actions, and this is less suited to general teaching except perhaps for discussion with senior pupils. 

Here, on the other hand, is another Christian leader urging his flock to join the march in New York next week, a march intended to produce even more destructive and dreadful policies ostensibly based on overblown fears about our carbon dioxide: http://blog.archny.org/index.php/peoples-climate-march/comment-page-1/

So, it is not all good!

Climate Chumps and Climate Cheats – '97%' is the tell-tale to find them

The sails on some boats have short lengths of wool attached to them to show the manner in which the air is flowing past. They are called tell-tales, and let the sailor know if the sail needs trimming.

The '97%' statistic can act as a tell-tale to let you know the manner of person you are dealing with when it is deployed to promote alarm over our impact on climate. I make the crude division of those who deploy it that way into climate chumps or climate cheats. The former have merely been deceived themselves, the latter want to deceive others.  

The basic deceit being that something like 97% of climate scientists or 97% of climate science papers support an alarmist view of climate change and our contribution to it.  Who could argue with such numbers?  Well, many people can and have.  When the sources of such claims have been checked out, they are found to be so unimpressive that it is grossly irresponsible for anyone to rely on them. At best, they indicate support for banalities such as 'climate changes', 'there was global warming in the 20th Century', 'CO2 is a greenhouse gas', 'humans contribute a warming effect by releasing CO2 into the atmosphere'.  None of these is intrinsically alarming.  For example, they are all perfectly consistent with the assertion that there is no problem.

The climate chumps relay the '97%' in conversation, in blog comments, and so on, but they do so in complete ignorance of the shoddy nature of the various derivations of this stinky statistic. Lots of ordinary members of the public might fall into this category. They may know next to nothing about the climate system, but they have heard the relentless propaganda in school, on tv, or in their newspapers for years and maybe the 97% number just struck them as impressive. They need your gentle help to get a clearer view.

The climate cheats know, or ought to know, that the '97%' is a stinker of a statistic, but nevertheless, they make a big deal out of it, even seeing it as a clincher in PR-work and other carefully produced materials. They include specialist journalists, bloggers, politicians, and civil servants. They ought to check the origins of prominent statistics used in their arguments. They deserve your sharp criticism for deploying something so shoddy and deceptive.

So, when you see the 97% being deployed in ways that are meant to impress and convince you that you should believe in climate catastrophe, or 'dangerous global warming' as President Obama put it, regard it as a tell-tale that you are reading/listening/watching either a chump or a cheat. A couple of questions, or maybe just a little more of your attention, should help you decide which label is the right one. If it is being used in this way in school materials which you or your children are exposed to, then make a formal complaint about them.

Andrew Montford has recently written a GWPF report (link is to the pdf file) on one of the most prominent and recent sources of '97%' - the notorious Cook et al. paper of 2013 - and he summarises some of the criticisms made about it by academics: 

e.g. Mike Hulme:

The [Cook et al.] article is poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed.

It obscures the complexities of the climate issue and it is a sign of the desperately

poor level of public and policy debate in this country that the energy minister

should cite it. It offers a similar depiction of the world into categories of ‘right’ and

‘wrong’ to that adopted in [an earlier study]: dividing publishing climate scientists

into ‘believers’ and ‘non-believers’. It seems to me that these people are still living

(or wishing to live) in the pre-2009 world of climate change discourse. Haven’t

they noticed that public understanding of the climate issue has moved on?

e.g. Richard Tol

Reported results are inconsistent and biased. The sample is not representative and

contains many irrelevant papers. Overall, data quality is low. Cook’s validation test

shows that the data are invalid. Data disclosure is incomplete so that key results

cannot be reproduced or tested.

e.g. Jose Duarte

. . .completely invalid and untrustworthy (and by customary scientific standards,

completely unpublishable.) I had no idea this was happening. This is garbage,

and a crisis. It needs to stop, and [such] papers need to be retracted immediately,

especially Cook, et al (2013).

Montford quietly concludes 'The figure of 97% is entirely discredited, whatever the nature of the

consensus.'

For an introduction to criticisms of Cook et al. and other sources of '97%', see my earlier post:

http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2014/03/occams-broom-and-stink-of-97-of-climate.html

Update 27 March 2015:  A useful summary of the Cook et al.  nonsense is given by Richard Tol here: http://richardtol.blogspot.co.uk/2015/03/now-almost-two-years-old-john-cooks-97.html

Update 18 May 2015. Ross McKitrick undermines the '97%' nonsense even further by pointing to ignorance on the part of many of those classed in surveys as 'climate scientists':  http://business.financialpost.com/fp-comment/climate-change-consensus-among-the-misinformed-is-not-worth-much

Update 19 February 2019
The tell-tale is still needed, still working, but this post has a neat rejoinder :  http://www.cfact.org/2019/02/17/32717/

Climate Teachers, Concerned Parents – here is a new scientific society worthy of your support to raise standards in climate science, and improve public outreach.

The somewhat strangely named 'Open Atmospheric Society', or OAS for short, has been officially launched and offers associate membership which is open to all to apply for, regardless of academic qualifications. There is a full membership category for those with professional qualifications in relevant fields.

Here is how their Home page begins:

'Welcome

Welcome to The Open Atmospheric Society, known as “The OAS”.

We give you a voice where other societies may not.

The OAS is an international membership society for the purpose of studying, discussing, and publishing about topics in atmospheric related earth sciences, including but not limited to meteorology, hydrology, oceanography, and climatology. It is open to anyone with an interest at the associate level, but student and full memberships also are offered.

The purpose of the society is to foster quality atmospheric science and atmospheric science communications through outreach, member education, member publishing, and electronic media.'

Why is this being posted here on Climate Lessons?

Joining the new society as an associate or as a full member, will provide it with financial and moral support. The benefits to society in general will include an online journal freely available to the public, press releases for each publication, statements and positions regarding atmospheric science as it relates to current news, and video production assistance for authors to explain papers. If the directors and other participants in this new venture maintain the high standards they have set for themselves, all of these things could provide a timely and much-needed counter-balance to the loaded-science and dogma-dominated media coverage of climate science that we have had to endure for decades. This could help create a calmer, more rational debate in the public square and within political circles, and in due course lead to higher quality textbooks and other materials for schools currently being bombarded with politically-biased and often scaremongering works of various kinds on climate.

Associate membership is open to all with an interest in the subject matter and in supporting the goals of the society.  It costs 45 US dollars for one year.

Full membership is open to professionally qualified people in relevant subjects, and costs 85 US dollars for one year.

Membership application forms can be found here: http://theoas.wildapricot.org/

Here is the welcome that awaits you there: 
'We welcome professionals, educators, students, and the general public/laymen who have an interest in open atmospheric science. There is a membership level to meet everyone's situation.'