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.'

Climate Alarm Virus Alert: new films starring DiCaprio will spread misinformation to the young

Filmstars often have a great many young fans for whom they can do no wrong.  Those who wish to bombard the young with climate scares can also find them attractive as vehicles for their propaganda, and it seems that a new series of short films starring DeCaprio are to be released with that end in mind.  Here are three extracts from an article in the New York Post by Tom Harris and Bob Carter, two experts in climate studies and in the tricks of the climate-scare trade which they so oppose (I have put one sentence in each extract in bold):

(1)

'In the run-up to the Sept. 23 UN Climate Summit in New York, Leonardo DiCaprio is releasing a series of films about the “climate crisis.”

The first is “Carbon,” which tells us the world is threatened by a “carbon monster.” Coal, oil, natural gas and other carbon-based forms of energy are causing dangerous climate change and must be turned off as soon as possible, DiCaprio says.

But he has identified the wrong monster. It is the climate scare itself that is the real threat to civilization.

DiCaprio is an actor, not a scientist; it’s no real surprise that his film is sensationalistic and error-riddled. Other climate-change fantasists, who do have a scientific background, have far less excuse.

Science is never settled, but the current state of “climate change” science is quite clear: There is essentially zero evidence that carbon dioxide from human activities is causing catastrophic climate change.'

(2)

'Oregon-based physicist Gordon Fulks sums it up well: “CO2 is said to be responsible for global warming that is not occurring, for accelerated sea-level rise that is not occurring, for net glacial and sea ice melt that is not occurring . . . and for increasing extreme weather that is not occurring.”

Consider:

•  According to NASA satellites and all ground-based temperature measurements, global warming ceased in the late 1990s. This when CO2 levels have risen almost 10 percent since 1997. The post-1997 CO2 emissions represent an astonishing 30 percent of all human-related emissions since the Industrial Revolution began. That we’ve seen no warming contradicts all CO2-based climate models upon which global-warming concerns are founded.
• Rates of sea-level rise remain small and are even slowing, over recent decades averaging about 1 millimeter per year as measured by tide gauges and 2 to 3 mm/year as inferred from “adjusted” satellite data. Again, this is far less than what the alarmists suggested.
•  Satellites also show that a greater area of Antarctic sea ice exists now than any time since space-based measurements began in 1979. In other words, the ice caps aren’t melting.
•  A 2012 IPCC report concluded that there has been no significant increase in either the frequency or intensity of extreme weather events in the modern era. The NIPCC 2013 report concluded the same. Yes, Hurricane Sandy was devastating — but it’s not part of any new trend.

The climate scare, Fulks sighs, has “become a sort of societal pathogen that virulently spreads misinformation in tiny packages like a virus.” He’s right — and DiCaprio’s film is just another vector for spreading the virus.'

(3)

'Dr. Bjørn Lomborg, director of the Copenhagen Consensus Center, calculates that the European Union’s goal of a 20 percent reduction in CO2 emissions below 1990 levels by 2020, currently the most severe target in the world, will cost almost $100 billion a year by 2020, or more than $7 trillion over the course of this century.

Lomborg, a supporter of the UN’s climate science, notes that this would buy imperceptible improvement: “After spending all that money, we would not even be able to tell the difference.”'

Note added 10 October 2014  A noteworthy video has been made about the contrast between what DiCaprio says and what DiCaprio does: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bw2bkISm0Ys

Good News: teachers with integrity resist climate campaigner corruption in their schools

Children have long been seen as an easy target by zealots intent on using them to help achieve their political ends.  Climate alarm campaigners provide a modern example of this.  But it may be harder than they presume.  Some parents will resist it.  Some pupils will see through it. Some teachers may seek to protect their pupils from the moral harm, mental anguish, and distorted curricula that climate campaigners want to inflict on the young.  All in the name of saving them of course. If you claim to love the environment above all things, you can easily despise children as the 10:10 campaigners revealed in their 'No Pressure' video in which pupils were depicted being brutally murdered by their teacher because their parents had not toed the party line on reducing energy consumption.  This was vivid brutality but mercifully fictional - the campaigners apparently finding it a jolly wheeze to help promote their cause.  But harm comes in many guises from this source.  The harm of telling children

BantheBulb

PushYourParents

that polar bears will die if they don't turn off lights.  The harm of telling children that their parents are helping to destroy the planet and need to be stopped.
 The harm of telling children that industrial progress is going to kill them.  The harm of telling children that carbon dioxide is a pollutant - a gas they produce and emit with every breath.  The harm of telling children that 'climate science is settled' and they have to obey 'authorities' about what it means for their lives.  The general harm of projecting vivid, scary, threatening scenarios to the young, and telling them they are certain to occur unless ... Unless the children do what they tell them to do.  A generation of docile, cowed, submissive children would be ideal for anyone intent on controlling the lives of us all.  No wonder the left is so keen on climate change campaigning.

Well, researchers are finding that some teachers* don't care for it.  On Bishop Hill we learn of lamenting by climate campaign collaborators because:

[Researchers] found that the teachers did not consider it their role to try to solve today's major social or scientific problems. Instead, the science teachers said they preferred to 'maintain the integrity' of the science rather than to explore the social, economic or political implications.

That's good that they wish to protect the integrity of their subjects.  Let us hope they succeed.

We might also hope that many teachers are determined to protect the integrity and well-being of their pupils as well.  Let us hope they succeed.

*Footnote.  But are such teachers in a minority?  For indications of the possible scale of climate-linked indoctrination in schools in the UK, see the report 'Climate Control: Brainwashing in Schools'.

Climate Change in Schools: not only the brainwashing is rotten, the buildings are as well

The scary but incredible premise of CO2-driven doom has been exploited by so many for political, religious, emotional, and financial ends that it is not hard to find people seized with fear doing foolish, and in some cases, unpardonable things. The unpardonable includes those adults deliberately setting out to frighten children about their future, feeding them them facile 'science' and even more reprehensibly, urging them to political 'action' even against their own families and friends.* The foolish includes being duped into sundry eco-ventures such as putting windturbines in school grounds, or solar panels on their roofs, or making school buildings that tick the eco-boxes while being unfit for human habitation.**  

Here is one in Devon which has wasted £7 million pounds and disrupted schooling for hundreds of pupils over the past 4 years (hat-tip Phillip Bratby ( on BishopHill Unthreaded , Sep 3, 2014 at 7:14 AM):

BBC

From a BBC website report: 

The £7m "flagship new eco-school" was intended to replace "dilapidated flood-prone" former buildings.

Classes were held in four clusters of pod-like timber-clad buildings, with electricity and hot water from solar panels.

But rainwater was reported to be running down the walls after apparent faults in the structure.

Ordering the school had been a "bold decision" by the county council, said district councillor Jacqi Hodgson.

"It's unfortunate that it had had so many problems and now it has come to this, it is really sad."

For more sources of 'sad' from Hodgson and her fellow Green Party campaigners, see their newsletter.  The usual sheep's clothing of sentimental socialism covering a vehicle for ruthless authoritarianism.  

Such blunders will surely open more eyes to the moral and intellectual emptiness of eco-alarmism and its spin-offs such as incompetent building projects.  Incompetent, but 'green'.  It is all part of a destructive subculture currently in such ascendancy that who knows how long it will take to recover from their physical blunders (such as bio-fuels, windfarms, and crappy buildings), let alone their educational ones producing generations of children made sick and anxious about the future.

Footnotes

* For example, Donna Laframboise has exposed global-scale conniving for that end: http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2012/02/03/proselytizing-to-toddlers/ (and I enlarged upon it here:

http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2012/02/co2-causes-contempt-for-childhood.html)

 And the possibly widespread extent of it in UK Schools is highlighted in this report: 'Climate Control: Brainwashing in Schools'

**Previous posts here on this topic:

http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2011/02/learning-by-metaphor-foolish-building.html

http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2012/01/climate-change-scaremongering-threatens.html

http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/2011/12/happy-head-chilled-children-troubled.html

Links given in them include:

http://www.westernmorningnews.co.uk/Acclaimed-eco-school-forced-shut-classrooms-years/story-19789593-detail/story.html#ixzz2fi669r8B

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/wildlife/10327504/School-closed-after-pupils-bitten-by-mites-in-eco-roof.html

http://notrickszone.com/2011/07/11/flopped-green-passive-school-suffocating-students/

(example from Germany)

Note added 04 August, 2016.   The £7 million eco-junk school is to be demolished: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2016/08/03/visionary-7m-eco-school-to-be-demolished-because-of-leaky-roof/

The Avalanche of Climate Scare Propaganda: what sustains it? Some answers here.

'Three major stories about the Green movement and its ties to major Left-wing foundations and Left-wing journalists have been in the news. '

MediaTrackers uncovered Gamechanger Salon, a secretive group of over 1,000 Leftwing leaders and activists from organizations like AFL-CIO, Change.org, NARAL, Planned Parenthood, Huffington Post, CNN, MSNBC, ThinkProgress, Media Matters, and such climate-alarm groups as Greenpeace, Sierra Club, Wilderness Society, US Climate Action Network, shaping news reporting and government policy. 

The U.S. Senate Environment & Public Works Committee revealed a “Billionaires’ Club” of carefully orchestrated and hidden Leftwing support for environmental organizations totaling over $1.3 billion per year that exploits ties with the Environmental Protection Agency and other parts of the Obama Administration to pass policies Congress, the real representatives of the people, won’t adopt. 

Capital Research Center exposed a concerted effort in the mainstream media here and around the world, including ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, and the BBC as well as leading newspapers and magazines, to exclude the views of “climate-change skeptic” scientists from coverage, thus hiding from the public the real and growing debates over climate change among qualified climate scientists. 

The above text, plus more details on each of the three topics has been published here in this article 

Exposing Big Bad Green

by E. Calvin Beisner
August 21, 2014

See: http://www.masterresource.org/2014/08/exposing-big-bad-green


The scale of the these propaganda efforts is breathtaking, as is the extent of the academic, governmental, NGO and business empires which they help sustain.  Despite it all, they are struggling to fool all of the people all of the time.  They are managing some of the people, some of the time, not least children in schools.  

Meanwhile, the climate system continues to defy the would-be alarmers since nothing has happened in it to contradict the notion that our CO2 is having only a weak effect - too weak to confirm reliably using temperatures, ice extents, precipitation patterns, cloud extents, storms, etc etc etc.  See the scholarly works in 'Climate Change Reconsidered II' for support for this view.

Background Briefings for Climate Teachers and Concerned Parents - SEPP's weekly compilation

The flood of materials about climate that comes out every week is liable to swamp anyone trying to keep up. The Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP) does a weekly email highlighting scientific papers, blog posts or materials in the mass media. You can scan this to find items of particular interest. For example, this week there is an item about the insertion of climate alarmism into English comprehension tests in the new and controversial 'Common Core' curriculum in the United States ( I have added the italics and bold):

'The eighth grade English test included several short written pieces that students had to read and respond to in order to demonstrate English mastery. One such piece was an article originally published on NASA’s website, “The Summer of 2012 –Too Hot To Handle?” The article discusses the high temperatures and drought during the summer of 2012 and looks at whether ordinary weather fluctuations or CO2-driven global warming are to blame.

After reading the article, students were asked to cite the article to describe the overall effect of increased CO2 emissions on the planet’s atmosphere. While the article included input from climate scientists John Christy, a climate change skeptic, the students’ answers were directed to focus exclusively on claims in favor of CO2-driven climate change.

“A response receiving full credit will describe the effect of increased CO2 emissions by explaining the relationship between higher temperatures and increased CO2 in the atmosphere,” says an annotation provided for teachers afterwards. Several sample answers were included, with top-scoring answers describing CO2′s effects as including rising sea levels and higher surface temperatures.

“The effect of increased CO2 emissions is that the atmosphere becomes a heat source itself… Also the average surface temperature of the entire Earth increases,” reads one answer that was awarded a perfect score.

Common Core standards cover only math and English, and do not concern science standards. Nevertheless, critics of the standards have frequently asserted that the standards will be used to push liberal political causes, and questions like that on the New York exam are unlikely to appease them.'

Source: http://dailycaller.com/2014/08/08/new-york-common-core-test-quizzes-kids-on-global-warming/

[In the US, the word 'liberal' has been hi-jacked and now denotes 'left-wing' - and, given left-wingers' determination to control the lives and thoughts of others, that is quite a switch.]

You can sign up for the free newsletter here: http://www.sepp.org/newsletter_signup.cfm

You can obtain past issues here: http://www.sepp.org/the-week-that-was.cfm

Climate Scaremongering Antidote: fight back with optimism and good cheer

'Compared with any time in the past half century, the world as a whole is today wealthier, healthier, happier, cleverer, cleaner, kinder, freer, safer, more peaceful and more equal.'

Matt Ridley, August 2014 : http://www.rationaloptimist.com/blog/reasons-to-be-cheerful-%281%29.aspx

One of the underpinnings of the pathological pessimism such as Paul Ehrlich and other extreme 'environmentalists' have promoted for decades is a sense of foreboding.  A sense that everything is getting worse, and that we need drastic, revolutionary change to have any hope of surviving.  Climate scaremongering is but one vehicle for such promotion, and it was one seized upon with relish by the likes of the Club of Rome, Maurice Strong, and sundry other modern millenarians whose biggest and most successful political monsters have been UNEP and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

The deliberate insertion of climate scaremongering into schools and the mass media has harmed many.  Surveys of children reveal high levels of anxiety about the future.  Several such surveys are reported on here, along with more specific reports of children scared about climate:  http://climatelessons.blogspot.co.uk/p/climate-anxiety-reports-of-frightened.html

But as Matt Ridley points out in his book, The Rational Optimist, and in the recent article from which the quote above is taken, we humans are actually doing pretty well when it comes to progress.  This includes our ability to cope with climate variation.  Unfortunately we are still vulnerable to superstition and deliberate scaremongering, especially when it is dressed up in pseudo-scientific guises and treated with an astonishingly low level of critical review in the mass media.  The reality is that ...

There is a lot to be cheerful about. (hat-tip Richard Drake, http://www.bishop-hill.net/discussion/post/2396918).

And our children should be told about it.

10-minute trainer: Hansen's faulty faith at Wirth's Sauna Session in 1988

Hansen was a performer in an event stage-managed by Senator Timothy Wirth to make an impact on the US Congress.  Wirth sneaked in the night before and opened all the windows in the room to be used for the hearing, thereby effectively disabling the air-conditioning for what was expected to be one of the  hottest days of the year. This childish piece of manipulation should not be forgotten.  Worse actions than that were to follow in pursuit of political goals through scaring the world about our impact on climate, but this is an early piece of arrogant and shoddy behaviour.  As for Hansen in his role as useful idiot, he put on a good show.  His faith in his vision of the future has turned out to be a faulty one.  The blog post by Steven Goddard points out how wrong he was on hot summers in the USA.  In the same year, he gave another interview in which he assured a journalist that roads in New York would be flooded by rising seas in 20 years.  That too has turned our badly for him.  Several years after this interview was published, he denied  this, claiming he said 40 years not 20 (but even 40 years is not being remotely supported by trends).  By then it was clear just how foolish the claim was from a scientific point of view.  It was not so foolish from an agit-prop one, and whether or not Hansen was aware of that, his words will have served to mislead many.

Everything below re-blogged from Real Science (Steven Goddard)

Posted on August 13, 2014by stevengoddard

On a hot day in 1988, Hansen told this to the US Congress

His Bold Statement Transforms the Debate On Greenhouse Effect

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Published: August 23, 1988

He held up one die representing the climate for the period 1950-1980. Two sides were white for an average summer, and two other sides were blue for colder-than-average summers. The other two sides were red for hotter-than-average summers. Thus, on a roll of the die for that period, there were two chances in six of having a hot summer at any given location in the country.

Then Dr. Hansen picked up the die for the 1990’s and explained:

”If our climate model calculations are approximately correct, the greenhouse warming in the 1990’s will be sufficient to shift the probabilities such that the chance of a hot summer in most of the country will be in the range of 55 to 80 percent. Four sides of the die are red. I believe it is obvious that the man in the street will notice that by then the dice are loaded. There will be more hot summers than normal, and the hottest ones will be hotter than they used to be.” 

His forecast couldn’t possibly have done any worse. He gave it during the hottest summer on record in DC, and this year has been second coolest

So far this year, less than 2.5% of days in Maryland have been over 90 degrees, which is the second lowest on record. Compare to the peak year of 1988, when over 19% of days through August 11 were over 90 degrees.

For the entire US, the frequency of 90 degree days has plummeted, and is near record lows

Teachers: prepare for a new piece of climate scaremongering guff – a button-badge, and fight back

The next 'last refuge' of the climate scoundrels?

Jo Nova has reacted to the new button-badge which has apparently been designed to give the climate scaremongering campaign a boost. The circular badge is mostly black, with a bit of green at the foot, perhaps to suggest a decaying plant stalk with just a hint of life left in it, and of course the circle is also used to invoke 'planet earth' since it comes with the tag-line 'It's Not Warming. It's Dying.' Jo has added a footnote to this latest piece of glib and irresponsble scaremongering to the effect that what may be dying is the fear of a carbon crisis.  Let us hope so.

The planet is, if anything, greening.  Furthermore, we humans are doing a pretty decent job of improving it wherever and whenever we have the spare wealth to do so.  And almost all of those countries which are still beset with great poverty and deprivation have been making spectacular progress in becoming wealthier.  Thanks in part to their increased use of fossil-fuels, just as those fuels were vital for the already developed nations.  They remain vital to us today, but we have several options that might allow us to reduce our use of them over the rest of this century if we should wish to do so, for example to reduce air pollution, or to conserve valuable chemical feedstocks.

If the climate scare campaigners start pushing these buttons at the school gates, or even from within your school, here are some links that expose the flimsy basis of this latest attempt to terrify the ill-informed and vulnerable in our societies:

NIPCC REPORT

(1) The IPCC is biased.  In a court of law, their case would not survive examination as a neutral brief.  It is blatant advocacy of a particular point of view.  It is not to be trusted for making a balanced case.  See this link for a legal analysis to this effect:  http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1612851 .  The IPCC makes the case for the prosecution of CO2, and it is a far from convincing one.  See this link for materials that expose the advocacy by marshalling the substantial scientific case for a calmer view of our impact on biological systems: Climate Change Reconsidered II: Biological Impacts.

Matt Ridley on 'greening'

(2) The  author of 'The Rational Optimist' (a book that would be good to see in every school's library, and staffroom) Matt Ridley appears in the following video to explain how the planet in greening, not least as a result of our CO2 and our wealth: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S-nsU_DaIZE

Mueller Report

(3) The GWPF has published a short and informative report on the greening of the Sahara: http://www.thegwpf.org/images/stories/gwpf-reports/mueller-sahel.pdf

Doug Hoffman has also reported on other studies showing beneficial, greening, trends in recent years: http://theresilientearth.com/?q=content/going-green-rising-co2

Taking a Break

Source: http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-14.76,84.65,349

My apologies to any regular visitors here, but I am taking a break from blogging for another couple of weeks or so.  In the meantime, here is an entrancing site showing recently estimated surface winds in an animation (with numerical values for speed and direction at any point clicked).  The view can be rotated and zoomed, and additional computer-model generated fields can be added (click on 'earth' at bottom left to get the menu):
http://earth.nullschool.net/

Note added 3rd July.  The model gives a dramatic picture of tropical storm Arthur's surface winds off the east coast of the States:  http://earth.nullschool.net/#current/wind/surface/level/orthographic=-73.54,30.96,1512

Should teachers use the classroom for campaigning on climate change?

'Is the teaching of basic skills and basic knowledge not hard enough without adding the complication of deliberate political manipulation into the mix? Are teachers to be the willing servants of whichever government or ideological position happens to be currently fashionable or empowered? Are they also to willingly intervene between parents and their children in ways which seem intended to weaken the special bonds within a family?

I am particularly concerned with climate change and the associated wish of some powerful groups, not least in international agencies and NGOs, to make use of children as political tools with which to promote fundamental views about life, and even lifestyle and political choices, on to their parents. There are materials out there aimed at scaring children about their future, and surveys show that many are in fact living with a fear that they may not survive thanks to environmental catastrophes heading their way. There are materials aimed at distancing children from their own parents by persuading them, the children, that their parents are part of ‘the problem’ and need to be changed.

This combination of fear about the future and separation from previous sources of trust and guidance, are basic elements of brainwashing as described by Sowell (1993) in his book ‘Inside American Education’ where he provides several examples of such ‘stripping away of defences’ in schools in a range of programmes.

Andrew Montford and I have written a report entitled ‘Climate Control: Brainwashing in schools’ (GWPF, 2014) in which we focus on eco-alarms in general, and climate-related ones in particular. This was reported on here on the Schools Improvement Net (2014), where it attracted a few generally disparaging comments. None addressed our concerns that there may be widespread targeting of children in our schools with what amounts to eco-propaganda or, at the very least, inadequate treatment of important topics. But why should teachers be engaged at all with such campaigning in their classrooms and in extra-curricular events for their pupils? By all means, let them campaign with other adults, and engage them in debate on controversial issues. But surely it should be beneath them to seek to take advantage of their position in the classroom to try to persuade their pupils of their views?'

Extract from a guest post on the Schools Improvement site: http://schoolsimprovement.net/guest-post-teachers-classroom-campaigning-climate-change/

'Too many of today's "educators" see students as a captive audience for them to manipulate and propagandize.'

'There was a time when common sense and common decency counted for something. Educators felt a responsibility to equip students with solid skills that could take them anywhere they wanted to go in later life -- enable them to become doctors, engineers or whatever they wanted to be.

Too many of today's "educators" see students as a captive audience for them to manipulate and propagandize.'

Thomas Sowell

The quotes above, and in the title of this post, are from an article by the scholar Thomas Sowell, published two days ago at Townhall.com under the title 'Moral Bankruptcy'.  The article is not about climate alarm or other eco-campaigning in schools, but it could have been.  It is about forced visits of children from a low income district of New York to a private school somewhere wealthier.  Sowell points out that this part of a shocking waste of educational time.  He notes:

 'When the low-income youngsters visited the posh private school, "they were just overwhelmed" by it, according to the New York Times. "One kid ran crying off campus." Apparently others felt "so disheartened about their own circumstances."

What earthly good did that do for these young people? Thank heaven no one was calloused enough to take me on a tour of a posh private school when I was growing up in Harlem.'

One imagines it was the brainwave of some determined campaigner for something or other who saw an opportunity to exploit the children for his or her own ends.  Let us note that surveys have shown anxious and despondent children scared by climate alarmism.  They too are no doubt 'disheartened about their own circumstances'.  Sowell was not impressed:

'No doubt those adults who believe in envy and resentment get their jollies from doing things like this -- and from feeling that they are creating future envy and resentment voters to forward the ideological agenda of the big government left.

But at the expense of kids?'

This was part of a programme which paired children from each of the two schools.  It not only upset some of them, but as Sowell points out, it wasted the time of the poor kids in particular:

'This school visit was not just an isolated event. It was part of a whole program of pairing individual youngsters from a poverty-stricken neighborhood with youngsters from families that can pay 43 grand a year for their schooling.

What do these kids do? They tell each other stories based on their young lives' unripened judgment. They go to a big park in the Bronx together and take part in a garden project there. They talk about issues like gun violence and race relations.

They have a whole lifetime ahead of them to talk about such issues. But poor kids, especially, have just one time, during their school years, to equip their minds with math, science and other solid skills that will give them a shot at a better life.

To squander their time on rap sessions and navel-gazing is unconscionable.

This is just one of many programs dreamed up by "educators" who seem determined to do anything except educate. They see school children as guinea pigs for their pet notions.'

The same kind of callousness or detachment from reality must be found in those who insist on scaring children into being political activists for 'sustainable development' or some other climate-scare driven activity.  Sowell finishes with these words, which could readily be applied to no end of climate-related materials and events aimed at school-children on and around climate alarms:

'At a time when American youngsters are consistently outperformed on international tests by youngsters in other countries, do we have the luxury of spending our children's time on things that will do absolutely nothing for them in the years ahead? Are children just playthings for adults?

Maybe the affluent kids can afford to waste their time this way, because they will be taken care of, one way or another, in later life.

But to squander the time of poor kids, for whom education is often their only hope of escaping poverty, is truly an irresponsible self-indulgence by adults who should know better, and it is one more sign of the moral bankruptcy of too many people in our schools.'

(hat-tip: http://edwatch.blogspot.co.uk/2014/05/moral-bankruptcy-thomas-sowell-if-you.html#links )

Standpoint: 'Global warming orthodoxy is not merely irrational. It is wicked.'

Nigel Lawson

This is a powerful, wide-ranging essay by Nigel Lawson, firmly based on his own experience as a participant in the 'climate change debate', and provides a devastating indictment of those who have so shamelessly promoted climate alarmism.  As he notes at the end, their belief system 'is not merely irrational.  It is wicked.'.   I urge all readers who come this way to visit Standpoint Magazine and get hold of the entire text for themselves. which published the essay.  I especially hope that teachers will refer to it for their own background reading and for sharing with at least their senior pupils who might benefit from this overview.

Extracts are given below (omitted sections are denoted by '...'). [The entire text of the article is now reproduced below, with permission.] I have added the emboldening at the end for the sentence which I used in the title of this post and for the sentence used as a title for the article. (original title is 'Cool It')

Climate change alarmism is a belief system, and needs to be evaluated as such.

'There is something odd about the global warming debate — or the climate change debate, as we are now expected to call it, since global warming has for the time being come to a halt.

I have never shied away from controversy, nor — for example, as Chancellor — worried about being unpopular if I believed that what I was saying and doing was in the public interest.

But I have never in my life experienced the extremes of personal hostility, vituperation and vilification which I — along with other dissenters, of course — have received for my views on global warming and global warming policies.

For example, according to the Climate Change Secretary, Ed Davey, the global warming dissenters are, without exception, "wilfully ignorant" and in the view of the Prince of Wales we are "headless chickens". Not that "dissenter" is a term they use. We are regularly referred to as "climate change deniers", a phrase deliberately designed to echo "Holocaust denier" — as if questioning present policies and forecasts of the future is equivalent to casting malign doubt about a historical fact.

The heir to the throne and the minister are senior public figures, who watch their language. The abuse I received after appearing on the BBC's Today programme last February was far less restrained. Both the BBC and I received an orchestrated barrage of complaints to the effect that it was an outrage that I was allowed to discuss the issue on the programme at all. And even the Science and Technology Committee of the House of Commons shamefully joined the chorus of those who seek to suppress debate.

In fact, despite having written a thoroughly documented book about global warming more than five years ago, which happily became something of a bestseller, and having founded a think tank on the subject — the Global Warming Policy Foundation — the following year, and despite frequently being invited on Today to discuss economic issues, this was the first time I had ever been asked to discuss climate change. I strongly suspect it will also be the last time.

The BBC received a well-organised deluge of complaints — some of them, inevitably, from those with a vested interest in renewable energy — accusing me, among other things, of being a geriatric retired politician and not a climate scientist, and so wholly unqualified to discuss the issue.

Perhaps, in passing, I should address the frequent accusation from those who violently object to any challenge to any aspect of the prevailing climate change doctrine, that the Global Warming Policy Foundation's non-disclosure of the names of our donors is proof that we are a thoroughly sinister organisation and a front for the fossil fuel industry.

As I have pointed out on a number of occasions, the Foundation's Board of Trustees decided, from the outset, that it would neither solicit nor accept any money from the energy industry or from anyone with a significant interest in the energy industry. And to those who are not-regrettably-prepared to accept my word, I would point out that among our trustees are a bishop of the Church of England, a former private secretary to the Queen, and a former head of the Civil Service. Anyone who imagines that we are all engaged in a conspiracy to lie is clearly in an advanced stage of paranoia.

The reason why we do not reveal the names of our donors, who are private citizens of a philanthropic disposition, is in fact pretty obvious. Were we to do so, they, too, would be likely to be subject to the vilification and abuse I mentioned earlier. And that is something which, understandably, they can do without.

That said, I must admit I am strongly tempted to agree that, since I am not a climate scientist, I should from now on remain silent on the subject — on the clear understanding, of course, that everyone else plays by the same rules. No more statements by Ed Davey, or indeed any other politician, including Ed Milliband, Lord Deben and Al Gore. Nothing more from the Prince of Wales, or from Lord Stern. What bliss!

But of course this is not going to happen. Nor should it; for at bottom this is not a scientific issue. That is to say, the issue is not climate change but climate change alarmism, and the hugely damaging policies that are advocated, and in some cases put in place, in its name. And alarmism is a feature not of the physical world, which is what climate scientists study, but of human behaviour; the province, in other words, of economists, historians, sociologists, psychologists and — dare I say it — politicians.

And en passant, the problem for dissenting politicians, and indeed for dissenting climate scientists for that matter, who certainly exist, is that dissent can be career-threatening. The advantage of being geriatric is that my career is behind me: there is nothing left to threaten.

But to return: the climate changes all the time, in different and unpredictable (certainly unpredicted) ways, and indeed often in different ways in different parts of the world. It always has done and no doubt it always will. The issue is whether that is a cause for alarm — and not just moderate alarm. According to the alarmists it is the greatest threat facing humankind today: far worse than any of the manifold evils we see around the globe which stem from what Pope called "man's inhumanity to man".

Climate change alarmism is a belief system, and needs to be evaluated as such.

There is, indeed, an accepted scientific theory which I do not dispute and which, the alarmists claim, justifies their belief and their alarm.

This is the so-called greenhouse effect: the fact that the earth's atmosphere contains so-called greenhouse gases (of which water vapour is overwhelmingly the most important, but carbon dioxide is another) which, in effect, trap some of the heat we receive from the sun and prevent it from bouncing back into space.

Without the greenhouse effect, the planet would be so cold as to be uninhabitable. But, by burning fossil fuels — coal, oil and gas — we are increasing the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and thus, other things being equal, increasing the earth's temperature.

But four questions immediately arise, all of which need to be addressed, coolly and rationally.

First, other things being equal, how much can increased atmospheric CO2 be expected to warm the earth? (This is known to scientists as climate sensitivity, or sometimes the climate sensitivity of carbon.) This is highly uncertain, not least because clouds have an important role to play, and the science of clouds is little understood. Until recently, the majority opinion among climate scientists had been that clouds greatly amplify the basic greenhouse effect. But there is a significant minority, including some of the most eminent climate scientists, who strongly dispute this.

Second, are other things equal, anyway? We know that, over millennia, the temperature of the earth has varied a great deal, long before the arrival of fossil fuels. To take only the past thousand years, a thousand years ago we were benefiting from the so-called medieval warm period, when temperatures are thought to have been at least as warm, if not warmer, than they are today. And during the Baroque era we were grimly suffering the cold of the so-called Little Ice Age, when the Thames frequently froze in winter and substantial ice fairs were held on it, which have been immortalised in contemporary prints.

Third, even if the earth were to warm, so far from this necessarily being a cause for alarm, does it matter? It would, after all, be surprising if the planet were on a happy but precarious temperature knife-edge, from which any change in either direction would be a major disaster. In fact, we know that, if there were to be any future warming (and for the reasons already given, "if" is correct) there would be both benefits and what the economists call disbenefits. I shall discuss later where the balance might lie.

And fourth, to the extent that there is a problem, what should we, calmly and rationally, do about it?

It is probably best to take the first two questions together.

According to the temperature records kept by the UK Met Office (and other series are much the same), over the past 150 years (that is, from the very beginnings of the Industrial Revolution), mean global temperature has increased by a little under a degree centigrade — according to the Met Office, 0.8ºC. This has happened in fits and starts, which are not fully understood. To begin with, to the extent that anyone noticed it, it was seen as a welcome and natural recovery from the rigours of the Little Ice Age. But the great bulk of it — 0.5ºC out of the 0.8ºC — occurred during the last quarter of the 20th century. It was then that global warming alarmism was born.

But since then, and wholly contrary to the expectations of the overwhelming majority of climate scientists, who confidently predicted that global warming would not merely continue but would accelerate, given the unprecedented growth of global carbon emissions, as China's coal-based economy has grown by leaps and bounds, there has been no further warming at all. To be precise, the latest report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a deeply flawed body whose non-scientist chairman is a committed climate alarmist, reckons that global warming has latterly been occurring at the rate of — wait for it — 0.05ºC per decade, plus or minus 0.1ºC. Their figures, not mine. In other words, the observed rate of warming is less than the margin of error.

And that margin of error, it must be said, is implausibly small. After all, calculating mean global temperature from the records of weather stations and maritime observations around the world, of varying quality, is a pretty heroic task in the first place. Not to mention the fact that there is a considerable difference between daytime and night-time temperatures. In any event, to produce a figure accurate to hundredths of a degree is palpably absurd.

The lessons of the unpredicted 15-year global temperature standstill (or hiatus as the IPCC calls it) are clear. In the first place, the so-called Integrated Assessment Models which the climate science community uses to predict the global temperature increase which is likely to occur over the next 100 years are almost certainly mistaken, in that climate sensitivity is almost certainly significantly less than they once thought, and thus the models exaggerate the likely temperature rise over the next hundred years.

But the need for a rethink does not stop there. As the noted climate scientist Professor Judith Curry, chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, recently observed in written testimony to the US Senate:

Anthropogenic global warming is a proposed theory whose basic mechnism is well understood, but whose magnitude is highly uncertain. The growing evidence that climate models are too sensitive to CO2 has implications for the attribution of late-20th-century warming and projections of 21st-century climate. If the recent warming hiatus is caused by natural variability, then this raises the question as to what extent the warming between 1975 and 2000 can also be explained by natural climate variability.

It is true that most members of the climate science establishment are reluctant to accept this, and argue that the missing heat has for the time being gone into the (very cold) ocean depths, only to be released later. This is, however, highly conjectural. Assessing the mean global temperature of the ocean depths is — unsurprisingly — even less reliable, by a long way, than the surface temperature record. And in any event most scientists reckon that it will take thousands of years for this "missing heat" to be released to the surface.

In short, the CO2 effect on the earth's temperature is probably less than was previously thought, and other things — that is, natural variability and possibly solar influences — are relatively more significant than has hitherto been assumed.
But let us assume that the global temperature hiatus does, at some point, come to an end, and a modest degree of global warming resumes. How much does this matter?

The answer must be that it matters very little. There are plainly both advantages and disadvantages from a warmer temperature, and these will vary from region to region depending to some extent on the existing temperature in the region concerned. And it is helpful in this context that the climate scientists believe that the global warming they expect from increased atmospheric CO2 will be greatest in the cold polar regions and least in the warm tropical regions, and will be greater at night than in the day, and greater in winter than in summer. Be that as it may, studies have clearly shown that, overall, the warming that the climate models are now predicting for most of this century (I referred to these models earlier, and will come back to them later) is likely to do more good than harm.

This is particularly true in the case of human health, a rather important dimension of wellbeing. It is no accident that, if you look at migration for climate reasons in the world today, it is far easier to find those who choose to move to a warmer climate than those who choose to move to a colder climate. And it is well documented that excessive cold causes far more illnesses and deaths around the world than excessive warmth does.

The latest (2013-14) IPCC Assessment Report does its best to ramp up the alarmism in a desperate, and almost certainly vain, attempt to scare the governments of the world into concluding a binding global decarbonisation agreement at the crunch UN climate conference due to be held in Paris next year. Yet a careful reading of the report shows that the evidence to justify the alarm simply isn't there.

On health, for example, it lamely concludes that "the world-wide burden of human ill-health from climate change is relatively small compared with effects of other stressors and is not well quantified" — adding that so far as tropical diseases (which preoccupied earlier IPCC reports) are concerned, "Concerns over large increases in vector-borne diseases such as dengue as a result of rising temperatures are unfounded and unsupported by the scientific literature."

Moreover, the IPCC conspicuously fails to take proper account of what is almost certainly far and away the most important dimension of the health issue. And that is, quite simply, that the biggest health risk in the world today, particularly of course in the developing world, is poverty.

We use fossil fuels not because we love them, or because we are in thrall to the multinational oil companies, but simply because they provide far and away the cheapest source of large-scale energy, and will continue to do so, no doubt not forever, but for the foreseeable future. And using the cheapest source of energy means achieving the fastest practicable rate of economic development, and thus the fastest elimination of poverty in the developing world. In a nutshell, and on balance, global warming is good for you.

The IPCC does its best to contest this by claiming that warming is bad for food production: in its own words, "negative impacts of climate change on crop yields have been more common than positive impacts". But not only does it fail to acknowledge that the main negative impact on crop yields has been not climate change but climate change policy, as farmland has been turned over to the production of biofuels rather than food crops. It also understates the net benefit for food production from the warming it expects to occur, in two distinct ways.

In the first place, it explicitly takes no account of any future developments in bio-engineering and genetic modification, which are likely to enable farmers to plant drought-resistant crops designed to thrive at warmer temperatures, should these occur. Second, and equally important, it takes no account whatever of another effect of increased atmospheric carbon dioxide, and one which is more certain and better documented than the warming effect. Namely, the stimulus to plant growth: what the scientists call the "fertilisation effect". Over the past 30 years or so, the earth has become observably greener, and this has even affected most parts of the Sahel. It is generally agreed that a major contributor to this has been the growth in atmospheric CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels.

This should not come as a surprise. Biologists have always known that carbon dioxide is essential for plant growth, and of course without plants there would be very little animal life, and no human life, on the planet. The climate alarmists have done their best to obscure this basic scientific truth by insisting on describing carbon emissions as "pollution" — which, whether or not they warm the planet they most certainly are not — and deliberately mislabelling forms of energy which produce these emissions as "dirty".

In the same way, they like to label renewable energy as "clean", seemingly oblivious to the fact that by far the largest source of renewable energy in the world today is biomass, and in particular the burning of dung, which is the major source of indoor pollution in the developing world and is reckoned to cause at least a million deaths a year.

Compared with the likely benefits to both human health and food production from CO2-induced global warming, the possible disadvantages from, say, a slight increase in either the frequency or the intensity of extreme weather events is very small beer. It is, in fact, still uncertain whether there is any impact on extreme weather events as a result of warming (increased carbon emissions, which have certainly occurred, cannot on their own affect the weather: it is only warming which might). The unusual persistence of heavy rainfall over the UK during February, which led to considerable flooding, is believed by the scientists to have been caused by the wayward behaviour of the jetstream; and there is no credible scientific theory that links this behaviour to the fact that the earth's surface is some 0.8ºC warmer than it was 150 years ago.

That has not stopped some climate scientists, such as the publicity-hungry chief scientist at the UK Met Office, Dame Julia Slingo, from telling the media that it is likely that "climate change" (by which they mean warming) is partly to blame. Usually, however, the climate scientists take refuge in the weasel words that any topical extreme weather event, whatever the extreme weather may be, whether the recent UK rainfall or last year's typhoon in the Philippines, "is consistent with what we would expect from climate change".

So what? It is also consistent with the theory that it is a punishment from the Almighty for our sins (the prevailing explanation of extreme weather events throughout most of human history). But that does not mean that there is the slightest truth in it. Indeed, it would be helpful if the climate scientists would tell us what weather pattern would not be consistent with the current climate orthodoxy. If they cannot do so, then we would do well to recall the important insight of Karl Popper — that any theory that is incapable of falsification cannot be considered scientific.

Moreover, as the latest IPCC report makes clear, careful studies have shown that, while extreme weather events such as floods, droughts and tropical storms, have always occurred, overall there has been no increase in either their frequency or their severity. That may, of course, be because there has so far been very little global warming indeed: the fear is the possible consequences of what is projected to lie ahead of us. And even in climate science, cause has to precede effect: it is impossible for future warming to affect events in the present.

Of course, it doesn't seem like that. Partly because of sensitivity to the climate change doctrine, and partly simply as a result of the explosion of global communications, we are far more aware of extreme weather events around the world than we used to be. And it is perfectly true that many more people are affected by extreme weather events than ever before. But that is simply because of the great growth in world population: there are many more people around. It is also true, as the insurance companies like to point out, that there has been a great increase in the damage caused by extreme weather events. But that is simply because, just as there are more people around, so there is more property around to be damaged.

The fact remains that the most careful empirical studies show that, so far at least, there has been no perceptible increase, globally, in either the number or the severity of extreme weather events. And, as a happy coda, these studies also show that, thanks to scientific and material progress, there has been a massive reduction, worldwide, in deaths from extreme weather events.

It is relevant to note at this point that there is an important distinction between science and scientists. I have the greatest respect for science, whose development has transformed the world for the better. But scientists are no better and no worse than anyone else. There are good scientists and there are bad scientists. Many scientists are outstanding people working long hours to produce important results. They must be frustrated that political activists then turn those results into propaganda. Yet they dare not speak out for fear of losing their funding.

Indeed, a case can be made for the proposition that today's climate science establishment is betraying science itself. During the period justly known as the Enlightenment, science achieved the breakthroughs which have so benefited us all by rejecting the claims of authority — which at that time largely meant the authority of the church — and adopting an overarching scepticism, insisting that our understanding of the external world must be based exclusively on observation and empirical investigation. Yet today all too many climate scientists, in particular in the UK, come close to claiming that they need to be respected as the voice of authority on the subject — the very claim that was once the province of the church.

If I have been critical of the latest IPCC report, let me add that it is many respects a significant improvement on its predecessors. It explicitly concedes, for example, that "climate change may be beneficial for moderate climate change" — and moderate climate change is all that it expects to see for the rest of this century — and that "Estimates for the aggregate economic impact of climate change are relatively small . . . For most economic sectors, the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers." So much for the unique existential planetary threat.

What it conspicuously fails to do, however, is to make any assessment of the unequivocally adverse economic impact of the decarbonisation policy it continues to advocate, which (if implemented) would be far worse than any adverse impact from global warming.

Even here, however, the new report concedes for the first time that the most important response to the threat of climate change must be how mankind has always responded, throughout the ages: namely, intelligent adaptation. Indeed, the "impacts" section of the latest report is explicitly entitled "Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability". In previous IPCC reports adaptation was scarcely referred to at all, and then only dismissively.

This leads directly to the last of my four questions. To the extent that there is a problem, what should we, calmly and rationally, do about it?

The answer is — or should be — a no-brainer: adapt. I mentioned earlier that a resumption of global warming, should it occur (and of course it might) would bring both benefits and costs. The sensible course is clearly to pocket the benefits while seeking to minimise the costs. And that is all the more so since the costs, should they arise, will not be anything new: they will merely be the slight exacerbation of problems that have always afflicted mankind.

Like the weather, for example — whether we are talking about rainfall and flooding (or droughts for that matter) in the UK, or hurricanes and typhoons in the tropics. The weather has always varied, and it always will. There have always been extremes, and there always will be. That being so, it clearly makes sense to make ourselves more resilient and robust in the face of extreme weather events, whether or not there is a slight increase in the frequency or severity of such events.

This means measures such as flood defences and sea defences, together with water storage to minimise the adverse effects of drought, in the UK; and better storm warnings, the building of levees, and more robust construction in the tropics.

The same is equally true in the field of health. Tropical diseases — and malaria is frequently (if inaccurately) mentioned in this context — are a mortal menace in much of the developing world. It clearly makes sense to seek to eradicate these diseases — and in the case of malaria (which used to be endemic in Europe) we know perfectly well how to do it — whether or not warming might lead to an increase in the incidence of such diseases.

And the same applies to all the other possible adverse consequences of global warming. Moreover, this makes sense whatever the cause of any future warming, whether it is man-made or natural. Happily, too, as economies grow and technology develops, our ability to adapt successfully to any problems which warming may bring steadily increases.

Yet, astonishingly, this is not the course on which our leaders in the Western world generally, and the UK in particular, have embarked. They have decided that what we must do, at inordinate cost, is prevent the possibility (as they see it) of any further warming by abandoning the use of fossil fuels.

Even if this were attainable — a big "if", which I will discuss later — there is no way in which this could be remotely cost-effective. The cost to the world economy of moving from relatively cheap and reliable energy to much more expensive and much less reliable forms of energy-the so-called renewables, on which we had to rely before we were liberated by the fossil-fuel-driven Industrial Revolution — far exceeds any conceivable benefit.

It is true that the notorious Stern Review, widely promoted by a British prime minister with something of a messiah complex and an undoubted talent for PR, sought to demonstrate the reverse, and has become a bible for the economically illiterate.

But Stern's dodgy economics have been comprehensively demolished by the most distinguished economists on both sides of the Atlantic. So much so, in fact, that Lord Stern himself has been driven to complain that it is all the fault of the integrated assessment models, which — and I quote him — "come close to assuming directly that the impacts and costs will be modest, and close to excluding the possibility of catastrophic outcomes".

I suggested earlier that these elaborate models are scarcely worth the computer code they are written in, and certainly the divergence between their predictions and empirical observations has become ever wider. Nevertheless, it is a bit rich for Stern now to complain about them, when they remain the gospel of the climate science establishment in general and of the IPCC in particular.

But Stern is right in this sense: unless you assume that we may be heading for a CO2-induced planetary catastrophe, for which there is no scientific basis, a policy of decarbonisation cannot possibly make sense.

A similar, if slightly more sophisticated, case for current policies has been put forward by a distinctly better economist than Stern, Harvard's Professor Martin Weitzman, in what he likes to call his "dismal theorem". After demolishing Stern's cost-benefit analysis, he concludes that Stern is in fact right but for the wrong reasons. According to Weitzman, this is an area where cost-benefit analysis does not apply. Climate science is highly uncertain, and a catastrophic outcome which might even threaten the continuation of human life on this planet, cannot be entirely ruled out however unlikely it may be. It is therefore incumbent on us to do whatever we can, regardless of cost, to prevent this.

This is an extreme case of what is usually termed "the precautionary principle". I have often thought that the most important use of the precautionary principle is against the precautionary principle itself, since it can all too readily lead to absurd policy prescriptions. In this case, a moment's reflection would remind us that there are a number of possible catastrophes, many of them less unlikely than that caused by runaway warming, and all of them capable of occurring considerably sooner than the catastrophe feared by Weitzman; and there is no way we can afford the cost of unlimited spending to reduce the likelihood of all of them.

In particular, there is the risk that the earth may enter a new ice age. This was the fear expressed by the well-known astronomer Sir Fred Hoyle in his book Ice: The Ultimate Human Catastrophe, and there are several climate scientists today, particularly in Russia, concerned about this. It would be difficult, to say the least, to devote unlimited sums to both cooling and warming the planet at the same time.

At the end of the day, this comes down to judgment. Weitzman is clearly entitled to his; but I doubt if it is widely shared; and if the public were aware that it was on this slender basis that the entire case for current policies rested I would be surprised if they would have much support. Rightly so.

But there is another problem. Unlike intelligent adaptation to any warming that might occur, which in any case will mean different things in different regions of the world, and which requires no global agreement, decarbonisation can make no sense whatever in the absence of a global agreement. And there is no chance of any meaningful agreement being concluded. The very limited Kyoto accord of 1997 has come to an end; and although there is the declared intention of concluding a much more ambitious successor, with a UN-sponsored conference in Paris next year at which it is planned that this should happen, nothing of any significance is remotely likely.

And the reason is clear. For the developing world, the overriding priority is economic growth: improving the living standards of the people, which means among other things making full use of the cheapest available source of energy, fossil fuels.

The position of China, the largest of all the developing countries and the world's biggest (and fastest growing) emitter of carbon dioxide, is crucial. For very good reasons, there is no way that China is going to accept a binding limitation on its emissions. China has an overwhelmingly coal-based energy sector — indeed it has been building new coal-fired power stations at the rate of one a week — and although it is now rapidly developing its substantial indigenous shale gas resources (another fossil fuel), its renewable energy industry, both wind and solar, is essentially for export to the developed world.

It is true that China is planning to reduce its so-called "carbon intensity" quite substantially by 2020. But there is a world of difference between the sensible objective of using fossil fuels more efficiently, which is what this means, and the foolish policy of abandoning fossil fuels, which it has no intention of doing. China's total carbon emissions are projected to carry on rising — and rising substantially — as its economy grows.

This puts into perspective the UK's commitment, under the Climate Change Act, to near-total decarbonisation. The UK accounts for less than 2 per cent of global emissions: indeed, its total emissions are less than the annual increase in China's. Never mind, says Lord Deben, chairman of the government-appointed Climate Change Committee, we are in the business of setting an example to the world.

No doubt this sort of thing goes down well at meetings of the faithful, and enables him and them to feel good. But there is little point in setting an example, at great cost, if no one is going to follow it; and around the world governments are now gradually watering down or even abandoning their decarbonisation ambitions.  Indeed, it is even worse than that. Since the UK has abandoned the idea of having an energy policy in favour of having a decarbonisation policy, there is a growing risk that, before very long, our generating capacity will be inadequate to meet our energy needs. If so, we shall be setting an example all right: an example of what not to do.

So how is it that much of the Western world, and this country in particular, has succumbed to the self-harming collective madness that is climate change orthodoxy? It is difficult to escape the conclusion that climate change orthodoxy has in effect become a substitute religion, attended by all the intolerant zealotry that has so often marred religion in the past, and in some places still does so today.

Throughout the Western world, the two creeds that used to vie for popular support, Christianity and the atheistic belief system of Communism, are each clearly in decline. Yet people still feel the need both for the comfort and for the transcendent values that religion can provide. It is the quasi-religion of green alarmism and global salvationism, of which the climate change dogma is the prime example, which has filled the vacuum, with reasoned questioning of its mantras regarded as little short of sacrilege.

The parallel goes deeper. As I mentioned earlier, throughout the ages the weather has been an important part of the religious narrative. In primitive societies it was customary for extreme weather events to be explained as punishment from the gods for the sins of the people; and there is no shortage of this theme in the Bible, either — particularly, but not exclusively, in the Old Testament. The contemporary version of this is that, as a result of heedless industrialisation within a framework of materialistic capitalism, we have directly (albeit not deliberately) perverted the weather, and will duly receive our comeuppance.

There is another aspect, too, which may account for the appeal of this so-called explanation. Throughout the ages, something deep in man's psyche has made him receptive to apocalyptic warnings that the end of the world is nigh. And almost all of us, whether we like it or not, are imbued with feelings of guilt and a sense of sin. How much less uncomfortable it is, how much more convenient, to divert attention away from our individual sins and reasons to feel guilty, and to sublimate them in collective guilt and collective sin.

Why does this matter? It matters, and matters a great deal, on two quite separate grounds. The first is that it has gone a long way towards ushering in a new age of unreason. It is a cruel irony that, while it was science which, more than anything else, was able by its great achievements, to establish the age of reason, it is all too many climate scientists and their hangers-on who have become the high priests of a new age of unreason.

But what moves me most is that the policies invoked in its name are grossly immoral. We have, in the UK, devised the most blatant transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich — and I am slightly surprised that it is so strongly supported by those who consider themselves to be the tribunes of the people and politically on the Left. I refer to our system of heavily subsidising wealthy landlords to have wind farms on their land, so that the poor can be supplied with one of the most expensive forms of electricity known to man.

This is also, of course, inflicting increasing damage on the British economy, to no useful purpose whatever. More serious morally, because it is on a much larger scale, is the perverse intergenerational transfer of wealth implied by orthodox climate change policies. It is not much in dispute that future generations — those yet unborn — will be far wealthier than those — ourselves, our children, and for many of us our grandchildren — alive today. This is the inevitable consequence of the projected economic growth which, on a "business as usual" basis, drives the increased carbon emissions which in turn determine the projected future warming. It is surely perverse that those alive today should be told that they must impoverish themselves, by abandoning what is far and away the cheapest source of energy, in order to ensure that those yet to be born, who will in any case be signally better off than they are, will be better off still, by escaping the disadvantages of any warming that might occur.

However, the greatest immorality of all concerns the masses in the developing world. It is excellent that, in so many parts of the developing world — the so-called emerging economies — economic growth is now firmly on the march, as they belatedly put in place the sort of economic policy framework that brought prosperity to the Western world. Inevitably, they already account for, and will increasingly account for, the lion's share of global carbon emissions.

But, despite their success, there are still hundreds of millions of people in these countries in dire poverty, suffering all the ills that this brings, in terms of malnutrition, preventable disease, and premature death. Asking these countries to abandon the cheapest available sources of energy is, at the very least, asking them to delay the conquest of malnutrition, to perpetuate the incidence of preventable disease, and to increase the numbers of premature deaths.

Global warming orthodoxy is not merely irrational. It is wicked.'

This essay is based on the text of a speech given to the Institute for Sustainable Energy and the Environment at the University of Bath.  It was published in Standpoint Magazine: http://www.standpointmag.co.uk/node/5541/full, where the full text can be found.  I will reproduce it here in full if I manage to get permission from Standpoint to do so.  In the meantime, I urge readers to follow the link and read the entire essay. [permission obtained].  It is a superb summary of where we are today, and a powerful, moving indictment of those who have done so much to get us to this sorry pass.  Their 'belief system' is a rotten one, and falls to pieces upon any sustained examination.  It is at the heart of the promotion of climate alarm in our schools.

PS Hat-tip Bishop Hill. A video is available of the Bath Speech: 

http://uniofbath.hosted.panopto.com/Panopto/Pages/Viewer.aspx?id=61f86168-3837-43a8-ae3d-37da91e0ea24

PPS I have had a chance to listen to the video, and in particular to the question and answer session of the final 30 minutes or so.  Here are my comments on that, as posted on Bishop Hill (on the post linked to in the PS hat-tip):

Not so much a video as a soundtrack since there is nothing to see other than Lord Lawson from a high angle in poor light. Note, if you will, how feeble the questions and points from the audience are. We are told the catastrophe is upon us or imminent, the science is settled, and the 'vast majority' of scientists are on board with it all. Yet where are the powerful arguments? Where is the convincing data? Where are the tough questions for those who declare their doubts about it all?

It is absolutely astonishing how far and how deeply the climate alarm spins have penetrated into society, and how inadequate our establishment's defences, such as a freely elected Parliament and a Royal Society which once upon a time held to Nullius in Verba, have been to it. The supine 'academy', of which I suspect this audience at Bath is not an outlier, has been particularly pathetic on this matter. We are in a bit of mess as a result. Perhaps something better will emerge from it.