Climate alarmist claims are at odds with reality

Many blame the public’s confusion over global warming on a widespread ignorance of science. A scientific grounding wouldn’t hurt but it also wouldn’t help much — few laymen, no matter how well informed, could be expected to follow the arcane climate change calculations that specialized scientists wield.

The much better explanation for the public’s confusion lies in a widespread ignorance of history, not least by scientists. Any child can understand that the Romans conquered the world when temperatures were warmer than today, that the Dutch invented the ice skates during the Little Ice Age five hundred years ago, and that melting glaciers off Newfoundland a century ago produced the iceberg that sunk the Titanic. Each of these well documented periods shreds speculations from climate alarmists, such as their assertion that the Arctic is only now warming, or that temperatures had been relatively stable over the past one or two thousand years, and only in the last century climbed dramatically.

Now that global warming is completely unravelling, I want to elaborate on a point I made a few blogposts back about the role of humanities graduates in this great debate.

On the face of it, their record isn't good. Some of the most influential promulgators of climate nonsense have been arts graduates – among them Bryony Worthington (the FoE activist turned peer responsible for the Climate Change Act), the BBC's Roger Harrabin and a fair few of the Guardian's 2,800-strong Environment Department. I think future historians – looking back on this period of mass hysteria in which so many people were persuaded by and so much expensive, damaging policy was based on the largest confection of lies in junk science history – could put together a reasonably persuasive thesis that it was mainly the fault of scientist-manque arts graduates too easily impressed by men in white lab coats.

This was supposed to be a column about “Gasland 2,” the sequel to the anti-fracking documentary by activist Josh Fox, which premiered Sunday afternoon at the Tribeca Film Festival. Instead, it’s about my exclusion, along with maybe 20 farmers from upstate New York and Pennsylvania, from the screening despite having tickets for a theater with lots of empty seats.

Our mistake was to believe the Tribeca Film Festival’s claims to want diversity of opinion and people who are passionate about film.

As a journalist who made a documentary looking at the factual deficiencies in the first “Gasland,” I put some inconvenient questions to Josh Fox as he was speaking to the media on the red carpet.

Strange. An Australian paper claiming unprecedented warming of our part of the world is quickly exposed as having made a howler that causes it to be withdrawn.

Yet slabs of it seem now to have been included in the IPCC’s upcoming review of global warming.

Too convenient to exclude?

UPDATE

The Gillard Government claimed it would rake in more than $9 billion a year from carbon trading from 2015 because Europe’s price would be a healthy $29 a tonne. The latest estimate?

This report positively concludes that an alleged near unanimous scientific consensus on anthropogenic global warming (AGW), that “the science is settled”, is overstated. The report finds a robust, critical scientific discourse in climate related research, yet it highlights that a “consensus-building” approach to science might represent a politicised and unscientific belief in science – a belief in tension with the ethos of “normal science”. The report calls for a continuing questioning, critical, and undogmatic public debate over man-made global warming, and a clearer separation between science and policy. --Consensus and Controversy, SINTEF April 2013

The Northern Hemisphere is experiencing unusually cold weather. Snow cover last December was the greatest since satellite monitoring began in 1966. The United Kingdom had the coldest March weather in 50 years, and there were more than a thousand record low temperatures in the United States. The Irish meteorological office reported that March “temperatures were the lowest on record nearly everywhere.” Spring snowfall in Europe was also high. In Moscow, the snow depth was the highest in 134 years of observation. In Kiev, authorities had to bring in military vehicles to clear snow from the streets.

Earth Day is here again, but few people seem interested any more in global warming. It's plausible to inquire whether people realize we've got a duty to protect the environment. Actually, "protecting the environment" is not necessarily the same topic as "global warming." Confusion about the two needs to be cleared up.

The earliest written indication that mankind is responsible for taking care of the earth is probably in the Bible, in Genesis 1 (v. 26-28) where God gives mankind dominion over everything else. Thus began the notion of stewardship, that we are responsible for properly using all things on earth.

For thousands of years the prevailing attitude was that the earth was huge and unlimited, so if you messed things up in one place you'd just move on.  Certainly the settlement of the American west displayed that mentality. But later in the 19th century people saw the damage and became conscious of the need to preserve some of nature's beauty, and National Parks became established.

LABOR'S global warming fever has already claimed the careers of two prime ministers.

Kevin Rudd claimed global warming was "the great moral challenge of our generation", but lost public support when he didn't dare back his hyperbole with action.

Julia Gillard imposed a carbon tax, but is now finished - reviled as a liar because she'd promised not to.

Now Labor's warmist folly will blow a massive hole in its Budget, thanks to the collapse last week of the European carbon trading system.

Not everything in the Tory party is rotten and irredeemable. There was good old Owen Paterson in the papers yesterday with his squirrel traps. There's Gove, sticking it to the eco-loons by removing global warming junk science teaching from the curriculum. And then there's this utterly magnificent performance by Peter Lilley in a climate change debate at Westminster Hall last week, up against two of his more bubonic colleagues Tim "Trougher" Yeo and Greg "so utterly crap he doesn't even merit a nickname" Barker. Lilley was participating in his new role as a member of the Climate Change Committee, which he was able to infiltrate by means of a secret ballot. I recommend you read the full Hansard transcript. It is, as they say, *popcorn*.

Just as the word “liberal” has given way to the less-tarnished “progressive,” it’s hard to find “global warming” in environmental groups’ materials celebrating April 22 as Earth Day.

The operative phrase is “climate change,” and it’s a reality if you’re in Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, where the overheated Earth last week deposited three feet of new snow. Talk about a sudden change in climate just when Coloradans were getting their flippers out and putting the snowboards in storage.

Like the global-warming crowd’s movement toward ever more labored explanations for why the weather isn’t behaving according to Al Gore’s scary computer-model scenarios, Earth Day keeps evolving. It began in 1970 as a well-meaning conservation effort, and even inspired some needed laws to clean up the air and rivers.