Climate Change Alarmists In A Choke Hold

I would love to see a 'check mate' moment but given how much is at stake (idiots are still 'by this date' predictions that will laughably come and go), this is an unlikely scenario. I'll just have to settle for it disappearing into the night just like the last great climate scare in the 1970s promised natural catastrophe.

From Various Scribblings:

"However, given that the IPCC claims to be a scientific rather than political body, it still ultimately has everything staked on the science. The single most important issue in all of the scientific debate is the expected response of the climate to a doubling of atmospheric CO₂. This is known as the climate sensitivity and if it is high then we are in trouble and if it is low there is no good reason to panic about CO₂. (There are actually two types of climate sensitivity, one for short term effects and one for the longer term, but they are closely related and for reasons of simplicity I’ll treat them as one here.) In AR5 the sensitivity was estimated to lie between 1.5°C and 4.5°C; it is generally agreed that if it is less than 2°C we are pretty much OK and if it is more than 3°C there will be serious trouble.

Curiously, AR5 declined to give a best estimate between these two numbers, despite previous IPCC reports having done so. The SFP however latched onto the fact that the range was closer to catastrophe than safety and advised accordingly.

There the story would normally rest, but in the last few days Nic Lewis (an independent researcher) and Professor Judith Curry (a climatologist) have published a paper that puts the IPCC in one hell of a judo hold. They have taken the IPCC’s own data and methods and calculated what that crucial ‘best estimate’ should have been. To cut to the chase, it comes in at 1.33°C, with a 95% chance it is less than 2.5°C.

Oops. It appears that those of us who think that man-made CO₂ will cause some warming, but almost certainly not anything remotely dangerous, were probably right all along."

"...The most important thing about the paper for me isn’t that it advances our scientific understanding of the climate (for it doesn’t), but that it provides a carrot for both scientists and politicians. I’ve said before that political attitudes to global warming will only change once there is a large enough body of scientific evidence out there for politicians to justify really ditching all the ‘green crap’. And this paper is a milestone in creating just such a body of evidence. It’s a big, fat, juicy carrot, dangling in full view of anyone who needs a reason to moderate their stance on the issue. "

"...That there is movement afoot in the scientific community has recently been shown by an opinion piece published in the Wall Street Journal entitled ‘Climate Science is not Settled.’ It is written by Steven Koonin, a theoretical physicist who is chairing the American Physical Society’s review of their public policy statement on global warming. Given that the previous APS statement on the topic claimed that “The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring,” the mere title of the new article shows just how much the ground is shifting."

Yes. It's 'settled'. President Obama has said so. Just the guy you want in your corner. By now, it should be pretty obvious to any person with their heads adjusted properly Obama would sell his mother to the Koch brothers if it meant saving his own butt. A guy who can't even be bothered to sit in on intelligence briefings (remember kids: Spies collect, intelligence officers interpret, the President decides. You can't decide if you have no information because you don't show up. And when that happens, you blame it all on faulty intelligence and point the finger elsewhere) because he probably thinks in his head he has all things figured out.

If you are the company you keep, then you are the people you support on issues. And as time goes on, even the great global warming scare will leave many people truly hot and red faced. Now that's human warming I can understand!

*note. I was not paid by big oil to publish this post.