The IPCC’s latest global warming/climate change report came out today. It pretty much restates what it said before.
Today the German and international media, politicians and activists are all in a celebratory mood – the climate catastrophe is back after all. It’s real and approaching faster than ever. The UN just certified it! Climate activists are in a state of euphoria again – they’re out dancing in the streets – there hasn’t been such a feeling since 2007.
The message is one of high confidence in their assessments. Ross McKitrick writes:
September 27, 2013 at 5:32 am
SPM in a nutshell: Since we started in 1990 we were right about the Arctic, wrong about the Antarctic, wrong about the tropical troposphere, wrong about the surface, wrong about hurricanes, wrong about the Himalayas, wrong about sensitivity, clueless on clouds and useless on regional trends. And on that basis we’re 95% confident we’re right.
Just like with smoking causing lung cancer.
…the Associated Press asked scientists who specialize in climate, physics, epidemiology, public health, statistics and risk just what in science is more certain than human-caused climate change, what is about the same, and what is less.
They said gravity is a good example of something more certain than climate change. Climate change “is not as sure as if you drop a stone it will hit the Earth,” Princeton University climate scientist Michael Oppenheimer said. “It’s not certain, but it’s close.”
Arizona State University physicist Lawrence Krauss said the 95 percent quoted for climate change is equivalent to the current certainty among physicists that the universe is 13.8 billion years old.
The president of the prestigious National Academy of Sciences, Ralph Cicerone, and more than a dozen other scientists contacted by the AP said the 95 percent certainty regarding climate change is most similar to the confidence scientists have in the decades’ worth of evidence that cigarettes are deadly.
“What is understood does not violate any mechanism that we understand about cancer,” while “statistics confirm what we know about cancer,” said Cicerone, an atmospheric scientist. Add to that a “very high consensus” among scientists about the harm of tobacco, and it sounds similar to the case for climate change, he said.
It all seems to depend how you present the data. Here’s one from the alarmists showing how well their models match the GISS historical data, after being carefully tweaked:
And here’s another one from sceptic Ross McKitrick showing how current global temperatures have fallen below projections that weren’t shown in the graph above.
Add the two graphs together, and you’ve more or less got the complete picture. The tweaked models do very well with the historical record up to 1998, but then start going wrong.
Anyway, since I no longer believe that smoking causes lung cancer, the suggestion that climate scientists are as certain about AGW as epidemiologists are about smoking and cancer has me thinking that neither of them have really got a clue about anything.
But if they just keep repeating endlessly that smoking causes lung cancer, and that human carbon dioxide emissions are warming the planet, eventually they will become generally accepted facts. In fact, after 60 years of repetition, the former has become an unquestionable fact of life for most people – which is why it was cited as an example of something that was pretty certain.
But the global warming message has only had about 25 years of repetition. But with the mass media on side, and most of the governments around the world too, after another 25 years of repetition everyone will believe in climate change.
And that’s probably what’s going to happen. They’re just going to carry on repeating the same message, over and over again, regardless of Climategate, or seventeen years without any warming, or anything else. The warming is there, y’see, it’s just hidden deep in the ocean.
…
Anyway, here’s Gene Vincent from 1956. The lead guitarist, Cliff Gallup, was about 10 years ahead of his time:
Frank Davis 
What is becoming more and more obvious is that none of this would matter if it were not for the fact that these ideas are costing us all a lot on money. The ideas themselves are just ideas. The problem has been the take-up of the ideas by Cameron et al as sacred text. There is the problem.
If politicians took advice from people other than Holy Zealots, we might get some sense. By that I mean that the presumption ought to be that there is NO global warming, and that the Zealots must prove that there is.
Global warming stopped over a decade ago. Nature has gone into reverse. I am sure that you are aware that Nature does not do ‘pause’ – it consists of accelerate and decelerate. Nature does not do straight lines.Rotation and acceleration and deceleration is what nature does.
Bejasus! How dumb can politicians be? The above facts ought to be imprinted into their minds when they stand for election – by force if necessary.
To rule the world lesson one
Create a fear!
Repeat it!
Legislate it!
Arrest the non-believer…………. that means us
Further, there is a lot to be said for the idea that no one should be allowed to stand for Parliament unless they have a grounding in science. Only science, and the scientific method, can rid government of witchcraft.
Interestingly on that point, I read a couple of years ago that hardly any MPs have a science background. I seem to remember that many of them were lawyers.
Id think we should simply toss the lot in the Thames and if they drown they weren’t witches and if bobble to the top we hang em!
“Further, there is a lot to be said for the idea that no one should be allowed to stand for Parliament unless they have a grounding in science.” I’m not sure that the last seven words are needed, J.
Further, there is a lot to be said for the idea that no one should be allowed to stand for Parliament! Quite right
Im just gonna go burn a few dozen tires……………….That should help their lie a tad Id guess!
Frank this is spot on to the junk IPCC report just put out and it tags right along with all the JUNK SCIENCE being tossed around for political legislation………….It seems they have surrendered the debate to us and shut it down while still maintaining their Bullshit claims……………The comments rule the day and they cant defend their junk science so they are shutting down comments or choking off certain people who do it regularly via blocking facebook connection,Twitter or what have you…………. GANNET has blocked me completely and 2 others I know of via FACEBOOK RECOGNITION and IP blockers to comments sections to all their online resources!
Why We’re Shutting Off Our Comments
Starting today, PopularScience.com will no longer accept comments on new articles. Here’s why.
A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics. Everything, from evolution to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again. Scientific certainty is just another thing for two people to “debate” on television. And because comments sections tend to be a grotesque reflection of the media culture surrounding them, the cynical work of undermining bedrock scientific doctrine is now being done beneath our own stories, within a website devoted to championing science.
http://www.popsci.com/science/article/2013-09/why-were-shutting-our-comments
This Story Stinks
An estimated 60 percent of the Americans seeking information about specific scientific matters say the Internet is their primary source of information — ranking it higher than any other news source.
The NAZIS don’t like competition to their propaganda
to the origins of climate change, is mistakenly up for grabs again
A politically motivated, decades-long war on expertise has eroded the popular consensus on a wide variety of scientifically validated topics.
That says it all, Harley. Scientifically validated? Christ, they’ve got some gall!
Comments can be bad for science. That’s why, here at PopularScience.com, we’re shutting them off.
Why are comments bad for science?
There are plenty of other ways to talk back to us, and to each other: through Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, livechats, email, and more.
Why would I wish to read an article at ‘PopularScience.com’ and comment on it on Twitter, Facebook, Google+, Pinterest, livechats, email, and more?
We also plan to open the comments section on select articles that lend themselves to vigorous and intelligent discussion. We hope you’ll chime in with your brightest thoughts. Don’t do it for us. Do it for science.
Everything in science lends itself to discussion.
My view: A scientific site that controls reader’s comments can safely be scrapped.
You see? – here I am, doing my best (being a non-scientist) to keep an open mind on a difficult subject, doing my best to follow, and then they go and do that comparison with smoking – and immediately they lose all credibility with me.
What really annoys me about these IPCC people is the do not answer abjections. They act as though there were no objections. We see exactly the same with tobacco control.
There has been no warming for over a decade and so the projections have proved to be false. Therefore there is something wrong wit the argument. It is not a matter of ‘wrong model’ – it is a matter of the facts. The word ‘pause’ is not acceptable since there is no scientific justification for ‘pause’. If there had been, ‘pause’ would have been built into the model. Nor is the oceans good enough. That too would have been built in.
Back to the drawing board, IPCC.
The IPCC report was the lead story on both the BBC feed and all of the majors I watched here. Both began by stressing how controversial (as in two-sided) the science behind climate change is and then proceeded to present only one side.
ABC News had Michael Oppenheimer pleading the affirmative case. He’s an annoying know-it-all that is for sure. He reminds me of Paul Ehrlich in mannerisms and cause-froth. He went with the deep ocean heat transfer defense for the lack of warming for the past 16 years with the reservation that we can’t be sure right now but we’ll know in the next few years. Evidently he knows the timeline of the eventual proof in advance. That’s quite a handy talent if you’re in the scientific prediction business.
As I watched, I reminisced about Ehrlich and his famous Earth Day speech which predicted that “[i]n ten years all important animal life in the sea will be extinct. Large areas of coastline will have to be evacuated because of the stench of dead fish.” In a 1971 speech, he predicted that: “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people … If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000.”
Ehrlich went 30 years out and lived to eat his false- prescient words with a dollop of ignominious gravy. Oppenheimer is going out 30+ years with his false prophesies. From the looks of him (65 years old?), unless he lives an extraordinarily long time, he’ll conveniently miss his meal of humble pie.
If ABC (or the BBC for that matter) really wanted to present both sides of the debate perhaps they could dig up some old archived Ehrlich footage. As things stand I feel like I’m living in Red China with only the government news channel(s) available. It’s no wonder the dinosaur network news stations are dying on the vine.