«Despite an apparent increase in climate hysteria among global-warming theorists outraged by President Donald Trump, global sea levels have actually been declining since before Trump took office, according to data compiled by NASA and posted on its website. The official data, compiled from satellite observations, shows that levels dropped from a variation of about 87.5 millimeters to under 85 millimeters over the last two years.
What the development means over the long term, if anything, remains unclear, though it would tend to contradict the dire predictions of an accelerating rise in sea levels. But the establishment press, which shrieks about every real and imagined occurrence that might potentially lend credence to the increasingly discredited man-made global-warming theory, has said literally nothing so far about the recent drop in sea levels
The news, first reported on the Ice Age Now website, drew massive worldwide attention only after being posted on the influential Drudge Report. Since then, it has been widely reported by the alternative media, once again bypassing the self-styled “gatekeepers” in the increasingly discredited establishment press that has long been pushing the man-made warming theory.
“NASA satellite sea level observations for the past 24 years show that – on average – sea levels have been rising 3.4 millimeters per year,” noted Robert Felix, who operates the Ice Age Now site and believes an ice age is on the way. “That’s 0.134 inches, about the thickness of a dime and a nickel stacked together, per year.”
“But when you focus in on 2016 and 2017, you get a different picture,” he continued. “Sea levels fell in 2016, and with all of this winter’s record-breaking snowfall, I wouldn’t be surprised if they decline again this year.” Using NASA's own chart and zooming in on the area covering January of 2016 through March of 2017, the decline in sea levels is clearly visible.
Other analysts suggested the development debunked yet again the climate hysteria pushed by self-interested warming theorists. “These data, of course, clearly contradict the false narrative of rapid, never-ending rising ocean levels that flood continents and drown cities — a key element of the climate change boogeyman fiction that’s used to scare gullible youth into making Al Gore rich,” wrote Mike Adams, chief of the enormously popular Natural News.
It is not the first time in recent years that the sea level has fallen, even based on NASA's own data. Between 2010 and 2011, there was a significant decline, according to NASA's chart, although the tiny rise continued upward after that.
Last year, the well-known Real Science blog highlighted NOAA data that also ran counter to the official narrative. According to the agency's sea-level data from New Jersey and Manhattan, sea levels along the East Coast of the United States have been steadily falling for at least six years. “Sea level rise rates on the Atlantic seaboard peaked around 1950,” explained the author, who goes by the name Steven Goddard, pointing to NOAA's data. “There is no human footprint. None at all.”
Of course, U.S. government data — especially on anything related to “climate change” in recent years — is notoriously unreliable. And in fact, both NOAA and NASA have come under fire repeatedly for altering temperature data in a manner that tends to make the past appear colder and the present appear warmer. Both have also come under fire for hyping their phony data in outlandish and misleading press releases discredited by their own data.
But occasionally, even NASA publishes studies and data debunking the climate hysteria and the phony claims of climate gurus. For instance, in late 2015, NASA published a study thoroughly debunking bogus United Nations claims about allegedly melting ice in Antarctica allegedly causing sea-level rise. In the real world, the ice was growing at a massive rate and causing a net loss to sea levels, completely contradicting the UN's claims.
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In addition to pseudo-science and manipulated data pushed by rogue U.S. government agencies, the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has become notorious for publishing fake science and absurd predictions — especially in its “summaries” for “policymakers.” This has been true across a broad range of fields.
On sea level, for example, the manipulation and agenda-driven fraud was so absurd that even one the UN's own handpicked scientists resigned in disgust. Professor Nils-Axel Mörner, one of the world’s foremost experts on sea levels and the retired head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics Department at Stockholm University, who served as an expert reviewer for the IPCC's sea-level section, said the UN was publishing known errors — even after he made them aware.
While there are indeed fluctuations in sea levels around the world over time, the sea is “not rising,” said Mörner. Indeed, in around 50 years that he has been studying sea levels using a broad range of different tools and metrics, levels have not risen, he said. If there is any rise over the next 100 years, it would not be more than four inches, with an uncertainty level of four inches, he explained.
In 2010, he told The New American that by serving as an expert reviewer for the IPCC's sea-level section, he had the opportunity to understand the UN body's inner workings. And it is doomed to fail, he said. Speaking of the chapter on sea-level he was supposed to review, Mörner said it was of “very poor quality.” And the hysteria surrounding sea-level rises, like most of the IPCC scaremongering, “is not grounded in reality,” he added.
Mörner also explained that the UN panel chose its authors based on loyalty, not credentials. And despite warning the IPCC about errors, they mostly ignored his advice. But the anti-science attitude came back to haunt them eventually. The Climategate mega-scandal that exposed leading alarmists trying to deceive the public was “wonderful,” Mörner exclaimed, calling it an “iceberg of shame” and adding that there was still much to be discovered.
Now, the scientific community must begin to restore the credibility of science. “The first thing which has to come now is the restoration of scientific values,” he argued, explaining that the climate campaign had “autocratically” tried to impose beliefs on the public that were not based on science. Still, he expressed confidence that the truth would eventually win out.
In the September 4 issue of the print magazine, The New American will be publishing an in-depth investigation on sea levels and climate change as a cover story by Ed Hiserot and Rebecca Terrell. In the meantime, the man-made global-warming theory and the absurd predictions of its proponents will almost certainly continue to implode on the world stage».
Alex Newman («Despite Climate Alarmism. Global Sea Levels Fell Last Year», in The New American, 27 July 2017).
«“As near as I can tell, Climate-Gate is almost entirely a tempest in a teacup,” wrote Kevin Drum in a November 30 column for the left-wing magazine Mother Jones. “There’s nothing questionable there,” he insisted. The tempest-in-a-teacup/no-big-deal trope has been regularly invoked by the proponents of global-warming alarmism to dismiss the significance of what may be one of the biggest science scandals in history.
The “Climategate” to which Drum refers is, of course, the still-developing scandal involving the release of thousands of e-mails and documents from a British climate research center. The leaked documents expose some of the biggest scientific names in the global-warming debate to serious charges of fraud, unethical attacks on colleagues, censorship of opposing viewpoints, and possible criminal destruction of, and withholding of, evidence.
The timing of Climategate has been a major boon to skeptics of catastrophic climate change and a monster headache to alarmists, breaking onto the world scene only three weeks before the United Nations Climate Change Conference (COP15) convened on December 7 in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Michael Mann, James Hansen, Phil Jones, Michael Oppenheimer, Stephen Schneider, and Kevin Trenberth — some of the biggest names in global-warming alarmism — are unfavorably exposed in the documents that were posted on the Internet on November 20 by unknown hackers who penetrated the computer system of the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at Great Britain’s University of East Anglia. Phil Jones, the director of the CRU and a top guru in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the UN’s climate brain trust, comes off especially poorly in the e-mails. After initially balking at calls to resign or step down, the university announced on December 1 that Jones would be taking temporary leave while an independent inquiry is conducted into the matter.
Climatologist Patrick Michaels, who has long criticized the IPCC process, sees the e-mail scandal far differently than Kevin Drum, and chooses a much different metaphor to describe it. “This is not a smoking gun,” says Dr. Michaels, “this is a mushroom cloud.” On the face of it, it would seem difficult to dispute Professor Michaels’ assessment. The Climategate e-mails provide powerful confirmation of charges by many scientists over the years that the UN’s IPCC process is politically — not scientifically — driven and that claims of scientific “consensus” to justify radical policies are a gross corruption of science. In the past, scientists who questioned the Jones-Mann-IPCC “consensus” have been denounced as “deniers” — a vicious attempt to associate them with Nazi holocaust denial — or “shills” for the fossil-fuel industries … or both. Now, however, scientists who cannot be classified as skeptics — indeed, some are prominent names in the alarmist camp — are challenging the IPCC and the Climategate defendants to come clean and release the data on which they have been basing their dire predictions, but have been withholding from the public and their scientific peers.
“Tricks” and “Consensus”
The Mike referred to in this message is Michael Mann, professor of meteorology at Pennsylvania State University, whose influential “hockey stick” graph utilized statistical manipulation to produce a curve that would support claims of recent human activities causing the warmest period in the past millennia. The now thoroughly discredited “hockey stick,” which was a big component of Al Gore’s Nobel Prize-winning documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, attempted to wipe the Medieval Warm Period, one of the most solidly established periods of climate history, from the historical record.
During the Medieval Warm Period (about A.D. 800-1300), temperatures were higher than today; the Vikings colonized then-balmy Greenland and roamed the ice-free waters of the North Atlantic. If allowed to stand, this inconvenient truth would undercut the alarmists’ exaggerated claims that burning fossil fuels is causing the warmest temperatures in 1,000 years.
In trying to make the Medieval Warm Period disappear, the Jones/Mann team went too far, and other scientists responded with a robust “smack-down” of this attempt to falsify the historical record. However, before Mann was forced to retract some of his most egregious statistical falsifications, he and his allies had managed to vilify many reputable scientists and keep their sham going for several years. In 1998, astrophysicists Sallie Baliunas and Willie Soon of the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics challenged the Mann-Jones thesis, arguing in the journal Climate Research that the evidence supported the existence of the Medieval Warm Period. Drs. Soon and Baliunas were soon subjected to a smear campaign and six editors at Climate Research were forced to resign for allowing the Soon-Baliunas article to be published.
Now the Climategate e-mails are showing that the corruption of science in the name of “saving the planet” from the supposed scourge of climate change is far more extensive and egregious than the public or the scientific community realized.
In an e-mail of January 29, 2004 to Michael Mann, Phil Jones refers to the recent death of global-warming critic John L. Daly with this churlish comment: “In an odd way this is cheering news!” In the same e-mail, Jones then suggests to Mann that he has obtained legal advice that he does not have to comply with Freedom of Information (FOI) requests from other scientists to release data and codes underlying his research claims.
Some of the e-mails seem to confirm concerns that Jones, Mann, et al., have destroyed data that could expose their fraudulent methods. That appears to be the case in a May 29, 2008 e-mail message, in which Jones writes to Mann about deleting data for the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4):
Mike, Can you delete any e-mails you may have had with Keith re AR4? Keith will do likewise.... Can you also e-mail Gene and get him to do the same?... Will be getting Caspar to do likewise.
In another e-mail that has shocked and infuriated many in the scientific community, Jones reveals the lengths to which he is willing to go to sabotage fellow scientists in order to maintain the myth of AGW “consensus.” In a July 8, 2004 e-mail, Jones assures Mann that he (Jones) and Kevin Trenberth will censor opposing scientific views from the forthcoming IPCC report. Jones writes:
I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!
Similar e-mails paint a picture confirming the charges of critics that Jones, Mann, and other IPCC activists constitute a “climate mafia” or “climate cartel” that punishes dissenters and rewards those who toe the global-warming party line. The e-mails are shedding light on ugly episodes over the past decade or more in which the cartel trashed the reputations of, and slammed doors on, distinguished scientists who dared to dispute the politically ordained AGW orthodoxy. With this kind of control, claims of overwhelming consensus become a self-fulfilling prophecy; contrary opinions are effectively barred from publication in accepted “peer-reviewed” literature. Besides Drs. Soon and Baliunas, other eminent scientists who are trashed or referred to crudely in the CRU e-mails include Richard Lindzen; Hans Von Storch; Sonia Boehmer-Christianson; Patrick Michaels; Roger Pielke, Sr.; Robert Balling; Fred Singer; and Tim Ball.
Huge government grants, impressive computer models, and guaranteed headline stories from sympathetic activists in the media have transformed climate scientists into celebrities and power brokers. However, even with their super computer programs, political connections, and prestigious awards, they still haven’t learned how to predict the weather, let alone control it.
An amusing admission against interest is this comment in an October 12, 2009 Climategate e-mail from Dr. Kevin Trenberth. He is stunned that not only have temperatures not warmed as predicted, but the temperatures have actually hit historic lows in his area, contradicting the supposedly authoritative pronouncements of the climate cartel. Trenberth comments:
Well I have my own article on where the heck is global warming? We are asking that here in Boulder [Colorado] where we have broken records the past two days for the coldest days on record.
Trenberth then goes on to admit: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.”
Not only did Trenberth, Jones, Mann, et al., miss the current temperature downturn, but none of the IPCC’s highly praised computer models foresaw the global mean temperature decline of the past dec-ade. However, their inability to explain away this enormous fact, which Trenberth admits is “travesty,” has neither diminished the cartel’s certitude nor dampened its zeal for implementing a planetary climate regime.
“Ignore That Man
Behind the Curtain”
For years, the IPCC climate cartel has been using the “Wizard of Oz” defense every time some “Toto” pulls back the curtain to expose the IPCC’s secretive machinations and its sanctimonious claims of “transparency,” “openness,” and “overwhelming consensus.” Inquiring scientists and the general public alike are told not to pay attention to the mysterious process behind the curtain where the fantastic and frightening scenarios of impending doom are being created.
However, two Canadian “Totos” refused to stop tugging on the curtain, and, as a result, have successfully exposed some of the trickery of the IPCC “wizards.” Retired businessman and statistician Stephen McIntyre and economist Ross McKitrick have doggedly pursued the truth and have subjected the IPCC’s “climate science” to rigorous examination. Troubled by unexplained statistical anomalies in Mann’s infamous “hockey stick” graph, they contacted Mann to request copies of his data sets. Mann balked and also refused to divulge publicly the algorithm he had used to concoct his “hockey stick” graph. McIntyre and McKitrick published several articles challenging Mann’s work on a number of key points. Their path-breaking research sparked a congressional hearing validated by two independent academic panels, one of which was appointed by the National Academy of Sciences.
McIntyre and McKitrick have continued their independent investigations on their award-winning Internet website, ClimateAudit.org, which has won the respect of even many AGW proponents. However, it is clear that Mann, Jones, and the climate cartel regard the two dauntless sleuths as the enemy, and they are the subject of many Climategate e-mails, often referred to as “MM” or “the two MMs.”
In an incriminating CRU e-mail of February 2, 2005, Jones writes to Mann:
The two MMs have been after the CRU station data for years. If they ever hear there is a Freedom of Information Act now in the UK, I think I’ll delete the file rather than send to anyone.
Oops! The Dog Ate It
The climate cartel, it appears, has already carried through on the data deletion threat. Scientists at the University of East Anglia CRU have admitted throwing out much of the raw data on which their ominous predictions are based.
In a statement on its website, the CRU said: “We do not hold the original raw data but only the value-added (quality controlled and homogenised) data.” What happened to the original data? According to the CRU, it was discarded back in the 1980s. What this means is that the original CRU data cannot be checked or replicated, which means that the graphs, research, and predictions supposedly based on the missing data is worthless. The available “value-added” and “homogenised” data would also then be worthless, since there would be no way to verify or replicate it.
How many other data sets have likewise been “lost” or “accidentally deleted”? We may soon find out, as official investigations and FOIA lawsuits progress. In the meantime, we are simply supposed to trust the IPCC “experts” who say that we must “invest” trillions of dollars for mitigation and reparation of past carbon consumption, as well as for prevention of future warming.
IPCC vice-chairman Jean-Pascal van Ypersele tried to minimize the significance of the e-mail scandal as the Copenhagen conference opened by claiming that Climategate only pertains to one data set out of many that confirm the serious peril posed by anthropogenic global warming.
“It doesn’t change anything in the IPCC’s conclusions,” said van Ypersele, “it’s only one line of evidence out of dozens of lines of evidence.” This is the party line echoed by most of the AGW alarmists in government, media, and environmental activist circles. Along with this corollary: The skeptics (or “deniers,” “shills”) are exploiting the e-mail controversy simply to sabotage Copenhagen and distract the scientists and politicians from the important work they must conclude there.
“We mustn’t be distracted by the behind-the-times, anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics,” British Prime Minister Gordon Brown told the Guardian. “We know the science. We know what we must do. We must now act and … seal the deal.”
Brown’s Environmental Secretary, Ed Miliband, was even more scathing, describing skeptics as “dangerous and deceitful.” “The approach of the climate saboteurs is to misuse data and mislead people,” he charged. Miliband’s accusations are especially audacious, inasmuch as it is his alarmist camp, not the skeptics (or “climate realists,” as many prefer to call themselves), that has been caught red-handed misusing data. “The skeptics are playing politics with science in a dangerous and deceitful manner,” Miliband continued, then concluded with this warning: “There is no easy way out of tackling climate change despite what they would have us believe. The evidence is clear and the time we have to act is short. To abandon this process now would lead to misery and catastrophe for millions.”
According to van Ypersele, “We are spending a lot of useless time discussing this rather than spending time preparing information for the negotiators.”
Professor Judith Curry has provided van Ypersele, Miliband, Brown, the IPCC, and other alarmists with an easy solution to this problem: Stop hiding your data and stop engaging in the hostile “tribalism” displayed in the infamous e-mail attacks on fellow scientists. Dr. Curry is no “climate skeptic.” In fact, she is an AGW true believer, an IPCC expert reviewer, and chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Dr. Curry says:
Scientists claim that they would never get any research done if they had to continuously respond to skeptics. The counter to that argument is to make all of your data, metadata, and code openly available. Doing this will minimize the time spent responding to skeptics; try it! If anyone identifies an actual error in your data or methodology, acknowledge it and fix the problem. Doing this would keep molehills from growing into mountains that involve congressional hearings, lawyers, etc.
In other words, why not actually practice the transparency and openness that the UN and IPCC claim to favor? Don’t hold your CO2 while waiting for that to happen».
William F. Jasper («Climate "Teacup Tempest"», in The New American, 21 December 2009).
«A massive new batch of embarrassing e-mails and documents from prominent climate “scientists” associated with the “Climategate” furor of 2009 was released on November 22, just a week before the next big United Nations global-warming summit in Durban, South Africa.
The newly leaked data shows supposed top experts using conspiratorial language to discuss devious ways to advance “the cause” — global-warming alarmism. The e-mails also reveal discussions on how to marginalize skeptics and even illegally destroy evidence and hide data.
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A few scientists’ e-mails expressed skepticism and concern about the shadowy process, too. At least one expert complained that his protests were being ignored. Another said governments should be used to help drum up public fears. And one exchange shows scientists encouraging the use of the term “climate change” instead of “global warming” due to “public relations” problems.
According to analysts, the embarrassing new leaks will have widespread repercussions and could mark the end of climate alarmism altogether. Critics of man-made climate-change theories touted by the UN are already calling the emerging scandal “Climategate 2.”
The last trove of leaked Climategate e-mails from the University of East Anglia’s disgraced Climatic Research Unit (CRU) provoked a massive public outcry. Scientists were caught discussing, among other unscientific scheming, ways to “hide the decline” in global temperatures.
In the new cache of documents, one unsourced line mentions the scientists’ efforts to manipulate data to conceal cooling. "Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on hiding the decline," the anonymous author of the document stated, pointing out that the trillions of dollars being wasted on “climate change” could save children’s lives instead.
The first Climategate scandal grew so large that many analysts credited it with stalling the creation of more global-warming treaties at the UN COP 15 climate conference, the 15th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, two years ago in Copenhagen, Denmark. And the new batch could have a similarly chilling effect on the upcoming COP 17 summit.
One e-mail from disgraced CRU boss Professor Phil Jones, for example, discusses an illegal conspiracy to violate the U.K. Freedom of Information Act. “One way to cover yourself,” he noted, “would be to delete all emails at the end of the process. Hard to do, as not everybody will remember to do it.”
Another e-mail from Jones talks about filling the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with “people we know and trust.” A third discusses stuffing the IPCC with scientists “on the right side” of the debate.
Jones was also at the center of the first Climategate scandal and eventually became a laughingstock among climate experts who did not support his alarmist views. But in the newly leaked correspondence, it becomes clear that even supporters of “the cause” had reservations.
In one e-mail to Jones, U.K. Met Office climate scientist Peter Thorne blasts some of the methodology and presentations being used. “Observations do not show rising temperatures throughout the tropical troposphere unless you accept one single study and approach and discount a wealth of others,” he noted. “This is just downright dangerous. We need to communicate the uncertainty and be honest.”
A separate e-mail from Thorne to Jones complains that his concerns are not being taken seriously. “I also think the science is being manipulated to put a political spin on it, which for all our sakes might not be too clever in the long run,” Thorne explained, noting that if something did not change, he did not even want to be associated with a research paper.
One widely cited quote came from the correspondence of Professor Jonathan Overpeck, the director of the Institute for the Study of Planet Earth. “The trick may be to decide on the main message and use that to guid[e] what’s included and what is left out,” he noted in an e-mail discussing how to condense a body of material, suggesting the exclusion of "inconclusive information."
The University of East Anglia promptly released a statement saying the e-mails were apparently held back from the last leak “to cause maximum disruption to the imminent international climate talks” in Durban. "This appears to be a carefully-timed attempt to reignite controversy over the science behind climate change,” the statement read, claiming the “science” had already been “vindicated.”
Self-styled climate scientists whose e-mails were leaked immediately went on the offensive, too. Several told every newspaper that would listen that their correspondence was “taken out of context” and that there are no doubts about human-caused global-warming theories.
Disgraced chief of Penn State University’s Earth System Science Center and creator of the discredited “hockey stick” graph Michael Mann, for instance, told the U.K.'s Guardian that the latest leak was "truly pathetic." Ironically, those are the exact same words used by one of his fellow climate scientists in the leaked e-mails to describe his hallmark graph.
But his own words are damning, too, according to critics. In one e-mail he sent, which was released this week, Mann said, “The important thing is to make sure [skeptical scientists] are loosing [sic] the PR battle.” He also blasted other scientists for “not helping the cause.”
While Mann admitted the e-mails were his, he claimed — as usual — that they were taken out of context. "I hardly see anything that appears damning at all," he added in the interview with the Guardian, a publication that has become notorious for promoting unjustified climate hysteria.
The New American obtained the leaked documents from a Russian server where they were posted briefly before being taken down. A spokesman for the University of East Anglia said the institution had not been able to sift through all of the data but that it appeared genuine.
Establishment publications such as the Washington Post, however, were quick to defend the supposed scientists and their theories despite the new revelations. “Competent people can disagree about how big of a problem global warming is,” Jason Samenow claimed in a Post piece, suggesting that a discussion about whether global warming is a problem — let alone manmade or even real — is entirely off limits. “But the scientific community has largely moved beyond the scientific issues brought to light in the Climategate 1.0 emails and more emails on the same issues only serve as an unneeded distraction.”
But critics of the UN global-warming narrative did not see it that way at all. "It appears that Climategate 2.0 has arrived to drain what little life there was left in the man-made global warming movement,” noted Climate Depot publisher Marc Morano, a longtime critic of the global body’s theories. “The new emails further expose the upper echelon of the UN IPCC as being more interested in crafting a careful narrative than following the evidence. The release of thousands of more emails is quite simply another victory for science.”
Popular commentator James Delingpole with the Telegraph suggested that the climate-alarmism “game” might finally be over. “All your favorite Climategate characters are here, once again caught red-handed in a series of emails exaggerating the extent of Anthropogenic Global Warming, while privately admitting to one another that the evidence is nowhere near as a strong as they'd like it to be,” he noted. “In other words, what these emails confirm is that the great man-made global warming scare is not about science but about political activism.”
There are still more than 200,000 e-mails that have not been released by the individual or organization responsible for the first two leaks. Police are reportedly investigating. It remains unclear what may be contained in the unreleased e-mails or if they will eventually be leaked».
Alex Newman («Climategate 2: More E-mails Leaked Ahead of UN Summit», in The New American, 23 November 2011).
Climate Alarmists Have Been Wrong About Virtually Everything
Not surprisingly, champions of the Paris accord are warning that U.S. withdrawal will lead to global environmental devastation. Are they correct? In answering this question, it is worthwhile looking at past predictions climate doomsayers have made, and to compare their dire warnings with what has actually happened. This article was originally published in the Jan. 4, 2016 print issue of The New American magazine.
The 1975 Newsweek article entitled “The Cooling World,” which claimed Earth’s temperature had been plunging for decades due to humanity’s activities, opens as follows:
There are ominous signs that the Earth’s weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production — with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas — parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia — where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually.
The article quotes dire statistics from the National Academy of Sciences, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Center for Climatic and Environmental Assessment, Columbia University, and the University of Wisconsin at Madison to indicate how dire the global cooling was, and would be.
Experts suggested grandiose schemes to alleviate the problems, including “melting the arctic ice cap by covering it with black soot or diverting arctic rivers,” Newsweek reported. It added, “The longer the planners delay, the more difficult will they find it to cope with climatic change once the results become grim reality.” Sound familiar — except that the “climate change” alarmists were warning against global cooling?
For decades, climate alarmists have been warning that, without a United Nations-run global “climate” regime to control human activity, alleged man-made “climate change” will bring the wrath of “Mother Earth” down upon humanity.
They did it again from November 30 to December 11, 2015 at the Paris Summit on Climate Change, and warned, yet again, that it is the “last chance” to save humanity from itself. But climate alarmists have a long history of forecasting disaster — and of being wrong about everything.
In fact, stretching back decades, virtually every alarmist prediction that was testable has been proven embarrassingly wrong. What follows is just a tiny sampling of those discredited claims.
A new ice age and worldwide starvation: In the 1960s and ’70s, top mainstream media outlets, such as Newsweek above, hyped the imminent global-cooling apocalypse. Even as late as the early 1980s, prominent voices still warned of potential doomsday scenarios owing to man-made cooling, ranging from mass starvation caused by cooling-induced crop failures to another “Ice Age” that would kill most of mankind.
Among the top global-cooling theorists were Obama’s current “science czar” John Holdren and Paul Ehrlich, the author of Population Bomb, which predicted mass starvation worldwide. In the 1971 textbook Global Ecology, the duo warned that overpopulation and pollution would produce a new ice age, claiming that human activities are “said to be responsible for the present world cooling trend.” The pair fingered “jet exhausts” and “man-made changes in the reflectivity of the earth’s surface through urbanization, deforestation, and the enlargement of deserts” as potential triggers for his new ice age. They worried that the man-made cooling might produce an “outward slumping in the Antarctic ice cap” and “generate a tidal wave of proportions unprecedented in recorded history.”
Holdren predicted that a billion people would die in “carbon-dioxide induced famines” as part of a new “Ice Age” by the year 2020.
Ehrlich, a professor at Stanford University, similarly claimed in a 1971 speech at the British Institute for Biology, “By the year 2000 the United Kingdom will be simply a small group of impoverished islands, inhabited by some 70 million hungry people.” He added, “If I were a gambler, I would take even money that England will not exist in the year 2000 and give ten to one that the life of the average Briton would be of distinctly lower quality than it is today.”
To stave off the allegedly impending ecological disasters, the two alarmists demanded the implementation of “solutions.” In the book Ecoscience, the duo pushed a “planetary regime” to control resources, as well as forced abortions and sterilization to stop overpopulation, including drugging water and food supplies with sterilizing agents.
Countless other scientists have offered similar cooling warnings. Fortunately, the alarmists were dead wrong, and none of their “solutions” was implemented. Not only did “billions” of people not die from cooling-linked crop failures, but the globe appears to have warmed slightly since then, probably naturally, and agricultural productivity is higher than it ever has been. Now, though, the boogeyman is anthropogenic global warming, or AGW.
Global warming — temperature predictions: Perhaps nowhere has the stunning failure of climate predictions been better illustrated than in the “climate models” used by the UN. The UN climate bureaucracy, known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), produces periodic reports on “climate science” — often dubbed the “Bible” of climatology. In its latest iteration, the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5), the UN featured 73 computer models and their predictions. All of them “predicted” varying degrees of increased warming as atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide (CO2) increased.
The problem is that every single model was wrong — by a lot. Not only did temperatures not rise by as much as the models predicted, they have failed to rise at all since around 1996, according to data collected by five official temperature datasets. Based just on the laws of probability, a monkey rolling the dice would have done far better at predicting future temperatures than the UN’s models. That suggests deliberate fraud is likely at work.
Dr. John Christy, professor of atmospheric science and director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH), analyzed all 73 UN computer models. “I compared the models with observations in the key area — the tropics — where the climate models showed a real impact of greenhouse gases,” Christy told CNSNews. “I wanted to compare the real world temperatures with the models in a place where the impact would be very clear.”
Using datasets of temperatures from NASA, the U.K. Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research at the University of East Anglia, NOAA, satellites measuring atmospheric and deep oceanic temperatures, and a remote sensor system in California, he found, “All show a lack of warming over the past 17 years.” In other words, global warming has been on “pause” for almost two decades — a fact that has been acknowledged even by many of the most zealous UN climate alarmists. “All 73 models’ predictions were on average three to four times what occurred in the real world.”
No explanation for what happened to the warming — such as “the oceans ate my global warming” — has withstood scrutiny.
Almost laughably, in its latest report, the UN IPCC increased its alleged “confidence” in its theory, an action experts such as Christy could not rationalize. “I am baffled that the confidence increases when the performance of your models is conclusively failing,” he said. “I cannot understand that methodology.... It’s a very embarrassing result for the climate models used in the IPCC report.” “When 73 out of 73 [climate models] miss the point and predict temperatures that are significantly above the real world, they cannot be used as scientific tools, and definitely not for public policy decision-making,” he added.
Other warming predictions have also fallen flat. For instance, for almost two decades now, climate alarmists have been claiming that snow would soon become a thing of the past.
The end of snow: The IPCC has also hyped snowless winters. In its 2001 report, it claimed “milder winter temperatures will decrease heavy snowstorms.” Again, though, the climate refused to cooperate. The latest data from Rutgers’ Global Snow Lab showed an all-time new record high in autumn snow cover across the northern hemisphere in 2014, when more than 22 million square kilometers were covered.
And according to data from the National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center cited by meteorologist Mike Mogil, “U.S. snow cover on the morning of Dec. 1, 2015 is the highest on record for this day of the year.” In all, 38.7 percent of the United States was covered in snow, surpassing the previous record — 36.5 percent — set in 2006. Worldwide, similar trends have been observed. Global Snow Lab data also shows Eurasian autumn snow cover has grown by 50 percent since records began in 1979.
After their predictions were proven wrong, alarmists claimed global warming was actually to blame for the record cold and snow across America and beyond. Seriously. Among the “experts” making that argument was former cooling zealot Holdren, Obama’s science czar: “A growing body of evidence suggests that the kind of extreme cold being experienced by much of the United States as we speak is a pattern we can expect to see with increasing frequency, as global warming continues.”
When asked for the “growing body of evidence” behind his assertions, Holdren’s office refused to provide it, claiming the ramblings were just his “opinion” and therefore not subject to transparency and accuracy laws. Still, Holdren’s claim directly contradicts the IPCC, which in 2001 predicted “warmer winters and fewer cold spells.”
The melting ice caps: Another area where the warmists’ predictions have proven incorrect concerns the amount of ice at the Earth’s poles. They predicted a complete melting of the Arctic ice cap in summers that should have already happened, and even claimed that Antarctic ice was melting rapidly.
As far as the Antarctic is concerned, in 2007, the UN IPCC claimed the ice sheets of Antarctica “are very likely shrinking,” with Antarctica “contributing 0.2 ± 0.35 mm yr - 1 to sea level rise over the period 1993 to 2003.” The UN also claimed there was “evidence” of “accelerated loss through 2005.” In 2013, the UN doubled down on its false claim, claiming even greater sea-level rises attributed to the melting in Antarctica: “The contribution of … Antarctic ice sheets has increased since the early 1990s, partly from increased outflow induced by warming of the immediately adjacent ocean.” It also claimed Antarctica’s “contribution to sea level rise likely increased from 0.08 [ - 0.10 to 0.27] mm yr - 1 for 1992 - 2001 to .40 [0.20 to 0.61] mm yr - 1 for 2002 - 2011.” The reality was exactly the opposite.
In a statement released in October, NASA dropped the equivalent of a nuclear bomb on the UN’s climate-alarmism machine, noting that ice across Antarctica has been growing rapidly for decades.
NASA said only that its new study on Antarctic ice “challenges” the conclusions of the IPCC. In fact, the UN could not have been more wrong. Rather than melting ice in the southern hemisphere contributing to sea-level rise, as claimed by the UN, ice in Antarctica is expanding, and the growing ice is responsible for reducing sea levels by about 0.23 millimeters annually. According to the NASA study, published in the Journal of Glaciology, satellite data shows the Antarctic ice sheet featured a net gain of 112 billion tons of ice a year from 1992 to 2001 — more than a trillion tons of ice in less than a decade. Between 2003 and 2008, Antarctica gained some 82 billion tons of ice annually.
The UN’s inaccurate Antarctic claims were illustrated most comically, perhaps, when a ship full of alarmists seeking to study “global warming” was trapped in record Antarctic sea ice in the summer of 2013 and had to be rescued by ships burning massive amounts of fossil fuels.
In the northern hemisphere, alarmists have fared no better. In 2007, 2008, and 2009, Al Gore, a man who has made a fortune pushing warmist ideology, publicly warned that the North Pole would be “ice-free” in the summer by around 2013 due to AGW. “The North Polar ice cap is falling off a cliff,” Gore said in 2007. “It could be completely gone in summer in as little as seven years. Seven years from now.” Speaking to an audience in Germany six years ago, Gore alleged that “the entire North Polarized [sic] cap will disappear in five years.” “Five years,” Gore emphasized, is “the period of time during which it is now expected to disappear.”
Contrary to Gore’s predictions, satellite data showed that Arctic ice volume in summer of 2013 had actually expanded more than 50 percent over 2012 levels. In fact, during October 2013, sea-ice levels grew at the fastest pace since records began in 1979. In 2014, the Arctic ice cap, apparently oblivious to Gore’s hot air, continued its phenomenal rebound, leaving alarmists struggling for explanations.
Data from the taxpayer-funded National Snow and Ice Data Center’s “Multisensor Analyzed Sea Ice Extent” (MASIE) also show Arctic ice steadily growing over the last decade, with a few minor fluctuations in the trend. Despite alarmist claims, polar bear populations are thriving there, too.
Gore, though, was hardly alone. Citing “climate experts,” the tax-funded BBC also ran an article on December 12, 2007, under the headline “Arctic summers ice-free ‘by 2013.’” That piece, which was still online as of December 2015, highlighted alleged “modeling studies” that supposedly “indicate northern polar waters could be ice-free in summers within just 5-6 years.”
Some of the “experts” even claimed it could happen before then, citing calculations performed by “super computers” that the BBC noted have “become a standard part of climate science in recent years.”
Increased storms, drought, and sea-level rise: The ice sheets have not cooperated with warmists, and neither have other weather-related phenomena, such as mass migrations owing to sea-level rise.
On June 30, 1989, the Associated Press ran an article headlined: “UN Official Predicts Disaster, Says Greenhouse Effect Could Wipe Some Nations Off Map.” In the piece, the director of the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP) New York office was quoted as claiming that “entire nations could be wiped off the face of the earth by rising sea levels if global warming is not reversed by the year 2000.” He also predicted “coastal flooding and crop failures” that “would create an exodus of ‘eco-refugees,’ threatening political chaos.” Of course, 2000 came and went, and none of those things actually happened. But that didn’t stop the warnings.
In 2005, the UNEP warned that imminent sea-level rises, increased hurricanes, and desertification caused by AGW would lead to massive population disruptions. In a handy map, the organization highlighted areas that were supposed to be producing the most “climate refugees.” Especially at risk were regions such as the Caribbean and low-lying Pacific islands, along with coastal areas. The 2005 UNEP predictions claimed that, by 2010, some 50 million “climate refugees” would be fleeing those areas. However, not only did the areas in question fail to produce a single “climate refugee,” by 2010, population levels for those regions were still soaring. In many cases, the areas that were supposed to be producing waves of “climate refugees” and becoming uninhabitable turned out to be some of the fastest-growing places on Earth.
Even the low-lying Pacific islands scare appears to have flopped. Supposedly on the “front lines” of AGW-caused sea-level rise, the Pacific atoll island nations don’t face imminent submersion and have experienced the opposite of what was predicted. Consider a paper published in March of 2015 in the journal Geology. According to the study, the Funafuti Atoll has experienced among “the highest rates of sea-level rise” in the world over the past six decades. Yet, rather than sinking under the waves, the islands are growing. “No islands have been lost, the majority have enlarged, and there has been a 7.3% increase in net island area over the past century,” the paper says.
Then there are the claims about drought. Some UN alarmists have even predicted that Americans would become “climate refugees,” using imagery that may be familiar to those who suffered through the infamous (and natural) “Dust Bowl” drought of the 1930s. Prominent Princeton professor and lead UN IPCC author Michael Oppenheimer, for instance, made some dramatic predictions in 1990. By 1995, he said, the “greenhouse effect” would be “desolating the heartlands of North America and Eurasia with horrific drought, causing crop failures and food riots.” By 1996, he added, the Platte River of Nebraska “would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers.” The situation would get so bad that “Mexican police will round up illegal American migrants surging into Mexico seeking work as field hands.”
When confronted on his predictions, Oppenheimer, who also served as Gore’s advisor, refused to apologize. “On the whole I would stand by these predictions — not predictions, sorry, scenarios — as having at least in a general way actually come true,” he claimed. “There’s been extensive drought, devastating drought, in significant parts of the world. The fraction of the world that’s in drought has increased over that period.”
Unfortunately for Oppenheimer, even his fellow alarmists debunked that claim in a 2012 study for Nature, pointing out that there has been “little change in global drought over the past 60 years.”
Countless other claims of AGW doom affecting humans have also been debunked. Wildfires produced by AGW, for instance, were supposed to be raging around the world. Yet, as Forbes magazine pointed out recently, the number of wildfires has plummeted 15 percent since 1950, and according the National Academy of Sciences, that trend is likely to continue for decades. On hurricanes and tornadoes, which alarmists assured were going to get more extreme and more frequent, it probably would have been hard for “experts” to be more wrong. “When the 2014 hurricane season starts it will have been 3,142 days since the last Category 3+ storm made landfall in the U.S., shattering the record for the longest stretch between U.S. intense hurricanes since 1900,” noted professor of environmental studies Roger Pielke, Jr. at the University of Colorado. On January 8, 2015, meanwhile, the Weather Channel reported: “In the last three years, there have never been fewer tornadoes in the United States since record-keeping began in 1950.”
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This article only features a tiny sampling of the outlandishly inaccurate predictions made by climate alarmists over the decades. In fact, it is difficult to find any falsifiable alarmist predictions that have come to pass. Generally speaking, the opposite of what was predicted has been observed. In short, there is absolutely no reason to believe today’s alarmist claims of AGW, and even if a handful were to eventually prove correct, destroying the economy under the guise of saving the climate would make adapting to such changes infinitely more difficult. (in The New American, 02 June 2017).
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