DELEGATES at the 18
th annual UN climate gabfest at the
dismal, echoing Doha conference center – one of the least exotic
locations chosen for these rebarbatively repetitive exercises in
pointlessness – have an Oops! problem.
No, not the sand-flies. Not the questionable food. Not the
near-record low attendance. The Oops! problem is this. For the past 16
of the 18-year series of annual hot-air sessions about hot air, the
world’s hot air has not gotten hotter. There has been no global warming.
At all. Zilch. Nada. Zip. Bupkis.
The equations of classical physics do not require the arrow of time
to flow only forward. However, observation indicates this is what always
happens. So tomorrow’s predicted warming that has not happened today
cannot have caused yesterday’s superstorms, now, can it?
That means They can’t even get away with claiming that tropical storm
Sandy and other recent extreme-weather happenings were All Our Fault.
After more than a decade and a half without any global warming at all,
one does not need to be a climate scientist to know that global warming
cannot have been to blame.
Or, rather, one needs not to be a climate scientist. The wearisomely
elaborate choreography of these yearly galah sessions has followed its
usual course this time, with a spate of suspiciously-timed reports in
the once-mainstream media solemnly recording that “Scientists Say” their
predictions of doom are worse than ever. But the reports are no longer
front-page news. The people have tuned out.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPeCaC), the grim, supranational bureaucracy that makes up turgid, multi-thousand-page climate
assessments every five years, has not even been invited to Doha.
Oversight or calculated insult? It’s your call.
IPeCaC is about to churn out yet another futile tome. And how will
its upcoming Fifth Assessment Report deal with the absence of global
warming since a year after the Second Assessment report? Simple. The
global-warming profiteers’ bible won’t mention it.
There will be absolutely nothing about the embarrassing 16-year
global-warming stasis in the thousands of pages of the new report.
Zilch. Nada. Zip. Bupkis.
Instead, the report will hilariously suggest that up to 1.4 Cº of the
0.6 Cº global warming observed in the past 60 years was manmade.
No, that is not a typesetting error. The new official meme will be
that if it had not been for all those naughty emissions of carbon
dioxide and other greenhouse gases the world would have gotten up to 0.8
Cº cooler since the 1950s. Yeah, right.
If you will believe
that, as the Duke of Wellington used to say, you will believe anything.
The smarter minds at the conference (all two of us) are beginning to
ask what it was that the much-trumpeted “consensus” got wrong. The
answer is that two-thirds of the warming predicted by the models is
uneducated guesswork. The computer models assume that any warming causes
further warming, by various “temperature feedbacks”.
Trouble is, not one of the supposed feedbacks can be established
reliably either by measurement or by theory. A growing body of
scientists think feedbacks may even be net-negative, countervailing
against the tiny direct warming from greenhouse gases rather than
arbitrarily multiplying it by three to spin up a scare out of not a lot.
IPeCaC’s official prediction in its First Assessment Report in 1990
was that the world would warm at a rate equivalent to 0.3 Cº/decade, or
more than 0.6 Cº by now.
But the real-world, measured outturn was 0.14 Cº/decade, and just 0.3
Cº in the quarter of a century since 1990: less than half of what the
“consensus” had over-predicted.
In 2008, the world’s “consensus” climate modelers wrote a paper
saying ten years without global warming was to be expected (though their
billion-dollar brains had somehow failed to predict it). They added
that 15 years or more without global warming would establish a
discrepancy between real-world observation and their X-boxes’
predictions. You will find their paper in NOAA’s
State of the Climate Report for 2008.
By the modelers’ own criterion, then, HAL has failed its most basic
test – trying to predict how much global warming will happen.
Yet Ms. Christina Figurehead, chief executive of the UN Framework
Convention on Climate Change, says “centralization” of global governing
power (in her hands, natch) is the solution. Solution to what?
And what solution? Even if the world were to warm by 2.2 Cº this
century (for IPeCaC will implicitly cut its central estimate from 2.8 Cº
in the previous Assessment Report six years ago), it would be at least
ten times cheaper and more cost-effective to adapt to warming’s
consequences the day after tomorrow than to try to prevent it today.
It is the do-nothing option that is scientifically sound and
economically right. And nothing is precisely what 17 previous annual
climate yatteramas have done. Zilch. Nada. Zip. Bupkis.
This year’s 18
th yadayadathon will be no different.
Perhaps it will be the last. In future, Ms. Figurehead, practice what
you preach, cut out the carbon footprint from all those travel miles, go
virtual, and hold your climate chatternooga chit-chats on FaceTwit.
