2013-09-17

My good friend Andrew sent me this story from The Australian.

Excerpt:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s latest assessment reportedly admits its computer drastically overestimated rising temperatures, and over the past 60 years the world has in fact been warming at half the rate claimed in the previous IPCC report in 2007.

More importantly, according to reports in British and US media, the draft report appears to suggest global temperatures were less sensitive to rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide than was previously thought.

The 2007 assessment report said the planet was warming at a rate of 0.2C every decade, but according to Britain’s The Daily Mail the draft update report says the true figure since 1951 has been 0.12C.

[...]Professor Judith Curry, head of climate science at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, told The Daily Mail the leaked summary showed “the science is clearly not settled, and is in a state of flux”.

[...]According to The Daily Mail, the draft report recognised the global warming “pause”, with average temperatures not showing any statistically significant increase since 1997.

Scientists admitted large parts of the world had been as warm as they were now for decades at a time between 950 and 1250, centuries before the Industrial Revolution.

And, The Daily Mail said, a forecast in the 2007 report that hurricanes would become more intense had been dropped.

Looks like the Australians chose well when they chose Tony Abbott to repeal their carbon tax.

So it looks like the IPCC global warming simulations were misrepresented to push a socialist agenda.  Shame on us for our scientific illiteracy in this country. But we can thank the naturalists in the schools for that, I suppose. They don’t like debates about scientific theories. This is what we get from hearing one side of scientific controversies all the time, I guess.

Andrew also sent me this UK Telegraph article that shows how insulated from science global warming alarmism really is in Europe.

Excerpt:

Regardless of whether or not scientists are wrong on global warming, the European Union is pursuing the correct energy policies even if they lead to higher prices, Europe’s climate commissioner has said.

 Connie Hedegaard’s comments come as the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is expected to admit that previous scientific predictions for global warming and the effects of carbon emissions have been proved to be inaccurate.

In an interview with the Telegraph, Europe’s most senior climate change official argued that the current policies are the correct ones because a growing world population will put pressure on energy supplies regardless of the rate of global warming.

“I personally have a very pragmatic view.

“Say that 30 years from now, science came back and said, ‘wow, we were mistaken then now we have some new information so we think it is something else’. In a world with nine billion people, even 10 billion at the middle of this century, where literally billions of global citizens will still have to get out of poverty and enter the consuming middle classes, don’t you think that anyway it makes a lot of sense to get more energy and resource efficient,” she said.

“Let’s say that science, some decades from now, said ‘we were wrong, it was not about climate’, would it not in any case have been good to do many of things you have to do in order to combat climate change?.”

The Danish commissioner also rejected public complaints over increases in electricity prices to subsidise renewable energies, such as wind farms, as unrealistic because, she said, increased competition over diminishing energy resources such as oil and gas will lead to higher bills.

“I believe that in a world with still more people, wanting still more growth for good reasons, the demand for energy, raw materials and resources will increase and so, over time so, over time, will the prices,” she said.

“I think we have to realise that in the world of the 21st century for us to have the cheapest possible energy is not the answer.”

Mrs Hedegaard, and the European Commission, have not changed their position that the science that is currently used to justify EU climate change policy is “over 90 per cent” certain that global warming exists and that it is manmade.

This story is just like the Matthew Shepard story that was misrepresented by the media to push a gay rights agenda. The sad thing is that both of these factions of the secular left got what they wanted, and the truth is only becoming known more widely now when laws and policies have already changed.

Maybe we should remember this lesson for the next time there is a “crisis” that requires us to lurch to the left.

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