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The biggest problem with trying to reason with the sort of loonies who glue themselves to roads and throw soup at priceless artworks is precisely that they are beyond reason. They are in fact religious zealots, as impervious to evidence and logic as a swivel-eyed beardy-weirdy wearing a sandwich-board and clanging his little bell for the End of the World.
If you’re still game enough to try and reason with these spittle-flecked dogmatists, the other thing you’ll quickly realise is that they know with absolute certainty what just ain’t so.
They know, for instance, that the world is ‘boiling’. They just know that the forests are disappearing, sea levels are surging and that global temperatures are headed to levels that will make the surface of Venus seem like Invercargill on a cold night in August.
Needless to say, none of this is remotely true.
The Global Warming Policy Foundation has just published The state of the climate 2023 by Ole Humlum. The interesting thing about this report is that it is a compilation of measurements, not the output of computer models. The real world, in other words.
Here are a few take-aways:
a) The measured global average temperature change over the last 40 years is about 0.18 degrees Celsius per decade. This does not sound like a scary climate emergency to me. Humlum notes that a proportion of the temperature increase is reported to be due to ‘administrative changes’! Life can easily adapt to a change of 0.18 degrees C per decade.
b) Humlum warns against overstating short-term warming or cooling and notes that the past does not change but the temperature record is continually changed, that the record differs and is not of equal scientific quality.
A particular issue with long-term climate records is that they’re not just apples and oranges: they’re the whole fruit basket, constantly rearranged to suit the changing biases of the greengrocers.
Another pertinent fact is that in past periods of climate change, such as the ‘Ice Ages’, climate in the Northern and Southern Hemispheres was often markedly different. Where, for instance, much of the Northern Hemisphere experienced severe glaciation, the Southern escaped the worst of the ice sheets.
Today, Humlum argues, is not much different.
c) Global warming since 1980 has predominantly been a Northern Hemisphere phenomenon with step changes from 1994 to 1999, influenced by the Mount Pinatubo volcanic eruption of 1992–1993 producing cooling and the 1997 El Nino event producing warming, and the 2015–16 El Nino warming. Such step changes cannot be explained by a gradual increase in atmospheric CO2.
Ocean cycles in the Pacific and Atlantic oceans are strongly linked with much of the effects (droughts, rainfall, etc) the climate alarmists attribute to increases in atmospheric CO2.
And those oceans are not about to drown large swathes of the terrestrial globe.
h) Tide gauge measurements of one to two mm per year do not indicate any acceleration or deceleration of sea level change. The tide gauges give an average sea level rise lower than the satellite sea level rise (three to four mm per year). Humlum states that there is no explanation for this difference in data sets. There has been no accelerated sea level rise as atmospheric CO2 has risen.
i) Possible sea level changes must be considered in the light of land level rises and falls measured at two mm per year. This has a profound effect on coastal planning but is ignored by local authorities. According to the IPCC, modelled sea level at Oslo should rise by 17.5 cm by 2100 but the measurements since 1914 show that it has dropped by 27 cm.
But the ice caps! Nope: Sea ice extent is stable or possibly even rising, and, both Northern and Southern Hemisphere snow cover is more or less stable since the onset of satellite observations.
Global precipitation, tropical storms and hurricanes: none of it is doing what the alarmists in government and the media are telling you.
Another recently released report, the Wyoming Climate Report, also argues that:
Current CO2 levels are at or near historically low concentrations.
Doctoring of historical temperature records have artificially amplified current warming. Temperature has increased by 0.7 degrees C since 1895, heatwaves peaked in the 1930s and have been in slight decline since then and night temperature has increased thereby lengthening the growing season.
Rainfall, although variable year-to-year, has not been decreasing, droughts have not increased and severe weather and natural disasters are declining.
Agricultural production and vegetation have increased.
Even NASA cannot hide the fact that the globe is greening. The data is clear that climate-related deaths are plummeting. This is because, while there is a slight increase in deaths from warming, they are more than offset by a decline in the far-more-numerous deaths from cold.
As scientist Ian Plimer concludes:
You have a far greater chance of dying before your time from socialist stupidity than climate change.
Spectator Australia
Plimar also notes that: we are the first humans in history to be afraid of a warm climate.
