Al Gore en weersextremen

Vandaag is de grote dag van de klimaatcampagne van Al Gore met videobijeenkomsten in alle uithoeken van de wereld. Deze hebben het karakter van erediensten van de broeikaskerk.

De introductievideo toont 'cataclismic climate events' en suggereert dat deze samenhangen met de (door de mens veroorzaakte) opwarming van de aarde (die al tien jaar geleden is gestopt). De video's zijn overigens een beetje knullig – van het houtje-touwtje-type. Dit keer waarschijnlijk dus geen Oscar.

De belangen van 'Big Coal' en 'Big Oil' zijn er natuurlijk weer de schuld van dat Al wordt gedwarsboomd in het uitdragen van 'De Waarheid' van de klimaatcrisis (die maar niet wil komen). Over de belangen van de financiële sector in de handel in CO2-emissierechten en die van de duurzaamheidsindustrie (subsidies enz. ten gunste van zonne- en windenergie), waar Al Gore flink in heeft geïnvesteerd, wordt gezwegen. De 'deniers' zijn de vijand.

Er zijn inmiddels vele studies over weersextremen verschenen. Deze bevestigen niet de opvatting dat deze zouden toenemen en/of dat deze zouden samenhangen met de geringe opwarming van de aarde die van 1975 – 1998 heeft plaatsgevonden.

Tom Harris schrijft daarover het volgende:

Unfortunately for Al Gore, but fortunately for the rest of us, much of what we will hear in his 24 Hours of Reality extravaganza starting Wednesday evening is pure fantasy. Gore is completely wrong when he tells us that the science of climate change is settled. If his “Climate Reality Project” actually did promote climate realism, he would tell us that the science is in a period of negative discovery — the more we learn, the more we realize we do not understand about this, arguably the most complex science ever tackled. Rather than “remove the doubt,” as Gore says, we need to recognize the doubt.

Many of the ideas expressed by climate campaigners such as Gore and United Nations Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon are the consequence of a belief in what Canadian professors Chris Essex (University of Western Ontario) and Ross McKitrick (University of Guelph) call the “Doctrine of Certainty,” “a collection of now familiar assertions about climate that are to be accepted without question” (Taken by Storm, 2007). ...

Consider extreme weather, the main topic of 24 Hours of Reality. Gore promotes the concept that greenhouse gas-induced global warming is leading to increasingly severe weather. But this defies logic. If the world warms due to increasing greenhouse gas emissions, temperatures at high latitudes are forecast to rise most, reducing the difference between arctic and tropical temperatures. Since this differential drives weather, we should see weaker midlatitude cyclones in a warmer world, and so less extremes in weather, not more.

It is also a mistake to blame human activities for current weather extremes. The NIPCC [Non-Governmental International Panel on Climate Change] concluded that “the data reveal there have not been any significant warming-induced increases in extreme weather events.” The report’s authors showed that this was the case whether the phenomenon being studied was precipitation, floods, drought, storms, hurricanes, fire, or other weather-related events.

For example, the NIPCC includes a study published this year in Geophysical Research Letters about the causes of the 2010 Russian heat wave. Researchers deduced that it “was due to internal atmospheric dynamical processes” and “it is unlikely that the warming attributable to increasing greenhouse gas concentrations contributed significantly to the magnitude of the heat wave.”

Besides increasing extreme weather that people always notice, it is also important to take note of decreasing trends. For example, we are now near a 30 year low in worldwide “accumulated cyclone energy” (hurricanes in the North Atlantic), something that was not supposed to be happening if the forecasts of climate models were correct. This graph [zie afbeelding boven] shows the trend in worldwide accumulated cyclone energy.

Gore tells us that his program will “reveal the deniers.” If by “deniers” he means those of us who do not support his belief in an impending human-caused climate catastrophe, then we certainly hope he does reveal us. Gore and Ban alone have had many times the mainstream media coverage of all the skeptics combined. It is time to listen to reputable experts who understand that predicting, let alone controlling, climate decades from now will remain science fiction for the foreseeable future.

That may not be a comforting thought to climate crusaders, but that, Mr. Gore, is the true “climate reality.”

Lees verder hier.

Alweer een klimaatsprookje minder.