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'The Economist' zaait twijfel over opwarming aarde
De 'consensus' valt uiteen.
Hoe vaak hebben broeikasgelovigen klimaatsceptici niet verweten twijfel te zaaien over de antropogene opwarming van de aarde? Schandelijk! Men dient onvoorwaardelijk te geloven in het door het VNKlimaatpanel (IPCC) verkondigde dogma dat de mens schuldig is aan de verschrikkelijke opwarming van de aarde (die maar niet wil komen). En de Amerikaanse president Obama zingt het hoogste lied in dat koor.
Maar onder de titel, 'A cooling consensus', trekt 'The Economist' zich daar niets van aan en gaat rustig door met het plaatsen van vraagtekens.
Ik citeer:
Global warming has slowed. The rate of warming of over the past 15 years has been lower than that of the preceding 20 years. There is no serious doubt that our planet continues to heat, but it has heated less than most climate scientists had predicted.
Nate Cohn of the New Republic reports:
"Since 1998, the warmest year of the twentieth century, temperatures have not kept up with computer models that seemed to project steady warming; theyre perilously close to falling beneath even the lowest projections" [Noot HL: Dit is suggestief geformuleerd. De afbeelding boven biedt een beter beeld van wat er aan de hand is.]
Mr Cohn does his best to affirm that the urgent necessity of acting to retard warming has not abated, as does Brad Plumer of the Washington Post, as does this newspaper. But there's no way around the fact that this reprieve for the planet is bad news for proponents of policies, such as carbon taxes and emissions treaties, meant to slow warming by moderating the release of greenhouse gases. The reality is that the already meagre prospects of these policies, in America at least, will be devastated if temperatures do fall outside the lower bound of the projections that environmentalists have used to create a panicked sense of emergency. Whether or not dramatic climate-policy interventions remain advisable, they will become harder, if not impossible, to sell to the public, which will feel, not unreasonably, that the scientific and media establishment has cried wolf. ...
[ ] climate scientists are actually pretty baffled about the failure of their predictions. Is it the oceans? Clouds? Volcanoes? The sun? An artifact of temperature data?
As a rule, climate scientists were previously very confident that the planet would be warmer than it is by now, and no one knows for sure why it isn't. This isn't a crisis for climate science. This is just the way science goes. But it is a crisis for climate-policy advocates who based their arguments on the authority of scientific consensus.
But the consensus never extended to the intricacies of the climate system, just the core belief that additional greenhouse gas emissions would warm the planet. If this is true, then the public has been systematically deceived. [Noot HL: Sic! Het is alleen jammer dat het zo lang heeft geduurd voordat 'The Economist' daar achter is gekomen.] As it has been presented to the public, the scientific consensus extended precisely to that which is now seems to be in question: the sensitivity of global temperature to increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide. Indeed, if the consensus had been only that greenhouse gases have some warming effect, there would have been no obvious policy implications at all. ...
We have not been awash in arguments for adaptation precisely because the consensus pertained to now-troubled estimates of climate sensitivity. The moralising stridency of so many arguments for cap-and-trade, carbon taxes, and global emissions treaties was founded on the idea that there is a consensus about how much warming there would be if carbon emissions continue on trend. The rather heated debates we have had about the likely economic and social damage of carbon emissions have been based on that idea that there is something like a scientific consensus about the range of warming we can expect. If that consensus is now falling apart, as it seems it may be, that is, for good or ill, a very big deal.
Lees verder hier.
Maar president Obama en zijn staf lijken niet te zijn geabonneerd op 'The Economist' en gaan rustig door met het verspreiden van misleidende klimaatpropaganda over die verschrikkelijke opwarming van de aarde (die maar niet wil komen), zoals Nick Ottens nog onlangs heeft gerapporteerd op DDS.
Kees Le Pair heeft een samenvatting gemaakt van een recente presentatie van John Christy, waarin deze de feiten nog eens op een rijtje zet. Deze is als bijlage bijgevoegd.
Voor mijn eerdere DDSbijdragen, zie hier.
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