This time it is different. Today’s post links to a video setting out what official climate science actually says. It is not at all a tale of climate crisis and imminent doom.
I am not a scientist. But I am numerate, capable of independent thought and analysis, and in a word, educated. I am accustomed to comparing the logic of rival arguments about aspects of reality. All I am really doing in these posts is communicating alternative views about reality, not formulating them.
I am so weary of being told that my posts are just ‘my science’ as opposed to what the state represents as ‘The Science’. These views have not been developed by me. They have been developed by credential-led economists and notable scientists, several of whom are Nobel Prize winners or the equivalent. The state and its minions in the mainstream media and academia nevertheless spend enormous resources year in, year out, concealing and attacking them.
Today, however, I hope to be of service by simply drawing your attention to the video linked below. It is a calm, sober summary of what the official climate change science actually says as set out in official reports such as the most recent UN IPCC Report published in August.
The speaker is Professor Steve Koonin, sometime US Under Secretary for Science and author of ‘Unsettled’, a bestselling book on climate change. The occasion was the recent Global Policy Warming Foundation’s (GWPF) annual lecture. (I heartily recommend signing up to the GWPF’s emails for anyone who really wishes to follow the climate debate properly.)
Remember, Koonin is just discussing the official view here. He is not discussing dissenting views, for example on whether atmospheric CO2 plays a significant warming role.
To see the roughly half hour video about the official science behind the endlessly repeated rhetoric of imminent disaster please click on the link below.
SUMMARY FOR THOSE PRESSED FOR TIME
The phrase ‘Climate Crisis’ occurs just once in hundreds of pages in the IPCC report, and that is in a discussion about why the media persists in inducing panic in the population about climate change. It appears nowhere else.
There is a discussion about changes in the frequency of extreme weather events, forest fires, and the rate of sea level rise. The overall picture is of little if any clear direction of change in these indicators, mixed in with a fair dose of uncertainty about how much we do or don’t yet know. In any case, adaptation over time to any changes will clearly be the main response in reality.
The costs of carefully and elaborately enumerated estimates of losses caused by the increase in global temperatures - as forecast by official climate models – in a hundred years’ time is some hundreds of billions of dollars annually. Sounds a lot? Well, it’s less than 5% of America’s current economy as measured by GNP. The climate crisis really boils down to an assertion that it will take Americans a few extra years to double their current standard of living.
That is the sum of the ‘oh my God, climate crisis – we’re doomed’ science. Not ‘my science’ but ‘The Science’ from government paid and approved scientists.
In the great scheme of things, the overall adverse consequence of any anthropomorphic global warming, as reported by the fear-mongering UN itself, is a great big nothing-burger. Don’t believe me? Watch the video. Please.
And that’s before you count the benefits of greater food production caused by CO2’s greening of the earth, and the huge plus of potentially heading off the next, certain, and genuinely catastrophic, glaciation. Anyway, how can you realistically estimate anyone’s GNP in a hundred years’ time, or anything else?
HYPE ABOUT IMMINENT CLIMATE DISASTER
In the talk, Professor Koonin talks about the prevalence of outrageously overblown scaremongering about the climate change hypothesis. It is, as we have just seen, not based on ‘The Science’ at all. It stems from a mixture of naked media self-interest (attracting readers), and political and commercial self-interest (grabbing power and making money based on ‘green’ initiatives).
It also results, he suggests, from an elaborate version of the Telephone Game’ or ‘Chinese Whispers’. A message fed in at the beginning of a chain of people -for example by respectable climate scientists – may be completely garbled by the time it reaches the public, or indeed senior politicians, because of innocent failures in transmitting understanding along the way.
This is, again, made a great deal worse if you include journalists from the dying legacy mainstream media in the chain. They will simply be unemployed if they don’t come up with a steady stream of scary stuff for their front pages and increasingly skimpy ‘news’ programmes.
A MEASURED WAY FORWARD ON CLIMATE CHANGE
The IPCC report sets out the environmental costs caused by a do-nothing approach in the face of what are assumed to be very rapidly rising CO2 emissions. As we have seen the costs are distant and less than dramatic.
Professor Koonin explains that the 6 billion people in the ‘developing’ or ‘non=Western’ world have become the leading source of emissions. They need to burn more hydrocarbons to fuel growing living standards. Living standards are after all mostly a function of using more energy. Preventing poor people from industrialising represents a cure that is much worse than the disease.
He explains that in time a switch to nuclear power in such countries will be necessary, for its own sake as an additional high density energy source, and as a way of curtailing greenhouse gas emissions. What is needed is an approach that makes realistic trade-offs between economic growth and projected warming. He puts forward a possible least cost longer term schedule for curtailing emissions taking into account the costs of the officially projected rises in global temperatures.
As ever the key point is that there is plenty of time for a measured process of adaption to whatever climate difficulties may actually lie ahead.
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