The political fiction that humans cause most or all climate change and the claim that the science behind this notion is ‘settled’, has been dealt a savage blow by the publication of a ‘World Climate Declaration (WCD)’ signed by over 1,100 scientists and professionals. There is no climate emergency, say the authors, who are drawn from across the world and led by the Norwegian physics Nobel Prize laureate Professor Ivar Giaever. Climate science is said to have degenerated into a discussion based on beliefs, not on sound self-critical science.
The scale of the opposition to modern day ‘settled’ climate science is remarkable, given how difficult it is in academia to raise grants for any climate research that departs from the political orthodoxy. (A full list of the signatories is available here.) Another lead author of the declaration, Professor Richard Lindzen, has called the current climate narrative “absurd”, but acknowledged that trillions of dollars and the relentless propaganda from grant-dependent academics and agenda-driven journalists currently says it is not absurd.
Particular ire in the WCD is reserved for climate models. To believe in the outcome of a climate model is to believe what the model makers have put in. Climate models are now central to today’s climate discussion and the scientists see this as a problem. “We should free ourselves from the naïve belief in immature climate models,” says the WCD. “In future, climate research must give significantly more emphasis to empirical science.”
Since emerging from the ‘Little Ice Age’ in around 1850, the world has warmed significantly less than predicted by the IPCC on the basis of modelled human influences. “The gap between the real world and the modelled world tells us that we are far from understanding climate change,” the WCD notes.
The Declaration is an event of enormous importance, although it will be ignored by the mainstream media. But it is not the first time distinguished scientists have petitioned for more realism in climate science. In Italy, the discoverer of nuclear anti-matter Emeritus Professor Antonino Zichichi recently led 48 local science professors in stating that human responsibility for climate change is “unjustifiably exaggerated and catastrophic predictions are not realistic”. In their scientific view, “natural variation explains a substantial part of global warming observed since 1850”. Professor Zichichi has signed the WCD.
The Declaration notes that the Earth’s climate has varied for as long as the planet has existed, with natural cold and warm periods. “It is no surprise that we are experiencing a period of warming,” it continues. Climate models have many shortcomings, it says, “and are not remotely plausible as global policy tools”. They blow up the effect of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide, but ignore any beneficial effects. “CO2 is not a pollutant,” it says. “It is essential to all life on Earth. Photosynthesis is a blessing. More CO2 is beneficial for nature, greening the Earth; additional CO2 in the air has promoted growth in global plant biomass. It is also good for agriculture, increasing the yield of crops worldwide.”
In addition, the scientists declare that there is no statistical evidence that global warming is intensifying hurricanes, floods, droughts and such-like natural disasters, or making them more frequent. “There is no climate emergency,” the Declaration goes on. “We strongly oppose the harmful and unrealistic net-zero CO2 policy proposed for 2050,” it says, adding that the aim of global policy should be “prosperity for all” by providing reliable and affordable energy at all times. “In a prosperous society, men and women are well educated, birth rates are low and people care about their environment,” it concludes.
The WCD is the latest sign that the ‘settled’ fantasy surrounding climate change science is rapidly breaking down. Last year, Steven Koonin, an Under-Secretary of Science in the Obama Administration, published a book titled Unsettled in which he noted that, “The science is insufficient to make useful projections about how the climate will change over the coming decades, much less what our actions will be.” He also noted that rigidly promulgating the idea that climate change is settled demeans and chills the scientific enterprise, “retarding its progress in these important matters”. In 2020, the long-time green activist Michael Shellenberger wrote a book called Apocalypse Never in which he said he believed the conversation about climate change and the environment had in the last few years “spiralled out of control”. Much of what people are told about the environment, including the climate, is wrong, he wrote.
Of course, green extremists in academia, politics and journalism will continue to argue for the command-and-control they crave through a Net Zero policy. In the end, their warped view of the scientific process will fade, leaving a trail of ludicrous Armageddon forecasts, and yet more failed experiments in hard-left economic and societal control.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Postscript: When we posted this article on the Daily Sceptic Facebook page, it was labelled “False Information”, a conclusion reached after it was “checked by independent fact-checkers”. If you then click on “See Why”, you’re taken to this page on a website called Climate Feedback. It takes issue with this sentence in the Petition on Anthropogenic Global Warming started by Professor Antonino Zichichi: “Natural variation explains a substantial part of global warming observed since 1850.” This is “incorrect” for the following reason: “Natural (non-human) drivers of climate change have been mostly stable since the onset of modern warming and all the available scientific evidence implicates human greenhouse gas emissions as the primary culprit. Scientific evidence also indicates that climate change is contributing to intensified or more frequent natural disasters such as heatwaves, drought and heavy rainfall.”
To claim “all the available scientific evidence” supports the view that human activity is the “primary culprit” when it comes to climate change is a bit misleading, surely? In fact, Professor Zichichi refers to at least some scientific evidence that the anthropogenic responsibility for the climate change observed during the last century has been exaggerated on page 1 of his petition. Indeed, Climate Feedback’s labelling of the central claims made in the World Climate Declaration as “incorrect” is a step up from its previous analysis of the Declaration, which concluded that the scientific credibility of the Declaration was “very low”.
Chris Morrison responded to some of the criticisms to the above piece here and specifically to the Climate Feedback fact check here.
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These nonladies and ungentleman have learnt the lessons of the pandemic well: Someone who’s in control of the megaphones can tell an unlimited amount of plain lies unchallenged. There was no summer in 2021, it just kept raining until autumn. Then, preciously few warm and somewhat dry weeks followed before it started getting cold again. With the exception of April, winter 2021/ 2022 basically lasted until the first week of July. There was plenty of rain and more often than not, it was so uncomfortably cold that I had to turn the heating on. I’ve never done that in June before. Come July, sort-of sommer came. Often overcast and rather cool but with longer pauses between the downpours. In the middle of this exactly three warm (not hot) days occurred. This doesn’t make an extreme heatwave and BBC employees who keep claiming the contrary and who know very well that they’re lying shouldn’t wonder why annoyed people keep calling them out on that.
Was it at least a safe and effective heatwave?
We’ve had some average July days this year, two really hot days thanks to a particular weather system, that was followed by a week of below average temperature and above average rainfall. Now it’s back to July norms. Overall I’d guess this July’s average temperature was middle to slightly low compared to the multi-year average.
There’s a technically interesting article in the Udraigna on this:
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/01/uk-farmers-count-cost-as-heatwave-kills-fruit-and-vegetable-crops
The first interesting thing to note here is that the top heading and the sub heading already differ in meaning, the top heading claiming a catastrophe (of sorts) occurred while the sub heading states that a catastrophe might occur if more extreme heat caused by clima crisis materializes. Chances are that the point of the sub headline is mostly to put extreme heat and clima crisis in one sentence, thereby implying a factually wrong cause-and-effect relation.
Half of the article is composed of quotes from a guy running a green wholesale business for fruit and vegetables in London. This is basically just a lot of handwaiving as no London business man has any first-hand experience of growing stuff in the fields somewhere out of London. The most amusing one is his assertion that he had faced a day long shortage of berries because they had all been cooked out in the open. As the cooking temperature of water is 100C and not 40C (at Heathrow), this certainly didn’t happen. As the next sentence reveals, this was really because fewer berries were picked for a couple of days, followed by the assertion that there could be real trouble of more hot spells occurred.
It then switches to farmers being concerned about the possible effects of the recent dry spell, implying that a few weeks without rain (we haven’t seen yet) would be somehow uncommon and dangerous during the summer months. Farmers – obviously – doesn’t refer to farmers but to another pencil pusher, namely, the deputy secretary of the union of farmers. Again, nothing has happened so far, but if different stuff would happen in future, there could well be difficulties in future.
— I really wish I was better at describing this, IMHO, the article is a textbook example of lying by implication while accurately reporting that nothing happened —
I was reading today that British winegrowers don’t want any rain because they are going to have the best wine year ever if the dry weather continues. My own observations show bumper crops of fruit coming on the trees and the wheat still standing, waiting to be harvested, has ripened perfectly (as opposed to some recent years where it has gone black on the stalk due to the wet). Even some blackberries are ready to pick.
According to the Met office, the definition of a heatwave is FIVE consecutive days of very high temperatures…not the one and a half we had the other week – Monday was Costa del Sol hot, Tuesday started that way, but by the afternoon it was raining. Call that a heatwave? No, Met office, you can’t because it b****y wasn’t you dorks.
The climate changer dream summer was 2018 which it was really unpleasantly hot and dry for an unusually long time. Since then, they’ve been trying to rerun this based on media fantasies every summer (with the exception of 2020 and 2021, when these clowns of doom were too occupied with COVID to care for the weather). 2018 was also the last year when we had normal weather forecasts in summer instead of climate catastrophe nudging by swapping the informational map showing a green outline of the country with cloud, sun and rain symbols to indicate local weather conditions to one using a gradient of light red to dark red calibrated such that the highest temperatures expected on a certain day get the darkest red, regardless of what these temperatures actually are. Any other information which used to be on this map has been silently dropped.
I’d really like to ask this BBC meteorlogist of 25 years why the BBC has chosen to remove the cloudy/ rainy/ sunny/ windy symbols from the overview map in favour of focussing exclusively on temperatures indicated in colours commonly associated with mortal danger from fire. There’s certainly no science which has determined that clouds, rain and wind don’t occur over England anymore. Hence, the BBC is selectively withholding important meteorological information about the actual weather in England in its visualizations of the weather forecast. What’s the rationale behind this?
Great points but this stopped being about observable reality, demonstrable fact and science long ago.
Crybullies, as they are known, have been a long established tactic of the left. It’s pretty easy to do:
Step 1, stoke up anger with a series of unprovoked inflammatory and/or abusive social media posts.
Step 2, cry victim when you get the inevitable backlash. If you are an A-lister this involves a sympathetic appearance on the BBC or in The Guardian.
The best way to deal with a crybully is to give them something to cry about, lol.
For most climate alarmists it’s a fashionable bourgeoise religion and one that ties in nicely with their pathological snobbery and their desire to tell the ghastly stinky little people how to live their lives. But for the BBC – the Grand Muftis of the sect – it’s more serious. They have most of their pensions invested in carbon trading and so-called renewables. The pyramid is collapsing and the only way they think they can shore up its foundations is by calling in ever more frequent truck loads of tax payer funded junk science bullshit, otherwise it’s goodbye gold plated pensions.
Driest July since 1935 according to met office as reported by the BBC
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-62382703
Not sure how wet July 1976 was or July 2003.
This is the same bullshit as with the global temperatures: They’re averaging different rainfall measurements to arrive at a fictional England-wide level of rain. Mathematically, averages are subject to distortions by outliers and regardless of that, averaging measurements of different quantities still makes no sense.
A sensible way to present this information would be something like the “We’re on fire!” temperature map, just using a neutral colour (eg, light grey to dark gray) which would show how much rain was measured where. One could also create a so-called histogram by adding measurements rounded to mm of the same value together and present the outcome as 2D-plot. One could get then an idea of weather trends by calculating the average number of entries in each category for a number of years.
This isn’t exactly rocket science, more basic working with numerical data. When the Met Office doesn’t do this, either the people working there are very unqualified or a serious presentation of rainfall data would not suit itself to the intended kind of headlines.
I came across a speech made by Hitler in Munich in 1937. He emphasises community, much like Twitter, Facebook and the New World Order gangs.
“…And that brings us to the problem of freedom! Freedom, yes! Insofar as the interest of the national community gives the individual freedom, it is given! Where the freedom affects or even impairs the interest of the national community, the freedom of the individual ceases! Then the freedom of the national community takes the place of the freedom of the individual.”
If you’re stupid enough to watch the BBC you get what you deserve. They’re a propagandist organisation; they pump out propaganda.
Turn it off.
On a positive note. Greta Thumberg has just won (for the 3rd consecutive year) the award for “International Truant of the Year”
The 4-year contract for broadband services costing £70 billion sounds like a modest Government programme to manipulate our lifestyles.
The £70bn contract went to a small company called Place Group Ltd, which in its last published accounts had 2 employees.
Correct. More about this surprising contract award here:
https://www.cornwalllive.com/news/cornwall-news/small-company-cornwall-awarded-giant-7407664
Most people promoting net zero and a climate change “emergency” are not scientistists and Marr is a typical example. I listem to the view of those scientists who have studied climate and what has efffected it over billions of years rather than people whose opinion is based on what happened in the last few weeks. Most real climate scientists tell us that CO2 generated by humankind has a very minor impact on climate compared to a whole list of other factors that mankind can neither impact or control. There is no current climate emergency apart from that generated by politicians and companies that benefit from the idea of it.
The climate crisis scam that is reaching a scope of almost 1 trillion per year worldwide. This is all funded by tax money from rich Western Countries treasuries using Non Profits NGOs, fake charities, billionaire class trust funds & charities, University grants & government funded agencies. Tens of thousands are making a living & rely on peddling this religion for their livelihood. Climate change only occurs in rich western countries for a reason. This climate crisis will not end until rich Western Countries stop allowing abuse of their tax systems.