Increasing numbers of commentators are starting to call peak Net Zero and this process is being helped by the crumbling of the decades-long suffocating stranglehold exerted on ‘settled’ climate science by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The latest body-blow to its credibility has come from last year’s joint winner of the Nobel Prize for Physics, Dr John Clauser. He has warned the Nobel Foundation not to model a proposed new body to police ‘misinformation’ on the IPCC, adding: “In my opinion the IPCC is one of the worst sources of dangerous misinformation.” It would seem unhelpful that at a time when Clauser voiced his criticism, the UN’s Secretary General headed for a public stage and upgraded global warming to “global boiling”.
Of course, by ramping up the fear to ‘boiling’ point, the unhinged Antonio Guterres has fallen into the ‘worse than Hitler’ trap. Where can you go after you call someone a Nazi, or tell a world audience that the Earth is bubbling beneath its feet?
Details have recently been made public about the short speech Clauser gave to young scientists in South Korea. He implored them to follow the scientific method based on good observations and experiments. Good observations always overrule purely speculative theory, he told them. Referring to climate science, he noted the current world was “literally awash, saturated, with pseudoscience, with bad science, with scientific misinformation and disinformation”.
Referring often to climate science, he told his audience that if they are doing good science they must beware since it may take them on paths that lead them into “political incorrect” areas. “If you’re a good scientist, you will follow them… I can confidently say that there is no real climate crisis and that climate change does not cause extreme events,” he said.
Easier said than done of course since most scientists are funded in one form or another by governments. In the area of climate, politicians require scientific backing for their collectivist plans to re-order society around Net Zero. Huge amounts of public money are flowing into untested, unproductive new technologies, few of which would be viable in a free capital market. Green subsidy hunters are making serious fortunes with little risk involved. The climate narrative is absurd, says MIT Emeritus Professor Richard Lindzen, but trillions of dollars says it is not absurd.
There are a number of fault lines that run through the IPCC science narrative. It maintains that all changes in the climate since 1900 are caused by humans burning fossil fuel. This is plainly odd since it asks us to ignore almost all natural variation, having accepted that natural causes were responsible for climate change in the past. It also suggests that the current period in the Earth’s history is the hottest for 125,000 years, ignoring copious evidence that temperatures were much higher in the Holocene Thermal Maximum about 9,700 – 5,700 years ago. The IPCC would have us believe that higher levels of carbon dioxide cause the temperature to inevitably rise, despite observational evidence throughout the paleo record that contradicts that simple hypothesis. After 50 years of trying, not a single credible paper has yet been published providing conclusive proof for the anthropogenic global warming boiling hypothesis.
Earlier this year, a group of scientists operating through the Clintel Foundation examined the latest work of the IPCC. The authors were damning about its most recent report, finding it emphasised worst-case scenarios, rewrote climate history and had a huge bias against good news. Its standout revelation was that 42% of the IPCC’s claims were based on climate models fed with the implausible assumption that global temperatures would rise by around 5°C in less than 80 years. Deep in the main body of its work, even the IPCC admits this is of “low likelihood”. Even worse, Clintel noted, was that about half the extreme climate model forecasts found across the entire body of scientific literature are based on this 5°C boost. It is a fair bet that almost 100% of the clickbait scare stories that dominate mainstream media are taken from these sources.
The former IPCC author and economics professor Roger Pielke Jr. thinks that the continuing reliance on these implausible assumptions by the IPCC is “one of the most significant failures of scientific integrity in the 21st Century”.
The tide could well be turning as the voices of previously cancelled giants of science are heard. In the UK, there is increasing media interest in the retrospective uplifts to temperature datasets enabling previous inconvenient pauses to be removed, and ‘records’ to be declared at regular intervals. Not before time, the Met Office’s habit of declaring heat highs amidst the jet exhaust at British airports is becoming something of a national joke.
One of those science giants, atmospheric scientist Richard Lindzen, recently told a U.S. government body that climate science “is awash with manipulated data, which provides no reliable scientific evidence”. In his view, the IPCC only issues “government-dictated findings”, noting that the important, and much quoted, “Summary for Policymakers” must be approved for publication by all governments. He further noted that, “misrepresentation, exaggeration, cherry-picking or outright lying pretty much covers all the so-called global warming caused by fossil fuel and CO2”.
Dr Clauser signed off his inspiring talk to young scientists in South Korea by telling them to observe nature directly so they could determine real truth. “Use the information gained from carefully performed experiments and research to stop the spread of scientific misinformation, disinformation,” he said.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
Stop Press: The new head of the IPCC, Professor Jim Skea, recognises that constantly pumping out apocalyptic predictions which don’t come true is damaging the credibility of the IPCC. In a series of press interviews following his appointment, he warned doom-mongering was doing more harm than good. “If you constantly communicate the message that we are all doomed to extinction, then that paralyses people and prevents them from taking the necessary steps to get a grip on climate change,” he told one newspaper. The Telegraph has more.
Stop Press 2: Janan Ganesh, the FT columnist, thinks the Conservative victory in the Uxbridge by-election is the beginning of the end of the pro-Net Zero consensus: “It was always paper-thin. In 2019, when Britain committed to net zero greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of the century, inflation was 2 per cent. A decade had passed since the previous recession. Had politicians been frank about the cost of the green transition, voters might have felt prosperous enough to pay it. Now? Not a chance.” Not paywalled and worth reading in full.
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