The false notion that the climate is collapsing due to human activity lies at the heart of the drive to collectivise human populations under a Net Zero global agenda. Everything about it is a lie. The science is not ‘settled’, it is an unproven hypothesis, and stating otherwise is giving credence to an obvious political construct. There is no way that scientists can calculate how much of the gentle rise in temperature seen over the last 200 years is caused by humans burning fossil fuel rather than natural influences. The idea that there is a 97% ‘consensus’ among scientists that humans cause the majority of warming is a whopper as big as they come, not least because holding that view is beyond current scientific knowledge.
This latter ubiquitous claim was recently revisited in a short essay published by the CO2 Coalition. It arose from a 2013 paper published by John Cook and asserted that 97% of 11,944 peer-reviewed science papers explicitly endorsed the opinion that humans had caused the majority of the warming of the last 150 years. Alas, 7,930 of those papers took no position on anthropogenic change and were excluded from the 97% claim. It was subsequently revealed that only about 0.5%, of the papers explicitly stated that recent warming was mostly human caused.
The authors of the CO2 Coalition essay quote Professor Richard Tol’s comment at the time:
Cook’s 97% nonsensus [sic] paper shows that the climate community still has a long way to go in weeding out bad research and bad behaviour. If you want to believe that climate researchers are incompetent, biased and secretive, Cook’s paper is an excellent case in point.
Science has three levels to judge the way the natural world operates – laws, theories and hypotheses. An apple falling from a tree hitting the ground demonstrates clearly the law of gravity. If it suddenly flew off into space, we would have to reconsider, but until then it is a given fact. A theory is an explanation that has been ruthlessly tested and is widely accepted as fact. Hypotheses covers the rest – mere suggestions that only gain credence with rigorous scientific testing and believable proof. Anthropogenic climate change is an unproven hypothesis, without a single credible peer-reviewed paper proving its proposition. And this is after at least 50 years of intense, money-no-object, scientific effort, all to no avail.
As the noted Australian geologist Dr. Ian Plimer is fond of pointing out: if there was such a paper, you would never hear the last of it. The common response to this is that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change provides the proof, but, again, no paper exists within that body of work to prove the hypothesis to any reasonable extent. As Dr. Plimer goes on to observe, when proof is sought, there is just “obfuscation and deafening silence”. A silence, it could be noted, disturbed only by the deafening pseudoscientific roar of computer models pumping out constant clickbait forecasts of climate Armageddon.
Anthropogenic climate change fails on almost every count. In particular, it cannot explain a vast body of observations available in the historic, near-historic and 600-million-year paleological record. In all that time, rarely do temperatures rise following rising carbon dioxide levels. In the near-historic period, ice core records going back about 500,000 years suggest that rising temperature preceded, and likely caused, CO2 levels to follow suit as natural processes such as ocean degassing come into play. Across the paleological period, CO2 levels have been up to 20 times higher with no evidence of a climate fireball. Over the last 120 years, temperatures have risen (1910-40, 1980-98), fallen (1940-75) and paused (2000-14, 2016-23), all at a time when CO2 showed a continuous rise.
As often happens in the human condition, the bad drives out the good. Plausible alternative explanations surrounding the effect of rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere have been more or less suppressed in the recent past. The hypothesis that CO2 ‘saturates’ after a certain level, and its warming properties fall away dramatically, has been around for many years. The gas absorbs heat only within narrow bands of the infrared spectrum. There is debate at what level the absorption work is mainly done, with some scientists suggesting from observations that ‘saturation’ sets in around 300 parts per million, 100 ppm lower than current levels. The big advantage of this hypothesis is that it provides a convincing explanation for much if not all the temperature and gas observations in the past.
The CO2 Coalition provides a timely reminder that science, unlike religion, is not a belief system. Like everyone else, scientists will say things for social convenience, political expediency or financial profit. For reasons such as this, science is not founded on the beliefs – in other words hypotheses – of scientists. It is a disciplined method of inquiry by which scientists apply pre-existing theory to observation and measurement to arrive at “that which is, and that which is not”, as the authors put it.
The CO2 Coalition concludes:
The long and hard road to scientific truth cannot be followed by the trivial expedient of a mere head-count among those who make their livings from Government funding. Therefore, the mere fact that climate activists find themselves so often appealing to an imagined ‘consensus’ is a red flag. They are far less sure of the supposed scientific truths to which they cling than they would like us to believe. ‘Consensus’ here is a crutch for lame science.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.
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Total nonsense.
The countries ignoring the “rules” are the US and it’s vassals who make up their own rules when it suits them.
Russia used UN Charter Article 51 and R2P to stop the ethnic Russians from persecution in Ukraine.
The US is Israel’s best friend who ignore all UN Resolutions and both vote against any UN peace deals along with their puppets in the UK and EU.
Russia and China are more likely to follow agreed rules than the West.
I agree.
Uncle Sam’s hegemony is collapsing. It would be amusing to see how that pans out but I fear that its death throes may do for us all.
Out of chaos is their only chance of survival.
The last great example of the ‘rules based order’ was the liberation of Kuwait in 1991.
The subsequent flouting of that order by Clinton and Blair in the Balkans, the nonsense that was Rambouillet, set the scene for much of what has followed.
Clinton and Blair, the worst pair of Western leaders in living memory……and then it got worse……
This rules-based international order (to this date, one of these rules is that Britain, France, the USA and Russia may chose to invade Germany whenenver they really dislike German domestic politics) is nothing but the league of nations concept reheated, ie, an attempt of the so-called victorious powers of the second world war to lend perpetuity to their reordering of the world by nothing but force by ‘prohibiting’ others from changing it again by use of force. Pretty much everyone except the German pseudo-states aka reservations for ethnic Germans in central europe has ignored all of this since ever.
Eg, probably the first violation of these rules occurred when Poland annexed Stettin after the second world war. That was westward of the supposed border of Poland but (obviously) Germany didn’t have an army which could have prevented this anymore and (as obviously) the proponents of this rule-based international order didn’t care provided the right perpetrator chose an acceptable victim.
Could Dr McGrogan’s opinion be summarised as “The Long March Through The Institutions has begun to eat its own tail”?. Or perhaps, rather than becoming circular, it has blundered into a swamp??
You know what killed the rules based order?
The US-UK invasion of Iraq.
Everything has been unravelling since then.
…and by the time of Lockdown, the general public had long forgotten about the order just went along with whatever wheeze was dreamt up by SAGE or even over breakfast at Downing Street. There’s nothing so effective as a declaration of war in persuading the population to forget the rules, whether the threat is real or invented.
So true. It was the single biggest blunder since Vietnam, if not worse.
Another example of the golden rule, those that don’t follow the rules are getting the gold in ever-increasing amounts.
There was a sense not that long ago that the western countries were far from perfect but nonetheless were responsible for vast improvements. It is still there even in colonised countries the sense they moved to a better place despite their subjugation. Railways for example. People in poorer countris value their railways far more than we do. And of course there is plenty to value. The speed, romance, chance meetings, just the idea of railway stations. They still admire the West as it was a few years ago they are just aghast at what it has turned into and you can hardly blame them.
Don’t destroy yourselves. Accept that by hook or crook you have been taken over and try to find something left to unite with. I know in contemporary Britain it might seem impossible but the chance is still there I think and I wouldn’t wait much longer.
I look back to not that long ago, say the early 1990s and the total takeover of the psyche that has occurred then amongst the British. I don’t know if there is a way back. The people that I get on with best these days are people living in caravans and attempting to disengage. I hope that we rediscover that these people are the best of us. I don’t give two hoots about death or money and I never will. I think that there is enough energy left in this country to re-awaken this spirit. You own nothing and your salary was just a comforting illusion. Can you imagine Iran or Putin trying to take over Cornwall? It will never happen these people are beyond reach. Same goes gor Geordieland.
The biggest irony of R2P is that Putin’s Russia has invoked it to speciously justify their invasion of Georgia and Ukraine (x2) as well. It’s all a load of hooey, or should I say, khuy.
The old Westphalian order is looking more and more like it will win out by default.
Why would anyone make reference to the FT when we know MSM has been telling porkies for over three years now. The last place we should be looking for reliable Information is the MSM. There are hundreds of other sources. Use them.
I may be guilty of not reading this article carefully enough, but I’m not really sure what the precise direction of this article is. True, Putin and Xi have rejected a highly corrupted Western ‘Rules based order’ – and rightly so. Why call Putin, Trump and Xi ‘rogue actors’ therefore, for seeking Realpolitik and practical solutions in a newly multipolar world?!! Whilst Erdogan is clearly not to be trusted (true), Putin is just about the most measured, calm and outwardly ‘moral’ leader around, and the whole of Russian foreign policy these days is very carefully measured and reasoned. Including participation in the United Nations. It is in many cases the West that has flouted UN resolutions. Trump, for his part, had a good record of avoiding war – I’m no expert about that… ask a Russian – they know it all, chapter and verse, just how many countries the USA has attacked. That we have effectively all but proscribed the Russian point of view in the West just about says it all.