This year’s climate jamboree is on its way to Azerbaijan next month, and the Silly Season is well underway with all sorts of absurd climate scare stories, all designed to persuade us to accept the Net Zero agenda.
On Sunday the Telegraph reported on a speech by Jim Skea, who heads up the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Skea warned us that if we don’t start rapidly cutting emissions, U.K. summers would be 6°C hotter by 2070.
Why the Telegraph gives credence to anybody who can seriously make such a ridiculous claim is a mystery.
In reality, U.K. summers have warmed on average by less than a degree since the 1930s. More importantly, there has been no increase in the temperature of the hottest summers since the 1970s. The tiny rise in average temperatures is mainly due to the relative absence of the unusually cold summers, which were commonplace in the 1950s and 60s particularly.
A rise of 6°C would mean that Birmingham would be as hot as the French Riviera is now. This is a meteorological impossibility. The reason why the Riviera gets much hotter in summer is because the sunshine is much stronger at that latitude.
Skea also made several other equally absurd predictions, such as summer droughts in Britain becoming more frequent. Again, the actual data show that long term rainfall trends have changed little since 1840. If anything droughts have become less frequent:
It goes without saying that both of these predictions originated from the U.K. Met Office, which does not say much for its credibility!
Skea also raised the spectre of surging numbers of heat-related deaths, despite the fact that many more people die in winter, while summer mortality rates here are always the lowest of any season, even in the hottest of summers.
Skea also said: “It’s very clear climate change is no longer decades in the future. It’s very obvious it’s happening now, so we need to adapt.”
I doubt whether anybody actually living here would even be aware of “climate change” if it was not rammed down our throats every day. The simple fact is that the natural variability of British weather far outweighs the minute trends identified over the last century or two. As for adaptation, quite what are we supposed to be adapting for?
Skea goes on to list all of the other flawed predictions of climate scientists, which continue to be debunked by reality – rising sea levels, more extreme weather, reduced food production and so on.
Skea has benefitted very nicely from the climate scam, as Professor of Sustainable Energy at Imperial College, a Director of The U.K. Energy Research Centre and then a founding member of the Government’s powerful Climate Change Committee.
He was a natural choice to be Chair of the IPCC. But as he admits, it is no longer about science, it is about politics:
Frankly, it’s down to human agency and choice. It’s our politicians, our political system, that can choose or can choose not to implement the measures that we need.
In that case, the IPCC should be shut down and the billions spent on climate research around the world ended. It is about choice and always has been.
We don’t need lectures from the high and mighty. And the choice is simple.
Fossil fuels have already brought immeasurable benefits to the world. Do we want to throw all that away while preventing the developing world from sharing those benefits?
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