Friday, April 18, 2014

IPCC cries wolf on global warming, again

PierreGuy Veer

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) recently released the summary of its fifth report. Unsurprisingly, it still blames humans as the main driver of global warming — or, climate change, climate disruption, extreme weather; whichever term you prefer. It’s unsurprising that the IPCC, an organization founded to find a way to limit human influence on climate, would sound such an alarm. After all, if it was discovered that nature is the main driver of the changes in climate, the IPCC would be out of a job.

Of course, that won’t happen. After all, the science surrounding global warming is settled and there is a vast consensus. Since we are running out of time, we therefore need to act promptly, right?

Wrong. First of all, science can never be settled for it to be called so. It took 250 years until Einstein found faults in Newton’s theory of gravity. It took more than 150 years to find how humans evolved from apes through a DNA discovery. Even today, scientists can’t decide what caused the Black Death in Europe.

The same goes for the climate hysteria. Scientists can’t decide if it will cause more snow or less snow, record snowfalls or their total absence, if biodiversity will increase or decrease, if there will be fewer tornadoes or more, or even when the world will end if we don’t act.

In addition, human influence on climate is unlikely considering that several peer-reviewed temperature reconstructions from Turkey, Poland, Eastern Australia, Northern Scandinavia, the Central Mediterranean Sea, Tibet, the Pearl River Basin in China, Bolivia, Arctic and Eastern Siberia, Southern England, the Equatorial Pacific Ocean, Peru, Chile, Iceland, Antarctica, the Central Eastern Alps, British Columbia, Quebec, and the Southwestern US all confirm the IPCC findings from 1990 that the Medieval Warm Period between 1000 and 1350 AD was much warmer than today. In other words, Michael Mann’s hockey stick, which supposedly shows a dramatic increase in temperatures since the Industrial Revolution, is probably false.

Also, hurricanes have not increased in strength or number in the past 40 years. A closer look at data shows the same neutral trend since 1851; it may even go back 228 years. Furthermore, no hurricane of category three or above has made landfall in the U.S. since Wilma (October 24, 2005) — the longest stretch since 1900. The same thing goes for tornadoes since the 1950s; F3+ tornadoes are actually decreasing. Similarly, droughts are not on the rise in the U.S., despite exponential increase in CO2. California’s recent drought, for example, is not uncommon.

Polar bears are nowhere near extinction, as assessed by the Nunavut government and Inuit hunters in Northern Canada. Speaking of debunked myths, dozens of papers show that the sun drives climate, not CO2, and that petrochemical influence on climate has been blown out of proportion. Finally, the Arctic, while it may be melting more during summer time, refreezes so quickly that its May 1st extent hasn’t changed much since 1979. Also, the Antarctic ice has been expending since that same year.









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