Latest article from Melanie Phillips

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It’s over – but its adherents will never admit it. Just as the exposure of the excesses of Stalinism drove many true believers into an ever more fanatical and deluded defence of Soviet communism, so the conclusive destruction of anthropogenic global warming theory is provoking ever more fantastical contortions by warmist zealots who, contrary to all reputable evidence, claim that the planet is about to turn into a furnace and (pace Bob Geldof )(http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/globalwarming/10353206/Were-facing-a-mass-extinction-event-claims-Bob-Geldof.html) ) it’s all over for the human race.

The recent release of the IPCC’s Final Draft Report of the Working Group I contribution to the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report Climate Change 2013: The Physical Science Basis (http://www.climatechange2013.org/report/review-drafts/)  revealed, beyond any measure of doubt, the intellectual vacuity, sophistry, and outright corruption of the AGW industry. Presented as an authoritative statement of the current state of climate change evidence, it was nothing of the kind. Indeed, it wasn’t even any kind of statement of evidence. It was instead a politicised draft summary of evidence that was to be amended

(http://www.climatechange2013.org/report/review-comments-disclaimer)  to ‘ensure consistency between the full Report and the Summary for Policy-Makers’. As Lewis Carroll might have said: conclusions first, rigged evidence to follow.

The report was notable for skating over the most salient fact about catastrophic, planet-pulverising global warming: that it is not happening. Reported rows between various governments apparently resulted in an act of censorship so blatant as to be farcical. While carbon dioxide levels have been rising, temperatures have been flat for 15 years – which destroys the claim that higher CO2 leads inexorably to higher climate temperatures.

The report failed to deal with this widening hole in the heart of the theory which justifies the IPCC’s very existence. Well, there’s a surprise. Its sly and perfunctory explanation of ‘a possible redistribution of heat within the ocean’ was sly and perfunctory because there is no scientific confidence in such a claim. And its nod to the possible contribution to the climate standstill from ‘an overestimate of the response to increasing greenhouse gas and other anthropogenic forcing’ was even more coy – because this grossly under-estimated ‘overestimate’ is precisely the reason for the discrepancy.

In other words, the AGW theory – as some of us have been pointing out for the past 25 years -- is total garbage. Past IPCC predictions have all turned out to be false; but still the warmists have steadily warmed up their claim of imminent doom.

As the veteran AGW debunker Ross McKitrick has pointed out (http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702304713704579092883286839894.html?mod=ITP_opinion_2) , IPCC models based on CO2 emissions predicted that temperatures should have risen between 0.2 and 0.9 degrees Celsius since 1990. Instead they have increased by about 0.1 degree. But still the warmists have stuck to their claim of imminent doom.

His fellow veteran debunker Steve McIntyre shows here (http://climateaudit.org/2013/09/30/ipcc-disappears-the-discrepancy/)  how the IPCC has fiddled the figures; while geology professor Don Easterbrook observes (http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/10/03/the-2013-ipcc-ar5-report-facts-vs-fictions/)  that the IPCC’s statement –

‘Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and since the 1950s, many of the observed changes are unprecedented over decades to millennia’

– is

‘…an outright lie. A vast published literature exists showing that recent warming is not only not unusual, but more intense warming has occurred many times in the past centuries and millennia. As a reviewer of the IPCC report, I called this to their attention, so they cannot have been unaware of it.’

Easterbrook concludes:

‘When compared to the also recently published NIPCC (Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change) 1000+-page volume of data on climate change with thousands of peer-reviewed references, the inescapable conclusion is that the IPCC report must be considered the grossest misrepresentation of data ever published.’


It is also beyond absurd. As the Science and Environmental Policy Project points out (http://www.sepp.org/twtwfiles/2013/TWTW%2010-5-13.pdf) , the global temperature data show a pronounced warming over the northern part of the Northern Hemisphere, little or no warming over the Tropics or the Southern Hemisphere and a cooling around Antarctica. So can global warming really be taking place in just one third of the planet, while another third is cooling? Lo and behold:

‘… the IPCC has great confidence in the part of the dataset that supports its theories and models, and no confidence in the part that does not. Such is the selective science of the IPCC’.

As Dr Richard Lindzen of MIT comments (http://www.climatedepot.com/2013/09/28/mit-climate-scientist-dr-richard-lindzen-rips-un-ipcc-report-the-latest-ipcc-report-has-truly-sunk-to-level-of-hilarious-incoherence-it-is-quite-amazing-to-see-the-contortions-the-ipcc-has/) :

‘The latest IPCC report has truly sunk to level of hilarious incoherence… It is quite amazing to see the contortions the IPCC has to go through in order to keep the international climate agenda going’.


Indeed. And while inadequate or opportunistic researchers have lined their pockets with AGW-theory funding, this giant scam has helped derail western economies, inflating the cost of living and causing the poor to shiver in homes they cannot afford to heat because of fuel bills inflated by governmental subservience to the grotesque fiction of the killer carbon footprint.

Yet despite all the evidence to the contrary, despite all the revelations of intellectual corruption at the very core of the theory, despite the denunciations by some of the most distinguished scientists in the various related fields of climate science, still the warmists have not only stuck to but reinforced their warnings of imminent doom. As they doubtless will to their dying day. For how can they do otherwise? Too many reputations, too many claims to scientific scholarship, too many livelihoods depend on the great multi-billion-dollar milch-cow of grant-funding, whose sole purpose is to uphold the conclusion that sunshine can be made out of cucumbers.

And so the warmists continue to make their ever more ludicrous claims, exhibiting that total absence of insight characterising all fanatics – who, by definition, are totally incapable of grasping quite what a ludicrous spectacle they present every time they open their mouths.

But the implications of this epic scam are even more serious and wide-ranging. For what the warmists have done is nothing less than to undermine public confidence in science itself. Science is a synonym for truth-telling, for the exercise of reason, for open-eyed inquiry and the absolute integrity of following where the evidence leads.

But wrapping themselves in the mantle of science, the warmists have utterly corrupted it: making the evidence fit prior conclusions, suppressing inconvenient truths that blow AGW theory into the stratosphere, tampering with and distorting the facts in order to serve a political agenda, pressurising and intimidating scientists who have tried to tell the truth about nothing-out-of-the-ordinary climate change. With AGW zealots pumping out propaganda under the guise of ‘science’, how is the public to be expected to believe scientists when they do tell the truth about where the evidence leads?

For ultimately, this is not even just about science. It is about truth, evidence and rational thought. The real casualty of the AGW scam is surely the blow it has dealt to reason itself.

Now reason has to fight back.
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