..by keeping calm. Bjorn Lomborg says, once again, cool it:
When you look at these issues properly, the results are surprising. Climate change, for example, has had a net benefit for the world. From 1900 to 2025, it has increased global welfare by up to 1.5 per cent of GDP per year. Why? Because it has mixed effects – and when warming is moderate, the benefits prevail (even if they are unevenly distributed between nations).
Increased levels of atmospheric CO2 have improved agriculture, because the gas works as a fertiliser; we have avoided more deaths from cold than have been caused by extra heat; and we have saved more from lower heating bills than we have lost to an increased need for air conditioning.
But that doesn’t give the socialists the control over our lives that they continue to crave.
Jeff Foust discusses the issue over at The Space Review (spoiler warning for those who haven’t seen it). Also spoiler warning for people who read the rest of the post.
The real story may not be in the IPCC rowback on temperature ranges, or its cack-handed “explanations” for the stalling temperatures. It may in fact all be in this table. Be sure to look for yourself. Every single catastrophic scenario bar one has a rating of “Very unlikely” or “Exceptionally unlikely” and/or has “low confidence”. The only disaster scenario that the IPCC consider at all likely in the possible lifetimes of many of us alive now is “Disappearance of Arctic summer sea ice”, which itself has a ‘likely’ rating and liable to occur by mid century with medium confidence. As the litany of climate disasters go, that’s it.
This prompted me to put a question to him, which was the first I’d been able to raise via the chair all day (I’d tried in several talks). I said to Matt:
“What the IPCC says, and what the media says it says are poles apart. Your talk is a perfect example of this. Low liklihood and low confidence for almost every nightmare scenario. Yet this isn’t reflected at all in the media. Many people here have expressed concern at the influence of climate sceptics. Wouldn’t climate scientists’ time be better spent reining in those in the media producing irresponsible, hysterical, screaming headlines?”
Tumbleweed followed for several seconds. Then Matt said:
The biggest problem, he says, is the anonymity granted to reviewers, who are often competing fiercely for priority with authors they are reviewing. “What would be their reason to do it quickly?” Tracz asks. “Why would they not steal” ideas or data?
Anonymous review, Tracz notes, is the primary reason why months pass between submission and publication of findings. “Delayed publishing is criminal; it’s nonsensical,” he says. “It’s an artifact from an irrational, almost religious belief” in the peer-review system.
Climaquiddick was a particularly egregious case of it, but the whole system is broken. And this is what leads to so much crap science, not just in climate, but in nutrition and other areas. It doesn’t get properly reviewed or argued.
They can either spur or prevent it. It’s amazing how much we still don’t know about this subject, and how so much conventional wisdom, especially about diet, is utterly wrong.
I have been publishing comparisons of data with climate models outputs for about two years. The climate models used by the IPCC clearly cannot simulate Earth’s surface temperatures, precipitation or sea ice area. Additionally, there are numerous scientific research papers that are very critical of how climate models perform specific functions. Looking at those papers independently, the faults do not appear too bad, but collectively they indicate the models are fatally flawed.
In my book Climate Models Fail, I have collected my past findings about climate models, and illustrated others, and I’ve presented highlights from the research papers critical of climate models. I would be happy to forward a link to a free copy of Climate Models Fail to your offices for your personal use. Please have one of your staff members leave a comment at my blog Climate Observations if that interests you.
I’m quite confident that it won’t interest the fool.
It’s suffering from permanent paradigm paralysis, and it’s time to put it down:
Paradigm paralysis is the inability or refusal to see beyond the current models of thinking. The vast amount of scientific and political capital invested in the IPCC has become self-reinforcing, so it is not clear how move past this paralysis as long as the IPCC remains in existence. The wickedness of the climate change problem makes if difficult to identify points of irrefutable failure in either the science or the policies, although the IPCC’s insistence that the pause is irrelevant and temporary could provide just such a refutation if the pause continues. In any event, there is a growing realization of that neither the science or policy efforts are making much progress, and particularly in view of the failure climate models to predict the stagnation in warming, and that perhaps it is time to step back and see if we can do a better job of understanding and predicting climate variability and change and reducing societal and ecosystem vulnerabilities.