Growing up is a weird notion to wrap your mind around. As you go through life, your perspectives on almost everything will change. How you define success will change as well. Things that you thought were important at the age of 35 will be useless when you're 65. You may not realize it now, but everything will shift.
At age 4 success is not peeing in your pants.
At age 12 success is having friends.
At age 16 success is having a drivers license.
At age 20 success is having sex.
At age 35 success is having money.
At age 50 success is having money.
At age 60 success is having sex.
At age 70 success is having a drivers license.
At age 75 success is having friends.
At age 80 success is not peeing in your pants.
It all comes full circle, whether you like it or not.
Share this hilarious truth about life with others.
I am not a scientist, but I can read! There are people whose opinions I value and there are those who are clearly motivated by being rent seekers feeding off the "climate change/global warming industry". The sceptics are accused of being in the pay of "big oil" and the like. There is little comment on all those organisations/institutions who are in the pay of "big government", including thousands of climate scientists.
Don Aitken, a former Vice Chancellor of the University of Canberra is amongst those I admire, others are Freeman Dyson, Nigel Lawson, James Spooner, Lord Fellowes, Lord Ridley, Deepak Lal, Ross McKittrick, Richard Lindzen and John Christy. All highly intelligent people whose views should not be lightly dismissed.
The apparently simple question like the one in the title of this essay is in fact almost impossible to answer unless it is specified further. Even then, it has been argued that that it implies a quantity — average global temperature — that is both mathematically and thermodynamically impossible to calculate. Interested readers should go to the link to explore further, but a short-cut is that it is as sensible as referring to the ‘average exchange rate’ of all currencies in the world today, or the average of all the telephone numbers in the telephone directory.
Perhaps a prior question is: what is the optimum temperature for human beings and human societies? The assumption underlying the notion of ‘catastrophic’ anthropogenic global warming, after all, is that we are moving away from some kind of optimum towards something dangerous. What is that optimum? It can’t be the period before the Industrial revolution, because that was icily unpleasant, as Judith Curry and others have pointed out. Given the contribution that more carbon dioxide makes to the lives of plants, and therefore animals, I can’t see why another degree or so would be other than beneficial.
But, as I have said before, if one wants to talk about the global warming or ‘climate change’ issue, there is no help for it: one has to use the data that we have. And they are not much help, either, because another prior question is: ‘Warming or not — from when to when?’. Over the last half-million years? The graph looks like this.
The present is to the right. On this ice-core evidence (Antarctic) previous interglacials were warmer. You don’t like that — too long ago? What about the time since our own interglacial began? The graph looks like this.
Yes, more ice cores, from one place. Alas, that’s all we really have. You’ll notice that the modern period is of much the same warmth as some earlier periods, but not as much as that of the Holocene Optimum. So are we warming? On the evidence of that graph, we seem to go through warm and cold periods, and maybe the long-term trend is a cooling one. Don’t like that? Let’s get to our own present and recent past. Here’s a graph I used a little time ago. It doesn’t go quite to the present.
My grandparents, whom I remember quite well, were born in the 1880s, so this whole period is relevant to me. What I take from this graph is more warm and cool phases, though of shorter duration that in the previous graph. There were rising warmth periods, of about the same duration and trend, from 1910 to 1940, and from about 1975 to 2000. There were cooling periods from 1880 to 1910, and from 1940 to 1975. There has been a relatively flat period from 2000 to the present, though this graph only shows the first part of it.
What are we to make of all this? Let’s leave carbon dioxide out of it for a moment. The three graphs show that the planet goes through phases of warming and cooling. There are long phases, medium phases and short phases. We seem to be in a short cooling or static phase at the moment, compared to earlier periods. This period will get cooler or warmer in due course. There are many candidate explanations for why all this happens and has happened, and we can leave them out for the the moment, too.
But what seems almost indisputable to me is that there hasn’t been some kind of special ‘right’ climate for humans. Our species has had to cope with more and less warmth, as we do at the moment. We haven’t had to deal with a really cold period since the 17th and early 18th centuries, but we will be much better prepared for the next one. If we go into a new warming phase, we’ll cope with that too. Eight years ago, in my ‘Cool Look’ address to the Australian Planning Institute, I said I was prepared to accept the IPCC’s estimated average increase in temperature over the 20th century of 0.60 plus or minus 0.20C. I still am. Is it a problem? Not on the evidence of the graphs.
Is it unprecedented? That was the next issue — the orthodox position is that the warming of our period is unprecedented in human history (and must therefore be our fault). I repeat here a little of what I wrote then.
By 10,000 years ago the first small permanent settlements began to appear, as people assembled and domesticated animals, learned how to plant crops, and abandoned being hunter-gatherers. There were then, according to some estimates, about a million of our ancestors. It seems to me to be no coincidence at all that global temperatures had begun to level out. The evidence for these temperatures is based on Greenland and Antarctic ice-core data, and I need to say at once that what happened in Greenland or the South Polar regions may not have happened anywhere else. Average temperatures seem to have remained within a narrow band of about two to three degrees Celsius ever since, save on a few occasions, such as the Mediaeval Warm Period, when English monasteries grew grapes and made wine, and the later ‘Little Ice Age’, when the Thames froze in 1683 and a Frost Fair continued for two months on the ice. On the evidence, present average temperatures are similar to those in the first century AD.
On the face of it, there is nothing especially unprecedented about the 20th century temperature rise, given its ‘agreed’ size. Shifts up and down of that magnitude and more seem to have occurred in the past, and will presumably occur in the future. Climate change is not new, and occurs for reasons that can have nothing to do with us. Orbital changes, sunspots, volcanic eruptions and meteorites have effects on the earth’s climate, and these causes are external to us. We simply have to put up with the changes and adapt what we do to them. Whatever warming that is happening now, and whatever contribution we humans are making to it, have to be seen in that context.
Eight years have passed, a great deal more research has been done, and the science is still not at all settled. I’ll stick to what I wrote then.
Next:Are we causing the warming?
Further reading: I wrote an essay on what had happened since 2008 six years later, and you can see that here. The website has lots of pieces about warming and measurement, because it remains a central intellectual interest for me. My basic position is that what we have as data is just awful, and no basis for making public policy. But elected governments, responding to insistent cries of approaching doom from the Greens and their sympathisers, desperately search for data, any data, that would allow them to make good policy. I don’t believe such data exist, and that governments should do nothing. Alas, that is not a position that governments like at all — they will be accused of indolence or worse. So we have to discuss the data we have. Hence this essay, and others like it.
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A 'comment' from a certain David Brewer, in the Catallaxy Files last night-
"The global warming narrative is a long chain of causation from industrial emissions to climate disruption – industrial CO2 emissions are not absorbed, they increase radiative forcing, then that is amplified by more water vapour in the upper atmosphere, and the thus-tripled radiative effect then raises temperatures which leads to all sorts of climate shifts and consequent biosphere changes.
The first link in the chain is none too strong – most emissions are reabsorbed and the reabsorption rate is not falling. But the key weak point is step 3 – the amplification of the initial radiative forcing by extra water vapour in the upper troposphere. This is undemonstrated, and cannot be occurring in the way the models say, since the temperature in that part of the atmosphere is hardly going up at all. Just like Semmelweis, we don’t know why, but the fact is the amplification of radiative forcing is not happening.
And so, logically enough, from that point on in the global warming narrative, nothing is happening the way it is supposed to. No rapid surface warming, no rapid ocean temperature rise, no acceleration of sea level rise, no significant change in droughts, floods, cyclones, the monsoon, or other weather patterns, no increase in extinctions, climate-induced deforestation, coral reef loss from water temperature rise etc etc etc.
What is really amazing and in need of explanation is how supposedly intelligent people are so sure of the entire narrative when they couldn’t even tell you the steps in the story, and have no idea what the real evidence is for any of them."
Some extracted ,out of context, but useful quotes. The pursuit of equality comes at the expense of liberty.
Left wing philosophers refuse to let the facts get in the way- If you have a good theory, forget about the reality.
Like ancient Druids pleading with the gods for good seasons, world leaders and their aides recently devoted a fortnight in Paris to pleading with each other to stop global temperatures from rising more than an average 2C above pre-industrial levels, when the Earth was emerging from the Little Ice Age.
Of the 196 nations represented at the COP21 conference, 154 were developing economies. Regardless of the direction of world temperatures, they left Paris happy that the UN’s Green Climate Fund, which aims to reach $US100 billion a year by 2020, will give them cash for anything they can pass off as remotely related to their intended national contributions to world CO2 reduction. They argue this is only fair. Poor countries fare worst from climate change and must be compensated for unspecified damage and their share of repairing the West’s legacy. You can bet $US100bn a year won’t do it.
Overwhelmingly, the money for the fund will come from 42 guilt-racked wealthy nations. That is their moral responsibility. They caused the warming. They threaten the planet. It’s time for them to repay their climate debts.
It matters not that there is no empirical scientific evidence to support these claims. Even the 2C target is not based on science, it was originally plucked out of thin air by the European People’s Party for election purposes. But then climate change is not about credible scientific evidence. It has its roots in Marxism, and ultimately the Green Fund is presided over by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, run by Costa Rican Marxist Christiana Figueres. The “paradigm-shifting” fund will provide employment for an army of green bureaucrats who will offer “concessional finance” for the development needs of less advanced countries.
China, the leading emitter, venting one billion tonnes of CO2 a year more than it admits to, has been adroit in dealing with the politics. It approaches its domestic air quality crisis under the banner of climate action and so turns a domestic necessity into a global virtue. From this and its lack of interest in aid for itself, China projects moral authority and, while there is no cap on its emissions and only a promise that they will peak by 2030, promotes emission restraints for others, for its own competitive advantage.
India has adopted a similar line. The world’s third largest emitter is set to overtake China. It will not accept constraints on development and does not spell out when emissions will peak. Like China, it will adopt cleaner energy to improve air quality and will claim UN compensation.
Having successfully captured the West, post-Paris, the noose will tighten. Despite assurances that intended nationally determined contributions, delivered before the conference, would keep temperature increases to no more than 2C, we are now told that even if fully implemented, temperatures will rise by 2.7C by 2100. So the Paris agreement will “only lay the groundwork” and all those hard-won pledges were based on a miscalculation.
How disappointing. But there is now an aspirational 1.5C ambition on the table that Figueres quickly endorsed. Should it ever be agreed to, expect more ambit claims. And without a Tony Abbott in Canberra or a Stephen Harper in Ottawa, no world leader utters a peep in protest.
Caught in a moral dilemma of its own making, the developed world concedes its culpability. Its representatives succumb to propaganda and bullying and credulously accept bogus science and catastrophism. They pay no heed to alternative views. They consider abandoning fossil fuels, the world’s cheapest, most efficient and wealth-creating power source, and baulk at nuclear alternatives.
Instead, they pour hundreds of billions of dollars into costly, in-efficient renewable energy, robbing their industries of flexibility and competitiveness and, punishing the world’s poorest citizens.
Indeed, Western capitalist societies have given up on rational thinking. They embrace junk science and junk economics and adopt wealth-destroying postmodern pseudo-economics, which teaches that taxpayer subsidies can produce desirable “economic transformation” and faster growth. Pigs may also fly.
Climate change has cowed once great powers into meekly surrendering sovereignty and independent thought to unelected bureaucrats in Geneva. From the White House to the Lodge, private choice now runs a distant second to collectivist visions.
Although only an aspiration now, the 1.5C target will be relentlessly pursued until adopted. The media, in step with the Green Machine, will bombard us with climate alarmism to the applause of the leader of the free world, Barack Obama, who says: “My mission is to make the world aware that climate change is a bigger threat than terrorism.” Really? That’s serious. Clearly authority, not common sense or science, now rules the world.
While some activists such as James Hansen may criticise the Paris agreement as “worthless words”, those such as Figueres, interested in reconfiguring the world’s political and economic structure, will be pleased with progress. We are another step closer to her ideal of ‘‘centralised transformation”, with the UN at the authoritarian centre, calling the shots and doling out transfer payments from the rich to ensure poor countries remain her mendicants. As UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon says: “If we really want to put an end to global poverty, if we really want to make the world healthier and planet Earth environmentally sustainable, we have first to address the climate change issue.”
The only certainty to come out of COP21 is that there will be a COP22.
In 1589, Princess Anne of Denmark left to marry King James VI of Scotland. En route, her boat was struck by storms. Someone had to be blamed and, as was standard for the time, witches were the usual suspects.
More than 100 suspected witches were duly arrested and at least four people were burned at the stake. The fact James and Anne went on to be happily married, apparently unmolested by tempests, must have reassured them that justice had been done.
The supposed connection between human activity and the weather is an instinctive one and perhaps helps explain the remarkable persistence of incorrect views on climate change.
Every time there is a big cyclone a finger is soon pointed to the modern witch of carbon dioxide emissions. This continues despite there being no evidence that extreme weather events have increased because of global warming. The latest reportof the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change admits that “evidence suggests slight decreases in the frequency of tropical cyclones making landfall in the North Atlantic and the South Pacific”.
A significant issue with climate change science is that often only one side of the debate is heard, so clear exaggerations and untruths can remain unchallenged.
The US military pioneered the use of so-called red teams whose job was to argue against prevailing wisdom, making its strategies more robust. Climate change science would benefit from more red team analysis.
For example, if you listen to the mainstream media, you would not realise that since the last major attempt to forge a climate change agreement in Copenhagen six years ago, the science has become less certain and gives us less reason to worry. This is primarily because the globe’s climate seems less sensitive to increases in carbon dioxide than previously thought.
In just the past 18 years we have experienced one-third of the increase in atmospheric carbon dioxide since the Industrial Revolution, but temperatures have not increased as expected.
Satellite data shows no or only minimal warming, and surface-based measures show a warming rate far below projected climate models. At a US Senate hearing this week, John Christy, a lead author on previous IPCC reports, presented evidence that, on average, climate models over-estimated the rate of warming by three times compared with what actually has occurred.
If these models cannot replicate the past, how can we rely on them to predict the future?
The IPCC has recognised this uncertainty by winding down its estimates of how sensitive the climate is to carbon dioxide levels.
In 2007 it reported a possible range of 2C to 4.5C, whereas last year it reported a range of between 1.5C and 4.5C. More recent evidence indicates that the figures could be even lower.
The greatest uncertainty revolves around debates about the climate impact of aerosols in the atmosphere. A paper published this year in the Journal of Climate by Bjorn Stevens from the Hamburg-based Max Planck Institute for Meteorology argues that the impact of aerosols on climate is significantly smaller than the latest IPCC report assumes.
Using these estimates shows that the upper bound of climate sensitivity should not be 4.5C but just 2.2C.
That is pretty close to what we were told the world needed to avoid dangerous climate change. Readers who are paying attention will note that some green activists are now saying we need to keep warming below 1.5C rather than 2C.
When the facts change, so can your arguments.
Whatever the facts, too much weight is placed on conformity in climate change science — most widely demonstrated by the inane argument that “97 per cent of scientists agree”.
Presumably 97 per cent of pundits agreed in the power of witchcraft in the 16th century.
Science is not a democracy. Scientific knowledge progresses from the ruthless exposure of competing hypotheses to criticism. But who is doing that critique of climate change theories today?
Public funding of climate change science almost exclusively flows to one side of the debate. Even just a small sliver of the reported $US100 billion ($139bn) fund that Paris is creating for developing countries could make a difference.
We need red team funding of scientists who take a different view on climate change. Even if such teams ultimately take positions that are incorrect, by challenging the climate zeitgeist they would make our scientific knowledge stronger. That means the policies we implement would be based less on dogma and more on a true appreciation of how carbon dioxide emissions affect our world.
Matthew Canavan is a Nationals senator for Queensland.
At age 12 success is having friends.At age 16 success is having a drivers license.At age 20 success is having sex.At age 35 success is having money.At age 50 success is having money.At age 60 success is having sex.At age 70 success is having a drivers license.At age 75 success is having friends.At age 80 success is not peeing in your pants.It all comes full circle, whether you like it or not.Share this hilarious truth about life with others.May you always haveLove to Share,Health to Spare, andFriends who Care.....
