Where The Sun Don’t Shine: Climate Alarmists’ Thinking

[Geee]

Issues & Insights

‘We’re building,” reads the headline of an op-ed written by Sen. Bernie Sanders for the British Guardian, “Congress’ strongest-ever climate bill.” Why? “Because the planet is in peril.” If so, it’s not because of human greenhouse gas production, says one group of researchers.

But scientific findings are no deterrent to predatory politicians. Backed by nothing more than a bloated certitude, the Vermont socialist declares “the planet will face enormous and irreversible damage” if “the United States, China and the rest of the world do not act extremely aggressively to cut carbon emissions.”

 

Man-made carbon dioxide emissions – the political left’s go-to whipping boy. Human CO2 emissions, in the febrile minds of Sanders and other members of the climate doomsday cult, is responsible for a nearly uncountable number of ills: hotter temperatures, more potent storms, wildfires, melting ice caps and glaciers, armed conflict, migration, poverty, famine, drought, floods, species extinction, weeds, pests … and a host of conditions and events so absurd no half-rational person would ever think of them.

Virulent though it might be, Trump Derangement Syndrome is hardly the mental health menace that Carbon Obsession Disorder has been for decades

Occasionally alarmists will point out that methane is a greenhouse gas. Yet their fixation has long been on CO2. But let’s be clear: Other factors impact climate and temperature, and few can match the power of the sun (which Democrats should be confident in, since they worship at the altar of the solar panel). According to the researchers who recently published a peer-reviewed paper in Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics, the most recent United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, whose value we’ve assessed, “is grounded in narrow and incomplete data about the sun’s total solar irradiance.”

Using different datasets than those cited by the IPCC – which chooses its datasets based on their potential to ratchet up fear – the authors concluded “that the global temperature changes since the mid-19th century have been mostly due to natural cycles, chiefly long-term changes in the energy emitted by the sun.”

One of the authors, Richard C. Willson, a NASA science team leader, says straight out that our “climate is determined primarily by the radiation” produced by the sun. He also clears up some of the misconceptions the alarmists have been spreading.

[Geee]

IPCC proposed banishment of fossil fuels would place most of the world’s population at risk

The AR6 Climate Change 2021Report just released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), an intergovernmental body of the United Nations, has called out a “code red for humanity“ that “must sound a death knell for…fossil fuels, before they destroy our planet.”

The report from the IPCC has failed to acknowledge that the introduction of oil just over 100 years ago has been overwhelmingly beneficial for the prosperity of the world’s population growth to 8 billion from about 1 billion that is shown clearly in their own United Nations graph. The IPCC goal to banish fossil fuels will place most of the world’s population at risk, like the medieval times.

The members of the IPCC seem oblivious to the facts of how life was without the fossil fuels industry just 120 years ago when we had NO medications and medical equipment, NO vaccines, the same vaccines that need refrigeration, and refrigeration needs electricity, especially in the hospital sector where redundant generation capacity is a mandate. NO water filtration systems, NO sanitation systems. NO fertilizers to help feed billions, NO pesticides to control locusts and other pests. NO communications systems, including cell phones, computers, and I Pads, NO vehicles, NO airlines that now move 4 billion people around the world, NO cruise ships that now move 25 million passengers around the world, NO merchant ships that are now moving billions of dollars of products monthly throughout the world, NO tires for vehicles, and NO asphalt for roads, NO militaries, and NO space program.

All the above infrastructures are made with products made from oil derivatives. Before the 1900’s we had NONE of the 6,000 products from oil and petroleum products. By ceasing oil production and fracking, the supply chain to refineries will be severed and production of various fuels for transportation, and the derivatives to make products would be terminated.

The IPCC is a religious and political organization that is systematically driven to catastrophize fossil fuels’ climate impacts and ignore fossil fuels’ benefits. The IPCC’s predictions and prescriptions are unconscionable in that they are reflecting support for the 11 million children dying every year being experienced in poorer countries. Those infant fatalities are from the preventable causes of diarrhea, malaria, neonatal infection, pneumonia, preterm delivery, or lack of oxygen at birth as many developing countries have no, or minimal, access to those products from oil derivatives enjoyed by the wealthy and healthy countries

[Geee]

The IPCC’s attribution methodology is fundamentally flawed

One day after the IPCC released the AR6 I published a paper in Climate Dynamics showing that their “Optimal Fingerprinting” methodology on which they have long relied for attributing climate change to greenhouse gases is seriously flawed and its results are unreliable and largely meaningless. Some of the errors would be obvious to anyone trained in regression analysis, and the fact that they went unnoticed for 20 years despite the method being so heavily used does not reflect well on climatology as an empirical discipline.

 

My paper is a critique of “Checking for model consistency in optimal fingerprinting” by Myles Allen and Simon Tett, which was published in Climate Dynamics in 1999 and to which I refer as AT99. Their attribution methodology was instantly embraced and promoted by the IPCC in the 2001 Third Assessment Report (coincident with their embrace and promotion of the Mann hockey stick). The IPCC promotion continues today: see AR6 Section 3.2.1. It has been used in dozens and possibly hundreds of studies over the years. Wherever you begin in the Optimal Fingerprinting literature (example), all paths lead back to AT99, often via Allen and Stott (2003). So its errors and deficiencies matter acutely.