Human EventsWitch doctors shake medicine sticks, warn of climate apocalypse to comeBy: John Hayward
3/31/2014 02:38 PM
The release of the “climate change impact report” by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change certainly shed an interesting light on the decline fortunes of the Church of Global Warming. The response has been widespread disdain, given that all of the Church’s projections and computer models have been utterly wrong for nearly two decades. Everyone can see the game being played here: ramp up the hype as the data fizzles.
One of the climate report’s authors, Professor Richard Tol of Sussex University in England, actually withdrew from the team because he thought succeeding drafts were becoming too alarmist. He also made interesting points about how humans are more adaptable than some climate scientists assume, and how the possible benefits of modest climate change (whether man-made or not) are undersold by doomsday theorists. From a Reuters report:
Tol said the IPCC emphasized the risks of climate change far more than the opportunities to adapt. A Reuters count shows the final draft has 139 mentions of “risk” and 8 of “opportunity”.
Tol said farmers, for instance, could grow new crops if the climate in their region became hotter, wetter or drier. “They will adapt. Farmers are not stupid,” he said.
He said the report played down possible economic benefits of low levels of warming. Less cold winters may mean fewer deaths among the elderly, and crops may grow better in some regions.
“It is pretty damn obvious that there are positive impacts of climate change, even though we are not always allowed to talk about them,” he said. But he said temperatures were set to rise to levels this century that would be damaging overall.
But most of the U.N. panel sang a unified song of doom, without pausing to explain why anyone should take them seriously, after none of their previous predictions came to pass. The New York Times tells us what to expect when “The Day After Tomorrow” arrives, to quote the title of one of those scaremongering B.S. productions “climate experts” tend to applaud for “raising awareness,” even though they know it’s all a load of Hollywood crap.
The report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations group that periodically summarizes climate science, concluded that ice caps are melting, sea ice in the Arctic is collapsing, water supplies are coming under stress, heat waves and heavy rains are intensifying, coral reefs are dying, and fish and many other creatures are migrating toward the poles or in some cases going extinct.
The oceans are rising at a pace that threatens coastal communities and are becoming more acidic as they absorb some of the carbon dioxide given off by cars and power plants, which is killing some creatures or stunting their growth, the report found.
Organic matter frozen in Arctic soils since before civilization began is now melting, allowing it to decay into greenhouse gases that will cause further warming, the scientists said.
And the worst is yet to come, the scientists said in the second of three reports that are expected to carry considerable weight next year as nations try to agree on a new global climate treaty. In particular, the report emphasized that the world’s food supply is at considerable risk — a threat that could have serious consequences for the poorest nations.
“Nobody on this planet is going to be untouched by the impacts of climate change,” Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the intergovernmental panel, said at a news conference here on Monday.
And you can trust Rajendra Pachauri, because in 2007 he fell hook, line, and sinker for a bogus report about disappearing Himalayan glaciers that the IPCC later had to retract in embarrassment. He’s also been known to misrepresent independent reviews of IPCC reports, “joke” about shooting climate-change skeptics into outer space, and wished they would kill themselves by washing their faces with asbestos.
But for the Church of Global Warming, every day is Day One. Their tattered credibility is not an issue, because you’re supposed to forget the mountain of things they’ve been wrong about and take the latest apocalyptic warnings as gospel, even as they struggle to come up with a plausible explanation for the 17-year “pause” in global warming. Is it raining where you are right now? Global warming. Is it dry? Global warming. Hot? Cold? Too many hurricanes? Not enough hurricanes? You know how this works.
The Angry Sky Gods will surely destroy us all, scream the witch doctors… unless of course they don’t, because maybe they can’t. The IPCC really hedged its bets this time around, as the New York Times illustrates:
The report attempts to project how the effects will alter human society in coming decades. While the impact of global warming may actually be outweighed by factors like economic or technological change, the report found, the disruptions are nonetheless likely to be profound.
Oh. So it all might be “outweighed” by factors as vague as “economic or technological change.” When ten years passes and all their warnings are once again proved false, that will be their escape clause: We could not have anticipated the astounding economic and technological changes that invalidated our previous warnings of doom. But don’t you dare think you can ignore Warnings of Doom, 2024 edition!
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