SPPI ScareWatch
Dangerous Climate Change Is Coming Print E-mail
Written by Christopher Monckton   
Thursday, 30 April 2009
“Dangerous Climate Change is Coming”
by Christopher Monckton | April 30, 2009

The Scare:
Two papers published in Nature in spring 2009 say that the rise in global temperature is unlikely to remain below the politically-defined threshold of “dangerous climate change”, if global economic growth continues at its current pace. The papers are based on computer simulations of the climate response to greenhouse-gas emissions.

Policymakers have adopted a goal of keeping the global rise in mean surface temperatures to no more than 2 C° (3.6 F°) above pre-industrial levels.

Myles Allen et al. simulate the mean “global warming” that would result from a given cumulative carbon emission. They conclude that a trillion tonnes of carbon emissions (about 3.7 trillion tonnes of CO2, roughly half of which has already been emitted) produces a “most likely” warming of 2 C° (3.6 F°).

Malte Meinshausen et al. take a slightly different tack by modelling the probability of global temperature rises across a range of greenhouse-gas emissions scenarios. They find that total emissions from 2000 to 2050 of about 1,400 gigatonnes of CO2 yields a 50% probability of exceeding 2 C° warming by the end of the 21st century. Emissions for the last seven years were almost 250 gigatonnes, implying that even without future increases in CO2 emissions the total emissions from 2000-2050 may well exceed this 50% probability.

The Truth:
Nature is one of many “scientific” journals that have openly declared an editorial prejudice in favor of a frankly alarmist viewpoint on the climate.
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"Wet Office" Issues a Scarewatch Print E-mail
Written by Christopher Monckton   
Thursday, 16 April 2009
The scare: For years, scientists, politicians, journalists, academics, and schoolteachers have been fabricating lurid and imaginative disaster stories about the supposed environmental impact of anthropogenic “global warming”. There have been apocalyptic predictions about soaring temperatures, Arctic ice-melt, sea-level rise, hurricanes, extreme-weather events of all kinds, species extinction, etc., etc. These scare stories have little basis in scientific reality: they are pure inventions, usually designed to attract funding or increase circulation.
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“‘Global warming’ will kill 6 billion” Print E-mail
Written by Christopher Monckton   
Monday, 16 March 2009
The scare: In March 2009, Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber, director of a grand-sounding pressure-group called the “Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research”, said that “global warming” of 7 Fahrenheit degrees would wipe out all but 1 billion of Earth’s 7 billion human population.

Mr. Schellnhuber said, “In a very cynical way, it’s a triumph for science, because at last we have stabilized something – namely the estimate of the carrying capacity of the planet – fewer than 1 billion people.” The planet, of course, is somehow currently carrying seven times that number. The previous month, Dr. James Hansen of NASA had predicted that “global warming” would raise sea level by 75 meters – equivalent to 246 feet.
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“Cracked earth may cause ‘global warming’” Print E-mail
Written by Christopher Monckton   
Saturday, 21 February 2009
The scare: In mid-February 2009, Discovery News announced that “a new study” had found that cracks in dry soil exhale large quantities of gas, “perhaps enough to affect ‘global warming’”.

Noam Weisbrod of Ben Gurion University of the Negev and a team of researchers monitored a crack about 6 ft 6 in long and a yard deep for two years in the Negev Desert is Israel. Each night, they watched as warm air in the crack drew water vapor out of the surrounding rock, and lifted it into the cold evening air.
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Sea Level Rise Print E-mail
Written by Christopher Monckton   
Monday, 09 February 2009

The scare: An article published in early February 2009 by Jonathan Leake, the environment editor of The Times of London, said “The ice caps are melting so fast that the world’s oceans are rising more than twice as fast as they were in the 1970s.”
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“Hudson air crash caused by ‘global warming’” Print E-mail
Written by Christopher Monckton   
Monday, 19 January 2009
The scare: In late January 2009, Time magazine blamed the bird-strike that brought down an Airbus passenger aircraft in the Hudson River, New York, on “global warming”. This was the latest in a long series of articles in scientifically-unaware mainstream news media, blaming real or imagined climate events on “global warming”. Such alarmism defies Occam’s razor, the philosophical principle by which the simplest explanation of an event is nearly always the true explanation. The Time article said that “Wildlife mitigation” was the official term for avoiding bird strikes. A report published in June 2008 by the Federal Aviation Administration had found that since 1990 the number of bird strikes had quadrupled, from 1,759 in 1990 to a record 7,666 in 2007. According to Time, “Officials cite a number of possible causes for the increase”, including “habitat destruction and climate change”, which “have disrupted migratory patterns”. Time adds, “Al Gore should be very proud of himself.”
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“2009 will be one of the five warmest years on record” Print E-mail
Written by Christopher Monckton   
Monday, 12 January 2009
The scare: In early January 2008, as part of an apparently-coordinated spate of stories in the international news media about “global warming” intended to distract public attention from the coldest start to a Northern-Hemisphere winter in at least 30 years and the end of the coldest year for almost a decade, Reuters ran a story saying that scientists at the Hadley Center for Forecasting in the UK had proclaimed that 2009 will be “the warmest year since 2005” and “one of the top-five warmest on record”, at “more than 0.4 °C above the long-term average”.
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Melting Greenland ice “will drown coastlines” Print E-mail
Written by Christopher Monckton   
Thursday, 08 January 2009
The scare: In early January 2008, Stephen Schneider, a biologist turned climatologist, put up a blog posting to say that “We cannot pin down whether sea levels will rise a few feet or a few meters in the next century or two”; that there is a “potential for up to 7 meters of sea-level rise stored as ice on Greenland”; that “Greenland is apparently melting at an unprecedented rate, and way faster than any of our theories or models predicted”; that “mounting evidence from ice cores says probably there is unprecedented melting going on right now”; that “another decade or two of such scientifically-documented acceleration of melting could indeed imply we will get ... meters of sea-level rise”; that “another 5 meters of potential sea level rise lurks ... in West Antarctica”; and that “this is a gamble with Laboratory Earth that we can’t afford to lose.”
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Yet another “moment of fateful decision” Print E-mail
Written by Christopher Monckton   
Wednesday, 07 January 2009
The scare: At the December 2008 UN climate conference at Poznan, held during the coldest commencement of the European winter in 30 years, former vice-president Al Gore said that the human species had arrived at yet another “moment of fateful decision”, because “our home, Earth, is in danger”. He said he would state “a few facts, if only to underscore the urgency of our task”, and “we cannot negotiate with the facts”, the first of which was the “unrestrained dumping of 70 million tons of ‘global warming’ pollution into the thin shelf of atmosphere surrounding our planet every 24 hours”. Scientists had “for several years now warned us that we are moving dangerously close to several so-called tipping points that could within less than 10 years make it impossible to avoid irretrievable damage to the planet's habitability”.
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