Climate Barbie and the denier slur

Nasty Rebel Media refers to Canada’s Environment Minister, Catherine McKenna as “Climate Barbie”. Pretty mean. Ms. McKenna is well credentialled, has a real record of accomplishment before politics and can’t help that she’s blonde.

But the Climate Barbie nickname has its roots in the fact that McKenna, like a wind-up doll, insists on calling those of us who disagree – usually on rather well-founded grounds – with the climate change consensus “climate deniers”. Which is as insulting as it is idiotic.

As Sheila Gunn Reid of The Rebel suggested – having coined the nickname – we’ll stop calling McKenna Climate Barbie when she drops “climate denier” from her lexicon. There is plenty of room for reasoned debate and dissent from the climate change consensus. A non-Barbie Minister would recognize that fact and stop slagging the people who take climate change seriously enough to question mainstream data, models and prescriptions. Repeating, by rote, “climate denier” whenever confronted with disagreement puts McKenna firmly in the Barbie camp.

Now, she asks that we stop calling her that because her young daughters might hear and that would be a bad thing. In fact, her daughters, on hearing their mother referred to so pejoratively might ask why their mother seems content to mouth platitudes rather than digging into the positions on both sides of the question.

McKenna is not an idiot. However, for the moment, her role as the all in spokesperson for an increasingly untenable, model based, scare story which is designed to justify massive tax increases for ordinary Canadians, forces her to sound like one. Just like Barbie.

Clive James on the failure of the Global Warming story

This article has been mentioned all over the conservative and climate sceptic blogosphere. Most of the links had it behind a paywall, this link is open.

James makes the point that even with Trump walking away from Paris and the science becoming less alarming by the minute, the climate change scam will take a while to fade into well-deserved obscurity. Too many scientists, policy wonks, journalists and politicians have nailed their reputations to the eternal truths of CO2 driven global warming. Too many huge companies stand to make too much money from “solving” this non-problem with all manner of pointless, but gratifyingly expensive, solutions – wind, solar…biomass. Wonderfully corrupt Third World governments and their enablers at the UN are not about to jump off the guilt driven gravy train.

By walking away from Paris and the unicorn fart economics of the “Green Fund”, Trump has killed climate change hysteria and its funding stone dead; but like a headless chicken, there may be a few circuits of the barnyard left in the beast.

Paris Plop

Heading into the final hours of COP21 – even with the traditional 24 hour extension – it is pretty apparent that:

• there will be no legally binding agreement – John Kerry himself has finally acknowledged that he couldn’t get it through Congress
• that the West is not actually willing to give the less developed nations of the world trillions of dollars to deal with “climate change” and the damage already suffered due to so called “historic emissions”
• that whatever agreement is finally signed – and there is always an agreement even if it is only to meet again – the wind has gone out of the climate alarmist sails
• that this entire exercise is not about science and it is barely about climate, rather it is about using a scare to force the West to transfer massive amounts of money to the developing world

The amusing part of the entire charade is that, when you look at the world relative to its state in 1992 when the whole climate madness began in Rio, the less developed world has radically developed.

India had a purchasing power parity GDP of 1124 billion in 1992, it was 7375 billion in 2014.

China had a purchasing power parity GDP of 1438.13 billion in 1992, it was 17617 billion in 2014.

Unsurprisingly, India is none too eager to stop buring fossil fuels and China’s great concession has been to accept unlimited growth in emissions until 2030 when, it really does promise to start reducing emissions.

Whack-a-doodle warmists and greenies will, as per usual, be sad when the Paris Conference ends with a non-enforcable damp squib of a not-a-treaty agreement. The more intelligent of them will be very depressed indeed because the wheels continue to fall of the science as the Pause lengthens, the models depart further from the observations and, oops, Arctic ice extent is the highest its been in a decade.

The “science” behind the climate hysteria is crumbling and the green dream of a reversion to horse and buggy days is collapsing faster than the price of oil. The fake consensus is under attack, the models are failing and, despite the great and the good all claiming that we’ll all be baked, the general public has turned away from global warming alarm.

2.65 Billion: It’s Harper’s Fault

(link)
Assorted rightie bloggers are expressing their outrage that Trudeau has committed Canada to spending 2.65 billion dollars helping 3rd world kleptocracies “fight climate change”.

As I said at Kate’s and repeated at BCF,

Idiot.

However, the real problem lies with Harper and the Cons not digging in and discrediting the global warming farce while they had a majority. 20 million tossed at sceptical researchers – ideally led by Steve MacIntyre – and the whole scam could have been buried forever.

Instead, Harper and the Cons pretended that global warming was a thing. They didn’t actually do anything about it; but they did not use their time in government to demolish the Green Blob.

20 million versus 2.65 billion simply because the Conservatives were chickenshits.

Harper might have had an excuse with the minorities. He had no excuse with a majority. He knew the science was bogus and the economics laughable. But he wanted to avoid offending the climate true believers. So he punted the file and we are stuck with 2.65 billion now and carbon taxes and, Lord knows, what else.

A twenty million dollar Commission looking at the science and the economics could have torpedoed the crazier claims of the warmists and built a solid wall of science preventing Trudeau and Dion and the other dimwits from fashionably screwing the economy.

Harper lacked the courage of his convictions on this file and many others. Good riddance.

Winter is Coming

Oh Dear….

You see those little lines up there? the blue one goes down the green one is flat. Well those are the trends of the satellite temperature measurements for the last couple of decades.

CO2 up, temperature flat or declining.

The nest time a Canadian politician talks about cap and trade or carbon taxes ask him (or her) when was the last time the worldwide satellite temperature gauges showed any warming.

Bet they won’t answer. Because they don’t know and it’s our job to tell them.

Shooting the Climate Cripples

I started writing about global warming and climate change at least a decade ago. At that point the warmists believed that CO2 was responsible for global warming, that the ice caps were melting, that sea level were rising and would rise meters rather the millimeters, that climate models – so long as they were peer reviewed – accurately reflected the Climate and should be relied upon for policy discussions, that natural variability of any sort played next to no role in the earth’s temperature, the temperature sensitivity to a doubling of CO2 was 3 to 7 or more degrees Celsius and that the “science was settled”.

In that decade virtually everyone of the items in this catechism has been proven wrong or highly exaggerated. The problem is that it takes a long time for the policy built on incorrect science and general hysteria to be turned around. The less important CO2 is to actual climate the more important it becomes to the policy fanatics for whom the science has always been subsumed to the politics.

Global warming hysteria was a tool in the hands of people who did not like the way in which the world worked or was likely to work. If you want to reduce consumption in the West and transfer money to the poor nations of the world (and you hate markets) you need a pivot for your lever and global warming was perfect. After all, if the fate of the world hangs in the balance you can and will convince decent people to pressure their politicians to “do something” and politicians, not being very brave and not being encouraged to do their own due diligence, will vote for “doing something” no matter how objectively hare-brained or cost ineffective.

Once you had the politicians falling over themselves to be seen as “Green” by their equally ignorant constituents, the science didn’t actually matter. Until and unless Nature gave the realists hardcore ammunition. Hardcore talking points the green blob and the wind spinners couldn’t dismiss. Headline stuff to counter and destroy the alarmist pap which the political end of the IPCC grafts on to the science in the Summaries for Policy Makers.

Now realists have two, fundamental, points to hammer home to the politicians – satellite records showing 18+ years of no warming and record breaking ice extent at the Poles. The End, it is not a pause or a hiatus as there is no certainty if or when warming will resume, of warming is well acknowledged by peer reviewed science, albeit indirectly, as there has been a surge in papers explaining the End. (Between 50 and 80, usually contradictory explanations have been proffered with no “consensus” emerging.) The rapid expansion of Polar ice has also been confirmed and various ding-a-ling theories as to how this is just what you’d expect with global warming are being peddled about with no great success.

Those two, peer acknowledged facts need to be ground into the political class’s brains until they are terrified to go to a political meeting or a community event because they know some member of the public, maybe several, will ask them how they justify (insert CO2 policy) when the world isn’t warming and the ice caps are growing. Do it over and over.
The science behind CAGW was always weak and the economics made no sense without positing the worst of worse cases, now it is time to bring that home to the mentally lazy, economically indolent and scientifically illiterate political class.

Climate Explainations

I used to write about climate a lot but when things got busy stopped.

When I did write I tended to suggest that a) the models were uncertain, b) natural variability was a much bigger deal than the warmists admitted, c) things like the Sun, the PDO and the vagaries of the Atlantic Ocean might have had something to do with the warming to 1998. I was certainly willing to concede that humans made some contribution to any warming which might have occurred but I suggested that it was unlikely to be just the CO2 emitting side of human activity. Finally, I suggested that the less significant CO2 was in the scheme of things the less it should signify in policy. In other words, I didn’t think the various carbon dioxide reduction schemes were worth the money.

The warmists, two or three years ago, denied each and every one of these ideas. The warmist position was that the Earth was warming fast and that man made CO2 was the only possible cause of such warming. They cited the IPCC Fourth Report to support their assertions and suggested that anything less was not peer reviewed and thus worthless.

and then, well and then came the pause. And with the pause the realization that the models and reality were gradually drifting apart. And with that drift there arose the need to explain where the heat in the models could be hiding and why it was hiding there.

The scientific immaturity of climate science was on full display as no less than 38 separate and often contradictory explanations for the pause were put forward. Many of which would have been heresy only a couple of years before.

As the explanations have been launched we’ve seen the curious spectacle of grown scientists coming up with enough cooling to overwhelm the observed warming all together. And many of these explanations involve the Sun, ocean currents, clouds and a host of other variables which we were assured could not have any effect on climate just a few short years ago.

It turns out that, in general, the climate science community has been exaggerating the precision of its models and the robustness of its physics. In the face of the unpredicted pause they have had to admit that maybe Nature and not Man might be responsible for at least a bit of the warming which has, well, disappeared.

The one thing which has become absolutely clear: the IPCC science and the policy recommendations based up on it are ungrounded in any serious, measurable, predictable science at all. There is no current theory of climate which implicates CO2 exclusively. And there is a great deal of uncertainty as to what the temperature’s sensitivity to CO2 actually is.

All of which means that any economic or energy policy based upon the theory that CO2 will create extreme climate change needs to be discarded at once before any more money is wasted.

More Climate Hilarity

Back in 2007 – in a post I cannot find anymore – I suggested that the wheels were falling off the global warming bus.

The absence of warming for the past 17 years has pretty much put paid to the ideas that a) global warming is an imminent problem, b) that the models “climate science” has relied upon are anything other than bogus, c) that CO2 has a control knob function so far as temperature is concerned.

Back in 2007 if you suggested that global warming might, possibly, have an explanation other than CO2 the flying monkeys of climate change – and John Cross – would descend upon you with shrill cries of heresy and “The IPCC says”. And it is important to remember that the IPCC concluded that having looked at all the variables the only possible explanation for observed warming was the increase in CO2. To suggest the Sun or natural variability was to “deny the science”.

Which makes today’s article in Nature all the more delicious:

From the “settled science” department. It seems even Dr. Kevin Trenberth is now admitting to the cyclic influences of the AMO and PDO on global climate. Neither “carbon” nor “carbon dioxide” is mentioned in this article that cites Trenberth as saying: “The 1997 to ’98 El Niño event was a trigger for the changes in the Pacific, and I think that’s very probably the beginning of the hiatus,” watts up with that

Realistically, the warmists will try to have it both ways: CO2 will still be a warming threat but natural variability, cycles, that sort of thing, can be used to explain the “hiatus”. My ten year old can find the logical fallacy in that position.

Now, once natural variability has been admitted as even a partial explanation, the entire edifice of climate is open to question. For example: perhaps the surface temperature record has been incorrectly adjusted. Perhaps there is more to the Urban Heat Island effect than was originally supposed. Perhaps the sensitivity of temperature to CO2 is close to 1 degree per doubling than to 4.

When a theory goes wrong it goes wrong in every particular. You can’t pick and choose. If natural variability is implicated in the observed hiatus then it is also implicated in the observed warming which preceded the pause (if pause it is.) The models do not include the oceanic cycles and, if those cycles matter as Trenberth now suggests they do, the models must be junked and begun again from scratch.

Ultimately, the implication of the Nature article is that, on the evidence, the null hypotheses, namely that CO2 is not significantly responsible for increases in temperature, has survived the worst climate science can do.

The policy implications are extraordinary. Essentially, the world is spending a billion dollars a day to reduce the emission of a substance which, on the evidence, has little or nothing to do with climate change.

That should stop. Now.

Where, oh where is the Heat

Those following along at home will know that the warmists have been having a terrible time figuring out where “the heat” predicted by their models could possibly be. Surface temperature is at a standstill but CO2 is still going up.

One good place for the heat to be hiding is at the bottom of the deep blue sea. The great advantage of this hiding place for the warmists is that we have very bad instrumental coverage of the oceans and virtually none below 2000 meters. Perfect place for the heat to hide until it jumps out and says “Boo” in fifty years.

Except there is one way of measuring the heat content of the oceans and that is as a matter of the rise in ocean levels. The oceans rise for two basic reasons: melt water from land held ice (ocean ice makes no difference to sea level because it is already displacing as much water as a melt would produce) and thermal expansion. As water gets warmer it expands.

Well, sadly for my warmist friends sea level rise, while still rising slightly, has slowed down since 2004 and sea level rise from thermic expansion has actually been negative since 2007. Peer reviewed and everything.

Time to look somewhere else for the hidden heat.

Penguins saved…well, er

Ice, lots of ice

Things have not been going well for the global warming hysterics. The most recent blow is the inexplicable fact that the Antarctic ice extent is growing. Now the warmies are trying to argue that ice is disappearing from the frozen middle of that continent and it may very well be; but it is a long stretch to say that that has anything at all to do with global warming.

Now, the penguins – if they need ice – are saved. But whether they need ice is an open question – in fact, more sea ice can kill penguins.