Source of climate change alarmism confirmed once again

Back in the wider world, regular readers will have noticed this blog rarely ventures onto the climate change topic these days.  The reason for this is simple, it is not about science.

While a number of other blogs continue to expend energy on arguing with climate activists and scientists who push the alarmist narrative, pulling apart findings and assertions and countering with studies and findings from scientists who reject the alarmist creed, this blog long ago explained that such debate is a waste of time.  Climate change long ago ceased to be a scientific issue, it has for a number of years been a political issue.

Several days ago this argument was bolstered by a couple of stories in the Telegraph concerning the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which is due to be published on Friday.  Scientists are struggling to explain why global warming has slowed to a statistically meaningless level for the last 15 years, despite rising greenhouse gas emissions.

If climate change was a scientific issue the discussion about how to handle this fact, which contradicts all of the claims and projections made by climate alarmists reliant on computer models, would be exclusively between scientists.  But as the Telegraph explained, other parties are actively influencing the report:

In a leaked June draft of the report’s summary from policymakers, the IPCC said the rate of warming in 1998-2012 was about half the average rate since 1951.

Several governments who fund the body have since complained about how the issue is tackled in the report.

Germany called for the reference to the slowdown to be deleted, saying a time span of 10-15 years was misleading in the context of climate change, which is measured over decades and centuries.

The US also urged the authors to include the “leading hypothesis” that the reduction in warming is linked to more heat being transferred to the deep ocean.

Belgium objected to using 1998 as a starting year for any statistics. That year was exceptionally warm, so any graph showing global temperatures starting with 1998 looks flat, because most years since have been cooler.

While Hungary worried the report would provide ammunition for sceptics.

This isn’t science, this is politics.

As such, rather than waste time countering scientific claims and trying to get one over the Michael Manns of this world, the focus should be on challenging the core of the alarmist cause – the governments and politicians who are clearly directing matter for their own ends.

In a follow up story on Saturday, the Telegraph reported that:

Jonathan Lynn, a spokesman for the IPCC, declined to comment on the content of the report because it is still to be finalised but insisted it would provide “a comprehensive picture of all the science relevant to climate change”.

More accurately, what it will provide is a picture of the ‘science’ relevant to climate change that has been shaped to fit the desired narrative of politicians, who then use the report as an excuse for more political actions to ‘fight’ climate change – which translate into more taxes, less conventional power generation, higher energy prices and more restrictions on supply.  That is what needs to be challenged.  Arguing statistics and method with scientists won’t make one iota of difference.

The real reason for the Met Office ‘extreme weather’ meeting

And the hype continues…  This is all part of the ongoing effort to create FUD in support of the political climate change agenda that services a lavish money train.  The Daily Wail is happy to play its part spreading the propaganda.

Have you noticed how until fairly recently weather forecasts just predicted the weather that was expected (to the usual mediocre standard).  But now it is a more common sight to see the weather forecaster standing in front of a split screen with the map on the left and large ‘weather warning’ triangles on the right.  But the weather warnings are seldom extreme events, they are the same kind of conditions we have long been used to on a sporadic basis, but now instead as simply being accepted as the varying nature of our weather they are presented in a way that deliberately suggests the conditions are somehow extreme, out of the ordinary and cause for concern.

I can think back to a May in the late 1980s where I was on my way to the coast and we had snow in southern England.  I can think of numerous occasions where heavy rain resulted in serious floods that covered playing local fields and football pitches.  Even ditches became small rivers and we kids built makeshift rafts to sail along them and try to sink each other.  I can think of several rotten summers where school holidays were characterised by rain, lack of sun and cooler than usual conditions that made a day jumping in the local river and larking about on the riverbank in our swimming trunks less than balmy.  What we are seeing now is not exceptional at all, and I doubt previous generations going back centuries would find them exceptional either.

The issue here is not that the weather has suddenly got very bad, it is that the weather is failing to conform with the Met Office’s predictions for a global warming thermaggedon.

The real reason for this hyped up meeting it that, having had to quietly and reluctantly dial down the rhetoric on ‘global warming’ in the face of observed events, the Met Office is seeking to reinforce its push of the ‘climate change’ narrative, where even conditions that run contrary to the Met Office’s previous predictions (not warmer, not drier, and not less snowy after all)  just happen to have the same human induced carbon root cause requiring the same politically driven taxpayer funded ‘solutions’.  There is nothing new under the sun here, apart for the desperate and cobbled together justifications for ‘action’ being presented to us.

Anyone being taken in by these hyperbolemongers deserves to be taken for fools.  The Met Office remains a poorly performing laughing stock devoted to hype in service of their and the government’s vested financial interests.