Tuesday, 9 September 2014

Daniel Payne: "We should be entirely skeptical of the ceaseless predictions of climate catastrophe"

Daniel Payne´s article "The United Nations Is A Parody Of A Doomsday Prophet" in the Federalist is well worth reading. Here are a couple of excerpts:

the UN World Meteorological Organization recently came out with a series of “imagined weather forecasts” predicting the state of climate in the year 2050. “Miami South Beach is underwater,” announced one forecast; another predicted a mega-fatal “mega-drought in Arizona.” Never mind that the average weatherman can barely predict whether or not it’s going to rain tomorrow: instead, think about the fact that the United Nations is so hard-up for climate-change material that they’ve looked 36 years into the future to create fictional accounts of what the weather may be like. The tsunamis, the blistering drought, the Beginning of the End—all this stuff was supposed to be here years ago. The global climate chaos has never materialized, so the “experts” have set their sights on the future, doing some educated guessing on what the weather’s going to be like four decades hence.
Maybe we should just ignore them.
In a sense it’s not difficult to understand where the “climate experts” are coming from when they start moving the goalposts nearly half a century into the future. As Anthony Watts pointed out recently, climate science predicted in 2009 that the world would “warm faster than predicted in [the] next five years,” a process that would doubtlessly “silence global warming sceptics.” Well, the world did not “warm faster”; as a matter of fact, it didn’t warm at all, and the “skeptics” have been anything but “silenced,” if only because we’re able to observe the difference between the climate lobby’s grandiose disaster predictions and the unremarkable reality of the climate itself. Climate science is the only field in which you’re derisively considered a “skeptic” or a “denier” by forming your judgment based upon the facts. The solution is to move the “facts” as far into the future as possible in order to delay the inevitable judgment. --

The average global temperature has been effectively flat for 19 years—not simply rising more slowly than predicted, mind you, but flat. Paused. Nobody predicted this; the climate models failed to even consider it. Climate science should be a subject marked by humility, skepticism, and cautiousness. Instead, it’s a topic overpopulated by blowhards, self-aggrandizing megalomaniacs, and environmentalists more interested in authoritarianism than anything else. We should be entirely skeptical of the ceaseless predictions of climate catastrophe–and we should be completely wary of the senseless alarmists and the little tyrants that peddle them.