Deniers

When Al Gore popularized global warming in his science fiction movie, An Inconvenient Truth, he argued that ice sheet disintegration would cause ocean levels to rise, plunging coastal areas into crisis. He further argued that temperature increases would create droughts, severe weather (e.g., stronger hurricanes) and other catastrophic events. He argued in later years that the "science was settled" and labeled those (myself included) who questioned his methods and his 'science' as "deniers." Among his strongest supporters were a significant percent of those on the Left, many of whom turned Climate Change" into a quasi-religious belief system. The UN IPCC was a very strong proponent of climate change calamity, until their biased methods and fraudulent data were called into question. It isn't surprising that Barack Obama continues to favor ruinous cap and trade legislation to kill the CO2 boogie man and save the planet.

The climate change models that Gore et al have used are inaccurate and in some cases fraudulent and biased. They have failed to predict past climatic events. Even more damning, they have failed to predict the pause in warming that has happened over the past 16 years. And yet, the IPCC states the obvious when it argues that there is a man-made component to climate change. By the way, no one argues this point. The problem is, the IPCC can't say whether it's 0.001 percent or 10 percent, and their models provide no additional insight.

The IPCC is releasing a report that main stream media hamsters will ignore or misquote. In the report the IPCC, a past supporter of a catastrophic climate change scenario, does an Emily Latella (there's a lot of that going around lately). Marlo Lewis summarizes:

The scariest parts of the “planetary emergency” narrative popularized by Al Gore and other pundits are Atlantic Ocean circulation shutdown (implausibly plunging Europe into a mini-ice age), ice sheet disintegration raising sea levels 20 feet, and runaway warming from melting frozen methane deposits.

As Bishop Hill and Judith Curry report on their separate blogs, IPCC now believes that in the 21st Century, Atlantic Ocean circulation collapse is “very unlikely,” ice sheet collapse is “exceptionally unlikely,” and catastrophic release of methane hydrates from melting permafrost is “very unlikely.” You can read it for yourself in Chapter 12 Table 12.4 of the IPCC’s forthcoming Fifth Assessment Report.

But these doomsday scenarios have always been way more fiction than science. For some time now, extreme weather has been the only card left in the climate alarm deck. Climate activists repeatedly assert that severe droughts, floods, and storms (Hurricane Sandy is their current poster child) are now the “new normal,” and they blame fossil fuels.

On their respective blogs Anthony Watts and Roger Pielke, Jr. provide excerpts about extreme weather from Chapter 2 of the IPCC report. Among the findings:

“Current datasets indicate no significant observed trends in global tropical cyclone frequency over the past century … No robust trends in annual numbers of tropical storms, hurricanes and major hurricanes counts have been identified over the past 100 years in the North Atlantic basin.”
“In summary, there continues to be a lack of evidence and thus low confidence regarding the sign of trend in the magnitude and/or frequency of floods on a global scale.”
“In summary, there is low confidence in observed trends in small-scale severe weather phenomena such as hail and thunderstorms because of historical data inhomogeneities and inadequacies in monitoring systems.”
“Based on updated studies, AR4 [the IPCC 2007 report] conclusions regarding global increasing trends in drought since the 1970s were probably overstated.”
“In summary, confidence in large scale changes in the intensity of extreme extra-tropical cyclones since 1900 is low.”

Hmmm. I guess the members of the IPCC have become deniers. Interesting.