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A funny thing happened to climate 'consensus'

Commentary: 'There is no climate emergency,' some 500 scientists tell UN

Tim Hearden, Western Farm Press

October 7, 2019

3 Min Read
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A tractor sits idle on a hot afternoon on a farm near Chico, Calif., in June 2018.Tim Hearden

About a year ago in writing about the climate hysteria emanating from a United Nations panel, I remarked that if you’re a petulant child and no one’s listening to you, you scream louder and try to sound more urgent.

Richard Lindzen, an atmospheric sciences emeritus professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who has published more than 200 scientific papers, puts it more succinctly. “It seems that the less the climate changes, the louder the voices of the climate alarmists get,” he said in a video on the conservative YouTube channel PragerU.

As if to illustrate this point, who do the alarmists adopt as the newest faces of their movement? Children, led by shrill Swedish 16-year-old Greta Thunberg and the tens of thousands of her contemporaries worldwide who piously cut school for a Sept. 20 protest.

But despite all the media-generated noise telling us the end is nigh, the notion of a “scientific consensus” on human-caused global warming suffered another setback recently, as more than 500 scientists and professionals in climate-related fields sent a letter to the UN to try to avert an all-out panic that could destroy everyone’s way of life.

“There is no climate emergency,” declared the scientists, including Lindzen. They asserted that the computer models on which international policy is based are beyond flawed.

Related:UN's climate hysteria has an air of desperation

“Therefore, it is cruel as well as imprudent to advocate the squandering of trillions on the basis of results of results from such immature models,” the Sept. 23 letter stated. “Current climate policies pointlessly, grievously undermine the economic system, putting lives at risk in countries denied access to affordable, continuous electrical power.”

The letter comes nearly a year after the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change breathlessly warned that we have just 12 years to right the climate ship (I guess now it’s down to 11). According to the group Solutions from the Land, the IPCC goal to limit the increase in global temperatures to no more than 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels would require “rapid, far-reaching, and unprecedented changes in the energy, transportation, and agriculture sectors.”

In his book The Global Warming Hypothesis is an Unproven Hypothesis, 25-year climate specialist Mototaka Nakamura contends that the data foundation underpinning global warming science is untrustworthy.

As the climate-centric website Electroverse explains, Nakamura notes that global mean temperatures recorded before 1980 were based on a small sampling of temperature observations in North America and Western Europe. In other words, we have no way of knowing whether so-called “record temperatures” are really records.

Electroverse opines: “Today’s ‘global warming science’ is akin to an upside-down pyramid which is built on the work of a few climate modelers.” These modelers cited human-derived CO2 emissions as the cause of recently rising temperatures and have simply projected that warming forward, and later climate researchers took the results of those original models as a given, the publication argues.

But the truth will prevail, assures MIT’s Lindzen. “The climate will have the final word on that,” he says.

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