Climbdown

Global Warming: We Were Wrong

James Delingpole
BreitbartNews

Climate alarmists have finally admitted that they’ve got it wrong on global warming.

This is the inescapable conclusion of a landmark paper, published in Nature Geoscience, which finally admits that the computer models have overstated the impact of carbon dioxide on climate and that the planet is warming more slowly than predicted.

The paper – titled Emission budgets and pathways consistent with limiting warming to 1.5 °C –  concedes that it is now almost impossible that the doomsday predictions made in the last IPCC Assessment Report of 1.5 degrees C warming above pre-industrial levels by 2022 will come true.  In order for that to happen, temperatures would have to rise by a massive 0.5 degrees C in five years.

Since global mean temperatures rarely rise by even as much as 0.25 degrees C in a decade, that would mean the planet would have to do 20 years’ worth of extreme warming in the space of the next five years.

This, the scientists admit, is next to impossible.

Which means their “carbon budget” – the amount of CO2 they say is needed to increase global warming by a certain degree – is wrong. This in turn means that the computer models they’ve been using to scare the world with tales of man-made climate doom are wrong too.

One researcher – from the alarmist side of the argument, not the skeptical one – has described the paper’s conclusion as “breathtaking” in its implications.  He’s right. The scientists who’ve written this paper aren’t climate skeptics. They’re longstanding warmists, implacable foes of climate skeptics, and they’re also actually the people responsible for producing the IPCC’s carbon budget.

In other words, this represents the most massive climbdown from the alarmist camp.  But you certainly wouldn’t guess this from the way the scientists are trying to spin their report.

According to the London Times:

 Michael Grubb, professor of international energy and climate change at University College London and one ofthe study’s authors, admitted that his previous prediction had been wrong.

He stated during the climate summit in Paris in December 2015: “All the evidence from the past 15 years leads me to conclude that actually delivering 1.5C is simply incompatible with democracy.”

Speaking to The Times, he said: “When the facts change, I change my mind, as Keynes said.

“It’s still likely to be very difficult to achieve these kind of changes quickly enough but we are in a better place than I thought.”

and

Myles Allen, professor of geosystem science at the University of Oxford and another author of the paper, said: “We haven’t seen that rapid acceleration in warming after 2000 that we see in the models. We haven’t seen that in the observations.”

He said that the group of about a dozen computer models, produced by government research institutes and universities around the world, had been assembled a decade ago “so it’s not that surprising that it’s starting to divert a little bit from observations”.

He said that too many of the models used “were on the hot side”, meaning they forecast too much warming.

Note the disingenuousness here.

Grubb is claiming that the facts have changed. Which they haven’t. Climate skeptics have been saying for years that the IPCC climate models have been running “too hot.” Indeed, the Global Warming Policy Foundation produced a paper stating this three years ago. Naturally it was ignored by alarmists who have always sought to marginalize the GWPF as a denialist institution which they claim – erroneously – is in the pay of sinister fossil fuel interests.

Allen’s “so it’s not that surprising” is indeed true if you’re on the skeptical side of the argument. But not if, like Allen, you’re one of those scientists who’ve spent the last 20 years scorning, mocking and vilifying all those skeptics who for years have been arguing the very point which Allen himself is now admitting is correct.

That’s why Benny Peiser, of the Global Warming Policy Foundation says, this is a “landmark” moment in the history of great climate change scare.

“It’s the first official confirmation we’ve had that CO2 is not as big a driver of climate change as the computer models have claimed; and it’s the first official admission that the planet is not warming dangerously.”

But this is not, unfortunately, a cause for wild celebrations in the street. ManBearPig has been scotched but by no means been slain. Nor are the alarmists yet ready to admit the full scale of their errors.

This is little more than a damage limitation exercise by scamsters who know they’ve been caught cheating and have now been forced to concede at least some territory to their opponents for fear of looking ridiculous.

Paul Homewood has their number:

1) We have known for several years that the climate models have been running far too hot.

This rather belated admission is welcome, but a cynic would wonder why it was not made before Paris.

2) I suspect part of the motivation is to keep Paris on track. Most observers, including even James Hansen, have realised that it was not worth the paper it was written on.

This new study is designed to restore the belief that the original climate targets can be achieved, via Paris and beyond.

3) Although they talk of the difference between 0.9C and 1.3C, the significance is much greater.

Making the reasonable assumption that a significant part of the warming since the mid 19thC is natural, this means that any AGW signal is much less than previously thought.

4) Given that that they now admit they have got it so wrong, why should we be expected to have any faith at all in the models?

5) Finally, we must remember that temperatures since 2000 have been artificially raised by the recent record El Nino, and the ongoing warm phase of the AMO.

Yup. But at least we climate skeptics have been proved right yet again, that’s the main thing.

Oh, and by the way, snooty alarmist scumbags: that word you were looking for to describe the current state of global warming science is: “Sorry.”