IPCC Now Cooling on Warming !

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's ''fifth assessment report'' that came out in the past week has, for the first time these reports started coming out in 1990, dialled back the alarmist rhetoric. It states, ''that the temperature rise we can expect as a result of man-made emissions of carbon dioxide is lower than we thought in 2007.''  It is a significant retreat because it points to the very real possibility that over the next several generations, the overall effect of climate change will be POSITIVE for humankind and the planet. With the IPCC unable to convincingly explain the stall in warming, the fact that they are forced to actually recognize reality and make changes in their predictions, like lowering the range of climate sensitivity -- is quite momentous.

It's important to recall the context for this latest report -- how global warming alarmists, calling them scaremongers is more accurate, have for two decades whipped up fear of all kinds of extreme weather events that would smash our cities, kill our citizens with cyclones/hurricanes, drown us in melting ice caps and suffer mega droughts. Indeed, the iconic image of global warming was this poster (right), from warmism's Svengali, Al Gore's An Inconvenient Truth, exploiting the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe to whip up world-wide angst.

For the last 10 years or more, a few of us ''deniers'' have been saying that the IPCC has been ignoring the elephant in the room....that the real climate system is simply not as sensitive to CO2 emissions as they were claiming. This elephant has had to be ignored at all costs. What, the globe isn't warming from manmade CO2 as fast as we predicted? Then it must be manmade aerosols cooling things off. Or the warming is causing the deep ocean to heat up by hundredths or thousandths of a degree. Any reason except reduced climate sensitivity, because low climate sensitivity might mean we really don't have to worry about global warming after all. Unable to convincingly explain the recent stall in warming IPCC fudges the figures to save face and avoid saying ''We're sorry we were so dogmatic!''

Professor Bjorn Lomborg says, ''the evidence now shows global warming theorists have vastly exaggerated the problem. Take sea-level rise, the IPCC has grudgingly had to lower the exaggerated and scary figure of 1-2 meters of rise that many environmental activists, and even some media outlets have bandied about down to 3-20 by century's end. A new Nature Climate Change study shows that the prevailing climate models produced estimates that overshot the temperature rise over the past 15 years by more than a whooping 300%!''  Back in 2007 the IPCC firmly stated that the planet was warming at a rate of 0.2C every decade -- a figure it claimed was in line with the forecasts made by computer climate models. Now the true figure since 1951 has been only 0.12C per decade -- a rate far below even the lowest computer prediction. Gore is going to have to swallow one hell of a Chill Pill to keep from fainting with these latest facts.

The IPCC admits, which Mr Gore easily ignored, that large parts of the world were as warm as they are now for decades at a time between 950 and 1250 AD -- centuries before the Industrial Revolution, and when the population and CO2 levels were both much lower. The temperature in that period was actually 3 degrees warmer when the Vikings were running around raping and pillaging. They discovered GREENLAND, when it really was green and built settlements there -- eighty sites in all. By 1300 AD a cooling shortened their growing season and by 1350 AD they left as Greenland slowly froze over. It's in their historical tales. This suggests many lies have been told for a very long time by some warmists.

IPCC's Draft Version

The IPCC warmists insist they're right despite all their mistakes. How convenient that the Intergovernmental Panel decided it was even more certain we're heating the world to hell. Supposedly their ''certainty'' went up from 90% to 95% certain that we are the culprits. These U.N. scaremongers distracted the media from inconvenient truths with their ''certainty'' pronouncement.  Fact is, the IPCC showed it's got a lot less to be confident about. Global warming is turning from imminent catastrophe to merely a problem -- or less. Not that you'd guess that from the media reports. One paper wailed, ''It is more certain than ever that human civilisation is the main cause of global warming, putting the world on track for dangerous temperature rises.'' 

IPCC's Misleading Published Graph

Sure there is warming if only they could find it. Here's how desperate warmists are to believe their theory, even when there's no real evidence for it.  ''According to the new IPCC report, temperatures rose by about 0.15C a decade for the latter half of the last century. Since 1998, however, thart rise has reduced to only 0.05C. The heat is still coming in, but it appears to have gone into the deep ocean nd, frustratingly, we do not have the instruments to measure there,'' said Professor Ted Shepherd of Reading University trying to keep the government grants trough from drying up. But the worst deceit was revealed yesterday when Steve McIntyre, of the Climate Audit website, explained how the IPCC had a damning graph that showed how global warming models failed to predict the 15 year hiatus appeared in the draft of the IPCC's latest report. (above right) In the released Report it showed the IPCC ditched that embarrassing graph, replacing it with a misleading one ( above left ) which, to the untrained eye, suggested the models had not been contradicted at all. Shameful!! So how did the observations move from outside the coloured envelope to inside the envelope?  McIntyre says, ''I do not believe that IPCC's decision to use a more obscure scale was accidental.''

The Way I See It.....the IPCC report calls into question the alarmist claim that sea levels will rise 1-2 meters. Its estimates are in the range of 40 to 63cm by the end of the century. The climate change scenario has been dominated by fear and end-of-the-world thinking. Less than a decade ago, that idiot Al Gore's film portrayed a sea level rise of 6 meters! The present day predicted rise of poses a more manageable challenge. For purposes of comparison, sea levels have risen about 30 cm in the past 150 years. Even with few resources and technologies at their disposal, our forefathers handled this challenge quite deftly.

With the IPCC giving us good reasons to stop panicking with a moderate forecast of 3.5C (the Viking's climate), not the 5C-plus scenario touted by the eco-alarmists, we find that economic models are finding that moderate global warming is a net global benefit. Firstly, by mid-century, researchers estimate 4000,000 more heat deaths but 1.8 million fewer cold deaths. Likewise crop production will increase, as I said in a previous posting, because CO2 fertilises crops. The agriculture satellites are already picking up a world-wide greening of the planet. According to a new study in the forthcoming book, ''A Scorecard from 1900 to 2050'', global warming has been an increasing net benefit for humanity since 1900.