By James Delingpole
The National Climate Assessment has been out nearly a week and the verdict is in: everyone, but everyone – apart from the Obama holdovers who wrote it and the gullible reporters at CNN, theNew York Times and CBS who bigged it up – has recognised it for what it is. A joke.
Climate expert Roger Pielke Jr: “Embarrassing.”
Climate expert Pat Michaels: “Systematically flawed.” Report should be “shelved”.
Greenpeace co-founder Patrick Moore: “The science must be addressed head-on. If POTUS has his reasons for letting this Obama-era committee continue to peddle tripe I wish he would tell us what they are.”
Marc Morano, author of the Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change: “It is a political report masquerading as science. The media is hyping a rehash of frightening climate change claims by Obama administration holdover activist government scientists. The new report is once again pre-determined science. The National Climate Assessment report reads like a press release from environmental pressure groups — because it is! Two key authors are longtime Union of Concerned Scientist activists, Donald Wuebbles and Katharine Hayhoe.”
Donald Trump, climate skeptic; U.S. President: “Yeah, I don’t believe it.”
Sarah Huckabee Sanders, White House Press Secretary: “It’s not based on facts. It’s not data driven.”
The last two responses are the most important because what they show is that the Trump Administration is not about to cave to the kind of junk science and emotional greenmail which has held so many Western governments in thrall for the last four decades.
But the response that is most damning is probably the one from Roger Pielke Jr.
Pielke, a professor at University of Colorado, Boulder, and a former a Fellow of the Cooperative Institute for Research in Environmental Sciences (CIRES), is neither a climate change skeptic nor a fan of Trump, as he makes clear in this tweet:
Roger Pielke Jr.
✔@RogerPielkeJr
Bottom line:
If experts are going to demand that they be trusted, their numbers should add up right.
They don’t here.
One way to ensure robust assessments is to invite in critical voices, rather than exclude them.
This error was easily preventable.
/END
Roger Pielke Jr.
✔@RogerPielkeJr
PS. Climate change is real, and aggressive mitigation and adaptation make very good sense. Trump is still wrong. Which makes an error of this magnitude so much the worse
So his views can’t be dismissed, as some of the above inevitably will be, as just the kind of anti-science, Big-Oil-funded propaganda you’d expect from evil Republicans.
Pielke is simply disgusted that the cause he believes in is being horribly traduced by bad science.
Roger Pielke Jr.
✔@RogerPielkeJr
Bottom line NCA:
By presenting cherrypicked science, at odds w/ NCA Vol,1 & IPCC AR5, the authors of NCA Vol.2 have given a big fat gift to anyone who wants to dismiss climate science and policy. People are not dumb. Clim chg is real & deserves policy response, but not like this.
Bad science bankrolled by left-wing billionaire political activists with presidential ambitions…
Roger Pielke Jr.
✔@RogerPielkeJr
Silly season as RCP 8.5 strikes again
USNCA assumes ~15° F (~8° C !!) temperature change in 2100.
Contrast IPCC AR5: “Warming above 4°C by 2081–2100 is unlikely in all RCPs (high confidence) except for RCP8.5, where it is about as likely as not (medium confidence)”
Embarrassing
Roger Pielke Jr.
✔@RogerPielkeJr
Side note: Research on which that 15 deg F temp change & 10% GDP hit (under RCP 8.5) was funded by Steyer & Bloomberg (ultimately published in Science). Imagine if research funded by Exxon was sole basis for claims. Given weaknesses of the work just fooling to lean on it so much.
Pielke is referring to the headline figure, eagerly relayed by the left-wing media, that climate change is going to cause a 10 percent fall in GDP.
Roger Pielke Jr.
✔@RogerPielkeJr
PPS. I see people are starting to blame the media for the emphasis on the 10% GDP value. It looks to have been first promoted by @CoralMDavenport at NYT.
Question: did the NYT cherry pick that number from the report or was that number promoted to them? https://twitter.com/CoralMDavenport/status/1066046480807530497 …
Roger Pielke Jr.
✔@RogerPielkeJr
Here is the NYT front page from Saturday, with NCA story top right.
This story by @CoralDavenport set the subsequent narrative of the NCA around the 10% GDP number, perhaps the least supportable claim in the entire report.
How did this #scicomm failure occur? pic.twitter.com/b8s6i1fYQ4
Roger Pielke Jr.
✔@RogerPielkeJr
But oddly, elsewhere the NCA associates RCP 8.5 with only a 4 deg C temp change, even 95th percentile is <5.5 deg C or < 10 deg F
From chapter 2 https://nca2018.globalchange.gov/chapter/2/
Roger Pielke Jr.
✔@RogerPielkeJr
So the headline, repeated everywhere 10% GDP number is not consistent with the physical science part of the report and represents a temperature change 2x the already implausible RCP 8.5 scenario. pic.twitter.com/ydkWcg81lA
This, he explains, is based on an imaginary 15 degrees F temperature rise which exists nowhere in scientific literature. It is in fact twice the projection of even the most alarmist scenario.
Roger Pielke Jr.
✔@RogerPielkeJr
1/2 By request
Here’s source of the top line conclusion of US National Climate Assessment, 10% damage to US GDP
It’s derived from a study funded by Tom Steyer et al.
The 15 deg F temp increase is 2x most extreme value reported elsewhere in the report (95th percentile of RCP 8.5)
Meanwhile, Paul Homewood has been busily doing the homework the ‘scientists’ who compiled the report shouldn’t have done – and found the whole exercise to be deeply suspect.
Here, for example, his is gloriously damning analysis of the Midwest section of the report:
These are some more of the specific claims made in the NCA, and highlighted by CNN:
- Farmers will face extremely tough times. The quality and quantity of their crops will decline across the country due to higher temperatures, drought and flooding. In parts of the Midwest, farms will be able to produce less than 75% of the corn they produce today, and the southern part of the region could lose more than 25% of its soybean yield.
This is exactly what the NCA has to say, in the Midwest chapter:
Projections of mid-century yields of commodity crops65 ,66 show declines of 5% to over 25% below extrapolated trends broadly across the region for corn (also known as maize) and more than 25% for soybeans in the southern half of the region, with possible increases in yield in the northern half of the region. Increases in growing-season temperature in the Midwest are projected to be the largest contributing factor to declines in the productivity of U.S. agriculture
However, as even the NCA is forced to admit, summer temperatures in the Midwest have not been increasing. What they fail to point out is that temperatures have actually been falling instead.
Even the scorching summer of 2012 was cool in comparison to earlier heatwaves.
Most US corn is grown in the Midwest, and nationally, US corn yields have been steadily rising:
http://worldofcorn.com/#us-average-corn-yield
One reason is that the climate is wetter than it used to be prior to 1970:
Astonishingly the NCA manages to turn that into a bad thing:
Increases in warm-season absolute humidity and precipitation have eroded soils, created favorable conditions for pests and pathogens, and degraded the quality of stored grain
I suggest whoever wrote this drivel went out and talked to a few farmers, and ask them if they would instead like to return to the dustbowl years.
This is precisely the point Sarah Huckabee Sanders made at the White House press conference earlier this week:
“We think that this is the most extreme version and it’s not based on facts,” she said. “It’s not data driven. We’d like to see something that is more data driven. It’s based on modeling, which is extremely hard to do when you’re talking about the climate.”
To hear such common sense coming out of any political administration, let alone that of the most powerful nation in the world, is indeed extraordinary and refreshing. Clearly and simply it states what is probably the single greatest flaw in the alarmist literature: that their doomsday predictions aren’t derived from real-world observations – but simply on computer modelled projections.
Garbage in. Garbage out. That’s the Climate Industrial Complex in a nutshell.
How good to see that the White House has finally got its number.
