Links tagged “cru”

In the last 500 years only some 80 mammals are recorded as having gone extinct. In his book, More From Less, Andrew McAfee, a board member of HumanProgress.org, discusses how relatively rare recorded extinctions are – with some 530 across all species in the last five centuries. More importantly, he notes, the rate of extinction “appear[s] to have slowed down in recent decades; for example, no marine creatures have been recorded as extinct in the last fifty years.”

Matt Ridley, another board member and frequent contributor to this site, argues that despite the human population doubling in the last half-century, “the extinction rate of wild species, especially in the most industrialized countries,” seems to have fallen rather than increased. While absence of evidence isn’t the same as evidence of absence, and there might be millions of unrecorded species in the world’s oceans and tropical forests, the most aggressive claims rest on shaky foundations.

Hulme: "January  12021, a new World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) climatological standard normal came into effect. The ‘present-day’ climate will now formally be
represented by the meteorological statistics of the period 1991-2020, replacing those from 1961-1990. National Meteorological Agencies in member states are instructed to issue new standard normals for observing stations and for associated climatological products. Climate will ‘change’, one might say, in an instant; today, the world’s climate has ‘suddenly’ become nearly 0.5°C warmer. It is somewhat equivalent to re-setting Universal Time or adjusting the exact definition of a metre." ...

"So, what is the significance of the move to a new 1991-2020 WMO normal in January 2021? On the one hand, it is a pragmatic move to redefine ‘present-day’ climate for operational applications to that of the most recent 30-year period. On the other hand, it puts into play a third climatic baseline. Already existing is the ‘pre-industrial’ climate of the late nineteenth century and the ‘historic’ climate’ of 1961-1990, the latter about 0.3°C warmer than the former. And now there is the new ‘present-day’ climate of 1991-2020, in turn about 0.5°C warmer than the ‘historic climate’ of 1961-1990." ...

"Combining a climatic tolerance of 2°C—or indeed 1.5°C—with a pre-industrial baseline yields a very different climate target than, say, using a 1986-2005 baseline, the period widely adopted by IPCC AR5 Working Group I as their analytical baseline. The choices of both baseline and tolerance are politically charged. They carry significant implications for historic liability for emissions (La Rovere et al., 2002), for policy design (Millar et al., 2017) and for possible reparations (Roberts & Huq, 2015)."

A new paper (Lightfoot, 2020) shows that the claims (a) CO2 and air temperature go up and down together, (b) CO2 and water vapor go up and down together, and (c) warming by water vapor can be added to that of CO2 to give enhanced warming are all not observed to occur in the real world.

Law Professor Bruce Pardy of Queen’s University sums up 'the science': "Pronouncements from medical officials deserve skepticism, not because they are bad doctors or scientists, but because they have lost sight of the limits of their own expertise."

"Skepticism and dissent, not consensus and authority, fuel scientific progress."

"Yet the scientific establishment has come to stand on consensus and authority. It, not the Church, is now the despot."

“Obey the science” is an anti-scientific sentiment wielded to achieve public compliance with political agendas.. Science makes an excellent servant and an imperious master. It is a method of enquiry, not an approved set of conclusions."

"Yet scientific truth is never settled, and the history of science is a history of error...For the layman, “confidence in science” is apt to amount to little more than blind faith in the authority of people who claim to have expertise."

"Climate scientists predicted far more global warming than has occurred Since climate scientists’ predictions have proven greatly overstated compared with real-world, measured medium-term warming, the Argonauts decided to find out what climate scientists were getting wrong. In science, any theory – however beautiful or profitable – is false and must be amended or even replaced if real-world data contradict it. The large discrepancy between predicted and real-world warming in recent decades indeed showed there must be something very wrong with the official theory."

Monckton: Your suggestion that warmer worldwide weather has caused net loss of life, particularly among the world’s fast-declining population of poor people, is fashionable but misplaced. Cold is a bigger killer than warmth. Research conducted three years ago for the European Commission found that, for this reason, even if there were 5.4 C° global warming from 2020-2080, there would be 100,000 more Europeans than with no warming at all.

"Your advocacy of “renewable” energy is fashionable but misplaced. Using 14th-century technology to address a 21st-century non-problem would be silly enough in itself. What is worse, however, is that “renewables” have not only quadrupled the price of electricity but have also added to CO2 emissions. The chief reason for this apparent paradox is that the more windmills and solar panels are connected to the grid the more grossly-inefficient, CO2-emitting spinning reserve must be maintained in the often vain hope of preventing blackouts when the wind stops or the night falls."