Climate Change is more real, and dangerous, and worrying than ever before because lots of bad weather has happened around the world.
Now that I have handily summarised the World Meteorological Organization’s (WMO) latest report — WMO Statement on the State of Global Climate in 2016 — you have no need to read it.
That’s because the report’s only intended function is as a propaganda device to prop up the global climate alarmist narrative.
You can tell this because of certain key phrases that have been embedded in the “Executive Summary.”
Phrases like:
Warming continued in 2016, setting a new temperature record of approximately 1.1 °C above the pre-industrial period…
…against a background of long-term climate change….
Severe droughts affected agriculture and yield production in many parts of the world, particularly in southern and eastern Africa and parts of Central America, where several million people experienced food insecurity and hundreds of thousands were displaced internally…
Detection and attribution studies have demonstrated that human influence on the climate has been a main driver behind the unequivocal warming of the global climate system…
Human influence has also led to significant regional temperature increases at the continental and subcontinental levels. Shifts of the temperature distribution to warmer regimes are expected to bring about increases in the frequency and intensity of extremely warm events.
But most of this stuff just comes from the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report, which was published in 2014. What, exactly, is its relevance to a new report on last year’s weather?
Short answer: none — but this was never the point.
The point is that the World Meteorological Organization has long been one of the chief promoters of the great global warming scare. The WMO was one of the two United Nations organizations — the other was the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) – which set up the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). The IPCC exists on the unquestioned assumption that man-made climate change is a serious problem. Its only purposes are to find more evidence for the problem’s existence and to propose various solutions for how to deal with it. At no stage, ever, can the IPCC admit to there not being a man-made climate change problem because that would mean doing itself out of business.
The WMO and its various UN sidekicks, in other words, represent the belly of the beast of the Climate Industrial Complex.
This is the rampaging monster against which President Trump has heroically pitted himself on his holy mission to slay the Green Blob.
It will not be an easy task — and it might even be a hopeless one for the Green Blob has many tentacles.
One of them is this rather noisome organisation, the Science Media Centre, which reports to be a neutral charity providing dispassionate information about science but, in fact, works as a tireless disseminator of green propaganda. In order to big up the WMO report, it has lined up various members of the usual suspects from the world of climate alarmism to testify about how amazingly important it is — and to dutifully confirm that, yes, global warming is, like, even worse than ever.
Why, here is Prof. Martin Siegert of the Grantham Institute, funded by climate alarmist hedge funder Jeremy Grantham, to promote the cause of climate alarmism:
The announcement from WMO is shocking but sadly unsurprising… We simply cannot say we haven’t been warned, however. The problem is ours to fix and we must do so right now. The longer we wait for effective action the harder and more costly it will be.
Well, whoulda thunk, eh?
And here is the photogenic Dr. Emily Shuckburgh of the British Antarctic Survey:
The changes we are now seeing in the polar regions are a stark reminder of the scale and urgency of the climate challenge.
Of course they are, Emily. Of course. And you didn’t even need to use the phrase, “By the way, please can we have lots more grant funding?”
And here’s Dr. Phil Williamson, speaking from the home of the Climategate scandal, the University of East Anglia:
Human-driven climate change is now an empirically-verifiable fact, combining year-to-year variability with the consequences of our release of extra greenhouse gases. Those who dispute that link are not sceptics, but anti-science deniers.
Surely this can’t be the same Dr. Phil Williamson whose complaint was humiliatingly rejected when he reported your humble correspondent to IPSO because he objected to a few pieces I’d written explaining why Ocean Acidification was basically just another junk science scare intended to prop up the alarmist anti-CO2 narrative? Why yes. Exactly that Dr. Phil Williamson.
Truly these people have no shame. And they can go on and on spouting all this nonsense because the braindead liberal media is more than happy to regurgitate it. As you can see, for example, from this pile of weapons-grade tosh from the Independent.
None of this scaremongering has any basis in reality, though, as Paul Homewood patiently explains in this masterly demolition job.
Here is a taste:
1) The record average temperature for the year of about 1.1C above pre-industrial levels
Why is there no mention of the fact that satellite measurements of atmospheric temperatures prove that last year was statistically no warmer than 1998?
Even if the figure is right, so what. Why should the Earth’s climate be any worse now than it was 10 years ago, or 50, or 150?
2) Millions of people going hungry after crops failed in parts of Africa as rainfall fell up to 60 per cent below average.
Where is the context that proves this is in any way unusual or unprecedented?
Why is there no mention of studies, such as this by McCabe & Wolock in 2015, that there has been no trend in global droughts in the last century.
Not to mention HH Lamb’s evidence that global cooling leads to worse droughts.
3) Flooding that displaced hundreds of thousands of people in south-east Asia
In 1971, the Red River floods left 100,000 dead in North Vietnam.
In the same year, Orissa in India was hit by a cyclone which left 10,800 dead, and 180,000 were affected in the Kuala Lumpur floods, reckoned to be the worst floods since 1926.
https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2011/09/21/is-our-climate-becoming-more-extreme/
What is so special about 2016?
As is confirmed by a separate report — The State of the Climate in 2016 — published Wednesday by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, there is absolutely nothing weird, alarming, or unprecedented about current global weather patterns.
- While 2016 was one of the warmest years on record, global temperatures dropped back at the end of the year to levels prior to the strong 2015/16 El Niño. This fact suggests that much of the global 2015–16 temperature peak was caused by a one of the strongest El Niños on record.
- Since 2003, the global temperature estimate based on surface station measurements has consistently drifted away from the satellite-based estimate in a warm direction, and is now about 0.1◦C higher.
- Much of the heat given off during the 2015–16 El Niño appears to have been transported to the polar regions, especially to the Arctic, causing severe weather phenomena and unseasonably high air temperatures.
- Data from tide gauges all over the world suggest an average global sea-level rise of 1–1.5 mm/year, while the satellite-derived record suggests a rise of more than 3 mm/yr. This noticeable difference between the two data sets still has no broadly accepted explanation.
- Arctic and Antarctic sea-ice extents since 1979 have developed in opposite directions, decreasing and increasing, respectively. In the Arctic, a 5.3-year periodic variation is important, while for the Antarctic a cycle of about 4.5 years duration is important. Both these variations reached their minima simultaneously in 2016, which explains the recent minimum in global sea-ice extent.
The report’s author, Dr. Ole Humlum, Professor of Physical Geography at the University Centre in Svalbard (Norway), based his report on real-world observations — as opposed to the models and projections relied on by climate alarmists.
He says:
There is little doubt that we are living in a warm period. However, there is also little doubt that current climate change is not abnormal and not outside the range of natural variations that might be expected.
But don’t expect to read that reported anytime soon by the mainstream media.