Klimaatalarmisme weer een tandje hoger: Bijbelse plagen!

De ‘New York Times’ ging onlangs weer vol op het orgel om ons te waarschuwen voor de nakende klimaatapocalyps. En dát terwijl de regering Trump daar niets van wil weten! Maar ja, vrijheid van meningsuiting is een groot goed. En op dit terrein blijft het in de VS mogelijk om meningen te publiceren die strijdig zijn met het officiële overheidsbeleid. In Nederland ligt dat moeilijker, althans wat klimaat betreft.

De timing van deze publicatie is natuurlijk zuiver toeval en heeft – zoals gebruikelijk – niets te maken met de komende klimaatconferentie in Katowice, Polen, die op 2 december begint. Agitprop? Welnee, zo’n gedachte kan natuurlijk alleen bij extreme AGW-negationisten opkomen.

Onder de titel, ‘Like a Terror Movie’: How Climate Change Will Cause More Simultaneous Disasters’, schreef John Schwartz:

Global warming is posing such wide-ranging risks to humanity, involving so many types of phenomena, that by the end of this century some parts of the world could face as many as six climate-related crises at the same time, researchers say.

This chilling prospect is described in a paper published Monday in Nature Climate Change, a respected academic journal, that shows the effects of climate change across a broad spectrum of problems, including heat waves, wildfires, sea level rise, hurricanes, flooding, drought and shortages of clean water.

Such problems are already coming in combination, said the lead author, Camilo Mora of the University of Hawaii at Manoa. He noted that Florida had recently experienced extreme drought, record high temperatures and wildfires — and also Hurricane Michael, the powerful Category 4 storm that slammed into the Panhandle last month. Similarly, California is suffering through the worst wildfires the state has ever seen, as well as drought, extreme heat waves and degraded air quality that threatens the health of residents.

Things will get worse, the authors wrote. The paper projects future trends and suggests that, by 2100, unless humanity takes forceful action to curb the greenhouse gas emissions that drive climate change, some tropical coastal areas of the planet, like the Atlantic coast of South and Central America, could be hit by as many as six crises at a time.

That prospect is “like a terror movie that is real,” Dr. Mora said. ….

The paper explores the ways that climate change intensifies hazards and describes the interconnected nature of such crises. Greenhouse gas emissions, by warming the atmosphere, can enhance drought in places that are normally dry, “ripening conditions for wildfires and heat waves,” the researchers say. In wetter areas, a warmer atmosphere retains more moisture and strengthens downpours, while higher sea levels increase storm surge and warmer ocean waters can contribute to the overall destructiveness of storms. …

Michael E. Mann, a climate scientist at Pennsylvania State University who was not involved in the paper, said it underscored the urgency for action to curb the effects of climate change and showed that “the costs of inaction greatly outweigh the costs of taking action.”

Dr. Mann published a recent paper suggesting that climate change effects on the jet stream are contributing to a range of extreme summer weather events, such as heat waves in North America, Europe and Asia, wildfires in California and flooding in Japan. The new study, he said, dovetails with that research, and “is, if anything, overly conservative” — that is, it may underestimate the threats and costs associated with human-caused climate change.

Lees verder hier en hier.

Ongeveer tegelijkertijd verscheen in de VS de ‘Fourth National Climate Assessment’, eveneens vol van klimaatkommer en –kwel. Agitprop? Welnee, zo’n gedachte kan natuurlijk alleen bij extreme AGW-negationisten opkomen.

Reuters rapporteerde:

Climate change will cost the U.S. economy hundreds of billions of dollars by the end of the century, hitting everything from health to infrastructure, according to a government report issued on Friday that the White House called inaccurate.

‘Hundreds of billions of dollars’! Het klinkt als een groot bedrag. Het betreft hier hypothetische schade, als de gebruikte fantasiescenario’s werkelijkheid worden, hetgeen niet waarschijnlijk is. Maar voor het klimaatbeleid van een veel kleiner land als Nederland is reeds tot 2050 een aanzienlijk hoger bedrag berekend! Het betreft hier beleid op basis van realistische schattingen. En ondanks astronomische uitgaven zal dat beleid geen meetbaar effect hebben op de gemiddelde wereldtemperatuur! Waarin een klein land groot kan zijn!

The studies clash with policy under President Donald Trump, who has been rolling back Obama-era environmental and climate protections to maximize production of domestic fossil fuels, including crude oil, already the highest in the world, above Saudi Arabia and Russia.

White House spokeswoman Lindsay Walters said the new report was “largely based on the most extreme scenario, which contradicts long-established trends by assuming that…there would be limited technology and innovation, and a rapidly expanding population.”

The government’s next update of the National Climate Assessment, she said, “gives us the opportunity to provide for a more transparent and data-driven process that includes fuller information on the range of potential scenarios and outcomes.”

Lees verder hier.

En op dezelfde website publiceerde Willis Eschenbach een grafiek van het verloop van de temperatuur in de VS over een aantal decennia. Daaruit blijkt dat de metingen geen aanleiding geven tot alarmisme.

Bron hier.

Ook in het Verenigd Koninkrijk lijkt het gezond verstand in de media door te breken. Zo schreef Cormac Lucey in ‘The Sunday Times’ onder de titel: ‘We Need More Heretics To Question The New Religion On Tackling Climate Change’:

How should a sensible conservative view climate change? I have several concerns: the air of hysteria used to promote it as a cause; the science behind it; the remedies that are proposed to stem it; and the cost of those remedies.

First, I am somewhat sceptical about the ideology of climate change, the phenomenon formerly known as global warming. I am wary of many who advance that cause. There is something pre-industrial in the desires and objectives of environmentalists who use apocalyptic warnings to spur us to adopt the changes they desire. In March 2009, Prince Charles warned that the world had only 100 months “before we risk catastrophic climate change”. That was 116 months ago.

I can find only one word to describe the recent claim by the United Nations’ intergovernmental panel for climate change (IPCC) that to avert complete climate catastrophe, with wars, famine and disease spreading across the globe, what is now required is nothing less than “unprecedented changes in all aspects of society”. That word is totalitarian. It’s not that these people are undemocratic or authoritarian. It’s that they we insist we reorder our lives to fulfil their plan.

I accept that a large majority of scientists in the relevant areas conclude that carbon emissions trigger global warming. I am generally inclined to believe the technical experts in any area. And there is a sensible conservative argument to be made that, even if we are unsure of the science, we should follow the precautionary principle and take care not to disturb what may turn out to be a very delicate global ecosystem.

Ivar Giaever

But I do find concerning the fact that there appear to be several heavyweight climate change sceptics despite the insistence that the climate change debate is settled. Ivar Giaever, a Nobel prize winner in physics, fears climate change orthodoxy has become a “new religion” for scientists, and the data is not as compelling as official conformity suggests. Bjorn Lomborg, a Danish scientist who has written several books such as The Skeptical Environmentalist, is not an outright denier. Yet he fears the approach to global warming is misguided and that the costs of drastic action are too high. Instead of concentrating so much on preventing climate change, he thinks we should focus on adapting to such change.

Michael Crichton.

Many eminent scientists have raised doubts about the climate change consensus. And, even though he was a writer of pot-boilers, Michael Crichton raised a fundamental question about scientific consensus in a 2005 speech: “Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.” ….

Lees verder hier of hier.

In de Nederlandse kwaliteitskranten ben ik tot dusver weinig artikelen tegengekomen die eenzelfde teneur hadden. Zij verkeren kennelijk nog steeds in de ban van de verschrikkelijke opwarming van de aarde (die maar steeds niet wil komen). Zij dragen daarmee bij aan stemmingmakerij ten gunste van een dreigende maatschappelijke verspilling als gevolg van het voorgenomen klimaatbeleid – een verspilling van een omvang die geen precedent kent in de Nederlandse geschiedenis.

Ik verwacht dat toekomstige historici een hard oordeel zullen vellen over de klimaathysterie waarin de gevestigde politieke partijen verstrikt zijn geraakt – een schandvlek op het posthume CV van de betrokken politici.

Lees verder bij de bron: Climategate