The old question that was used to demonstrate the futility of a particular line of thought was ‘How many angels could you fit on the head of a pin?’…the new question is ‘How many ‘Mainstream Scientists’ can you get into a Roger Harrabin report on global warming’?
On the Today programme this morning Harrabin was going through the usual smoke and mirrors routine that he has perfected to ensure that whatever the evidence he can claim the world is always warming, the ice melting, seas rising and doom is fast approaching….and he has a whole stable of ‘mainstream scientists’ to prove it.
He actually had Andrew Montford (Bishop Hill) on but only to ‘rub his nose in the consensus’ as Harrabin sailed merrily on ‘proving’ his own narrative.
Harrabin tells us that the scientific establishment agrees that global warming appears to have stalled….
However…Professor Sir John Houghton from the IPCC….says oh no it hasn’t…the climate is still warming…er…depending when you start to measure the change.
Ah yes….if you were gaining weight for 20 years and then start to drop for one year…the average trend says you are still gaining weight.
Harrabin says ‘that CO2 warms the climate is not in doubt.’…despite records showing that temperature rises came before CO2 rise…as the CRU’s Phil Jones admitted.
He then asks….‘If CO2 warms the planet..and we have a record 400 ppm now…why has the planet not warmed for over a decade?’
Harrabin has the answer or rather Sir Brian Hoskins has it…the answer lies in the sea…this is where the imbalance in heat energy has gone…most of it into the ocean….you can have a period of a decade or so where the atmosphere doesn’t warm up but ocean stores the heat.
Harrabin postulates that it is hard to see where else the projected warmth has gone…well yes..it must be hard to see…or else all those high powered computer models would have predicted it…surely? Just where did it all go wrong Roger?
Have the oceans warmed in the last decade…or rather 16 years?……WUWT disputes that….
As usual, global warming enthusiasts in the press overlook some basic issues—like the sea surface temperatures for the Indian and Pacific Oceans from pole to pole haven’t warmed in 19+ years, and the Atlantic data show little warming for more than a decade. Further, the tropical Indian and Pacific sea surface temperatures haven’t warmed since 1986. It’s therefore difficult to make claims like “more evidence of a rapidly warming planet”….In other words, the sea surface temperature data for about 70% of the surface of the global oceans provide no indication of warming for almost 2 decades.
You would also have to ask why the oceans have only suddenly been so receptive to heat…why did the oceans not absorb heat at a similar rate as proposed by Harrabin in the 1990’s?
Harrabin admits that that was only a theory…it may be that climate is not as sensitive to CO2 as ‘mainstream scientists’ told us…..it maybe we get no temperature rise above 2.5° C but he says ‘that is very optimistic…and we will probably see much worse.’
Mainstream scientists, he tells us, suggest that 2 – 4.5° C is more likely and ‘there is little reassuring about that’…and temperature is the 27th year above average and sea ice is melting rapidly, as well as weather disruption around the globe…Harrabin spices it all up with ridiculous soundbites…someone had to wear bobbly hat recently….oh no!
He tells us that it is not single events that matter but all the extremes of weather stacked together…that the new ‘low level warming’ can be more dangerous than high level…it’s the cumulative effect you see.
The cumulative effect of decades worth of climate science going up in smoke he should say.
This is the best guess that we’ve got….he tells us…in other words it’s all guess work…they don’t have a clue…they are running around like headless chickens making it up as they go.
But no matter…….We are conducting a very dangerous experiment with the planet if we do not take measures to rein in CO2 levels…our children and grandchildren are at risk.
Isn’t that a bit like ‘Godwin’s Law’? A child’s tears are worth a thousand words in News terms…..To save the life of a child is worth paying any cost….act now!!!
As usual Harrabin is spinning like mad to dismiss any of the Sceptics claims and build up a case for the climate change fanatics.
Perhaps he is being fed all this ocean warming guff by his ex-colleague, now ocean researcher, Richard Black.
This graph from the US Environmental Protection Agency show that temperatures have risen for over 100 years…and that since 1998 they have stalled….and that previous ‘data’ (the greyed area of the graph) is not really reliable….
The warmists at the BBC must be in a right old panic as even the Met seems to be the latest rat measuring itself for a bespoke life jacket as HMS Global Warning heads at full speed for the icebergs. To round off its one-note coverage of climate change Today had arch-charlatan James Hansen on at around 08:25 to give a completely unchallenged pack of attempted panic-inducing untruths to listeners shivering in the UK.
The James Hansen interview is really worth hearing. Poor Sarah is doing her best to be mildly quizzical about the warmists previous estimates, she cites recent revisions in temperature projections by the Met Office as support.
The Olympian Hansen is having none of this and sweeps Sarah, a troublesome pygmy aside, stating (c)” I have not come across the Atlantic in order to argue about minutiae” Sarah is suitably chastened and from then on is keen to disassociate herself from the Met Office who would appear to be included in the “deniers” (per Hansen) camp
I got the impression that Sarah was merely reciting questions he knew damn well she’d ask so he could rebut them. There didn’t seem to be any serious intention to challenge him.
Still got my wooly jumper on watching the test match, roll on global warming i say !
At least they had Andrew Montford on the programme, that’s a step in the right direction. And Harrabin did say “the scientific establishment agrees that GW appears to have stalled”.
We can’t expect a Harrabin to change it’s spots overnight.
Denial of GW can sometimes cause dilemmas and mixed emotions:)
Yes, listening on Radio 4 from 07:35 to 07:42 this morning, Harrabin did admit that global warming had stalled a while ago.
“In Our Time” on Thursday a.m. was interesting as they discussed cosmic rays, though if I recall correctly they did not put forward the following hypothesis linking these rays to climate on earth (please excuse my oversimplification):
An ‘active’ Sun emits more charged particles towards Earth, whose changed electro-magnetic atmosphere then offers more resistance to cosmic rays, reducing ionisation in the upper atmosphere and so hindering formation of clouds around ionised particles, so that more sunshine gets through to Earth, raising temperatures.
The Sun might be ‘active’ or ‘quiet’ as part of the regular 11.2 year cycle or for other exceptional reasons (e.g. quiet during the 1645-1715 Maunder Minimum of sunspots, etc).
One point to the BBC for allowing a serious skeptic on, but they forfeit about 50 points for all the gibberish that followed. What’s the transfer mechanism for all that heat going to the oceans? Who knows? What does Harrabin mean when he says evidence that Climate Change causes extreme weather is “inconclusive”, but then says several extreme weather events in a row can “stack up”? That got a bit vague. The whole series of talking points from the other two speakers seemed rather incohesive. It felt more like being hit over the head a number times rather than being presented with a convincing, coherent argument.
It sounded an awful lot like religious people discussing a new interpretation of Scripture. Even if our previous belief turned out to be wrong, it’s still right to believe in it, and we still must base our entire lives and economic structure on it, regardless.
Well I don’t know what to say about this.
This does not seem to be science.
And I am being attacked by some “BBC idiots” over the word terminology in a scientific paper.
Harrabin’s piece was, I thought, very carefully crafted. Giving just enough time to the ‘skeptics’ to show he was being reasonable. Allowing someone to say that doing nothing was not an experiment he would wish on his children and grandchildren. Had he been an impartial interviewer, Harrabin might have suggested what the warmists wanted was the experiment. In my view economically what these people want is a huge experiment that would cost billions (of whatever currency) and destroy opportunity for our children/