Published by on 16 Feb 2009
Glimmer of hope for consensus climate honesty is short-lived
Paul MacRae
February 13, 2009
Do not knowingly mislead, or allow others to be misled, about scientific matters. Present and review scientific evidence, theory or interpretation honestly and accurately.
–Proposed scientific code of ethics
For one giddy, almost magical moment, I thought the “consensus” climate science community, or at least a small portion of it, had come to its senses. I should have known better.
The almost-magical moment came on reading a headline in the U.K. Guardian online. It read: “Scientists must rein in misleading climate change claims: Overplaying natural variations in the weather diverts attention from the real issues.” The article was by Dr. Vicky Pope of the British Meteorological (Hadley) Centre, one of the four major centres monitoring climate.
Finally! I thought. The consensus climate scientists who believe, passionately but with almost no scientific evidence beyond computer models, that the planet is warming, that it’s all humanity’s fault, and that we’re heading for oblivion, are willing to admit they’ve been wildly exaggerating the threat of warming to places like the Arctic.
Pope even seemed to agree, noting:
Recent headlines have proclaimed that Arctic summer sea ice has decreased so much in the past few years that it has reached a tipping point and will disappear very quickly. The truth is that there is little evidence to support this. Indeed, the record-breaking losses in the past couple of years could easily be due to natural fluctuations in the weather, with summer sea ice increasing again over the next few years.
Figure 1: IPCC computer predictions of warming versus real-world temperature data (blue and green lines)
But the giddiness quickly passed. The rest of Pope’s article is just another consensus attempt to explain away its deplorable track record in predicting a great deal of warming when there is either very little or no warming at all (see Figure 1 and Is the Planet Still Warming?).
At best, Pope will only admit that “in the past 10 years the temperature rise has slowed,” when in truth temperature rise hasn’t “slowed” (see How the Hadley Centre Spins the Data on Non-Warming), it’s stopped. The climate may even tip into cooling for the next decade or two or longer. But why quibble over facts?
