The great climate climbdown

Matt Ridley writes:

I first wrote a doom–laden article for the Economist about carbon dioxide emissions trapping heat in the air in 1987, nearly 40 years ago. I soon realised the effect was real but the alarm was overdone, that feedback effects were exaggerated in the models. The greenhouse effect was likely to be a moderate inconvenience rather than an existential threat. For this blasphemy I was abused, cancelled, blacklisted, called a ‘denier’ and generally deemed evil.

The effect is very real, but the alarm is definitely overdone. I would call the greenhouse effect as more than a moderate inconvenience. I would call it a significant and complex challenge. But it isn’t and never has been an existential threat.

The activists who took over the climate debate, often with minimal understanding of climate science, competed for attention by painting ever more catastrophic pictures of future greenhouse warming. They altered the name to ‘climate change’ so they could blame it for blizzards as well as heatwaves. Then they inflated the language to ‘climate emergency’ and ‘climate crisis’, even as projections of future warming came down.

Yes it once was global warming, but now they use it to try and blame every natural disaster in the world on it.

‘I’m talking about the slaughter, death and starvation of six billion people this century. That’s what the science predicts,’ said Roger Hallam, founder of Extinction Rebellion, in 2019, though the science says no such thing. ‘A top climate scientist is warning climate change will wipe out humanity unless we stop using fossil fuels over the next five years,’ tweeted Greta Thunberg in 2018. Five years later she deleted her tweet and shortly after decided that Palestine was a more promising way of staying in the limelight.

Here is what the consensus science of the IPCC says:

• Global surface temperature was 1.09 [0.95 to 1.20]°C higher in 2011–2020 than 1850–1900
• Global mean sea level increased by 0.20 [0.15 to 0.25] m between 1901 and 2018. The average rate of sea level rise was 1.3 [0.6 to 2.1] mm yr-1 between 1901 and 1971, increasing to 1.9 [0.8 to 2.9] mm yr-1 between 1971 and 2006, and further increasing to 3.7 [3.2 to 4.2] mm yr-1 between 2006 and 2018 (high confidence)

So a 20 cm rise in sea levels over the last 117 years.

And what of the future:

• Relative to 1995–2014, the likely global mean sea level rise under the SSP1-1.9 GHG emissions scenario is 0.15–0.23 m by 2050 and 0.28–0.55 m by 2100
• While for the SSP5-8.5 GHG emissions scenario it is 0.20–0.29 m by 2050 and 0.63–1.01 m by 2100 (medium confidence)

So by 2100 the sea level increase with medium confidence is as low as 28 cm in the best case scenario and as high as 1 metre in the most extreme scenario. The extreme scenario would be a significant and complex challenge.

Perhaps Gore might now regret his exaggerated preachings of hellfire and damnation. In his 2006 film An Inconvenient Truth, for which he shared a Nobel prize, he predicted a sea-level rise of up to 20 feet ‘in the near future’ – out by around 19 feet and nine inches. In 2009 he said there was a 75 per cent chance all the ice in the Arctic Ocean would disappear by 2014. In that year there were five million square kilometres of the stuff at its lowest point – about the same as in 2009. This year there were 4.7 million square kilometres. 

The doomsday cult have actually harmed the climate change cause. When doomsday doesn’t happen, people (wrongly) conclude it is all a hoax, rather than it was exagerrated.

Indoor air pollution caused by poor people cooking over wood fires because they lack access to gas and electricity kills three million a year. So yes, Gates, influenced by Lomborg and Wright, is correct to say that getting cheap, reliable, clean energy to the poor is by far the more urgent priority.

Agreed.

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