The Happy Green Planet, Why Has Global Warming Stopped?

By: Andrew_McKillop

Despite the propaganda, despite the outright hysteria drummed out by a large slice of the Global Warming Crisis Community, world average temperatures have not risen for over 10 years. Reading the politically correct press or watching government-friendly TV news you might not know it - but it is true. The global warming guru cartel of "warmist" well-paid talking heads has broken apart.

The guru talkers included Britain's Sir James Lovelock, who in 2006 screamed in the politically correct UK press that "Billions will die from global warming before the end of the century". The very same 'Jimbo' Lovelock, today, accuses the "warmists" of outright and shameful exaggeration.

Another 'Jimbo, James Hansen, presently described as a "former NASA scientist" was an equal-rank global "warmist" guru with Lovelock. This 'Jimbo' in 2007 could scream that "Trains carrying coal to power plants are death trains. Coal-fired power plants are factories of death". Hansen now talks about the biosphere absorbing more CO2, growing faster than previous, and this explains why global average temperatures are not increasing. He calls it "biosphere fertilization by CO2".

He was forced by straight facts to find an answer to why his doomster forecasts are wrong, and talk around the fact that CO2 levels are increasing, but temperatures are not.

BLOOMBERG RIDES THE DEATH TRAIN
Bloomberg News, stripping away its flimsy mask of "objective journalism", is not able to rage that temperatures are relentlessly rising - and instead screams this weekend that the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere "surpassed a threshold not seen for 3 million years, exceeding 400 parts per million for the first time since researchers began tracking the data". In 1958.

This claim of "not seen for 3 million years" is firstly an assertion - not a fact. Paleoclimatology is very far from an exact science. Dispute about firstly how to measure and estimate atmosphere composition and climate behaviour in the remote past, and the numbers used, is the subject of hundreds of scientific articles. Claiming that the Earth's atmosphere had exactly 400 parts per million of CO2 exactly three million years ago is however 100%-perfectly impossible. It cannot be stated, it can only be asserted, by deliberately hysterical junk journalists.

The rational response and reaction is: So what? Previous climates of the Earth in a large slice of geological time certainly contained up to 750 ppm CO2, possibly 1000 ppm, that is 0.1% CO2 and 99.9% "other things", mostly nitrogen, oxygen and hydrogen, and water vapour. In those past paleoclimatic eras the only sure and certain CO2-and-global temperature link was that the Earth tended to warm up about 800 - 1000 years after, not before, CO2 levels rose. The IPCC and the warmists (and Bloomberg News) tells us that this "old paradigm" is finished. Earth temperatures will now rise as fast as CO2 levels increase and could (remaining gurus tell us) rise as much as 6 degreesC in the next 37 years, by 2050. This has literally never been done before and would be downright miraculous!

The IPCC (and Bloomberg too) tells us the temp rise in the last 150 years has been 0.8 degreesC. Even this may be an exaggeration. Scientists as untouchably eminent as Ivar Giaevar say it isnt really scientifically possible to say there is one single "global average temperature" at any one time. MIT quantum physics doyen, Freeman Dyson, simply says he thinks the IPPC is "fudging the numbers". But why would Bloomberg News give any attention to these scientists?

The U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s Mauna Loa monitoring station in Hawaii, May 9, reported that measured CO2 attained 400.3 ppm. According to Bloomberg, this is "considered a landmark by scientists and environmentalists, who say carbon emissions caused by burning fossil fuels are warming the planet and must be reined in before they cause irreversible changes to weather, sea levels and Arctic ice cover".

In the case of "iconic environmentalist" Jimbo Lovelock, they certainly do not say that any more, but the vacant seat on the gravy train created by 'Jimbo' bowing out was quickly snapped up by Bob Ward, the policy director at Lord 'Nick' Stern's Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics. Quoted by Bloomberg, Bob tells us “We are in the process of creating a prehistoric climate that humans have no evolutionary experience of”. Bob says hello to Jurassic Park!

AND NOW, DOWN TO BUSINESS
Bob Ward was also quoted as saying that 3 million years ago "world  temperatures were 2 to 3 degrees Celsius higher than pre-industrial times, the polar ice caps were much smaller, and sea levels were about 20 meters (66 feet) higher than today”. He did not quite go so far as claiming he was there, but it was close run thing.

What counts for Bloomberg News is more grave. More critical. The Mauna Loa readings come three weeks after the European Parliament rejected a plan to shore up prices in the European ETS, which is  incorrectly called the "Emissions Trading System" by Bloomberg, because the "S' stands for Scheme, not System. This is the world's only, failing and inefficient, corrupt and farcical effort to put a price on carbon by letting brokers and traders play around with permits "and save the climate". What they did was first talk them up to the sky, then crashed them to nothing. A classic bubble.

Bloomberg's paid journalist describe the ETS as designed to "ratchet back greenhouse-gas pollution" in Europe by "giving manufacturers and utilities an incentive to reduce emissions".

Primarily it gives them a big incentive to get out of Europe, to delocalize and let European technocrats and talking heads moan about rampant deindustrialization and the growth of unemployment, both of which provenly cut carbon emissions.

Carbon permits traded on the ETS have a lot less going for them, a lot less rebound potential than gold, which Bloomberg's journalists are paid to regularly tell us "could fall to $800".  Carbon permit prices are having problems holding above 3 euros per tonne CO2 equivalent, after their April 16 near-death experience dealt them by the European Parliament. As Bloomberg reminds us, permit prices were as high as 31 euros per tonne in 2006, back in the good times for Global Warming talking heads.

David King, former chief science adviser to the U.K. government is quoted as saying "(European) industry won’t eliminate carbon for less than 100 euros a tonne". This is equivalent to a cool addition of $30 to the price of every barrel of oil, or every barrel equivalent of fossil energy consumed in Europe. As a death threat to European industry this is an impressive threat. What impact this would have on European equity prices might be "hard to forecast" for Bloomberg's global warming happy-happy  journalists, but average human beings can do it for them, for free.

It would be disastrous, and Europe is already wrestling with economic disaster.

KEEPING UP THE PSEUDO SCIENCE
Likely to show they "did their homework" Bloomberg's journalists and editors, raking over the remains of the Global Warming gravy trainwreck, trying hard to pump it up a little or a lot, add a dash of science to their article. In their weekend article they say that rising CO2 in the atmosphere confirms "part of Swedish chemist Svante August Arrhenius’s theory from 1896 that burning fossil fuels may cause global warming".

That is correct, he said "may".

They jump straight from the Arrhenius theory to the United Nations in 2007 deciding that stabilizing the gas at 400 ppm to 440 ppm may (that is could or might) lead to a temperature gain of "as much as 2.8 degrees Celsius" relative to widely varying estimates of what world temperatures averaged in year 1800, although sometimes 1850 and 1880 are used as a datum. Since 2007, almost endless "climate treaty negotiators", from 2009 led to a first non-binding agreement by more than 190 nations of a "goal of limiting the temperature increase to 2 degrees by about 2050".

Europe-based Green NGOs, notably WWF, described in the Bloomberg article as "dealing with climate change", and receiving in UK WWF's case about $6 million a year of government funding to do it, are quick to claim that the world is "heading in the wrong direction". David Nussbaum, chief executive officer of UK WWF is cited by Bloomberg as saying: “There is limited time for governments to achieve the goal they have set themselves for agreeing a global deal that effectively tackles climate change.”

Negotiators at the UN are working toward a global climate treaty in 2015 that would come into force from 2020. Their next meeting on the subject is in Warsaw in November 2013.

What Bloomberg calls "the surfeit of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere" is very unscientifically described by its journalists as "already threaten(ing) the 2-degree target". At least as unscientific because a formal, direct and calculated relation between carbon dioxide emissions in tonnes per year, and temperature rises by year would be needed - but does not exist - Bloomberg's journalists tell readers that "predicted emissions in 2020" would need to be cut from about 58 gigatons (billion tons) to a "level consistent with 2 degrees of warming". The article claims to know this is 44 gigatons per year.

Bloomberg them allows itself to publish another blatant error, saying the IPCC is "The world body’s (the UN's) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former U.S. Vice President Al Gore". The IPCC is not a UN agency, despite trying hard to get that status and presently does not enjoy the diplomatic immunity from prosecution of a UN body. This fact is well known to the IPCC, strongly diluting the spin it once added, "Hockey stick" style to the climate catastrophe "findings" it publishes. Its next report on "climate science" is due in September 2014.

Skeptics of man’s influence on warming temperatures note that while CO2 levels in the atmosphere have continued to rise since the 1990s, no year has been statistically warmer on average than 1998 - now 15 years back in time. The higher levels of temperature for 2005 and 2010 "fell within the margin of error" for any year since 1998, according to the U.K. Meteorological Office.

At the end of its distorted and deliberately alarmist article, Bloomberg cites Marc Morano, former spokesman for Republican Senator James Inhofe and the executive editor of Climate Depot, saying the earth has had much higher CO2 levels in the past, and “Americans should welcome the 400 parts-per-million threshold. This means that plants are going to be happy". Happy Green Planet, as the biosphere grows faster than previous -  but not happy for the Global Warming doomsters and fearmongers who started wrong, and are being proven wrong by the science they claim to respect.

By Andrew McKillop

Contact: xtran9@gmail.com

Former chief policy analyst, Division A Policy, DG XVII Energy, European Commission. Andrew McKillop Biographic Highlights

Co-author 'The Doomsday Machine', Palgrave Macmillan USA, 2012

Andrew McKillop has more than 30 years experience in the energy, economic and finance domains. Trained at London UK’s University College, he has had specially long experience of energy policy, project administration and the development and financing of alternate energy. This included his role of in-house Expert on Policy and Programming at the DG XVII-Energy of the European Commission, Director of Information of the OAPEC technology transfer subsidiary, AREC and researcher for UN agencies including the ILO.

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