OPINION:
For over 30 years, since the first Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report (AR1), we have been told that global warming will plunge the world into mega-famines, mega-droughts, climate terrorism and even nuclear war. The same breathless hysteria is found in the latest report, AR6.
It accepts that climate cannot ’stay still’ — the sun and Earth are always in flux and in movement relative to each other — but the IPCC claims humanity’s influence on climate is vast, undeniable and always bad.
Really? Let’s look at European flood losses in the past 150 years. Over 21,000 people were killed in 1870-1899, 14,000 in 1900-1929, 12,000 in 1930-1959, 6,000 in 1960-1989, and 2,000 in 1990-2020, while Europe’s population rose from 250 million to 750 million. But we can still make this sound bad,and blame global warming for it,if we concentrate on just the damage cost. The fact is any metric that involves behavior and population can be made to look bad or good by unscrupulous manipulation and misattributing the cause.
In July 2021, a Science headline read: “UN climate panel confronts implausibly hot forecasts of future warming.” With AR6 almost due for release, scientists scrambled to find the model errors and produce more reliable guidance for policy makers. Sadly, the IPCC, instead of choosing to delay AR6 as the climate models on which it was based were clearly wrong, issued it anyway.
This is the kind of behavior exposed by the Climategate whistleblower and shows why politicos need a neo-religious faith in ’the’ science.
JOHN CAMERON
St. Andrews, Scotland
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