Onder de titel, ‘Apocalypse Delayed’, schonk Ben Pile op ‘Spiked Online’ aandacht aan de afzwakking van het klimaatalarmisme, zoals dat in het gelekte, maar nog niet officieel gepubliceerde rapport van het VN-klimaatpanel (IPCC) valt te lezen. In het verleden hebben klimaatsceptici vaak ernstige kritiek op eerdere rapporten geuit, als zijnde té alarmistisch. Nu zijn het de verstokte AGW’ers (AGW = ‘Anthropogenic Global Warming’) die van mening zijn dat het IPCC te weinig waarschuwt voor de risico’s van opwarming.

‘Het kan verkeren’, zei Brederode.

Ben Pile:

The IPCC report does not justify climate scaremongering.

We should all be dead by now, thanks to overpopulation and resource depletion. The few of us remaining should be scavenging a landscape denuded of life by acid rains and UV rays. Thankfully, we are not. Also still standing are the scientific institutions and the global bureaucracies that predicted our premature demise. One of those is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). …

[…] before the [new] report was even published, it began to excite climate alarmists. In September, the Guardian reported leaked details from the report’s summary for policymakers, claiming that government interference had forced scientists to ‘water down’ their findings and ‘pull their punches’. The claim that ‘temperature rises of above 1.5°C could lead to increased migrations and conflict’ was cut from the final draft, it reported.

It is usually climate sceptics, not alarmists, who point out that the IPCC’s summaries are subject to political interference. These summaries tend to be much more alarmist than what the actual science says in the reports’ technical chapters. In 2014, for example, the summary for policymakers warned that climate change can increase the risks of conflict and migration. But this was totally unsupported by the technical parts of the document.

This year’s IPCC’s report has been a disappointment to many climate activists, including the apparent source of the leak, Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy (CCCEP) and the Grantham Research Institute (GRI). The GRI is named after its billionaire benefactor, Jeremy Grantham. Both the CCEP and the GRI are chaired by the world’s leading climate technocrat, Nick Stern, author of the UK government’s review of the economics of climate change in 2007.

Zie voor kritiek op Stern hier.

The problem for Stern, his financial backers, researchers and PR men is that their political agenda depends on science identifying dramatic risks, which can act as a spur to action: catastrophic increases in the frequency and intensity of storms, flooding and drought, devastating changes to agricultural productivity, increases in diseases and poverty, impacts across society that could lead to civil conflict and war for resources. But so far, signs of these dramatic consequences have not materialised. As a result, these activists, researchers and technocrats are now at odds with the science.

That’s not to say that this year’s IPCC report gives nothing to alarmism. But it tells the alarmists that they will have to wait longer, that the apocalypse has been delayed. …

None of which is to say that global warming does not create risks. It does. But they are not the risks that climate technocrats have hoped to capitalise on. There are no immediate, looming catastrophes that can easily be detected in statistics which can provide unambiguous instruction to governments. Climate activists and technocrats need this threat of catastrophic risks to sustain their political arguments in lieu of any positive agenda. Though the most alarmist edges have been smoothed out of the IPCC’s output, it is still very much driven by ideology.

Lees verder hier.

En zo wordt de ballon van het klimaatalarmisme langzaam doorgeprikt – dit keer door het VN-klimaatpanel zèlf, en niet door de klimaatsceptici!

Daar komt nog bij dat die verschrikkelijke opwarming maar steeds wil niet komen.

Op dit blog wordt door sommige respondenten – ten onrechte – grote waarde gehecht aan extrapolatie van (lineaire) temperatuurtrends over verschillende decennia. Zouden we deze benadering toepassen op het alarmistische gehalte van de rapporten van het IPCC, dan ligt geleidelijke verdwijning in de lijn der verwachting (grapje!).