Panel counters UN climate conference Tom Harris is Executive Director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition and is also a policy advisor to Heartland. Dr Jay Lehr is the Science Director of The Heartland Institute which is based in Arlington Heights, Illinois For the first two weeks of December, the United Nations has been holding their 24th annual climate change scarefest, this time in Katowice, Poland. Dubbed COP24, the informal name for the 24th Conference of the Parties to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), we are being told that the world is near its end if we continue to use fossil fuels. UN General Assembly president Maria Espinosa even went so far as to tell the international news agency Agence France-Presse that humankind is “in danger of disappearing” if we allowed climate change to progress at its current rate. This is ridiculous, of course. The current rate of climate change is essentially zero since global temperatures have plateaued since the new millennium, a phenomenon known in the climate modeling community as the ‘Global Warming Hiatus.’ Presenting a more realistic point of view in a panel held just a few blocks from the COP24 conference site, Dr Craig Idso, founder of the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, explained, “Literally thousands of peer-reviewed scientific journal articles do not support a catastrophic – or even problematic – view of global warming.” The panel, organized by The Heartland Institute, an Illinois-based free-market think tank, and the European Institute for Climate and Energy (EIKE), operated out of Germany, revealed that the goal of COP24 to redistribute the wealth of developed countries to developing nations to supposedly control Earth’s climate is not based on solid science. Where the speakers for COP24 offered no meaningful physical evidence to support their absurd gloom and doom predictions, the Heartland/EIKE team offered serious data to prove the opposite, including: sea levels are not generally rising more than 8 inches per century; hurricanes, floods, tornadoes, droughts and forest fires have not increased while carbon dioxide (CO2) in the atmosphere has risen 40% in the past 70 years. The panel event featured the unveiling of the latest in the Climate Change Reconsidered (CCR) series of reports from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), an international network of climate scientists sponsored by three nonprofit organizations: the Center for the Study of Carbon Dioxide and Global Change, the Science and Environmental Policy Project (SEPP), and Heartland. Titled Climate Change Reconsidered II: Fossil Fuels (CCR II – FF), this latest, over 700-page, CCR report was the culmination of the contribution of 117 scientists, economists, and other experts. It addresses environmental economics, the climate science overlooked or ignored by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), and, most importantly, the huge benefits fossil fuels provide to human health, welfare, living standards, and the global environment. Joining Idso at the Heartland/EIKE event were Dr Horst-Joachim Lüdecke and Wolfgang Müller of EIKE; Dennis Avery, director of the Center for Global Food Issues; and James Taylor, Heartland Senior Fellow for Environment and Energy Policy. Let’s tune in to hear what they had to say. James Taylor opened the panel with the following remarks: “At COP24 here in Katowice we have a gathering of the world’s global collectivists, the climate totalitarians, the global ruling class elites. And what they want to tell us is that humans are creating a global warming crisis that necessitates people sacrificing affordable energy, people sacrificing abundant energy, and people sacrificing their own individual and national rights to turn over to the global climate bureaucracy… “It is entirely fitting that this meeting is in Katowice… This is a mining area, particularly a coal mining area. This is a place where the economic impacts of restrictions on affordable energy and particularly fossil fuels are going to be felt hardest. “Solidarity [Solidarity Labor Union] points out that half a million jobs in Poland alone rely on the coal sector. These are people that would be put out of work under the UN Agenda.” Craig Idso, a lead author for Climate Change Reconsidered series, spoke next and cited the five NIPCC volumes, explaining, “Given what is compiled in those reports and the thousands of peer-reviewed scientific references therein, I can tell you with complete confidence that there is absolutely no observational evidence that provides any compelling support for the contention that there is something unusual, unnatural or unprecedented about Earth’s current warmth. Neither are there any real-world data that confirm that floods, droughts, wildfires or hurricanes are becoming either more frequent or more severe as a result of global warming.” Idso continued to dash the popular, though unfounded belief that Earth’s polar ice sheets are on the verge of disappearing and that sea levels are about to rise dangerously and swamp coastal lowlands. He also completely dispelled the notions that: “searing heat waves are killing the poor and elderly and drying up precious farmland” “devastating diseases are spreading to regions previously considered immune to them” “migrating plants and animals will be unable to move to cooler locations fast enough to avoid extinction” “coral reefs will dissolve into oblivion as the oceans warm and turn acidic.” Concerning the model forecasts on which the climate scare is based, Idso showed the below graph and said: “... radiosondes [balloon] measurements shown in blue reveal that the actual warming rate is three times smaller than that predicted by the models [red bars show warming that should have occurred from 1979-2017, as predicted from 102 different climate models].” Similarly, Taylor finds that real world data does not correlate well with the original forecasts of the IPCC either. He stated: “IPCC predicted in its first assessment report (1990) that temperatures would rise 0.30C each ensuing decade. Global warming has happened much more slowly than that, at a pace of merely 0.13C per decade. Now, IPCC has lowered its prediction to merely 0.20C per decade, and it will soon have to lower that one as well.” Idso concluded: “There is nothing unique, unusual or unnatural about the recent warming of the Earth…. The present run-of-the-mill warming, which began about 1860, is thus viewed as a garden-variety climate change of the type that has occurred over and over again for the past several hundreds of thousands of years without any help from humanity.” Dennis Avery, a contributing author to the Climate Change Reconsidered series and co-author of the landmark book Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years, gave an overview of the history of climate change and society. He explained that societies become unsustainable, not because we overwhelmed our natural resources with overpopulation, as used to be thought, but because: “Every so often, Mother Nature inflicted a little ice age on this planet and that gave us colder, shorter, cloudier growing seasons with massive changes in regional rainfall patterns and centuries-long drought that afflicted most of the Eurasian steppes, the whole Mediterranean basin, the American southwest, large tracts of Central and Latin America, and massive parts of China. Our cultures in the past failed because they couldn’t feed their cities when the production from their fields was slashed by inopportune weather by 20 - 80%...” Indeed, we should welcome global warming. Avery said: “The Earth has given us weather as good as we’re enjoying today … about 10 to 15% of the last 200,000 years. We’ve had two 90,000-year ice ages [in this period] and the [rest of the years] have been split half and half between warmings like this—warm stable good crops—and climate chaos. "Climate chaos in the little ice ages—colder, less stable, storms, Noah’s floods, centuries in which Europe, for example, could hardly harvested a grain crop because of the incessant rain. That was northern Europe, of course, and in southern Europe it was too dry to grow anything. Human number shrank. “Population surges in the past occurred during the global warmings when the crops were good…We supported [this larger population] successfully for centuries at a time [but] suddenly nature turns against our farmers. They couldn’t feed the cities. Often, the farmers themselves couldn’t find enough to survive. Egypt has a number of past cold centuries in which the Nile floods failed so consistently that parents were recorded by writers at the time of eating their own children… “Today, we’ve farmed beyond that vulnerability. We have improved our agriculture to the point where we could now almost certainly feed the population the Earth will have in the next little ice age from the farming resources and farming systems that we have today.” Avery then explained that University of Hong Kong Archaeologist David Jang found that 90% of collapsed past societies failed during little ice ages. Avery said that in Mesopotamia around 2200 BC, one of the aspects of a little ice age that extended from Turkey down through Ethiopia was a 300-year drought that covered the whole region. There was “no way to walk off. You were doomed,” he said. Avery revealed a very positive development of late: “Stone Age man could feed about 2 people per square mile. Slash and burn farming can feed about 60 per square mile. But today humans are sustainably and consistently feeding 245 people per square mile and the average is still rising. Some of it of course has to do with what Craig Idso just told us about the enrichment of the air with additional CO2, the plant food and the water enhancing factor that has done so much for us already and promises to do more.” EIKE General Secretary Wolfgang Mueller spoke next about Germany’s failed renewable energy experiment: “Despite the fact that there is basically no science supporting this claim [catastrophic man-made climate change], there is in Germany this obsession with reducing CO2—the decarbonizing of the economy and phasing out of fossil fuels. We started with the electricity sector and, you look back, what we do see: about 30,000 wind turbines installed in Germany, roughly 1 million solar installations on roofs and in fields, and at the same time, the CO2 emissions didn’t go down. “But something happened—electricity prices rose significant. In US dollars since, [we] paid 35 [or] 34 cents per kilowatt-hour. So, while we basically invested per year roughly 30 to 35 billion dollars in order to go green, we don’t have any significant impact and … we created something which we now have to call energy poverty—fewer and fewer people are able to pay their electricity bills on time. They are disconnected from the grid. “So, while [Germany’s] position is that we need more of it [solar and wind power], I have to say this is a very good example of insanity—when you do the same thing over and over again and just think next time there’s a different outcome.” EIKE’s Dr Horst-Joachim Lüdecke followed up with a discussion about what science now knows about the influence of the changing sun on climate cycles. Lüdecke said: “Science has very good indications for the influence of the Sun on the climate but nevertheless the IPCC refuses to consider it.” The IPCC’s 2013 Working Group 1 Summary for Policymakers’ assertion that the impact of anthropogenic CO2 on climate was 1.68 watts per square meter and that changes in the output of the sun were responsible for only 0.05 watts per square meter is “ridiculous” according to Lüdecke. He explained: “The consequences of this neglection of the IPCC is that IPCC models, that does not include the power of the changing sun, cannot give reasonable results. Without including the Sun, it is impossible to model the climate. If there is any way to model the climate, you have to mention that the climate has so many parameters that it is a chaotic system, and it is my personal belief that it is never possible to [properly] model the climate.” He also showed the famous Milankovitch cycles with periods of roughly 100,000 years as follows: Lüdecke explained that the upper panel shows temperatures and the lower panel showed the CO2 concentration of the atmosphere. He said: “You see there is a very good correlation between the two-time series but, in reality, if you have a better time resolution, we know that CO2 follows the temperature [by] about 800 years. That means that CO2 is the effect and temperature is the cause, not vice versa. The explanation of this very interesting cycle is the change of the distance of the Earth from the Sun and the change in angle and the precession of the Earth’s axis.” It should be noted that warmer water leads to more CO2 outgassing to the atmosphere. Lüdecke said: “Man-made global warming today is a new religion. As one normally does not doubt religion, there are no real discussions about man-made global warming. The CO2 alarmists avoid any scientific debate about causes of climate change—the religion of man-made global warming is not supposed to be questioned. Instead of this, they propagate worldwide action for establishing extremely expensive programmes to reduce CO2 emissions. This means banning fossil fuels and replacing the reliable coal-powered stations [with] windmills and solar panels. "However, these renewables provide electricity only very costly and unreliably. In contrast to this, climate realists consider the scientific basics of climate change. In addition, they compare the huge costs of CO2 mitigation against its absent benefits. Because of the deep differences between CO2 believers and climate realists, a dialog between them is nearly impossible and seldom fruitful—if it takes place at all.” American journalist HL Mencken’s (1880-1950) asserted: “The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed, and hence clamorous to be led to safety, by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” Government officials who seek to extend their control over society have obviously come to the conclusion that man-caused global warming is the very best hobgoblin ever conjured up. In Katowice, speakers from around the world presented doom and gloom scenarios that, so they say, require the replacement of fossil fuels with alternative sources such as wind and solar power. But it is clearly impossible to power modern societies with wind and solar alone or eliminate the fossil fuel back-ups required for the times when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine. UN delegates apparently fail to understand that attempts to realize their goals would require the de-industrialization of developed countries and the consequent deaths of millions of people from starvation and/or exposure to the elements. They also seem to not know that such a venture would eliminate the chance for the poorest of the poor in developing countries to ever climb out of poverty. James Taylor ended the panel presentations by summarizing: “It’s extremely important that we stand up to the climate agenda that would impose expensive energy on the United States, expensive energy on the rest of the world, for absolutely no good. The reason why conservatives and skeptics challenge the science is because of these economic numbers that show the cost in the impacts of the UN climate agenda. And when we look under the hood and look at the science, [it] shows that there’s nothing to be gained by sentencing ourselves to this poverty and human misery.”
... it is clearly impossible to power modern societies with wind and solar alone or eliminate the fossil fuel back-ups required for the times when the wind does not blow and the sun does not shine

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Model-predicted vs observed warming of the tropical troposphere

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