CHURCHVILLE, VA—The man-made warming activists at the UN are trapped in turmoil over how to deal with the earth’s lack of warming since 1998. A week or so ago, the UN climate panel circulated a draft statement that would have admitted we’re unlikely to have any further earth-warming for the next 30 years “because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability.”
The BBC’s environmental reporter Richard Black reported that he’d received a copy of that draft. Black said he expected member governments to reject the statement, however, because it would embarrass the first-world governments’ green energy subsidies and taxes agenda. It would also have finally killed the world’s climate-terror campaign.
In fact, NASA and the U.S. Solar Observatory had already told us months ago to expect moderate global cooling for the next three decades due to a quiet period on the sun, and a consequent cooling of the Pacific Ocean’s huge heat mass.
Searching for a way out of the non-warming trap, one of the Intergovernmental Panel’s lead science authors announced that the climate computers had always correctly predicted non-warming lulls like ours. (We just missed that clause in the UN’s earlier press releases about the soon-to-be parboiled planet.)
“Looking at a single, noisy 10-year period is cherry picking, and does not provide reliable information about the presence or absence of human effects on climate,” wrote Ben Santer, in the November 17 Journal of Geophysical Research (Atmospheres) online. Santer said that “tropospheric temperature records must be at least 17 years long to discriminate between internal climate noise and the signal of human caused changes.”
What’s magic about 17 years instead of 15? From their point of view, it would give the alarmists at least two more years of “grace” before they had to admit the giant computer models are a total failure. That might be enough time to re-elect Obama.
But wait. Horses were about to be changed once more. The next day, November 18th, the IPCC decided not to admit we will have no global warming for the next 30 years. Instead, they announced that the real danger to humanity was not warming at all, but “extreme weather.”
The UN IPCC and its compliant followers will apparently rely on the mainstream media to keep headlining every small weather “disaster” in the world—and there are always lots of those. They’ll somehow all be blamed on too much CO2. Thus green taxes and subsidies can go forward as planned. It seems not to matter that there’s even less evidence for an “extreme weather” scare than for the “long-term global warming disaster” that lasted just 22 years and caused no harm.
When I think of “extreme weather,” I think of the century-long drought that desiccated the entire western two-thirds of America for virtually the whole period between 1200 and 1300 AD. That extreme drought starved the Anasazi Indian culture out of the San Juan Basin of the Colorado River. Simultaneously, it collapsed the only city Native Americans ever built—at Cahokia, just east of today’s St. Louis, Missouri. Cahokia had perhaps 40,000 people, about double the population of London at that time—until the drought destroyed their corn crops.
Folks, that was extreme weather.
Dennis Avery is a former U.S. State Department senior analyst and co-author with astrophysicist Fred Singer of Unstoppable Global Warming: Every 1,500 Years
