IPCC scientists test the Exit doors

 
Courtesy: JoNova

This is another big tipping point on the slide out of the Great Global Scam. IPCC scientists — facing the travesty of predictions-gone-wrong — are trying to salvage some face, and plant some escape-clause seeds for later. But people are not stupid.

A conveniently leaked IPCC draft is testing the ground. What excuses can they get away with? Hidden underneath some pat lines about how anthropogenic global warming is “likely” to influence… ah cold days and warm days, is the get-out-of-jail clause that’s really a bombshell:

“Uncertainty in the sign of projected changes in climate extremes over the coming two to three decades is relatively large because climate change signals are expected to be relatively small compared to natural climate variability”.

Translated: The natural climate forces are stronger than we thought, and we give up, we can’t say whether it will get warmer or colder in the next twenty years.

This multipurpose prediction means that in the future, if it’s colder, they’re right; if it’s warmer, they’re right; and they have it covered for more or less storms, floods, droughts, blizzards and frost too.

And then there’s the perpetual-motion aspect of the threat. Greenhouse gases might not be dominant now (like they’ve been saying for the last 20 years) but they will be, they tell us. They will be! Look out! The storms are coming, we’re all doomed. (Well we definitely absolutely might be.) Got that?

If the century progresses without restraints on greenhouse gas emissions, their impacts will come to dominate, it forecasts: 

• “It is likely that the frequency of heavy precipitation or the proportion of total rainfall from heavy falls will increase in the 21st Century over many areas of the globe…
• “Mean tropical cyclone maximum wind speed is likely to increase…
• “There is medium confidence that droughts will intensify in the 21st Century in some seasons and areas…
• “Low-probability high-impact changes associated with the crossing of poorly understood thresholds cannot be excluded, given the transient and complex nature of the climate system.” 

It’s impossible to read the draft without coming away with the impression that with or without anthropogenic climate change, extreme weather impacts are going to be felt more and more, simply because there are more and more people on planet Earth – particularly in the swelling “megacities” of the developing world that overwhelmingly lie on the coast or on big rivers close to the coast.

That’s an EXIT clause and it reads like this: We might have been wrong about CO2 causing the disasters, but disasters are still coming. More people are going to die from climate catastrophes because there are lots more people! See, “we were right all along to be concerned about the climate”. (Just not quite right about the cause).

This is a handy excuse. Al Gore tried a segue like this out a couple of years ago — pretending that he was just fine tuning his altruistic saintly concern by saying quietly that CO2 wasn’t as bad as he’d thought but Black Carbon (!) was awful pollution. In other words, he’ll never admit he made a bad call, or has been caught pushing a scam, he’ll just say he was right all along, “carbon is still the issue, it’s just a slightly different form”.

These IPCC scientists are using the same technique: Climate Disasters are still the issue — it’s just a slightly different reason.

Repeat after me: AGW is still bad, skeptics are still wrong, and look over here at this slightly new twist on the predictions of disaster.

We all know there won’t be a slew of headlines trumpeting: 

• New IPCC leaked report; Weather could get warmer or colder!
• “Storms might be not quite as bad, but could be much worse!”
• “IPCC underestimate natural climate forces! Skeptics correct!”

Obviously this is an all-encompassing all-occasion document. For journalists fishing for disaster, there are ways to find it in the prophesies, and for scientists who want to be able to say “My predictions were right” in five years time, they can find just about any prediction under the sun somewhere in there and point to it to say “I told you so”.

Even Hulme is acknowledging that things are changing and the “climate” meme is receding. As UK academic Mike Hulme and others have argued, such events will occur whether exacerbated by climate change or not; and vulnerable societies need protection irrespective of climate change.

He’s argued for a divorce, therefore, between the issues of adaptation, which he says could usefully be added into the overall process of overseas development assistance, and mitigation of emissions.

In other words, the money will still flow, it’s just being rebadged. But the developing nations don’t like that. They prefer the current arrangement when developed nations atone for carbon sins and “pay” the third world. The alternative is the same cash, but it’s called “aid” and that comes with more strings. Everyone wants to be paid their rightful due, and no one wants to be “indebted” in any sense.

It’s not proved to be a popular notion with developing world governments, which remain determined to tie the two together in the UN climate process.

Governments of vulnerable countries argue that as developed nations caused the climate change problem, they must compensate those that suffer its impacts with money above and beyond aid.

Developing countries like the fact that under the UN climate process, the rich are committed to funding adaptation for the poor.

That this is all a naked clamor for pork-barreling money and payments to patrons (and not about the poor or the environment) is not even hidden. Black points out that the aid is not getting out as fast as it should:

Yet as the brief prepared for the Dhaka meeting by the humanitarian charity Dara shows, it isn’t happening anywhere near as fast as it ought to be.

Only 8% of the “fast-start finance” pledged in Copenhagen, it says, has actually found its way to recipients.

Where is the outrage? Doesn’t this type of inefficiency or corruption completely undermine any pretense that there is a point in fighting to “solve” the climate problem (assuming there was one). The entire Copenhagen boondoggle was never about helping the world’s poor, because 92% of the money pledged went to “looking good” or funding bureaucrats or was a mythical promise, and hardly anyone cares.

Then, Wait! No. Seriously? You mean the IPCC is not about rigorous scientific analysis free of government influence?

It’s possible – no, it’s “very likely” – that the IPCC draft will be amended as the week progresses, and presumably the governments represented at the Climate Vulnerable Forum will be asking their delegates to inject a greater sense of urgency.

“Asking delegates to inject “urgency”? Wasn’t this supposed to be based on overwhelming evidence, all uncertainties acknowledged, no exaggeration, and the scientific integrity of thousands of the world’s top experts was a given? All along it’s just been a tool for Big-Government to use to suck the money from honest citizens. Even Black knows it.

Does Black realize that he needs an Exit Door too? “The skeptics were always wrong. I was just reporting the scientists who underestimated natural variability”.

No Richard, No. You switched off your brain, stopped investigating, and turned yourself willingly into a mouthpiece for government funded scientists against the unfunded independent scientists who turned out to have been right all along.

The shape-shifting here is entirely predictable. It means the machine adapts to reality, but hardly anyone one gets punished. A bit like the bailouts and fraud on Wall St — no one went to jail. (Occupy Climate anyone?) They just change the letterheads on the parasitic agencies that pretend to help the poor and care about lemurs, and all of them get away with the sloppy reasoning, wasteful practices, bullying, deceit, and corruption.

Unless of course, the internet foils that plan. May we always be free from the forces of censorship.