This is the best way for me to satisfy my spergiosity without cluttering up the boards. Also Harry doesn't have to read this if he doesn't want to.
http://hockeyschtick.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/science-is-about-evidence-not-consensus_8.htmlScience is about evidence, not consensus. You should never "believe" in a theory because there's a consensus.
But when the evidence starts to come up short, the hand wringers and arm wavers will appeal to consensus to try and "prove" that their theory is correct.
The facts presented in the article are pretty basic in climate science now:
There is no hockey stick. Every hockey stick graph has been quickly torn down upon release.
The process with the latest hockeystick started a few years ago when Keith Briffa released a hockeystick graph that was supposed to corroborate Michael Mann's original hockeystick from 1998. But Steve McIntyre was able to quickly show some glaring mistakes in the work... including much over reliance on one tree in northern Russia that suddenly began to grow much faster in the late 20th century. This greatly skewed the graph to show a hockeystick. Instead, it is likely that a neighboring tree died... and this freed up more nutrients for this tree to grow.
But McIntyre was slandered by the alarmists including many prominent climate scientists who called him a "confusionist denier".
Now Briffa finished the analysis that showed no hockey stick... but a plateauing of temperatures after the mid 1970s that coincides with a change in the main multi-decade Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) and led to a similar change in Alaska's climate. That is.. the warmest years of the 20th century were not at the end.. but in 1978 and 1981 in Alaska.. soon after the big PDO shift when the most warm water was hugging the coast of North America from the Aleutians to Mexico. The same goes for places like San Diego.
But recently the PDO has become consistently negative. The accumulative index of the PDO changed from increase to decrease in 2005 and 19 of the 20 main weather stations in Alaska have shown a dramatic cooling trend since 2000.. but especially after 2005.
Despite the hoopla over the heat wave that struck for a couple days in June, periods of record cold have been much more common in the past 3 years. This year that was illustrated by the record latest break up of the Nenana River in central Alaska... a record that includes the precise second of the breakup going back to the 1920s.
But that didn't fit the pattern so it wasn't talked about outside of the "deniersphere". When confronted with it directly, alarmists will do a lot of arm waving "it's all part of 'the new normal' and we're to blame!"
I've heard this before. Remember polar bears were doomed? Well, polar bear populations are on the rise. It seems the lack of summer ice has led to an explosion of the ringed seal population... which the polar bears gorge themselves on during the March-May period... a period where there is plenty of ice to walk around on. Later on, as the ice melts, the seals escape to open water where they are safe until freeze up again. March-May ice coverage is not expected to decline very much.. even under the worst scenarios.
And, you guessed it... polar bear numbers crashed during times of higher ice coverage.. namely the early-mid 1970s and mid 1980s. Ringed seal numbers decline dramatically when the ice doesn't melt... which is why the areas in the Arctic with the most consistent ice... the northern side of the Canadian Archipelago and Greenland where ice breaks into big chunks and piles up into slabs 50 feet thick... there are very few ringed seals and thus few polar bears. While more sea ice benefits the bears in a longer hunting season.. it so negatively affects the prey that ultimately what is good for the goose is bad for the gander which then is bad for the goose.
Also.. remember how desertification is gonna ruin us all? Actually, the planet has greened dramatically in the past 30 years as higher levels of CO2 have allowed plants to produce more food with less water. Many of our own crops have benefited handsomely from higher CO2 concentrations... and it is very possible that if we had not increased CO2 levels like we have... that we would struggle much more to feed the 7 billion humans alive today as drought stress would eat into yields much more easily.
How about sea level rise? Claims of 70 feet already being locked in by 2100... sinking Miami, NYC, and much of the Netherlands under the sea... are nothing but wild alarmist claims that will never come true.
In fact, the ocean at the moment is rising at a decidedly more modest 6-8 inches per century and shows no sign of an acceleration.. but actually a deceleration. Sea level increases are decreasing in size!
The same goes for atmospheric CO2 concentration. Despite by far record emissions of CO2 by humans since 2000.. the rate at which the concentration of CO2 is going up has decreased! It seems the lack of warming on the globe has increased the ocean's uptake of CO2, which means despite increasing human emissions, the oceans have made up for that increase simply by not warming.
Drop your alarm. The end is far from nigh.
