More Exaggerated Climate Change Claims Causing Backlash as More Are Debunked

The Times UK online reports on more potential errors IPCC Synthesis Report to government leaders

The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change.

This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim. The revelation follows the IPCC’s retraction of a claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035.

The Sunday Telegraph reveals new factual errors and poor sources of evidence in the IPCC reports.

Last weekend, the Telegraph revealed that the panel had based claims about disappearing mountain ice on anecdotal evidence in a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.

And on Friday, it emerged that the IPCC’s panel had wrongly reported that more than half of the Netherlands was below sea level because it had failed to check information supplied by a Dutch government agency.

The Globe and Mail and other sources that are usually very pro-environmentalism and climate change are reporting “The Great global Warming Collapse”

Walter Russell Mead has coverage

The Dutch government has demanded that the IPCC correct its erroneous assertion that half of the Netherlands is below sea level. Actually, it’s only about a quarter. A prediction about the impact of sea level increases on people living in the Nile Delta was taken from an unpublished student dissertation. The report contained inaccurate data about generating energy from waves and about the cost of nuclear power

But many climate scientists now sense a sinking ship, and they’re bailing out. Among them is Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria who acknowledges that the climate body has crossed the line into advocacy. Even Britain’s Greenpeace has called for Mr. Pachauri’s resignation. India says it will establish its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the IPCC.

None of this is to say that global warming isn’t real, or that human activity doesn’t play a role, or that the IPCC is entirely wrong, or that measures to curb greenhouse-gas emissions aren’t valid. But the strategy pursued by activists (including scientists who have crossed the line into advocacy) has turned out to be fatally flawed.

By exaggerating the certainties, papering over the gaps, demonizing the skeptics and peddling tales of imminent catastrophe, they’ve discredited the entire climate-change movement. The political damage will be severe. As Mr. Mead succinctly puts it: “Skeptics up, Obama down, cap-and-trade dead.” That also goes for Canada, whose climate policies are inevitably tied to those of the United States.

Alfin Cites Evidence of Black Carbon and Stratospheric Water Vapour Effects

A new study of the effect of black carbon on the melting of Himalayan glaciers demonstrates that 90% of melting is due to aerosols — not CO2. More than 30% of melting is due to black carbon aerosol, and probably considerably more than 30%.

There is also new climate science on stratospheric water vapour.

scientists from NOAA have published research in Science that challenges the core assumptions of the global warming camp…

…the fundamental assumption in global warming dogma, that carbon dioxide is the most important factor in global warming, is simply not true…the research does allude to human emissions having a much smaller role in climate change than previously thought…

Miskolczi is not the first scientist to introduce the idea of “negative feedback” into atmospheric studies. MIT’s Richard Lindzen has been discussing negative feedbacks in climate for many years.

In fact, wherever you look in the atmosphere, the biosphere, or the oceans, you find negative feedbacks are predominant in climate. Otherwise by now the Earth would have experienced runaway climate change in various directions, and never have come back. Instead, when one looks at the history of Earth’s climate, one sees fractal cycles that repeat over several overlapping time scales.

Update- Study Says Ice Cap Melting Faster than Predicted

The head of the largest climate change study ever undertaken in Canada says the Arctic sea ice is thinning faster than expected.

Nature Geoscience paper -Climate response to regional radiative forcing during the twentieth century

We conclude that decreasing concentrations of sulphate aerosols and increasing concentrations of black carbon have substantially contributed to rapid Arctic warming during the past three decades.

It is easier and cheaper to reduce black carbon – soot to zero. Plus there could be investigation of cheap ways to make all of the ice caps as white as possible. Just like painting roofs white would provide a cooling effect. Whiter ice caps would reflect more heat and would lessen any melting. Why go after CO2 first when it is among the slowest and most expensive things to do ?