Climate Conversation Group

The shrewdly-woven fabric of the great climate change narrative has begun to tear. Remarkably, its resistance to tearing is proving non-existent. The rifts widen daily as exaggerations are piled upon naked lies and climate theories and snake-oil remedies are dissolved to expose the venal money-making schemes that lie at their root.

The IPCC is doomed, Pachauri faces removal

As much as I would like to focus on local facets of the climate change dreamland it is nevertheless impossible to ignore the continuing revelations from abroad that are tearing at the fabric of the “Grand Narrative”, to use Philip Stott’s term at the Clamour Of The Times.

These tectonic changes will demand alterations to or even cancellation of our own ETS and other responses to “global warming”, so we need to know about them. New Zealand needs a dialogue to debate the implications.

But, since the MSM are mostly silent on what must surely be the largest shift in international attitudes on any topic in several generations (why are they silent?), it falls to others to spread the news and comment on it — hopefully to spark the public debate we must have. It’s only because of the Internet that we know about it at all, so thank God for the freedom it brings.

Professor Stott has been unknown to me but I already admire his insight; as thus (note the juicy second paragraph):

Moreover, the collapse has been quicker than any might have predicted. The humiliating exclusion of Britain and the EU at the end of the Copenhagen débâcle was partially to be expected, but it was brutal in its final execution. The swing of power to the BASIC group of countries (Brazil, South Africa, India, China) had likewise been signified for some time, but, again, it came with precipitate ease, leaving even the American President, Barack Obama, with no doubts as to where the political agenda on climate change was now heading, namely to the developing world, but especially to the East, and to the Pacific Rim. The dirigiste tropes of ‘Old Europe’, with its love of meaningless targets and carbon capping, will no longer carry weight, while Obama himself has been straitjacketed by the voters of Massachusetts, by the rust-belt Democrats, by a truculent Congress, by an increasingly-sceptical and disillusioned American public, but, above all, by the financial crisis. Nothing will now be effected that for a single moment curbs economic development, from China to Connecticut, from Africa to Alaska.

And, as ever, capitalism has read the runes, with carbon-trading posts quietly being shed, ‘Green’ jobs sidelined, and even big insurance companies starting to hedge their own bets against the future of the Global Warming Grand Narrative. These rats are leaving the sinking ship far faster than any politician, many of whom are going to be abandoned, left, still clinging to the masts, as the Good Ship ‘Global Warming’ founders on titanic icebergs in the raging oceans of doubt and delusion.

He says a lot more and quotes his mate Bradnock, “seething” about the “nonsense” written in recent years about flooding in Bangladesh.

There are so many claims around the Internet and my inbox refuting the assertions of the IPCC and their supporters that it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.

Robert Muir-Wood accuses Stern of “going far beyond what was an acceptable extrapolation of the evidence”. Which is understated, scientific jargon for “he told lies”.

Just today, at the Times Online, Jonathon Leake picks up on a remarkable distortion perpetrated by Lord Stern in his highly influential 2006 Stern Report.

That report, though strongly impressing national policy around the world, has already been challenged by McKitrick and others for predicting far worse costs of global warming than are justified by the evidence. But now the good Lord Stern has been found out in what can only be called a deception.

Stern refers to a paper on economic losses by Robert Muir-Wood (right), an American disaster analyst, who says his research was misused to help support dramatic predictions of the costs of unchecked global warming. According to Stern:

“New analysis based on insurance industry data has shown that weather-related catastrophe losses have increased by 2% each year since the 1970s over and above changes in wealth, inflation and population growth/movement.

“If this trend continued or intensified with rising global temperatures, losses from extreme weather could reach 0.5%-1% of world GDP by the middle of the century.”

The trouble is, his paper was unpublished at the time, was not peer-reviewed and said no such thing. None of which prevented the IPCC jumping on the bandwagon in the AR4 in 2007. Pachauri even reinforced those incorrect assertions at the Copenhagen conference in his introductory speech. Roger Pielke Jr also has something to say about it.

Among the Internet articles and comments, one fact stands out: the number of comments now critical of AGW. They have increased and they are tolerated. It seems the atmosphere has changed.