It was a meeting
that changed the world,
officially called:
"The WMO-UNEP
Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change,
Working Group I (Science),
Fifth Session, Madrid
27-29, November 1995".
A late change
to a scientific report,
at that meeting,
resulted in a new claim
that the balance of evidence
pointed towards
a discernible human influence
on global climate.
This implied that
the catastrophic
climate change
predicted by the
climate models
had already begun.
It was only in 1995
that an official panel
had finally come up with a
(however weak)
"detection claim".
Back in the late 1970s,
funded by the
US Department of Energy,
scientists developed a program
to investigate the ‘CO2 question’.
They all recognized
evidence was needed
to turn the current
climate speculation
into science.
What they needed was
the ‘first detection’
of the human influence
on global climate.
In the early 1980s,
that detection proof
was still seen as a priority,
because there were concerns
that theoretical climate models
were overstating
the CO2 warming effect.
The "CO2 is evil" believers
realized nothing would be done
about evil CO2
until a clear signal
of man made warming
was detected.
The global warming scare
started to take off
in the 1980s.
It was clear that
a detection claim
was desirable for
the fortunes
of climate science,
but the body
of scientific opinion
refused to budge
from 'we don't know'.
This doubt
was demonstrated
in summer 1988,
when the most famous
detection claim was made,
by NASA’s James Hansen,
in a congressional testimony.
There was a huge
scientific backlash
to his ‘grandstanding’ --
it was clear that
no official scientific panel
would support him.
After it was decided
that the UN's IPCC
should produce
another full report,
the coordination
of the drafting of the
detection chapter
was passed to a
junior scientist,
Ben Santer.
Santer's first draft
was skeptical,
with a highly skeptical
conclusion
about when detection
might be achieved
(‘We don’t know.’)
In his introduction,
Santer made
a detection claim,
but it did not match
the rest of his chapter,
especially not
his skeptical conclusion.
The main tasks
for the country delegates
at meeting in Madrid
that November:
(1) Accept the final Ben Santer report, and
(2) Agree on a brief summary for policymakers.
The meeting should have been
mainly debating how to
summarize the Santer report,
but what actually happened
was to push for a detection claim
to appear in the policy makers’ summary.
The push succeeded.
Santer's concluding summary
was removed,
and the rest of his report
was modified
to support a detection claim,
which was made prominent
in the policy makers’
(aka politician's) summary.
Adding that detection claim
to the second IPCC assessment
allowed the WMO and the UNEP
to be established as
the scientific authorities
for CO2 action.
Controversy broke out
over the science.
But various science institutions
chose to support the IPCC,
despite concerns over
the science and the
highly political process.
Then there was
a closing of the ranks,
Scientific dissent
became intolerable.
Claiming man made CO2
is dangerous
was, for climate scientists,
their permanent job security.
Scientists who produce
study results
in support of
the warming alarm
could do so knowing
that criticism
of their claims
would be absent,
or at least muffled.
After Madrid 1995,
many large companies
gradually switched
to promoting themselves
in a ‘green’ image
in support of
climate action.
Madrid 1995
was the turning point.
The IPCC and
government payroll
climate scientists
gained great attention
and power from the
(very questionable)
detection claim.
But in "modern" climate science,
facts are not necessary.
You can just make up stuff
to (falsely) blame on CO2.
Examples include increases in
storms, droughts, war, refugees,
loss of the Great Barrier Reef,
drowning of Pacific Islanders,
declines of polar bears, and
predictions of +5 degree C.
of global warming by 2100, etc.
No one in the leftist-biased
mainstream media
(95% of the media in the US)
will question
any scary CO2 claim,
no matter how bizarre
-- they just print them!
Whatever worst case
imaginary scenario
an individual speculates
MIGHT occur in the future,
is sufficient to demand action!
The IPCC summary
does not deal in facts,
only imagined, i.e.; modeled,
outcomes far in the future.
The imaginations are
not constrained
by observations.
Facts are no longer material.
Welcome to the
nearly science-free world
of modern climate "science" !
It is a bizarro world,
where slight global warming
(+1 degree C., +/- 1 degree C.)
in the past 138 years,
whose causes are unknown,
is used to scare people
about the future climate.
Virtually no one is told
the warming was
mainly at night,
mainly in the coldest
six months of the year,
and mainly in the northern half
of the Northern Hemisphere,
all of which are
obviously good news
... but claimed
by smarmy leftists
to be a
'climate disaster
in progress',
so everyone must
do as they say,
without questions,
to save the planet
for the children !
And that leftist nonsense,
is my motivation to write
a free climate science blog,
with no money for me,
as a 'public service hobby',
to refute the climate scaremongering.