"Lots of folks are up in arms about some rumored “CLIMATE CRISIS” or “CLIMATE EMERGENCY.”
These terms refer to all the terrible things that are supposed to happen when we get +2°C warmer, or +1.5°C warmer, than the “pre-industrial” temperature.
... I thought I’d see how far we are from the +2°C or the +1.5°C cliff that we’re supposedly going to go over with disastrous results.
Let me start with a long-term look …
Ljungqvist extra-tropical NH temperature reconstruction
shows the Roman Warm Period that ended in about 150AD.
Temperatures dropped and bottomed out during the Dark Ages, in about 500AD.
They then warmed until the Medieval Warm Period peak in about 1000AD,
cooled to the bottom of the Little Ice Age around 1700, and have been warming in fits and starts ever since.
Questions:
Why did the Roman Warm Period end?
Why did it end in 150 AD and not in say 400 AD?
Why did the following cooling stop around 500AD, and not say 350 or 650 AD?
Why didn’t the warming up to the peak of the Medieval Warm Period (MWP) just continue?
Why did the MWP end in 1000 AD and not say 1200 or 800 AD?
Why did the following cooling stop in 1700 AD, instead of continuing to a new glaciation as the Milankovich (planetary geometry) cycles would suggest?
Why has the earth warmed for 300 years since then?
Why did the recent warming start 100 years or so before the recent rise in CO2 levels?
... the answer to any and all of those questions is obviously not “CO2”.
The bad news is, I don’t know the answer to those questions.
But the worse news is, not one climate scientist on the planet knows the answers to those questions.
So let me open by repeating my plea to what might be termed the “climastrologists”,
my term for those well-meaning folks that claim that they can tell the climate future by peering into and interpreting the entrails of a climate model …
How about you stop telling us that you can predict the future until such time as you can explain the past?
Seriously, folks, if you can’t explain the past, how can you possibly claim to predict the future?
That makes no sense at all.
If a man told you his system can predict the winner of tomorrow’s horserace, but he can’t explain the outcome of a single horserace in the past, you’d laugh him out of town …
I suggest you apply the same incredulous laughter to those folks mumbling about “scenarios” and “averages of ensembles of ‘state-of-the-art’ climate models”.
Now, I started this to look at how far we are from the dreaded 1.5°C or 2°C of warming.
... with the Central England temperature record, one of the longest we have ... (is)not global and it’s land-only
… but for the people living in that part of the planet, it’s what they experienced. h.
... the temperature bottomed out at the depth of the Little Ice Age around 1700.
Why?
Who knows?
And since then, it’s gone up over two degrees … again, who knows why?
But if someone knows of any “climate emergencies” due to those three centuries of gradual warming, now would be the time to bring them up.
I know of none.
In fact, this slow warming has generally been beneficial to man and beast alike.
... Unfortunately, we don’t have (enough) data all the way back to 1700 …
but ... there’s been over 2°C warming since 1750.
And again, I know of no “climate catastrophes” since that time.
... the globe seems to have warmed by about half of a degree from 1700 to 1850 ...
we’re already past the dreaded _2°C “post-industrial catastrophic warming” that the climastrologists are using to terrify the unwary … and there have been no ill effects.
... Nobody can explain the climate of the past, which makes the climastrologists’ predictions of the climate of the future a sick joke.
To quote the IPCC itself: “The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.“
This seems to be very hard for climastrologists to understand ...
Do not expect the climastrologists to change their views.
As Upton Sinclair noted, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
We’re already past the dreaded “+2°C warming since pre-industrial times” they keep warning us about.
There has been no “climate emergency” or any “climate catastrophe” resulting from that 300-year gradual warming.
In general, the warming has led to longer growing seasons, less bitter winters, and longer periods where northern ports are ice-free, and it has generally been a benefit rather than a danger.
The warming has mostly been at night, in the winter, in the extra-tropical and sub-polar regions.
I don’t think that folks in say Vladivostok are complaining about slightly warmer winter nights, particularly the homeless.
Excess cold is much more lethal to the poor than is excess warmth.
There is no sign of the long-foretold but never-arriving “CLIMATE EMERGENCY”
The doomcasts of the climatastrophists have all failed miserably.
There’s a list of fifty such cratered predictions here.
When a group is zero for fifty in their predictions of disaster, pointing and laughing at their latest doomcast is warranted.
The average of an “ensemble” of a number of inaccurate climate models is as useful as ... the average of an ensemble of the entrails of a number of goats.
Climate scientists should ... get out of the Chicken Little “THE SKY IS FALLING” business entirely, and work solely on trying to understand the climate of the past.
Only once they can understand the past should they begin to make guesses about the future.
I say “guesses” because as the IPCC says, long-term prediction of future climate states is simply not possible.
Finally, what can we do about all of this?
Here’s the key.
Everything that people warn us about regarding the dreaded “CLIMATE EMERGENCY” has been with us forever.
They warn about droughts ... like those haven’t happened before?
Floods?
Storms?
Hurricanes?
Been there, done that.
Wildfires?
Gradual sea level rise?
Always been happening.
... I’m not seeing any increases in any of the bad things the alarmists are screaming about. ...
... if you think that we’ll get more droughts from increasing CO2, give money to organizations that drill wells in Africa.
Or advance the cause of drought-resistant crops.
Or work to teach farmers how to reduce their water use.
Because any of those will be of value, whether or not CO2 is bringing bad news … and thus you will never regret the work that you’ve put in, however it plays out."
Two interesting comments that followed the article:
"Climate is mostly local, sometimes regional, but *never* global. The climate 100 miles north of me is different than here. The climate 100 miles south of me is different than here. The climate 20 miles north of me, on the other side of a river valley is different than here, different temps, different humidity, different rainfall, etc. The climate 300 miles west of me is different than here and so is the climate 300 miles east of me. There isn’t even a regional average climate let alone a global one!
"The IPCC uses 1850–1900 as its reference period for ‘pre-industrial’ temperature. The change to this value is calculated using linear regression, not by taking the maximum anomaly for any point after 1900.
I believe they use HadCRUT data as the source for this.
The average HadCRUT4 annual anomaly for pre-industrial is -0.3°C (relative to their 1961-1990 base).
For the purposes of calculating post-industrial change, anomalies from 1901 forward, are deducted from -0.3°C and change over time is calculated by linear regression of these values.
Using Excel I get a figure of exactly +1 °C warming from 1901-2020 in HadCRUT4.