Climate Scares Discredited

Good news for wine drinkers – a leading international body says grape vines are a hardy little number and can survive climate change, at least over the medium term. Earlier harvesting, changes in grape varieties and new wine-making processes have already helped counter the impact of the harsher weather hitting vineyards across the globe, the head of the International Organisation of Vine and Wine (OIV) says. “You can adapt to climate change or you can react to it,” Treasury Wine Chief Supply Officer Stuart McNab said at a Reuters Global Climate Change Summit earlier this month. --Reuters, 28 October 2015

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Scientists say that there is significant disagreement about how climate change will affect the Gulf region, after one published study raised fears about high temperatures and humidity at the end of the century. The new research, by two scientists based in the United States, said that... unless greenhouse-gas emissions are cut, in the UAE’s major cities the wet-bulb temperature would, several times between 2071 and 2100, exceed the level at which humans could survive. The Global Warming Policy Foundation dismissed the latest study. The group’s director, the social anthropologist Benny Peiser, said: “These kind of scare stories crop up” whenever a UN climate-change conference is looming, a reference to the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Paris that begins at the end of next month. “The fact of the matter is that warming over the last 50 years is much slower than most computer models predict. The models are wrong and the observations are more reliable than the models.” --Daniel Bardsley, The National, 27 October 2015 All public policies, in France, Europe and throughout the world, find their origin and inspiration in the battle against global warming. The impact on the entire field of scientific research is particularly clear and especially pernicious. There is not a single fact, figure or observation that leads us to conclude that the world‘s climate is in any way disturbed. Conclusions based on any kind of model should be disregarded. As the SCM specializes in building mathematical models, we should also be recognized as competent to criticize them. Models are useful when attempting to review our knowledge, but they should not be used as an aid to decision-making until they have been validated. --Calculation Mathematical Society, September 2015 Has anyone been wondering why we’ve been hearing so little about the Arctic lately? It turns out that the Arctic is far less ice free than many thought or expected just some years ago. So wrong can the models be. More Arctic ice and up to 1.5°C colder! The new study finds that in 2014 “more ice survived the summer as MYI than in the nine most recent years” and it was only “slightly less than during 1968–2015 on average” Also “between November 2014 and April 2015, winter air temperatures were between −0.5°C and −1.5°C colder than during 1980–2010.” --Pierre Gosselin, No Tricks Zone, 27 October 2015 For reading matter on my half-term trip away, I took Matt Ridley's latest book The Evolution of Everything. At nearly 400 pages long it's not a short book, but it turned out to be not nearly long enough to keep me occupied and by the middle of the week I had finished it. There's only one word to describe it: subversive. It's subversive of pretty much everything - religion, politics, technology, statism, central banking, education, culture. You name it and it's subverted by the book's central hypothesis. This is the idea that while we seek proximal, top-down explanations for change, in truth bottom-up forces are more powerful, more sustained, and more often than not are the true causes. So with this book, Ridley sets the philosophical cat well and truly among the pigeons, and those who make their living in the world of top-down plans are up in arms. --Andrew Montford, Bishop Hill, 26 October 2015

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