Preliminary reports from the Energy Information Administration’s “Annual Energy Outlook” (which will be fully published in April) suggest that any carbon crisis may not be quite as imminent as thought. Not so long ago, the EIA predicted [US] carbon emissions levels would rise by 37 percent between 2005 and 2025. The EIA — get this – now thinks that [US] CO2 emissions in 2025 will be 6 percent lower than they were in 2005. The difference between 37 percent growth and 6 percent decline is 43 percent. That is about the level of accuracy you could expect from a blind monkey throwing darts at a wall. --Walter Russell Mead,
Via Meadia, 3 February 2012
The Chicken Littles of the green movement throw a lot of statistics, trends and projections together and claim the status of scientific truth for whatever big and scary numbers they can coax out of their statistical black box. The truth is that forecasts about greenhouse gas emissions are basically worthless. An astrologer would throw up his hands in dismay at this sloppy reasoning and hazy science. --Walter Russell Mead,
Via Meadia, 3 February 2012
Research based on Met Office figures pointed to temperatures having been flat since 1997. It was the kind of admission that those who doubt climate science pounce on. “Forget global warming,” trumpeted The Mail on Sunday, because “the planet has not warmed in 15 years”. Two days earlier The Wall Street Journal had published a letter from 16 scientists advancing similar arguments. It said: “The lack of warming for more than a decade . . . suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause.” Since then the same cry has been taken up by innumerable bloggers, exemplified by Dr David Whitehouse, formerly the BBC’s science editor, now an adviser to the Global Warming Policy Foundation, which frequently challenges the views of climate-change scientists. He, it turns out, was a source of the research that sparked the whole row. Some scientists appear to be warning we will fry, while other sources fear we will freeze. What were the rest of us meant to make of this? --Jonathan Leake,
The Sunday Times, 5 February 2012
He was the best-known environmentalist in the German Social Democratic Party (SPD). Now, even Fritz Vahrenholt no longer believes in the predictions of global warming. --Michael Miersch,
FOCUS, February 2012
The fact is that the whole anthropogenic warming theory is based not on observation but on computer models: in this case, it seems, computer models in which so-called “feedbacks” involving water vapour and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2. It is, incidentally, interesting that none of the computer models which feed the theory, not one, predicted the present global warming pause: so why, one might ask, should one have any faith at all in their predictive powers about anything else? --William Oddie,
The Catholic Herald, 6 February 2012
