Wheels falling off the climate science deniers [updated]

Robert Bryce at the Master Resource blog provides a useful summary of ways the wheels are falling off the real climate science deniers—ie., The Team who have been part of “hiding the decline.”

The wheels have been falling off for several reasons. First of all, because even politicians interested in no more than their own careers are rational enough to recognise that in the middle of a Great Recession, with unemployment rising with each new report, this is no time to impose additional shackles on producers in the form of an Emissions Trading Scam.

But the science of the IPCC Team has also given new meaning to the saying “good enough for government work.”

    “Sloppy work has tarnished the reputation of the UN-sanctioned Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), perhaps irretrievably so. The most dramatic error was that 80% of Himalayan glacier area would very likely melt by 2035. But it is hardly the only one.”

It sure isn’t. As Chip Knappenberger explained yesterday at MasterResource:

    “Another new problem with the IPCC’s AR4 was reported earlier this week. This one involved the IPCC’s reliance on a book chapter instead of the peer-reviewed literature to conclude that sea ice extent around Antarctica had changed little since the late 1970s. In fact, it is well-established in the scientific literature, dating both prior to and subsequent from the production of the AR4, that there has been a statistically significant increase in the extent of sea ice in the Antarctic. That the IPCC AR4 projects Antarctic sea ice declines to accompany global warming, it is little wonder why the IPCC AR4 Chapter 4 authors wanted to downplay the actual behavior of Antarctic sea ice.
    “The Antarctic sea ice problem adds to an ever growing list of problems uncovered recently (since the EPA’s Endangerment Finding) that exist within the IPCC AR4 reports. Other errors involve IPCC findings on Himalayan glaciers, Amazon rainforests, African agriculture, Dutch geography, attribution of extreme weather damages, and several others.”

The list of errors is long.  The list of excuses for them is short, and increasingly shrill.  And as more and more errors come to light in the wake of the release of the Climategate emails--revealing as Bryce says, “an agenda at work where desired ‘science’ trumped careful, open, respectful scholarship”—much of Europe and the U.S. still lies under several feet of global warming, having been hit with “record-cold temperatures and record amounts of snow.”

And that’s not all. The IPCC’s “keeper of the records,” Phil Jones, has admitted that his record keeping is frankly appalling, and he has trouble “keeping track” of them all--a major admission when it’s solely on the basis of Jones’s manipulations of those records that so much of the manipulation of the world’s surface temperature records has been justified. 

And he also admitted to the BBC’s environmental reporter, Roger Harrabin that “from 1995 to the present there has been no statistically-significant global warming.” Yes, you read that right.

    “While that statement is enormously important, another Harrabin question was just as significant. Harrabin asked Jones to comment on the claim that ‘the debate over climate change is over.’ Jones responded:

    ‘I don’t believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the paleoclimatic) past as well.’

As Robert Bryce says, “All this has the establishment climate industry rethinking a number of things.” As it should. Because even the “denier” smear is beginning to backfire.

     “Last month, Rolling Stone magazine published a list of “the 17 polluters and deniers who are derailing efforts to curb global warming.” The article, called, ‘The Climate Killers’ lambasted a range of people — Warren Buffett, Exxon Mobil CEO Rex Tillerson, Oklahoma US Senator James Inhofe, and columnist George Will, among them.
    “Yet less than six weeks after Rolling Stone published its list of ‘climate killers’ Phil Jones, one of the world’s most prominent climate scientists, [can tell] the BBC that
    a) there’s been no statistically significant warming of the earth over the past 15 years, and  
    b) that the science of global warming is not, in fact, settled and that, in his words, ‘there is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties.’”

So in the face of that admission then, who in fact are the real deniers?  They’re those who still insist the opposite—and who want to impose an Emissions Trading Scam on us regardless.

READ: The Rapidly Melting Case For Carbon Legislation   - Robert Bryce

UPDATE:  The avalanche of inconvenient truth emerges. The Guardian has news that “Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings.”

    “Study claimed in 2009 that sea levels would rise by up to 82cm by the end of century – but the report's author now says true estimate is still unknown.”