The UN Climate Panel That Cried Wolf Too Often - Rex Murphy

Rex Murphy, National Post

You can’t set multiple deadlines for Doomsday. It’s a kind of one-off by nature.

Do it too often and people cease to take notice or even care.

Everybody loves the Apocalypse. The idea of the end of the world, the more imminent the better, has always had enthusiastic popular support. For as long as we’ve enjoyed life on this delightful Earth there has been a morose and righteous sect of one sort or another telling us the lease was nearly up, the doomsday bailiff coming any minute now to shut things down forever. And whether from the abrasive thrill of the message, or the melodrama of the scenario, people have lapped it up.

Indeed there is a whole category of philosophy devoted to that time when the world in flame and fire renders itself into ash, when time stands still, life evaporates into eternity and all is dead and cold. It is impressively called eschatology — the study of The Four Last Things. Not, as might be facilely assumed, Feminism, Ecowarts, Don Lemon and WE Day, but the rather more appetizing quartet of Death, Judgment, Heaven and Hell. It is the four last things, not the four most annoying.

As an attention-getter, The End is Near is right up there with the fabled cry of “Fire” in a crowded theatre. Identical really, as claiming the world is about to end any moment now is the loudest possible cry of “Fire” in the largest possible theatre of all. The call does gather a crowd. Under the spell of lunatic prophets belching Armageddon, people have done the craziest things — crowded on mountain tops or gone off into the torrid desert — to await the end, only, of course, in the end (that never happens) to be disappointed.

Its enchantment never fades. However often it proves hollow, there is always another set ready to take it up. (It’s like the Quebec referendum: if at first you don’t secede, try, try again. Sorry.) Summoning the shadow of universal doom has advanced many a fretful cause, spawned numerous sects, and wrought tribulation and anxiety in the minds of men since ancient times.

Religious pretenders, in particular, have demonstrated a fondness for the imagery and idea of extinction and collapse and none quite so gluttonously as the modern sectarians of the environmental movement. They have been throwing out scares of population bombs, famine, extinction, wars, world floods, vast migrations and — the favourite — imminent and absolute global ecological collapse for decades now. It would take a master of the abacus to tot up how many “deadlines” and “last chances” and “tipping points” and “if-we-don’t-act-NOW-it-will-be-too lates” the world has been teased with, whether from Prince Charles on his private train, sundry ecological anchorites, or the pursed pious lips of the “we’re-here-to-save-you, send-in-your-money-now” megacorp fundraising machines of Greenpeace, the Sierra Club and all their green ilk.

None however, have more versatility with the alarm bells of the apocalypse than the annual gatherings of the Gotterdammerung club, the Infinite Projectors of Climate Collapse, the assembly of existential dread known as the IPCC. For them, as Paris was for terse Hemingway, the end of the world is a moveable feast. For near three decades now they have held their annual jumbo jamborees. And every year the news is worse, the threats are greater, and it is always just a hair’s breadth from being too late. The scene is always the same. A keening goes around the assembled multitude of worshippers as a fresh and even more definitive deadline than any of the past 20 or 30 for Saving the Planet as inscribed in The Book of Climate Revelations.

The IPCC enjoys a delightfully recurrent state of despair over the world’s imminent collapse, which happily coincides with the release of each annual report. This is not without some burden of paradox. Had the world come close to ending when and as many times as its green sages have foretold, there wouldn’t be enough of it left to hold their next conference. An extinction event “devoutly to be wished.”

Things are looking, unsurprisingly, down. 2100 used to be the final frontier. It’s been moved up some 70 years to 2030. And we’ve lost half a degree. The new threshold is 1.5, where we used to have the full comforts of a whole two degrees. Other good news. No one is living up to their commitments. Even the most sanctimonious on the subject. […]

The trouble with apocalypses is that they can’t be plural. You only get one by definition. Neither can you set multiple deadlines for Doomsday. It’s a kind of one-off by nature. Do it too often and people cease to take notice or even care.

Everyone knows the sad story of Cassandra, the woman given the gift of true prophecy by the gods and simultaneously cursed to have no one believe her. The IPCC’s problem, up to now, is like that but reversed. Always off, but generously credited. I think that string has run out. They can play Wagner and whistle the Ride of the Valkyries all they want from here on. People are tired of that music, and sick of the band.

For many years, Rex Murphy was a highly respected commentator on CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corp - Canada's left-leaning national broadcaster), until recently. Was it the honesty with which he exposed the great global warming hysteria that got him fired? Was he just not leaning far enough to the left? 

Neither of Canada's other two national broadcasters are anywhere closer to centre, so they have no use for a commentator who is, and who is honest.

Scientist Accused of ’Crying Wolf’ on Climate Change with Claim that Arctic Sea Ice Would Vanish

Arctic Sea Ice returning over the past month at record pace

Sarah Knapton, The Telegraph


A handout photo provided by the European Geosciences Union on September 13, 2016 shows an undated photo of a polar bear testing the strength of thin sea ice in the Arctic. Polar bears are among the animals most affected by changes in Arctic sea ice because they rely on this surface for essential activities such as hunting, traveling and breeding. AFP PHOTO / European Geosciences Union / Mario

A handout photo provided by the European Geosciences Union on September 13, 2016 shows an undated photo of a polar bear testing the strength of thin sea ice in the Arctic. Polar bears are among the animals most affected by changes in Arctic sea ice because they rely on this surface for essential activities such as hunting, traveling and breeding.

Dire predictions that the Arctic would be free of sea ice by September have proven unfounded after satellite images showed there is far more ice now than in 2012.

Scientists including Peter Wadhams, of Cambridge University, and Wieslaw Maslowski, of the Naval Postgraduate School in Moderey, California, have regularly forecast the loss of ice by 2016, a warning that has been widely reported by the BBC and other media outlets.

Prof Wadhams, who is considered a leading expert on Arctic sea ice loss, has recently published a book entitled A Farewell To Ice in which he repeated the assertion that the Arctic would be free of ice in the middle of this decade.

As late as this summer he was still predicting an ice-free September.

Yet when figures were released for the yearly minimum on Sept 10, they showed that there was still 4.14 million sq km of sea ice, which was 21 per cent more than the lowest point in 2012.

For the month of September overall there was 31 per cent more ice than in 2012, figures released this week by the National Snow and Ice Data Centre (NSIDC) show, amounting to an extra 1.09 million sq km of sea ice.

Although NSIDC satellite data going back to 1981 show an undeniable downward trend in sea ice over the past 35 years, scientists have accused Prof Wadhams and others of “crying wolf” and harming the message of climate change through “dramatic”, “incorrect” and “confusing” predictions.

Dr Ed Hawkins, associate professor in the department of meteorology at the University of Reading, said: “There has been one prominent scientist who has regularly made more dramatic, and incorrect, in my view predictions suggesting that we would by now be in ice-free conditions.

“There are very serious risks from continued climatic changes and a melting Arctic but we do not serve the public and policy-makers well by exaggerating those risks.

“We will soon see an ice-free summer in the Arctic but there is a real danger of ’crying wolf’ and that does not help anyone.

“As global temperatures rise we will see a continuing decline in Arctic sea ice extent, although this will happen somewhat erratically, rather like a ball bouncing down a bumpy hill.

“Without substantial reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, the ball will reach the bottom of the hill, meaning the Arctic is ’ice-free,’ starting with a few days one summer, a few weeks another summer and gradually becoming more and more frequent.”

It is the latest example of experts making alarming predictions which do not come to pass. Earlier this week environmentalists were accused of misleading the public about the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch” after aerial shots proved there was no “island of rubbish” in the middle of the ocean.

Likewise, warnings that the hole in the ozone layer would never close were debunked in June.

Note: I have not checked out either of these claims, but will do so soon. I hope.

Scientists said that such claims risked detracting from the real issue.

Losing Arctic sea ice is a major problem because ice reflects 85 per cent of sunlight while open water reflects just seven per cent, meaning the rest is absorbed by the planet, which speeds up global warming. A massive melt of freshwater could also disrupt global ocean currents, and change weather systems.

I suspect that in the high Arctic, the sun is at such a low angle that a lot more than 7% of sunlight is reflected from water, a lot more!

For more than a decade most scientists have accepted that the Arctic will be free of ice by 2050, while the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) calculates there is a 66 per cent chance of no ice by the middle of the century if emissions continue to increase annually.

Yet in 2007 Prof Wadhams predicted that sea ice would be lost by 2013 after levels fell 27 per cent in a single year.

By 2013 ice levels were actually 25 per cent higher than they had been six years before. In 2012, following another record low Prof Wadhams changed his prediction to 2016.


(AP Photo/The Canadian Press, Jonathan Hayward) This July 10, 2008 file photo made with a fisheye lens shows ice floes in Baffin Bay above the Arctic Circle, seen from the Canadian Coast Guard icebreaker Louis S. St-Laurent.

The view was supported by Prof Maslowski who in 2013 published a paper in the Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences also claiming that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2016, plus or minus three years.


La Nina at work, already

Instead of record lows, this year the Arctic has seen the quickest refreeze on record with the extent of sea ice growing 1.05 million sq km in just three weeks since the Sept 10 minimum. The Danish Meteorological Institute said that refreezing was happening at the fastest rate since its daily records began in 1987.

Thank you, La Nina! I'm sure the Arctic will recover a lot of ice cover this winter.

Andrew Shepherd, professor of earth observation at University College London, said that there was now “overwhelming consensus” that the Arctic would be free of ice within the next few decades, but warned that earlier predictions were based on poor extrapolation.

“A decade or so ago, climate models often failed to reproduce the decline in Arctic sea ice extent revealed by satellite observations,” he said.

“One upshot of this was that outlier predictions based on extrapolation alone were able to receive wide publicity. But climate models have improved considerably since then, and they now do a much better job of simulating historical events.

Is that really true? Or have the models been adjusted to predict a more desirable outcome? You can see I'm a bit cynical.


THE CANADIAN PRESS/AP/NOAA This 2014 photo provided by NOAA shows Arctic ice coverage.

“This means we have greater confidence in their predictive skill, and the overwhelming consensus within the scientific community is that the Arctic Ocean will be effectively free of sea ice in a couple of decades should the present rate of decline continue.”

Prof Myles Allen, of Oxford University, added: “The Arctic was only predicted to be close to ice-free in September by mid-century.”

Scientists said it was clear that sea ice was shrinking but there were large fluctuations between years. For example 2013 showed a 50 per cent increase from the previous year.

Prof Jonathan Bamber, of the University of Bristol, said: “This year’s low was the second lowest on record and not as low as 2012 but there is always variability in any part of the climate system so you would not expect a monotonic decline year on year, whatever was going on.

Nevertheless, this was 4 more years of global warming and the strongest El Nino ever. It certainly seems odd that this would not be the year of the greatest sea ice minimum. Or perhaps we are missing something here?


Sea ice decline may not be man-made

“The signal of Arctic sea ice decline is possibly the clearest we have of climate change. That does not mean, by definition, it is man-made but there is no question that sea ice volume has been declining, on average, over the past 40 years and that all the indications from climate data, satellite observations etc. are that the decline will continue.”

Bob Ward, of the Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment, added: “Peter Wadhams has made predictions of the imminent disappearance of summer Arctic sea ice, which have not been fulfilled, but the evidence still shows a rapid decline.

“The trend in Arctic sea ice extent is definitely downwards for every single month of the year. The most recent IPCC forecast is that the Arctic has up to a 66 per cent chance of being ice-free in September by 2050 for the highest emissions scenario.”

Speaking to The Daily Telegraph, Prof Wadhams accepted that sea ice decline had not happened as quickly as he had predicted. However, he still believes that an ice-free Arctic is still only a “very small number of years” away.

“My view is that the trend of summer sea ice volume is relentlessly downward, such that the volume (and thus area) will come to a low value very soon – in a very small number of years,”

He said. “This is to be contrasted with some of the bizarre predictions made by computer modellers, who have the summer sea ice remaining until late this century, which is quite impossible.”

I think I prefer the bizarre modellers. In "Global Warming - Getting Off the Fence (Updated)", I predict a global temperature rise of only 0.5 to 0.75 degrees by the end of this century. And that may be an overestimate.

I don't mind being lumped in with those who are called 'bizarre', especially since those doing the calling have been consistently wrong.