Climate Change: The ‘Planned Recession’ Strategy

Well, the admissions just keep on coming. In the UK, lead canary for all things “climate change” — for example, polls show a majority of their public now see the agenda as just a new excuse for the state to extract more wealth from its citizens — we have a paper by the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research saying the agenda demands “reducing the size of the economy through a ‘planned recession’”, in the words of the Daily Telegraph. Tyndall is an activist consortium of British academic institutions known for carrying the banner on the “climate” agenda.

The Telegraph offers an eye-catching sub-head: ” Britain will have to stop building airports, switch to electric cars and shut down coal-fired power stations as part of a ‘planned recession’ to avoid dangerous climate change.”

This should only surprise you if you have relied upon claims by the global warming industry — itself a consortium of activists inside and outside of government, Big Science, Big Academia, and other rent-seeking industry crafting schemes to profit in the near-term from the wealth-transfers — or the Obama administration, desperate to walk-back the president’s admission that his plan of cap-and-trade will “bankrupt” all sorts of facilities and cause your energy prices to “necessarily skyrocket.”

Obama’s own Treasury Department has been providing him memos noting that even his “first step” would shave a full percentage off of our Gross Domestic Product and cause manufacturing to flee to saner shores. These claims were found in their pitiful response to my Freedom of Information Act request. In fact, their response made clear they are plainly hiding more, and surely more damaging, documents.

As the Senate faces the prospect of taking this “first step”, this week we sent Treasury our Notice of Intent to Sue if they do not come into compliance with the law, and provide us responsive documents responsive to our request. At which point, we are confident, we will find that even in these strained times the U.S. and UK’s “special relationship” has one more thing in common.

“Well, the admissions just keep on coming.” ~ Horner

More admissions:

Wattsupwiththat:

The pause that cools: No more warming until 2015?
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2008/04/30/a-look-at-hadcrut-global-temps-and-pdo-with-hodrick-prescott-filtering-applied/
[snip]

Some comments:
MattN (06:50:51):

When asked the question “What has to happen to discredit AGW predictions”, I’ve seen Gavin Schmidt, on Realclimate, type the words “at least 1 decade of non or negative temperature trend.”
What rationalization will he and the rest of his lackeys come up with in 2018 when it’s been 20 years without eclipsing the 1998 record?

Pierre Gosselin (08:30:35) :
Really, this Nature report is a huge watershed event!
It stems from one of the world’s most prestigious institutes, a big believer in AGW. Something must have spooked them into saying something that is, in essence, contrary to what they’ve previously believed.

Nature, Latif and the Leibnitz Institute now admit for the first time that even natural ocean oscillations alone are indeed strong enough to cancel out and drown the much ballyhooed AGW. Who knows, the cooling situation may be worse than we think. And they now have left the door open for the other even more powerful factors like the sun, clouds or Lindzen’s iris effect. These doors are all open now.
Again Latif’s statement here says a lot.

“…Of course, always with the assumption that no other unforeseen effects such as volcanic eruptions occur, which can have a substantial effect on our climate as well”. See: http://www.ifm-geomar.de/index.php?id=4192&L=1
Could this be the start of the domino effect? Are we about to see other scientists change their tunes as well? I must say I’m a little bit in disbelief that these folks have put something out that will surely upset the AGW activists.

Pierre Gosselin (08:35:28) :
Think about it!
They’re saying:
“Sorry activists – you’ll have to wait 10 years for any new warming. But we promise it’ll be back!”
Just a few months ago they were telling us it was all settled, that warming was here to stay!

Pierre Gosselin (03:17:35) :
The Germans are by no means reversing their views. But they are beginning to cover their Hinterns. It is indeed highly amusing to watch them scramble and modify what they have been claiming up to now as “settled science”.

Mojib Latif, a professor at the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences in Germany is by no means objective. I’ve heard enough of his interviews on radio, etc. He’s right up there, right at home, with the science-propogandists of Schellnhuber and Ramstorf, obstinately, arrogantly claiming everything is known and the science is settled.
The Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg has also been guilty (in my view) of practising the same type of pig-headed, obstinate, politically correct science. Now they risk making these formerly highly respectable and esteemed institutes look like the laughing stocks of science.
Some people simply refuse to learn the lessons of the past.

Pierre Gosselin (04:01:33) :
You can read the English version of the Leibnitz Institute’s press release here:
http://www.ifm-geomar.de/index.php?id=4192&L=1
In this release they admit much what we’ve been trying to tell them for years:
1. The models are inadequate
2. They’ve lacked data
3. The models have not taken oceans enough into account
4. Other factors (still not taken into account) have substantial effects on climate.
LOL! Read at the end how Prof. Latif installs a giant garage-sized back door:
“Of course, always with the assumption that no other unforeseen effects such as volcanic eruptions occur, which can have a substantial effect on our climate as well”. LOL!

Pierre Gosselin (05:37:29) :
Lubos Motl drives it home…
http://motls.blogspot.com/2008/05/nature-amo-will-stop-warming-until-2020.html

Bob Tisdale (01:44:31) :
Anthony: I didn’t notice anyone answering your question about a link to the letter in “Nature”. Roger Pielke Jr has it attached to his unfavorable opinion on climate models: http://sciencepolicy.colorado.edu/prometheus/archives/climate_change/001413global_cooling_consi.html
The Nature link: http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7191/pdf/nature06921.pdf
Based on the blurb it appears to deal primarily with the AMO and ENSO,

Bob Tisdale (02:02:54) :
And here’s a link to the Supplementary info on the Nature paper:
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v453/n7191/extref/nature06921-s1.pdf
[snip]
Now on to icecap:

http://icecap.us/

Tuesday, September 08, 2009
World’s climate could cool first, warm later
By Fred Pearce, New Scientist
http://icecap.us/index.php/go/joes-blog/worlds_climate_could_cool_first_warm_later/

Forecasts of climate change are about to go seriously out of kilter. One of the world’s top climate modellers said Thursday we could be about to enter “one or even two decades during which temperatures cool. “People will say this is global warming disappearing,” he told more than 1500 of the world’s top climate scientists gathering in Geneva at the UN’s World Climate Conference.

Latif predicted that in the next few years a natural cooling trend would dominate over warming caused by humans. The cooling would be down to cyclical changes to ocean currents and temperatures in the North Atlantic, a feature known as the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO). Breaking with climate-change orthodoxy, he said NAO cycles were probably responsible for some of the strong global warming seen in the past three decades. “But how much? The jury is still out,” he told the conference. The NAO is now moving into a colder phase. Latif said NAO cycles also explained the recent recovery of the Sahel region of Africa from the droughts of the 1970s and 1980s. James Murphy, head of climate prediction at the Met Office, agreed and linked the NAO to Indian monsoons, Atlantic hurricanes and sea ice in the Arctic. “The oceans are key to decadal natural variability,” he said.

[]
The NAO is imversely related to the AMO and lags the AMO state as shown above. Enlarged here

Another favourite climate nostrum was upturned when Pope warned that the dramatic Arctic ice loss in recent summers was partly a product of natural cycles rather than global warming. Preliminary reports suggest there has been much less melting this year than in 2007 or 2008.

Here is the latest daily JAXA IJIS based plots for July through September 9 for 2007, 2008, 2009 for arctic ice extent. Note as the melt season draws near an end, we are running 20/8% above the record low levels of 2007, continuing the rebound started in 2008.

[]

In candid mood, climate scientists avoided blaming nature for their faltering predictions, however. “Model biases are also still a serious problem. We have a long way to go to get them right. They are hurting our forecasts,” said Tim Stockdale of the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts in Reading, UK.
See full story here.

[]
The positive NAO relates to more zonal flow with warmer Atlantic air into Europe and Pacific air into North America. The negative NAO leads to a more meridional pattern with cold air in Siberia often making its way west to western Europe and Cold arctic air over North America trapped over the eastern and central parts of the continent. Enlarged here

Note: MIT’s Dr. Lindzen commented “Lateef is actually one of the better ocean modelers. However, he used to be all over the German media proclaiming that models were perfect, and should be used to determine policy. When someone responded that since the models were perfect, there was no need for more funding, Lateef developed a deeper appreciation for the model shortcomings. I suppose that there is a lesson here someplace.”

UPDATE: This has led science reporter Eric Berger of the Houston Chronicle to discuss Climate scientists should talk about what “may” happen, rather than what “will” happen

I’m the science reporter for the Houston Chronicle, the daily newspaper in the petrochemical capital of the United States, if not the world. I’ve been called a global warming skeptic by environmentalists, and I’ve been called an environmentalist toady by the skeptics.

I’m neither of these things. Rather, I’m just trying to grasp what is happening to the planet’s climate, and how humans are impacting it.

For a long time now, science reporters have been confidently told the science is settled. That the planet is warming and humans are unquestionably the primary cause. We’ve been told to trust the computer modelsthe models which show a markedly upward trend in temperatures as carbon dioxide concentrations increase. And I’ve trusted the scientists telling me this.

Below you’ll find the computer model forecasts for the 21st century temperatures from the most recent IPCC summary for policymakers, which call for a 1.8C to 3.8C rise in global temperatures by 2100:

It seems pretty clear that the models forecast a steady upward trend in global temperatures as long as carbon dioxide levels rise. (Which they have). Yet according to satellite and surface temperature measurements the global average temperature has essentially remained flat for the last 12 years. This strikes me as somewhat curious.

When An Inconvenient Truth came out I believed the movie to be scientifically accurate. Carbon dioxide levels were rising and so were temperatures. And hurricane activity, especially after the disastrous 2005 season, was out of control.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the end of the world: hurricane activity on the global scale is near historical lows. And the Earth seems to have, at least temporarily, stopped warming.

This, despite the fact that some of the country’s leading climate scientists say there is unequivocally a link between major hurricanes and climate change. And despite the fact that other leading climate scientists predicted 2009 or 2010 will go down as the warmest year in recorded history. Either prediction, if true, would be alarming.

Yet both of these predictions seem, at the present moment, to be off.

Then there’s this: a revealing story from an international meeting of climate scientists where a German climate scientist says the world may cool for the next decade or two. New Scientist reports:

One of the world’s top climate modelers said Thursday we could be about to enter “one or even two decades during which temperatures cool. “People will say this is global warming disappearing,” he told more than 1500 of the world’s top climate scientists gathering in Geneva at the UN’s World Climate Conference.

“I am not one of the skeptics,” insisted Mojib Latif of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences at Kiel University, Germany. “However, we have to ask the nasty questions ourselves or other people will do it.” Few climate scientists go as far as Latif, an author for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. But more and more agree that the short-term prognosis for climate change is much less certain than once thought. If we can’t have confidence in the short-term prognosis for climate change, how can we have full confidence in the long-term prognosis?

The article is significant for a couple of reasons. First of all it’s written by Fred Pearce, who has a history of forceful journalism outlining climate change’s perils, and it’s published by New Scientist, which has long advocated vigorous action to curb climate change. I respect both the author and the publication.

Secondly, the key point here is that scientists are acknowledging that natural variations are playing a very important role in our present and future climate, perhaps cooling it. Therefore it stands to reason that natural variations might also have played a role in the temperature run-up of the 20th century. Do not misunderstand me. I am not a climate change skeptic. I do not deny that the planet warmed 0.6C in the 20th century. I do not deny that humans played some part in that significant warming.

But I am confused. Four years ago this all seemed like a fait accompli. Humans were unquestionably warming the climate and changing the planet forever through their emissions of carbon dioxide. The problem is that some climate scientists and environmentalists have been so determined to see something done about carbon dioxide emissionsnowthat they have glossed over the uncertainties.

Uncertainties like: maybe there isn’t a linear relationship between carbon dioxide and temperature, and maybe the planet will cool for a couple of decades even as carbon dioxide emissions accelerate. For the last few years some scientists and environmentalists have been telling us a lot about what “will” happen in the future if carbon dioxide emissions continue unabated. It perhaps would have been a lot better if they talked about what “may” happen.
Read more here.

This has led Marc Morano of Climate Depot to comment “I have been researching and reporting on man-made global warming science over the past decade. The past few weeks havewithout a doubtseen the most dramatic acceleration of developments against the claims of a so-called ‘consensus.’ The Houston Chronicle science reporter Eric Berger’s latest admission merely reflects an inescapable reality: Man-made global warming fears are quickly descending into the ash heap of history. Even top UN IPCC scientists are now openly questioning these claims.”

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