Guest opinion by Christopher Monckton of Brenchley

For Totalitarianism Day (formerly Earth Day), over three dozen weather forecasting organizations have issued a joint (or, in their revealing word, “Collective”) “Global Climate Statement”. It has not exactly made headlines: even the Mainstream media are tired of yet another pietistic, self-serving demand that more taxpayers’ money should be sent in the direction of yet another generously-proportioned trough in which the rent-seekers keep their snouts.

Let’s take this drivelling international-socialist agitprop apart, line by line, beginning with the tediously earnest title:

“Climate developments demand enhanced evidence-based action”.

The problem with followers of any Party Line, and, in particular, of a totalitarian-extremist Party Line such as watermelon environmentalism, is that the Party Line is all, and that any mere evidence, however definitive, is automatically and utterly disregarded to the extent that it does not conform to the Party Line – or, as it is now excitingly rebranded, the “Consensus”.

The first paragraph of the Collectivists’ statement says:

“The scientific evidence is now overwhelming: our planet is warming, largely due to emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities.”

Yet it is these very same Collectivists who demand that we seek for “the scientific evidence” in the peer-reviewed learned journals. Four years ago a clutch of Collectivists so wedded to the totalitarian Party Line that their leader has been known to wear an SS-style uniform examined 11,944 reviewed papers published during the 21 years 1991-2011.

They themselves, though they declared and still declare themselves to be supporters of the Party Line to the effect that recent warming was mostly manmade, were only able to record 64 out of the 11,944 papers as explicitly having stated that recent warming was mostly manmade.

Legates et al. (2013), whose co-authors are other-worldly enough not to subscribe to any Party Line on scientific questions, decided to read the 64 papers and found that only 41 of them had actually stated that recent warming was mostly manmade. So the Collectivists’ statement is flat-out inaccurate. The overwhelming evidence from the peer-reviewed journals is to the effect that nearly all scientists do not know and, therefore, do not presume to say whether recent warming was mostly manmade.

Next, the Collectivists say that

“in 2016 a new record for global average temperature was set (approximately 1.1°C above the pre-industrial level)”.

But it is the Collectivists themselves who are always telling us that one cannot take a single year out of context. So let us look at the temperature record since IPCC’s First Assessment Report in 1990 made a prediction (“We predict …”) that there would be 1 C° global warming by 2025, equivalent to 0.75 C° by now. In fact, taking the least-squares linear-regression trend on the mean of the global mean surface or lower-troposphere anomalies from two terrestrial and two satellite datasets, there has been just 0.4 C° warming since 1990, or little more than half IPCC’s central prediction, and below even its least prediction.

Fig. 1 Global warming from 1990-2016 at about half the predicted mid-range rate

The Collectivists continue with their usual tired litany of non-events: sea ice extent allegedly at “record lows” (but we only have 40 years’ proper data, and indications are that there was less sea ice in the 1920s than today, and a lot less in the Middle Ages); sea level “increased to a new record” (but sea level has been rising for 10,000 years, and the “new record” is bare millimeters above the previous year); and that “a wide range of extreme climatic events displaced hundreds of thousands of people across the world” (except that on all measures extreme-weather events show no noticeable increase and many have declined, as even IPCC has been compelled to concede).

Next, the Collectivists tell us

“The Paris Agreement needs to be implemented urgently,”

and that governments, Canute-like, should stretch forth their trembling, liver-spotted hands and command global warming to rise no more than 0.5-1 C° above today’s agreeable global mean surface temperature. However, since the world is warming at only half the originally-predicted rate, there is really no urgency at all. Economically speaking, since the rate of warming is very substantially below prediction, and since the absolute value of global temperature is a lot less than predicted, at any realistic intertemporal discount rate (the U.S. Treasury uses 7% p.a.) there is no case for “climate action” at all. Our wealthier grandsons can well afford to clean up after us, if they are not thanking us for the warmer climate and greener planet that we shall have bequeathed to them.

Then comes the nakedly rent-seeking bit:

“Meteorological and climate services are an essential element of the response to climate change. They provide early-warning information and understanding of present-day climate variability, projections of future changes, and they inform mitigation and adaptation options, …”

…yada, yada.

On the evidence of this Collectivists’ Statement, “meteorological and climate services” are no longer to be trusted to give independent and impartial advice. The correct response of the Trump administration to their latest intervention in politics would be to defund them altogether and make them live by the accuracy of their forecasts. On that basis, IPCC is doomed.

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