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As climate observations continue their now obscene divergence from the earlier IPCC model projections, some media outlets are becoming harsher in their criticism of a science that increasingly appears corrupt and politicized. Moreover climate scientists are looking ever more shrill and desperate.

Hat-tip: hajo.

A recent feature story by Markus Schär in the print edition of Swiss news weekly Weltwoche even goes so far as to call IPCC lead author Thomas Stocker a “butler for politicians”. Weltwoche’s introduction reads:

Climate scientists, foremost some from Switzerland, are issuing increasingly louder warnings of catastrophe. This is because next year the global community should obligate itself to a strict treaty on protecting the climate. Despite the alarm, hardly anyone desires to keep playing along.”

Weltwoche adds later in the article that the way things stand now, the chances that of a new binding treaty getting ratified “are close to zero“.

As a result global warming alarmists are mounting another scramble to salvage a hypothesis that is increasingly looking unsustainable.

With the next large climate conference in Lima, Peru in December, more than ever scientists are coming under pressure to explain why warming has stopped and the models have been so embarrassingly wrong so far. The steam (science) that is supposed to be powering climate policy forward has blown a major gasket. Ironically science is beginning to act as a brake.

Weltwoche writes that the final (up-to-now confidential) Synthesis Report scheduled for release in October is designed to salvage the movement and supply the necessary urgency to get the binding climate treaty process to replace the expired Kyoto Protocol back on track. Here Weltwoche writes: “Dramatic proclamationS are in demand in order to wake up the global public.” It adds:

The authors of the Synthesis Report, among them as always are environmental activists, have to threaten with an apocalypse.”

Clearly among those involved in the effort, Weltwoche writes, are Swiss scientists Thomas Stocker of the University of Bern and Reto Knutti of the ETH Institute, a leading climate modeling center.

As part of the effort to rescue the alarmism, Weltwoche describes how Reto Knutti, once a student of Stocker, was the lead author of a recent paper that systematically analyzed the reasons behind the global warming pause. The paper concluded that it was due to ocean cycles and solar activity, and that these factors merely needed to be adjusted in the models, and so there was “no reason to doubt the newest climate models“.

But Weltwoche writes Knutti’s paper got “more ridicule than praise worldwide“. Weltwoche quotes the Science & Environmental Policy Project (SEPP):

“Unwittingly the study only proves once again that the IPCC got it all wrong with its claims of 95% certainty.”

Weltwoche then informs how there have been a number of recent papers showing that the sun is a major driver in climate change, citing papers by Joos, Beer, and even Stocker himself. The Swiss weekly also sharply criticizes the “method” used by climate scientists who rather than applying the scientitfic method, stubbornly insist their theory can’t be wrong:

The climate scientists, on the other hand, have been working a quarter century using all means to prove their theory. When they fail to do so, they instantly conjure up – like Reto Knutti – a new hypothesis.”