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Stunning scientific illiteracy behind the Paris 2 °C target

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The “final” COP21 Paris agreement has 31 pages and it will go down in history as a certificate of madness and hysteria.Fourteen months ago, Victor and Kennel published an article in Nature explaining some of the reasons why the “temperature targets” such as the 2 °C target should be ditched because it’s ill-defined, meaningless, inconsequential, unreachable, … and just plain idiotic. But the climate hysteria has lost all contacts with Science. The hundreds of stupid mammals from all corners of the world who gathered in Paris don’t read Nature. They don’t talk to anyone who has a clue about science, either. They’ve brainwashed themselves into believing that the global warming temperature must be a high-precision, well-defined number and, which is even worse, they may push it in any direction they want by meeting their fellow mammals and signing meaningless arrogant declarations.Needless to say, sub-degree accurate comparative temperature targets can’t be used as the basis of any human or corporate or national behavior or planning. This form of planning is nonsensical for at least 5 totally fundamental reasons.First of all, there is no canonical – and no generally agreed – operational definition of the global mean temperature that could quantify the increase of the temperature between the “pre-industrial era” to “now” with this amazing sub-degree accuracy. On this graphyou may see that the wiggles of the global mean temperature in the lower troposphere as seen from the satellites (green) look very similar to the (red) surface+ocean temperature data. It is obvious that most of this history has a “universal basis”. At the same moment, there are differences that are significant and can’t be eliminated. The peak temperatures in 1997-1998 looked about 0.3 °C warmer to the satellites than to the weather stations. And while the red and green curves mostly overlapped throughout this history, you may see that the (green) satellites were about 0.2 °C cooler than the (red) weather station.This 0.2 °C is a tiny temperature difference that humans can’t really “feel”. But if someone tries to plan some accumulated warming from the observer temperature trends, it corresponds to some 15 years of the trends. So if you decide that you will change some laws about the fossil fuels once the temperature reaches a threshold, this transition may be done now or in 15 years, depending on the details how the temperature is quantified. If an international treaty tells you that you should stop driving your car at some point, but it may be now or in 15 years or in 30 years, it’s a pretty vacuous treaty, isn’t it?Second, even if you ignore the disagreements between the different methodologies to quantify the global mean temperature and use one of them or the average, it is still full of huge wiggles. Just look at the graph above. The temperature anomaly dropped from the 1998 peak by 0.8 °C according to satellites or 0.5 °C according to the weather stations just in one year. The most important “meteorological phenomenon” that decides about these annual swings is the El Niño or La Niña phenomenon.I may actually imagine that some powerful technological system could start or end El Niño and La Niña in the equatorial Pacific. But the treaty says nothing about such science-fiction plans. It talks about the ordinary technologies and production of energy. No changes in the production of electricity or fuels for cars will change anything about the fact that every other year, an El Niño episode or a La Niña episode takes place and those routinely change the temperature by 0.5 °C or more just in one year.Once the people agree that a jump or drop in the global mean temperature was due to such an episode, will the Paris treaty be annulled? Or do these mammals really expect to do something with the industry that will also compensate the effect of the El Niño or La Niña episodes? It obviously makes no sense. The correct answer obviously is that these stupid mammals don’t have the slightest clue what the El Niño or La Niña is (except for the animals who came to Paris from the Spanish-speaking countries who think that it’s a boy or a girl or the Baby Jesus) and how it affects the global mean temperature.You might suggest that the “interpreters” of the treaty will try to “remove” the effect of the El Niño and La Niña episodes in order to get the more well-behaved “pure” global mean temperature. But believe me, there’s no way to do it. I’ve tried to define a “better” global mean temperature – the usual ones corrected by some multiples of the ENSO index or its integral or something like that – and you basically don’t reduce the oscillations too much. Similar swings that are often as high as 0.5 °C a year will be there regardless of the details how you define the “global mean temperature” as long as the definition is completely and objectively given.Alternatively, you may want to talk about the global mean temperature averaged over several years to reduce the effect of the interannual variability and the ENSO episodes. Indeed, if you average things over longer timeframes, the relative swings will get reduced. However, a complementary problem will arise: people and nations will be able to say “wait a little bit longer, the temporarily raised temperature will go down again” and they will be right.The broader point is that if your global mean temperature \(T(t)\) defined in any way you want will surpass an arbitrary threshold, it doesn’t mean that it will always be above this threshold in the future. Instead, it may and probably will drop beneath the threshold at some point again. If it doesn’t take place thanks to the interannual or decadal or centennial or millenial variability, be sure that by the year 60 000 AD when we have a new ice age, the global mean temperature will drop by 5-10 °C relatively to the current ones again.Moreover, if you choose the initial and final moment appropriately, the temperature has “already” increased by almost 2 °C. Look at the HadCRUT4 dataset based on the weather stations and a method to measure the sea surface temperature. The temperature anomaly was –0.962 °C in January 1893. In January 2007, it was +0.832 °C. The increase in those 114 years was 1.794 °C. Relatively to the cold January 1893, we may easily get over 2 °C of warming as soon as in January 2016. Does it mean that we should start to panic? Clearly, whether we start to panic has nothing to do with the temperatures. Sane people won’t panic because they see that the temperature is totally OK in the world around us. The lunatics will always be hysterical and it doesn’t matter what numbers or definitions they choose as their preferred benchmarks. Their universal constant is the complete denial of the reality – of the obvious fact that the temperature and the average climate on Earth have no well-defined “defect”. They are just perfectly fine.So the “global mean temperature” can’t possibly be the basis of any particular remotely sensible decision of any human, corporation, or a nation. It is ill-defined, heavily dependent on the tiniest details in the technical definition, and dominated by the ENSO and similar natural variability – at least at the interannual scale (it is also dominated by natural effects – the Earth’s spin – at the scale of one day; by a natural effect – seasons – during one year; by natural astronomical effects identified by Milutin Milankovič at the timescale of the glaciation cycles 20,000-100,000 years, and so on).But another, perhaps even greater layer of lunacy is the implicit assumption in the document that to control the greenhouse gas emissions is the “same thing” as to control the global mean temperature.You must be completely and hopelessly ignorant about the very basics of climatology if you’re ready to buy this assumption. The assumption is completely wrong becausemost of the variability, at least at the interannual, decadal, and other timescales that we observe, is due to natural effects (“meteorology”) and greenhouse gas emissions won’t beat itthe strength of the effect of the greenhouse gas emissions is only known as an order-of-magnitude estimatePeople considering themselves skeptics or lukewarmers end up with the climate sensitivity between 0 and 1.5 °C of warming per doubling of the CO2 concentration. The latest, fifth IPCC report has the 80% confidence interval for the climate sensitivity between 1.5 °C and 4.5 °C. The unusual 80% confidence band is verbally described by the word “likely”. If you wanted a higher certainty, like 90%, you would have to go to the interval between 1 °C and 5 °C, or something like that.Most skeptics consider any value above 2 °C very unlikely. On the other hand, values above and ideally well above 2 °C are a necessary condition for worries about the effect of CO2 to have any basis at all. At any rate, the value of the sensitivity is not know accurately – not even “remotely accurately”.Do I have to explain to you what it means for the IPCC interval to be 1.5 °C to 4.5 °C? The upper bound is thrice the lower bound. If you use the upper estimate, it may mean that you need to reduce the emissions by a factor of three to fulfill a climate plan. But if the lower bound is valid, you don’t need to reduce the emissions at all! And this makes a big difference, especially because the actual national emissions that are achieved in the real world are not three-fold but at most by one or two percent a year and no one is certain about the actual reason why the emissions went down at some moment or in some country.This whole paradigm of temperature planning – as well as pretty much every detail and “overlooked” technicality – is completely irrational and shows that the participants of the Paris summit were children who were left behind. Retarded morons who aren’t capable of understanding the total basics of the scientific method. The planned goals are a pure wishful thinking that has nothing to do with the reality because those signatories don’t have any tools whatsoever to fulfill such plans.The Paris document is an absolutely insulting text to read for dozens of other reasons. At the beginning, we read (I shortened this totally worthless verbosity significantly)Proposal by the presidentThe conference of parties is recalling previous meetings and the nice champagne in Bali (but we will demand the CO2 bubbles to be removed next time),recognizing that all of us must be hysterical about the climate,also recognizing that we have to get rid of carbon in our industries and our bodies,acknowledging, proselytizing, intimidating, lying, spinning, framing, firing, … And so on. These guys haven’t said one damn thing after the first page and a half. The remaining 30 pages are no better.On the second page, they “decide” to adopt this treaty – a self-referring nonsensical proclamation (they are probably trying to recover Russell’s paradox) which still says absolutely nothing. They say a couple of things about hundreds of new worthless offices and thousands of new bureaucratic parasites to be created. But there’s still no content of the treaty or no proposed work for the new parasites. Every paragraph starts by a verb,The conference of partiesdecides, requests, also decides, notes, decides, also decides, …And so on. What does it mean for an international treaty to “decide”? It’s ultimately the kings, dictators, national parliaments, and similar institutions that are actually making decisions on this planet. And the most important ones, like the U.S. Congress, will hopefully throw this piece of dirty paper to the trash bin quickly.An international treaty could say that some national politicians etc. are promising to do this or that etc., promote laws that will do this or that. The Paris “treaty” isn’t formulated as a treaty at all. Some of the “verbs” done by the conference of parties are truly stunning. For example,21. Invites the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to provide a special report in2018 on the impacts of global warming of 1.5 °C above pre-industrial levels and relatedglobal greenhouse gas emission pathways;What does it legally mean for a bunch of stupid politicians to “invite” the IPCC to create a special report on the impacts of 1.5 °C of warming? And what do you think that will be written in the report?If you read the reports so far, then you will see that the 1.5 °C of warming since the industrial era is treated as business-as-usual close to the current reality. Every sane person knows that 1.5 °C above the preindustrial levels means nothing special – it’s pretty much the world we love and inhabit.But by this paragraph, the politicians are openly telling the IPCC to rewrite the reports and write a new one in which even 1.5 °C will already be a problem. This verse of the Paris draft and nothing else is completely sufficient for a rigorous proof that the IPCC is a 100% corrupt organization controlled by special political and similar interests.Most of the articles are filled with insanely arrogant and vacuous Orwellian jargon but sometimes they go so much over the edge that you are likely to explode in laughter, for example:Article 27No reservations may be made to this Agreement. Except for several billions of people in the world who haven’t lost their mind completely and who will have “reservation” about every part of this 31-page-long psychopathological text. The people who sign something like that should be stored in psychiatric asylums. They are existentially dangerous for their fellow citizens.And that’s the memo.

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