[030718.EN.BIZ] 30 Years of Dire Global Warming, Carbon Warnings Prove False

ALARMING official predictions about the dire effects of carbon emissions on global warming - which have become a major cost to world shipping - have proved false after 30 years of observable temperature readings, reports the Wall Street Journal.

James Hansen, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) scientist, started the global carbon craze, when he warned a US Senate committee in June 1988 of rising temperatures worldwide. These have now shown to be false, says a CATO Institute think tank study.

"Models devised by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have on average predicted about twice as much warming as has been observed since global satellite temperature monitoring began 40 years ago," said the CATO report.

"Corrected climate predictions raise a crucial question: Why should people worldwide pay drastic costs to cut emissions when the global temperature is acting as if those cuts have already been made?" said authors Pat Michaels and Ryan Maue, scholars at the Cato Institute's Center for the Study of Science.

"On the 30th anniversary of Mr Hansen's galvanising testimony, it is time to acknowledge that the rapid warming he predicted isn't happening," they said.

Mr Hansen's testimony, which kicked off the global carbon craze, described three possible scenarios for the future of carbon dioxide emissions.

He called Scenario A "business as usual," as it maintained the accelerating emissions growth of the 1970s and '80s. This scenario predicted the earth would warm up one degree Celsius by 2018.

Scenario B set emissions lower, rising at the same rate today as in 1988. Mr Hansen called this outcome the "most plausible" and predicted it would lead to about 0.7 degree of warming by this year.

Mr Hansen added a final projection, Scenario C, which he deemed "highly unlikely": constant emissions beginning in 2000. In that forecast, temperatures would rise a few tenths of a degree before flat lining after 2000.

After 30 years, even the least alarming Scenario C falls short, said the report.

"Global surface temperature has not increased significantly since 2000. Assessed by Mr Hansen's model, surface temperatures are behaving as if we capped 18 years ago the carbon dioxide emissions responsible for the enhanced greenhouse effect," it said.

"As observed temperatures diverged over the years from his predictions, Mr Hansen doubled down. In a 2007 case on auto emissions, he stated in his deposition that most of Greenland's ice would soon melt, raising sea levels 23 feet over the course of 100 years.

"Subsequent research published by Nature magazine on the history of Greenland's ice cap demonstrated this to be impossible. Much of Greenland's surface melts every summer, meaning that rapid melting might reasonably be expected to occur in dramatically warming world.

"But not the one we live in. The Nature study found only modest ice loss after 6,000 years of much warmer temperatures than human activity could ever sustain.

"Several more of Mr Hansen's predictions can now be judged by history. Have hurricanes gotten stronger, as Mr Hansen predicted in a 2016 study? No. Satellite data from 1970 onward shows no evidence of this in relation to global surface temperature.

"Have storms caused increasing amounts of damage in the US? Data from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration show no such increase in damage, measured as a percentage of gross domestic product.

"How about stronger tornadoes? The opposite may be true, as the NOAA data offers some evidence of decline. The list of what didn't happen is long an tedious," said the report.

Source : HKSG.