EclectEcon

As I have written often, I am skeptical about the concerns over global warming. Here is one reason: the predictions of the climate models have spectacularly wide confidence intervals and even lead to wildly different conclusions. From Melanie Phillips:

... [G]lobal warming is a truly miraculous theory. It means that, without a shadow of a doubt, we will have dry summers and wet winters, and wet summers and er, well, wet winters. As Dr Stott says:

‘In the UK wetter winters are expected which will lead to more extreme rainfall, whereas summers are expected to get drier. However, it is possible under climate change that there could be an increase of extreme rainfall even under general drying.’ (my emphasis [M.P.])

As it gets dryer, it will get wetter. Truly, this global warming theory has some extraordinary properties.

Bewildered? Wake up at the back there —haven’t you got it straight yet? We’re going to be frying and freezing, drowning and dehydrating at the very same time. And carbon emissions will be to blame for the planet getting hotter and getting colder, getting wetter and getting dryer. Because global warming means that whatever happens to the weather, wet dry, hot, cold— it’s all our own fault.

Those who still nurture an old-fashioned regard for facts as opposed to tendentious and indeed ridiculous hypothesis might like to bear in mind that these torrential downpours are not unprecedented in Britain at all. Indeed, we have had worse in the past. As Michael Hanlon reports in the Daily Mail:

On May 29, 1912, nearly five inches of rain fell in three hours near the town of Louth in Lincolnshire. The flood-water practically razed the town and killed 22 people. Even more spectacular was the deluge that occurred three months later in Norfolk: Brundall, near Norwich, experienced more than eight inches of rain on one hellish August day — roughly double the total measured anywhere in the recent floods. Much of Norfolk was still under water six months later.
And on August 15 that year, a depression moving up the Bristol Channel deposited nine inches of rain over Exmoor, spawning the lethal flood that was nearly to wash away the village of Lynmouth. More than 30 people were killed. The record for rainfall in one 24-hour period occurred on July 18, 1955, when nearly 12 inches of rain fell on parts of Dorset. So there is certainly nothing unprecedented about these floods, and similar deluges occurred long before we worried about global warming.

But then global warming theory represents the ultimate triumph of hypothesis over experience, as the latest distinguished scientist in the Canadian Financial Post’s series of climate change sceptics recently made clear. Tom V. Segalstad, head of the Geological Museum at the University of Oslo and formerly an expert reviewer with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, says the whole theory is nonsense.

Why does he say it is nonsense? Because it relies on a crucial assumption that the CO2 being produced will hang around in the atmosphere for 50 years or more rather than be absorbed by the oceans, whereas all the evidence to date suggests that C02, on average, stays in the atmosphere for no more than 5-10 years.

Amazingly, the hypothetical results from climate models have trumped the real world measurements of carbon dioxide’s longevity in the atmosphere. Those who claim that CO2 lasts decades or centuries have no such measurements or other physical evidence to support their claims. Neither can they demonstrate that the various forms of measurement are erroneous. ‘They don’t even try,’ says Prof. Segalstad. ‘They simply dismiss evidence that is, for all intents and purposes, irrefutable. Instead, they substitute their faith, constructing a kind of science fiction or fantasy world in the process.’

In the real world, as measurable by science, CO2 in the atmosphere and in the ocean reach a stable balance when the oceans contain 50 times as much CO2 as the atmosphere. ‘The IPCC postulates an atmospheric doubling of CO2, meaning that the oceans would need to receive 50 times more CO2 to obtain chemical equilibrium,’ explains Prof. Segalstad. ‘This total of 51 times the present amount of carbon in atmospheric CO2 exceeds the known reserves of fossil carbon– it represents more carbon than exists in all the coal, gas, and oil that we can exploit anywhere in the world.’

Global warming: religion, not science.