CEI’s Ebell: Warming Alarmists Still ‘In Denial’ Over Climate Data

WASHINGTON, Sept. 27, 2013 – Disappointed in results that show the warming trends of the 1990s seem to have ended, the environmental left has stepped up efforts to whitewash a key document that will become part of the next report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

The spin already has begun, said Myron Ebell, director of the Center for Energy and Environment at the Competitive Enterprise Institute (cei.org) in Washington. But the facts don’t change. The world has not warmed in any significant way in the last 16 years, and the threats from ocean levels rising and other alleged problems are supremely overblown, he said.

“The global warming establishment is in denial over the still-widening divergence between the models and reality,” Ebell said. “The modelers dominate the public debate and the IPCC reports, but their predictions in the past 20 years have been disproved by reality.  If they can’t even come close to predicting the global mean temperature for 10 or 20 years, how can they possibly predict the gmt for 50 or 100 years? Models tend to diverge from reality the further away from the starting point they go.

“They can’t, and now everyone can see that they can’t. The IPCC summary is merely further evidence of this denial of reality. They are living in cloud-cuckoo land or, perhaps more accurately, they are remarkably similar to the projectors in Gulliver’s third voyage. Most people now understand this. The major groups that don’t are, in this country, the bicoastal urban elite, and, in England, what are called London’s chattering class.

“On one particular point, the idea that warming would continue for hundreds of years even if the level of greenhouse gases was stabilized at the current level immediately is poppycock. CO2 levels have gone up 12 percent in the past 16 years, but the gmt has remained flat. A higher ghg level has an almost immediate effect.

“Check higher water vapor levels in Singapore compared to the Sahara – as soon as the sun goes down it gets cooler in the Sahara but not much in Singapore. The warming doesn’t hide somewhere, which is what the alarmists are now claiming – for example, in the deep oceans. This is conjecture at the level of childish fantasy. What is the mechanism for hiding the warming in the deep ocean before it appears in the atmosphere or the shallow ocean? No one can explain the occult process that transmits the so-called greenhouse effect to the deep ocean simply because there is no process known to physical science.

“This is cover-your-backside BS concocted by the alarmists, and it is shameful and deeply disturbing that they are not being laughed off the stage and out of paid employment by the informed media and other authorities. To sum up: Nothing the IPCC can claim at this point can change the debate, which is over: Global warming may become a problem at some point in the next 50 or 100  years – although the chances are slim. But it is not now a crisis, and we need to stop acting as if it were.”