As the catastrophic climate narrative slumps inelegantly beneath a prolonged lack of warming, where does it leave us? Bearing in mind that it is not easy to come up with a higher authority than the climate – not even Vivienne Westwood on a good day.
It is becoming increasingly apparent that the C has come tumbling off CAGW, or Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming as it used to be known before options were quietly widened via the weasel word change.
So apart from a dwindling band of doomsday hopefuls we are presumably left with AGW. Even that seems to be quietly mutating to ACC – Anthropogenic Climate Change. Ho hum, I suppose even a furtive and long overdue change of emphasis is probably welcome.
Where this takes us I’m not sure but I’m pretty sure we aren’t due for a bout of institutional honesty and the sweet strains of mea culpa issuing from the BBC, Guardian, IPCC, Defra, Greepeace, Al Gore, Ed Davey, Ed Miliband, Lord Deben and a host of middle class poseurs of the green persuasion.
It is more likely that the new narrative will be stitched to the old as seamlessly as a dodgy temperature graph. The new narrative will imply that ACC is what was meant all along and AGW will turn up eventually and meanwhile every single weather outlier will be the weirdest weather since the last weird weather and anyone who says otherwise is some kind of flat-earth far-right nutcase denier in the pay of Big Oil...
...or whatever.
The irony is that most climate sceptics probably have no great problem with ACC because we could be affecting the climate in a number of ways from land usage to atmospheric nitrogen or sulphur pollution to airborne particulates. Most sceptics also think CO2 may have a minor effect, but nothing remotely like the calamity proclaimed for so long by the swivel-eyed activists.
The debate may even lurch towards something delightfully rational, where uncertainty is given its rightful place in the science...
...no I’m not holding my breath for that one.
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5 comments:
AK - I realize that you want to deny the available science, and we can agree to disagree.
However, this new right-wing (in the US) meme that 'global warming' is changing to 'climate change' is just an out-and-out lie.
The IPCC, founded in the late 1980's, is the 'Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change'.
Wasn't there some story recently about a big freeze period a-coming instead?
Sackerson - not to my knowledge. 'Watts up with that' keeps a list of articles from the 1970's predicting a new ice age. The problem is that none of them is peer-reviewed science. It's a way of pretending that the current consensus is wrong.
That being said, if the predicted changes come about, Britain could become much colder, as one anticipated effect will be to shift the Gulf Stream.
Paddington – I take your point about the IPCC, but according to Google’s Ngram Viewer in the mid nineties there was a sharp increase in the occurrence of the term “climate change” over the term “global warming”.
One might speculate about causes, but for some reason, round about 1995, Ngram finds the imprecise term “climate change” being used more frequently than the more precise “global warming”.
Maybe the change was innocent or accidental or something else, but its occurrence is not a lie, merely data.
Sackers - some people predict cooling and some say it has already started. In my view predictions worth little at this stage. Uncertainties are too numerous.
It's being used here over and over to attempt to refute actual evidence. That's lying.
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