‘Consensus’ on climate science takes a hit in 2017

Author Kenneth Richard looked into research conducted in 2017, and found that at least 485 scientific papers were published that in some way questioned the supposed consensus.

These papers questioned the human contribution to CO2 emissions or the efficacy of climate models to predict the future and showed that significant limitations and uncertainties remain.

According to Richard’s analysis, the 485 new papers highlight “significant limitations and uncertainties inherent in our understanding of climate and climate changes,” suggesting that climate science is not as clear as media reports and climate activists would have people believe.

More specifically, the papers support the four main skeptical positions which question climate alarm.

They suggest that natural mechanisms play well more than a negligible role as claimed by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the net changes in the climate system, which includes temperature variations, precipitation patterns, weather events, etc.

The IPCC is the leading international body for the assessment of climate change. It was established by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) in 1988 to provide the world with a clear scientific view.

The IPCC position is that natural mechanisms would have caused a slight cooling in the recent past. Instead it warmed significantly. The best current explanation is the forcing from GHGs such as CO2, but this doesn’t mean that the Sun has no influence.

The IPCC claimed that the Himalayan glaciers would “disappear” by 2035.  The reality is that a recent study indicated they were predominantly stable with very little melting.

The influence of increased CO2 concentrations on climatic changes, they maintain, are less pronounced than currently imagined.

Warming, sea levels, glacier movement and sea ice retreat or hurricane and drought intensities are neither unprecedented or remarkable, nor do they fall outside the range of natural variability.

Computer climate models are not reliable or consistently accurate, and projections of future climate states are little more than speculation as the uncertainty and error ranges are enormous in a non-linear climate system.

There may be an actual consensus on the existence of the greenhouse gas effect, something that can be experimentally demonstrated, but elevated CO2 and a warmer climate provide unheralded benefits to the biosphere, including for enhanced crop yields.

Current emissions-mitigation policies, especially related to the advocacy for renewables, are often ineffective and even harmful to the environment, some argue.

Large regions of the Earth, including much of the Southern Hemisphere, has not warmed in decades, and this should not be happening with well-mixed greenhouse gases.

The Southern Ocean been cooling since 1979, and not one of the “consensus” climate scientists has named the mechanism for the cooling and increased sea ice extent, Richard has noted.

“Most of the Southern Hemisphere and even almost half of the Northern Hemisphere have been cooling for the last few decades. The warming has not been global in scale,” he pointed out.

The “consensus” positions are that close to or over 100 percent of the warming since 1950 has been caused by increases in anthropogenic CO2 emissions, leaving natural attribution at something close to zero.