The UN’s new species extinction group IPBES is an offshoot of another UN doomsday group, the IPCC
Recent doomsday predictions from the United Nations claim that millions of species are about to become extinct due to human activity and global warming. The predictions come from a new UN body called the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES).
In personnel, methodology, and message, the new body is noticeably a spin-off of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the leading promoter of global warming disaster scenarios. The retiring chairman of IPBES, Robert Watson, was chairman of the IPCC from 1997 to 2002 and is currently Director of Strategic Development for the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research at the University of East Anglia. That university was the center of a scandal in which leading scientists promoting global warming alarmism were revealed to be conspiring to suppress rival scientific studies critical of their viewpoint.
The methodology of IPBES also mirrors the IPCC:
- recruit a body of respected scientists already likely to be favorable to the outcome being sought,
- have them write a very long report too technical to be understood by the general public,
- then have a shorter executive summary written and re-written by politicians and partisan ideologues to convey the desired political message.
The message of both the IPCC and IPBES is essentially the same: human activity, especially economic growth and fossil fuel use, is causing catastrophic harm to the climate and species diversity. IPBES’s own flavor of catastrophism centers on the prediction that millions of species are about to become extinct because of human activity.
UN Secretary General António Manuel de Oliveira Guterres is now barnstorming South Pacific countries advocating urgent measures to stop climate change. The Democratic Party’s Green New Deal bases itself on the supposedly scientific predictions of these two UN groups.
Motives
The American Thinker has a useful article on the extinction predictions coming out of the UN and dutifully echoed by the New York Times and other Progressive outlets:
“As with most stories on climate change caused by humans, most of the news media are just feeding these predictions to the public without any questions.
“Faunalytics, a group that helps save endangered animals, has only 3,000 animals on its endangered species list, so there’s reason to ask questions. Start with this: where does the one million number come from?
“The public has repeatedly been told that humans are causing thousands of animals to go extinct each year, yet a study by National Autonomous University of Mexico in 2015 found only 477 identified species that have gone extinct since 1900, or around four per year.
“In 2015, Yale University estimated that there are three trillion trees on Earth. Previous estimates were 400 billion, yet we are told that humans are killing trees rapidly.”
The author concludes by noting the interest of the Party of Government in the US – the Democrats – in fostering climate and ecological panic:
“The purpose of all these dire predictions is clearly to transfer freedom, power, and money from the people to the government. The U.N., especially, would love to weaken the U.S. economically…[in favor of itself becoming the world’s most powerful government].
“I would challenge any journalist to come up with a list of Democrat proposals that seek to help the private sector and help the poor, the middle class, and minorities to move up the economic ladder. I can’t think of any. Every policy I see seeks to make the government richer and more powerful and makes more people dependent on government.”
No cost / benefit analysis possible, just planet-wide averages useless for planning
Panic over global warming makes no sense from an economic standpoint. This is powerfully explained by Australian atmospheric physicist Garth Paltridge.
“Whether we should do anything now to limit our impact on future climate boils down to an assessment of a relevant cost-benefit ratio. That is, we need to put a dollar number to the cost of doing something now, a dollar number to the benefit thus obtained by the future generations, and a number to a thing called “discount for the future”—this last being the rate at which our concern for the welfare of future generations falls away as we look further and further ahead. Only the first of these numbers can be estimated with any degree of reliability. Suffice it to say, if the climate-change establishment were to have its way with its proposed conversion of the global usage of energy to a usage based solely on renewable energy, the costs of the conversion would be horrifically large. It is extraordinary that such costs can even be contemplated when the numbers for both the future benefit and the discount for the future are little more than abstract guesses…
“[I]n order to be really useful, [any climate] forecast must necessarily be of the future distribution of climate about the world—on the scale of areas as small as individual nations and regions. Calculating only the global average of such things as the future temperature and rainfall is not useful. The economic models need input data relevant to individual nations, not just the world as a whole.
“Which is a bit of a problem. The uncertainty associated with climate prediction derives basically from the turbulent nature of the processes going on within the atmosphere and oceans. Such predictability as there is in turbulent fluids is governed by the size (the “scale”) of the boundaries that contain and limit the size to which random turbulent eddies can grow. Thus reasonably correct forecasts of the average climate of the world might be possible in principle. On the scale of regions (anything much smaller than the scale of the major ocean basins for example) it has yet to be shown that useful long-term climate forecasting is possible even in principle.
“To expand on that a little, the forecasts of the global average rise in temperature by the various theoretical models around the world range from about 1 degree to 6 degrees Celsius by the end of this century—which does little more than support the purely qualitative conclusion from simple physical reasoning that more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will increase the global average temperature above what it would have been otherwise….There is still a distinct possibility that much of the observed rise in global temperature may be the result of natural (and maybe random) variability of the system….
“As Michael Crichton put it: ‘Our [economic] models just carry the present into the future.’ And as Kenneth Galbraith once remarked: ‘Economic forecasting was invented to make astrology look respectable.’
“There is a lot of discussion among academics as to what should be an appropriate “discount for the future” to apply in the cost-benefit calculations associated with human-induced climate change….
“There are two extremes of thought on the matter. At one end there are those who tell us that the present-day view of a benefit for future generations should be discounted at the normal rate associated with business transactions of today. That is, it should be something of the order of 5 to 10 per cent a year. The problem for the academics is that such a discount would ensure virtually no active concern for the welfare of people more than a generation or so ahead, and would effectively wipe out any reason for immediate action on climate. At the other end of the scale, there are those who tell us that the value of future climatic benefit should not be discounted at all—in which case there is an infinite time into the future that should concern us, and “being fair” to that extended future implies that we should not object to spending an unlimited amount of present-day money on the problem….
“The significant point in this cost-benefit business is that there is virtually no certainty about any of the numbers that are used to calculate either the likely change of climate or the impact of that change on future populations. In essence it is simply assumed that all climate change is bad—that the current climate is the best of all possible climates. Furthermore, there is little or no recognition in most of the scenarios that mankind is very good at adapting to new circumstances. It is more than likely that, if indeed climate change is noticeably “bad”, the future population will adjust to the changed circumstances. If the change is “good”, the population will again adapt and become richer as a consequence. If the change is a mixture of good and bad, the chances are that the adaptive processes will ensure a net improvement in wealth. This for a population which, if history is any guide, and for reasons entirely independent of climate change, will probably be a lot wealthier than we are.
“Perhaps the whole idea of being fair to the people of the future should be reversed. Perhaps they can easily afford to owe us something in retrospect.
“The bottom line of politically correct thought on the matter—the thought that we must collectively do something drastic now to prevent climate change in the future—is so full of holes that it brings the overall sanity of mankind into question. For what it is worth, one possible theory is that mankind (or at least that fraction of it that has become both over-educated and more delicate as a result of a massive increase of its wealth in recent times) has managed to remove the beliefs of existing religions from its consideration—and now it misses them. As a replacement, it has manufactured a set of beliefs about climate change that can be used to guide and ultimately to control human behaviour. The beliefs are similar to those of the established religions in that they are more or less unprovable in any strict scientific sense.”
NASA fakes the data
Meanwhile, the debate continues over competing satellite data sets that are used by climate models and that have understandably led to the now-familiar complaints of “garbage in, garbage out.” Anthony Watts writes:
“Some heated claims were made in a recently published scientific paper, “Recent Global Warming as Confirmed by AIRS… One of the co-authors is NASA’s Dr. Gavin Schmidt, keeper of the world’s most widely used data set on global warming: NASA GISTEMP.
“Press coverage for the paper was strong. ScienceDaily said that the study “verified global warming trends.” U.S. News and World Report’s headline read, “NASA Study Confirms Global Warming Trends.” A Washington Post headline read, “Satellite confirms key NASA temperature data: The planet is warming — and fast,” with the author of the article adding, “New evidence suggests one of the most important climate change data sets is getting the right answer.”
“The new paper uses the AIRS remote sensing instrument on NASA’s Aqua satellite. The study describes a 15-year data set of global surface temperatures from that satellite sensor. The temperature trend value derived from that data is +0.24 degrees Centigrade per decade, coming out on top as the warmest of climate analyses.
“Oddly, the study didn’t compare two other long-standing satellite data sets from the Remote Sensing Systems (RSS) and the University of Alabama at Huntsville (UAH). That’s an indication of the personal bias of co-author Schmidt, who in the past has repeatedly maligned the UAH data set and its authors because their findings didn’t agree with his own GISTEMP data set. In fact, Schmidt’s bias was so strong that when invited to appear on national television to discuss warming trends, in a fit of spite, he refused to appear at the same time as the co-author of the UAH data set, Dr. Roy Spencer….
“Critics of NASA’s GISTEMP have long said its higher temperature trend is due to scientists applying their own “special sauce” at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), where Schmidt is head of the climate division. But what is even more suspect is the fact that while this is the first time Schmidt has dared to compare his overheated GISTEMP data set to a satellite data set, he chose the AIRS data, which has only 15 years’ worth of data, whereas RSS and UAH have 30 years of data. Furthermore, Schmidt’s use of a 15-year data set conflicts with the standard practices of the World Meteorological Organization, which states “as the statistical description in terms of the mean and variability of relevant quantities over a period of time… The classical period is 30 years…
“Why would Schmidt, who bills himself as a professional climatologist, break with the standard 30-year period? It appears he did it because he knew he could get an answer he liked, one that’s close to his own data set, thus “confirming” it.
“The 15-year period in this new study is too short to say much of anything of value about global warming trends, especially since there was a record-setting warm El Niño near the end of that period in 2015 and 2016. The El Niño event in the Pacific allowed warm water heated by the Sun to collect, dispersing heat into the atmosphere and thus warming the planet. Greenhouse gas induced “climate change” had nothing to do with it; it was a natural heating process that has been going on for millennia.”
Despite the use of professionally unacceptable data sets, a lack of plausible cost/benefit analysis, the uselessness of planet-wide averages, and the unsupported and unlikely prediction of one million species extinctions — the Malthusian groups backed by the Democratic Party seem no closer to achieving popular credibility than their discredited predecessors, the Club of Rome and The Limits to Growth report. Democrats are likely to learn this the hard way in the 2020 elections.
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