“Is there or isn’t there a scientific consensus on climate change? And does it matter?”
The BBC’s Richard Black writes in “Climate consensus cracking open – or not”:
Finding the name of a Cambridge University engineering professor, Michael Kelly, on the WSJ letter, I decided to get in touch and find out his reasons for signing.
His basic position is that the kind of energy transformation through which the UK, for example, is planning to go is really tough to achieve in engineering terms, and would be financially ruinous.
To meet the goals of the Climate Change Act (notably an emissions cut of 80% from 1990 levels by 2050) he argues that “we’d really need a command economy of the kind we had in World War 2 if we were really serious about meeting the targets in full.
The rush to renewables is largely driven by hot air, Prof Kelly believes.
“What we need to do will bankrupt us if we really go for it and ignore the rest of the world.”
He would, he says, still endorse the rapid transformation if he thought the scientific evidence for needing it was compelling.
“Are you convinced that the world’s going to hell in a handbasket on the basis of the predictions and what’s been happening for the last 10 or 12 years?
“The answer is simply ‘no’.
“I look back 300 years and I find that the temperature went up by more than it’s gone up recently – in Central England from about 1699 to 1729 it went up by nearly 2C – and nobody said that was carbon dioxide”…
CO2 is innocent. OK!
In science the ultimate arbiter of Truth is not consensus, and it never has been.
The heart and soul of the Scientific Method is empiricism – the validation or invalidation of ideas about the way the universe works based on replicable measurements.
The hypothesis of AGW has as a consequence, in ALL the computer models, a warming of the mid-troposphere at equatorial and temperate latitudes. The thousands of measurements that have already been made gainsay this consequence.
Consensus is irrelevant. As Sherman and Larsen satirically observed “Fifty Million Commies Can”t Be Wrong”
http://www.amazon.com/Fifty-Million-Commies-Cant-Wrong/dp/images/B000SH8PWU
Truly knowledgeable scientists, not biased by being on the gravy train, know the CO2 theory is false from: history, the lack of correlation with real data, the fact that we now know what is causing the modest warming we have seen – the sun, amplified by cosmic rays (particles) seen in the proxy record for the last one million years, and especially from the faulty climate models.
Moreover, the sun/cosmic ray story matches our solar system sojourn around the Milky Way galaxy. The times the Earth passes through the spiral arms of the galaxy (heavily laden with cosmic particles) correlates amazing well with all the major glaciations in Earth’s history (see book by Ian Plimer, geologist from Australia).
What keeps this circus going are the UN and media folks who propagandize and over-dramatize various purported climate risks. In every case, the historical record exposes their claims as flagrant distortions of the truth and themselves as buffoons. See my book at http://www.rexfleming.com.