But many warmists disagreed with her over the past week.
From a QUEST interview with UNFCCC chief Christiana Figueres:
Q: What is the value of California’s leadership if there are so few followers? Isn’t there a danger that it’s all going to be too little too late?
A: Yes, there is that danger but that’s not the only possibility. We have so many more extreme weather events that are really making this issue no longer a debate. Every single country is being affected and every single country is realizing that—in their own interest—they need to address this. There is no more compelling evidence of this than the joint working group between the United States and China. If you had asked anybody four years ago, three years ago, two years ago: will the United States and China ever come to the table on climate change to try to find joint collaborative solutions, it would have been a hard sell to say yes. Here we have a joint working group of the United States and China, not because they necessarily are looking at the global benefit, but because they are motivated by avoiding the national impacts that they are already seeing.
But this position has been repudiated to some extent in the past week by the IPCC chief, Kevin Trenberth, the Associated Press, and a Congressional Democrat.
Her specialty doesn’t make much difference here. Any science asks its practitioners to look at whatever data is available before making a pronouncement. Simple counts of events shows no impulse of extreme weather.
My grandmother believed that deaths came in threes. Smart ass me pointed out to her that was roughly what we could remember at any time.
My grandmother was a saintly woman who took me in when why mother died at age 32. This UN official seems devoid of worth.
“Extreme weather events” is an elastic term. There are no reliable indications that there are more floods or greater levels of flooding, more drought or more severe droughts, more tornadoes or hurricanes or more severe tornadoes or hurricanes. Damage from severe weather has increased in some areas but this appears to be largely because more people have built more stuff where weather has always been potentially dangerous.
When you start your argument with something that is false to fact, you’re supposed to lose credibility. How is it that the AGW greenies in particular succeed in portraying errors (or lies) as facts?
That may have been the case 40 years ago when I was in grad school, I’m not convinced that the realities physical science or even facts have much to do with keeping a position in climate science.
Ms. Figueres’ statement is strong evidence of the general level of competence of the leading UN figures. It scares you stiff each time someone of them opens her/his mouth to see what frogs are jumping out this time. The sad thing is that they are democratically elected so that there is no way in the world to get rid of them in any other way than waiting for age to run. To be sure, Ms. Figueres holds a degree in Social Anthropology, but with 50+ years experience in academic research and teaching I have not as yet come upon any kind of connection between that discipline and the Physics and Chemistry of climate. Would she behave like this in research activities continually being scrutinized through peer review and competing projects, she would not even get the traditional 15 minutes to clear her desk, but being a UN profile on high level she is completely shielded, like all the others, from any kind of responsibility for her doings and from any kind of criticism or evaluation of her deeds.