Wall Street Journal: Since 2007, IPCC leading scientists exposed as bullies and eye-catching predictions debunked

The Wall Street Journal editorializes:

Between 1998 and 2012 the global economy more than doubled in size—to some $71 trillion in GDP from $30 trillion. That’s the good news. Over the same period the world pumped more than 100 billion tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That is supposedly the bad news. Yet global surface temperatures have remained essentially flat. That’s the mystery: If emitting CO2 into the atmosphere causes global warming, why hasn’t the globe been warming?

That’s the question we would have liked to see answered by the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which Friday published the summary of its fifth report on what co-chairman Thomas Stocker calls “the greatest challenge of our times.” It would have also been nice to see some humility from the IPCC, which since its last report in 2007 has seen some of its leading scientists exposed as bullies, and some of its most eye-catching predictions debunked. (Remember the vanishing Himalayan glaciers?)

No such luck. “Warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” insists the report in its first bold-face conclusion, followed by the claim that “each of the last three decades has been successively warmer at the Earth’s surface than any preceding decade since 1850.” What follows are warnings of shrinking ice sheets, rapidly rising sea levels and other scary events…

They use the flimsy intellectual scaffolding of the IPCC report to justify killing the U.S. coal industry and the Keystone XL pipeline, banning natural gas drilling, imposing costly efficiency requirements for automobiles, light bulbs, washing machines and refrigerators, and using scarce resources to subsidize technologies that even after decades can’t compete on their own in the marketplace…

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