Royal Cockup

The Royal Society of Edinburgh have produced a report (aka propaganda leaflet) on global warming. So, I dipped into the report to the first main section after the introduction:

CLIMATE CHANGE, SUSTAINABILITY AND THE NEW INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION
Key findings

• Climate change is inextricably linked to wellbeing, security and sustainability.
• Rising levels of CO2 in the atmosphere, linked to burning fossil fuels and land use, present a major risk of climate change with challenging regional impacts.
• A new industrial revolution is underway to achieve energy security and to reduce greenhouse gas emissions,with energy efficiency and energy production emitting low or no CO2 at its heart.
• Scotland has much to gain economically and socially from this revolution.
• Scotland’s ambitious emission reduction targets (42%cut by 2020 and 80%by 2050) are achievable but require major commitment and resources.
• Despite success in cutting emissions from activities within Scotland, Scotland’s consumption-based emissions rose by 11%in 1996–2004.

This is all just utter waffle. “wellbeing”, “security” what are these? Where is the evidence of a “major risk” – we’ve had decades of this supposed climate catastrophe, we are perhaps a quarter of the way to doomsday, and what have we got to show for it? A few early snowdrops – which aren’t early this year, like last year because of the cold winter. As for the “new industrial revolution”, we’ve already seen what this is doing to Scots – it’s putting 3.7 people out of a job for each and every renewable job created. Scotland has nothing to gain economically from this scam and everything to loose. This racket is costing each and every Scot a fortune, depressing the economy and wasting government effort on frivolous projects which will only cost us dearly if ever any of them came to fruition.
And the last two just about sum up the whole report:

Scotland’s ambitious emission reduction targets (42% cut by 2020 and 80%by 2050) are achievable … Despite success in cutting emissions from activities within Scotland, Scotland’s consumption-based emissions rose by 11%in 1996–2004.

Despite the clear evidence that:

1. Global temperatures have not gone up for a decade.
2. That the government has utterly failed to achieve any kind of reduction.

The Royal society just blandly state (without reference to the current evidence – for obvious reasons) that the world is currently warming and that reduction is “achievable”.
They even have the audacity to include a graph of the Vostok Antarctic ice core which they appear to cite like the discredited Gore as proof of a causal link between CO2 and warming. The fact is that the Vostok core shows that warming occurs before CO2 increases, strongly suggesting that changes in CO2 are caused by warming and not the other way around.
Then I  spotted this little snippet:

“Key findings: Human activity is causing a rise in atmospheric CO2 concentrations; there is little doubt that this is contributing to globalwarming.”

“Oh, that’s be interesting” I thought. The report has a key finding that CO2 is causing global warming, so I tried to find this “science”, and eventually there it was:

The Climate Change 2007 report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change showed how global mean temperatures have been rising since the middle of the 20th Century. There are strong theoretical and observational grounds for predicting that this trend brings regional changes in climate with a greater likelihood of heatwaves, heavy precipitation events and floods, an increase in the frequency and extent of drought, and an overall rise in global sea level. Such changes have implications for water supply, ecosystems, food, health and coastal flooding  …. etc. etc.

So, basically one of the essential foundations of the report, a key “finding” of the report, was not a finding of the report at all! It was something found in another report entirely. OK, that may be a “finding”, but not in the way they suggest. It’s always the the same with these propaganda leaflets. This report, quotes that report; that report quotes another report; and none of them ever explain how the science can justify their assertions of massive temperature rises which aren’t being born out by the temperature data and which are far higher than the real science can justify.
This kind of rubbish just drives me barmy. It’s sloppily produced, it distorts the evidence to support a biased point of view, it fails to recognise the economic cost of this disastrous policy and it unquestionably regurgitates old group-think clichés as if it were saying something new. The Royal Society clearly have some good people but this type of report does nothing to enhance their reputation.
For more see: Bishop Hill: econowoo

Marking:

Science: 1/10
Economics: 0/10
Imagination: 11/10