What are the opponents of Donald Trump’s climate review committee afraid of?

Credit: nationalreview.com

Dr Roy Spencer tries to strike a note of sanity amidst the latest bout of doom-laden climate hysteria doing the rounds via cynical manipulation of the minds of school kids. What is accelerating is the bluster of alarmists, who lack credible empirical evidence of ‘human-caused’ as opposed to natural climate variation.

On March 5, 58 senior military and national security leaders sent a letter to President Trump denouncing his plan to form a National Security Council panel to take a critical look at the science underpinning climate change claims.

Their objections to such a Red Team effort were basically that the “science is settled”, writes Roy Spencer in The Washington Times.

But if the science is settled, what are they afraid of? Wouldn’t a review of the science come to the same conclusion as the supposed consensus of climate scientists?

The letter claimed, “Climate change is real, it is happening now, it is driven by humans, and it is accelerating.”

While climate change is indeed real, it is not at all obvious how much humans have to do with it. Even the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admits this, saying only that over half of warming since the 1950s is believed to be human-caused. So, “driven by humans” is an exaggeration, even by the IPCC’s rather alarmist standards.

The additional claim that climate change is “accelerating” can also be challenged. In recent decades, warming actually decelerated, and there is a growing gap between climate model forecasts and measured global temperatures.

In fact, a peer-reviewed paper published last year in the prestigious Journal of Climate found that the observed level of global warming since the late 1800s, including the deep oceans, was consistent with a climate system only half as sensitive as are the climate models guiding U.S. energy and national security policy.

And even that study assumed that all of the warming was human-caused. If recent warming is only half anthropogenic, then the global warming problem is only one-fourth as bad as the public is being told.

In their letter, the Gang of 58 then used Hurricane Florence from last year as a supposed example of human-caused climate change. Seriously?

Until 2017, The U.S. went a record-setting 11-plus years without a major hurricane strike (Cat 3 or greater), and Hurricane Florence was normal and expected from a climatological point of view, making landfall as a Category 1 storm.

Continued here.