The Week’s Climate Embarrassment

by Steven HaywardJune 27, 2014

Tough competition for the most egregious embarrassment of the week for the Climatistas.  But you can add one more thing to The Warmlist’s 883 items caused by global warming climate change: the rise of ISIS in Iraq.  So says Slate.com:

Could there be a connection between climate change and the emerging conflict in Iraq?
The short answer is a qualified yes . . .

You know, I’m really not interested in the long, unqualified answer.  Oh heck, yes I am, especially with this much comedy gold left to mine:

Sure enough, this year has been unusually hot so far in Iraq with the March-April-May season ranking as the warmest on record across much of the country. (Reliable records from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration date back to 1880.) The emergence of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria around the same time may just be an interesting coincidence, but the implications are important enough for us to consider a broader connection.

Hmm, what about radical murderous Islamic ideology?  Could there a “broader connection” there?  Who knows.  Maybe someone should study the matter.  Meanwhile, paging Victor Davis Hanson: you think things are bad in California’s central valley now.  Well just wait: ISIS may be coming there next:

Much of Iraq’s climate is similar to California’s Central Valley, with a long summer dry season and a rainier, more productive winter. That’s helped Iraq serve as the breadbasket of the region for millennia, but no longer. Like Bakersfield, Baghdad is intensely dependent on river water from upstream for irrigation of most of its crops. After decades of war, not nearly as much water is getting through.

So the Warmlist is well on its way to 1,000 things caused by climate change.  When it reaches that milestone, I suggest the UN adopt a new slogan: Climate Change: Now More Uses Than Super Glue.”
But this is only the runner-up for Climate Embarrassment of the Week.  The good folks at the Global Warming Policy Foundation and the NoTricksZone blog bring our attention to a 2007 forecast from Britain’s Met Office that temperatures in 2014 would be 0.3 degrees C warmer than 2004.  The forecast was even published in Science magazine, so, you know, the whole thing was “settled.”  Someone else even found a transcript of the Met Office press conference announcing our forthcoming kilometerstone of doom:

[This is an excerpt from a presentation by Dr. Vicky Pope, at the "Climate Change 07" conference at the Barbican in London, on 5th September, 2007.]
Vicky Pope: By 2014, we’re predicting that we’ll be 0.3 degrees warmer than 2004. Now just to put that into context, the warming over the past century and a half has only been 0.7 degrees, globally – now there have been bigger changes locally, but globally the warming is 0.7 degrees. So 0.3 degrees, over the next ten years, is pretty significant. And half the years after 2009 are predicted to be hotter than 1998, which was the previous record. So again, these are very strong statements about what will happen over the next ten years.
So again, I think this illustrates that, you know, we can already see signs of climate change, but over the next ten years, we are expecting to see quite significant changes occurring.

Someone apparently forgot to tell Mother Nature, since, um, the Met Office’s own data for 2004 – 2014 show a slightcooling of 0.014 degrees C.  Here’s the chart from NoTricksZone:

[Observed temperature development as to the MetOffice’s own data HadCRUT4 compared to the claims made in the Smith et al paper. The lower black line shows the linear trend of the observed results. The blue-gray lines show the confidence range of the forecast. The red line shows the linear trend of Smith et al.]

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2014/06/the-weeks-climate-embarrassment.php