How pro-lifers can fight the climate scare threatening their movement

A common refrain from the climate activists is "1.5 to stay alive." Indeed, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) advocates that we make greenhouse gas emission reductions adequate to limit global warming to 1.5^oC above pre-industrial levels. The IPCC even published a special report in 2018 titled "Global Warming of 1.5^oC."

But this makes no sense. According to the World Meteorological Organization report Provisional State of the Global Climate in 2022, "The global mean temperature in 2022 is currently estimated to be about 1.15 [1.02 to 1.28] °C above the 1850-1900 pre-industrial average."

So we are only 0.35^oC from the dreaded 1.5^oC rise that so frightens climate campaigners. Most normal people can see that an additional three-tenths of a degree rise in a statistically computed "global temperature" is inconsequential.

Finally, determining a temperature rise from pre-industrial levels requires that we know what the temperature was long ago and that we know what it is today. ICSC-Canada board member Dr. John McLean explains that neither criterion is met by the temperature data from HadCRUT that is being used to back up trillion-dollar policy decisions around the world. McLean said,

Today, about 85% of the world is covered with temperature data. I recently looked closely at the HadCRUT5 data, especially between 1850 and 1900. I wanted to see if the data collection was comparable to recent data. It's not by a long way. What data we have from back then are from very variable coverage (annual average coverage from about 14.5% to 49%), very different number of weather stations, and it isn't homogenous around the world but focussed heavily on Europe, the Atlantic Ocean and the voyages from Europe to Indonesia and Hong Kong. And it wasn't until 1949 that we started to get temperature data from even 50% of the southern hemisphere.

The newest version of the composite data from weather stations, the CRUTEM5 dataset, has no data for the southern hemisphere - and therefore no global average - until January 1857. The previous version, CRUTEM4, did have global averages, but in 2018 it was pointed out to the CRU people that there was very little data from the southern hemisphere in the early years after 1850, including that a single weather station provided the only data from January 1850 to June 1852. Of course, they should have already recognised this and taken action rather than claiming how accurate their global averages were, but, with enough pushing, they've finally accepted that coverage of the southern hemisphere was far too small to claim that, when data from both hemispheres were combined, there was sufficient to label the result a global average.

What's even more dishonest is claiming that climate models are sufficiently accurate that they can meaningfully work backwards from the scant 1850-1900 data to define what the global average temperatures were in true pre-industrial times [i.e., 1720 – 1800 is the pre-industrial date range suggested by this paperin the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society].

Therefore, the actual 'global temperature' rise since pre-industrial times is really unknown.

Next week, I will show pro-lifers how to refute climate alarmist claims that today's weather is unusually extreme, which, like virtually everything else mainstream media tell us about climate change, is completely wrong as well!