Anthony Watts:
The royal prince in waiting of Britain labels climate skeptics as “headless chickens”.
From The Telegraph:
Prince Charles has criticised climate change deniers, describing them as the “headless chicken brigade” during an awards ceremony recognising a leading young green entrepreneur.
Charles, who has campaigned for years to reduce global warming, also spoke out against “the barrage of sheer intimidation” from powerful anti-climate change groups during the event held at Buckingham Palace last night.
The mark of a true leader is bringing people with diverse views and backgrounds together, clearly with this recent pronouncement, Prince Charles clearly has failed as a leader.
I’ll point out a few things the prince who may be king should know, but doesn’t, or chooses not to.
1. Rational climate skeptics don’t doubt that some portion of the proposed greenhouse effect is real, it’s just that nobody (and that includes many scientists) seems to be able to agree upon how much. The few who actually deny the Greenhouse effect exists, such as the “Slayers” aka “Principia Scientific” only represent the views of a fringe.
2. Item 1 then leads to arguments about climate sensitivity, values are literally “all over the map”:
Figure 1: Climate sensitivity estimates from new research published since 2010 (colored, compared with the range given in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) (gray) and the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR5; black). The arrows indicate the 5 to 95% confidence bounds for each estimate along with the best estimate (median of each probability density function; or the mean of multiple estimates; colored vertical line). Ring et al. (2012) present four estimates of the climate sensitivity and the red box encompasses those estimates. The right-hand side of the IPCC AR4 range is dotted to indicate that the IPCC does not actually state the value for the upper 95% confidence bound of their estimate and the left-hand arrow only extends to the 10% lower bound as the 5% lower bound is not given. The light grey vertical bar is the mean of the 14 best estimates from the new findings. The mean climate sensitivity (3.4°C) of the climate models used in the IPCC AR5 is 13 percent greater than the IPCC’s “best estimate” of 3.0°C and 70% greater than the mean of recent estimates (2.0°C).3. The global climate isn’t responding as it was predicted by government scientists, the trend over the last 12 years is basically flat:
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Figure 2: Global Average Surface Temperatures, 2001-2012Compare that to climate sensitivity predictions, which center around .2°C
Figure 3: 12-year Trends compared to climate sensitivity predictions from Figure 1The three graphs above are from Michaels and Knappenberger in this post.
4. The response of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is nearing saturation, which may explain why there is little warming over the last 12 years:
Figure 4: Red: The AGW accepted climate sensitivity of 0.81 (3C for doubling) Green: Climate sensitivity of 0.28 (1C for doubling) Blue: Climate sensitivity of 0.066 (0.24C for doubling)Figure 4 is from this WUWT post: Sensitivity Training: Determining the Correct Climate Sensitivity
5. While rational climate skeptics point out reality based factual inconsistencies with warming projections, the global warming movement has been hijacked by emotional activists, such as Bill McKibben and Al Gore, who use emotional pleas and invective to motivate people. You won’t see them ever show the graphs above because they don’t deal in facts, only emotional appeals.
