Climate Orthodoxy

Temperatures on track for 5-degree rise
by 2100 after another hot year

Thus screamed the heading to an newspaper article that continued:

This year is on course to be the fourth hottest year on record, trailing only the three previous years, as rising levels of greenhouse gases warm the planet, the World Meteorological Organisation said. 

Up to October 31, mean temperatures in 2018 were an estimated 0.98 warmer than the average for 1850-1900, according the UN agency's provisional State of the Global Climate report. 

“We are not on track to meet climate change targets and rein in temperature increases,” said Petteri Taalas, WMO Secretary-General. “Greenhouse gas concentrations are once again at record levels and if the current trend continues we may see temperature increases 3 to 5 degrees by the end of the century." 

The WMO report comes days ahead of a global climate summit in Katowice, Poland, where nations will discuss progress on implementing the goals of the Paris climate accord signed three years ago keep temperatures to 1.5-2 degrees above pre-industrial levels. Australia's delegation will be led by Environment Minister Melissa Price.

Figure 1

https://public.wmo.int/en

So the WMO Secretary-General says "we may see temperature increases 3 to 5 degrees by the end of the century", plucking the figures seemingly out of thin air. The heading of the Brisbane Times article thus includes the upper limit of his prediction with the intended result that anybody perusing the newspaper can hardly fail to miss this unsettling prediction.

For anyone who bothers to read the article, there is the inevitable graph included in a screenshot of a tweet from a so-called "climate scientist" Gavin Schmidt, described (source) as a "climatologist, climate modeller and Director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, and co-founder of the award-winning climate science blog RealClimate".

Figure 2

The graph is below a photo of firefighters battling a blaze in England with the caption: Firefighters work on a wildfire on Winter Hill near Bolton, England. Extreme temperatures, particularly warm ones, have again been prominent in 2018, on course to be one of the hottest years in history.

Let's break the news article down into its components:

• overly sensational heading
• dire pronouncement from a prestigious international organisation (here the WMO)
• dramatic photograph of firefighters battling a conflagration
• suitably supporting graph from a climate scientist

I'm not attempting here to confront any details in the WMO report but just to focus on the highly biased manner in which climate news is presented by the mass media. Despite evidence to the contrary, the message being conveyed is clear: the world is getting warmer. You must believe this or else you are a climate denier who has chosen to ignore the irrefutable climate science and the climate facts as presented by the world's leading climate scientists. You must be a climate skeptic and a deluded fool.

Figure 3

As with vaccinations, there is no middle ground when it comes to man-made global warming. It's all or nothing. It is the prevailing orthodoxy to which you must adhere.

Clearly there is an agenda