Al Gore’s global warming vision proves more mirage than material

Al Gore’s vision of a dangerous climate “tipping point’’ has failed to materialise, says a top US business professor.

Al Gore predicted a dangerous climate ‘tipping point’ in his 2007 book Assault on Reason.

Al Gore’s vision of a dangerous ­climate “tipping point”, foreshadowed in his 2007 book Assault on Reason, has failed to materialise, according to a top American business professor who a decade ago challenged the former US vice- president to bet on how global ­ave­rage temperature would change.

Mr Gore’s staff said he did not take bets, but a decade on Scott Armstrong, a business professor at the Wharton Business School, has concluded that global temperature deviations since 2007 had easily fallen within the natural level of variation, and “no change” was the most accurate way to describe global weather patterns over the past decade.

“When you lack scientific evidence, the primary way to keep ‘global warming’ alive is to avoid having a testable hypothesis,” Professor Armstrong said, mocking how some observers had “touted the extremely cold weather that occurred in January (in the northern hemisphere) as another piece of evidence of global warming”.

The UN’s 2001 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change projected warming of 3C every century, which prompted governments to introduce taxes and regulations to curb CO2 emissions.

Professor Armstrong said he had seen “no dangerous long-term trends” in temperature data and, in any case, “like most people”, he would prefer temperatures “a little warmer”. “A few years ago, people in the US were asked how much tax they would be willing to pay on gasoline to completely eliminate dangerous global warming — the amount was about a dollar.”

 

Professor Armstrong and his academic colleague Kesten Green at the University of South Australia took Mr Gore’s “tipping point” scenario, charitably, to be the “business as usual” forecast from the UN’s 2001 panel on climate change, which had anticipated a 0.3C increase in average global temperature every decade.

The “bet” was monitored on theclimatebet.com site using global temperature data from University of Alabama researchers.

“Global temperatures have ­always varied on all timescales and Professor Armstrong was not highly confident that he would win a 10-year bet when temperatures had commonly drifted up or down by 0.3C over 10-year periods in the past,” Dr Green said.

The monthly data showed the years from 2008 to 2014 were largely cooler than the 2007 average deviation, while 2016 and last year were warmer. Between AD16 and 1935, a “no change” forecast over periods of one to 100 years was “much more accurate” than a hypothesis of global cooling or warming, the academics said.

The 2001 IPCC report said “...the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible”.

“The fact the last two years … favoured the warming forecast is meaningless in the context of the swings in temperature that ­occurred during the bet, and that will continue to occur in the ­future,” Dr Green said.

“Basing public policy on failed alarmist scenarios is irrational, and is causing enormous harm.”