There was something vaguely familiar about the BBC’s Matt McGrath reporting that our “overheating” world was set to break the 1.5°C threshold within the next five years, meaning average global temperatures would be 1.5°C warmer than they were in the second half of the 19th Century. At the same time last year, McGrath told us there was a 50-50 chance the world would hit 1.5°C “over the next five years”. And the year before that, BBC Science Editor David Shukman reported it was likely that the key 1.5°C “global temperature limit” would be broken – yes you guessed it – “in one of the next five years”.
But it might not surprise you to learn that this particular alarmist song has been around for even longer than its recent reappearance in the charts. In early 2019, the Guardian reported that “within five years”, global temperatures could temporarily climb to 1.5°C above 19th Century levels. The Guardian noted the view of the Met Office that previous results had “demonstrated the accuracy of such decadal reports”, which were said to cover the ground between short-term weather forecasts and long-range climate models. For its part, the Met Office stated as far back as 2017 there was a 39% chance of one month at 1.5°C within – you guessed it – five years.
Missing from all these stories is the admission that the 1.5°C threshold has no basis in science and is just a political invention designed to hasten the implementation of Net Zero. Suggestions that the planet will encounter ‘tipping points’ are pseudoscientific fear-mongering produced by climate models fed with improbable climate data. As we have noted, the recently published Clintel report –The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC – showed that about half the work produced by the IPCC and the wider scientific community is corrupted by incorporating predictions of up to 5°C warming within 80 years. It is a fair comment to say that almost nobody now believes these predictions are remotely plausible.
The other major problem in promoting Thermogeddon is that global warming ran out of steam 25 years ago. The high point of the small jump in temperatures from 1980 occurred in 1998, and current readings are similar to this day. Two inconvenient long pauses during the current century were separated by a small uptick in warmth caused by a very powerful El Nino natural oscillation around 2016.
There may well be some warming caused by humans burning fossil fuel during this period but it seems you need a vivid imagination and a well-prompted climate model to spot it. It can be argued that surface temperatures measurers have done their best to get them through the heat drought with large retrospective additions of warming, poor siting of measuring devises – airport runways an obvious cause of concern – and big boosts from growing urban heat distortions. But there is a feeling that the gig is up on global warming unless some proper heat makes a long overdue appearance.
Read More: ‘1.5°C Temperature Disaster’ Story Makes its Annual Media Appearance
