‘100 months to save the planet’ was just a fantasy

You may not have noticed, but 2016 was the hottest year for more than 100,000 years. At least this was the claim reported last week by under the headline “Planet at its hottest for 115,000 years thanks to climate change, experts say”.

The “experts” in question are a bunch of US scientists led by James Hansen, the former Nasa employee who did so much to set the great global warming scare on its way in 1988. And, of course, such a claim could only be made by ignoring all the evidence that Earth was actually hotter than today during the Mediaeval Warm Period, less than 1,000 years ago, and even more so during the thousands of years of the Holocene Optimum, following its emergence from the last ice age 10,000 years ago.

But Hansen and his gang do not stop there. They argue that we can only hope to save the planet by finding ways to suck vast quantities of CO2 out of the atmosphere, at a cost, they estimate, of up to $570 trillion. That figure may trip off the tongue, but it equates to seven times the world’s entire current annual GDP, or $77,000 for every human being now alive.

If this only shows how dottily desperate some of our wilder climate alarmists have become, we may come back to earth a little by focusing on another version of the great climate scare which also got very excited eight years ago, when it launched a campaign under the heading “The final countdown”. This proclaimed that we then had only “100 months” left to save the world from “irreversible climate change”: soaring temperatures, melting ice caps, dangerously rising sea levels, more hurricanes, tornadoes, The remnants of a marina at a reservoir in drought-affected California, above. Yet overall the number of severe droughts across the world has actually declined droughts, and all the other familiar harbingers of catastrophe.

Now those “100 months” are up, it has prompted the diligent Paul Homewood to publish on his website, Not A Lot of People Know That, a set of graphs meticulously compiled from official data. These show what has actually happened to Earth’s climate in the past eight years. Despite the 2016 El Niño spike, now rapidly declining, satellite measurements show that the trend in global temperatures has not risen for 18 years.

Far from the ice caps melting, the total amount of polar ice in the world is almost exactly the same in today’s Arctic and Antarctic as it was when satellite records began in 1979. Despite all those computer models predicting otherwise, the rise in global sea levels has been barely detectible, not having accelerated in more than a century. Despite Hurricane Matthew, there has been no increase in the incidence or power of tropical cyclones. Tornadoes in the US have been at a historic low level. The number of severe droughts across the world since the first half of the 20th century has actually declined.

All the computer models that predicted these horrors were programmed to assume that they would be the inevitable result of that increase of CO2 in the atmosphere, which has steadily continued all through these past 100 months. Yet not one of their predictions has come true. Indeed, the most startling of Homewood’s charts (taken from the BBC website, no less) shows that the most obvious consequence of the rise in CO2 has been its effect, as plant food, on the “greening” of the planet, helping to