A non-profit watchdog group’s lawsuit against the National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Administration may have spurred the agency to release documents to a congressional committee that reveal a “new climate data scandal.”
Judicial Watch filed a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit Dec. 2, 2015, against NOAA “regarding methodology for collecting and interpreting data used in climate models,” the group said Tuesday.
Why Is NOAA Refusing To Hand Over Documents?
The House Committee on Science, Space and Technology subpoenaed the same documents earlier this year, but NOAA refused to hand the records over until a few days after Judicial Watch filed its lawsuit.
“We have little doubt that our lawsuit helped to pry these scandalous climate change report documents from the Obama administration,” Judicial Watch President Tom Fitton said. “Given the lawless refusal to comply with our FOIA request and a congressional subpoena, we have little doubt that the documents will show the Obama administration put politics before science in advance of global warming alarmism.”
The documents revealed a “new climate data scandal,” Judicial Watch said in announcing the suit.
“Information provided to the committee by whistleblowers appears to show that the study was rushed to publication despite the concerns and objections of a number of NOAA employees,” according to the committee.
Committee Chairman Lamar Smith wrote recently that “NOAA often fails to consider all available data in its determinations and climate change reports to the public.”
The Texas Republican also noted that a recent NOAA study made adjustments to historical temperature records, which led the findings to refute a nearly two-decade pause to global warming.
The Judicial Watch’s lawsuit was filed after the Department of Commerce, which governs NOAA, failed to respond to an Oct. 30 Freedom of Information Act request seeking communications between NOAA’s officials regarding how climate data is collected, analyzed and used.
Smith subpoenaed the agency for the same documents on Oct. 13, and sent a total of four letters to NOAA requesting the information.
The year 2015, which started with the coldest January to March for the Northeast (10 states plus DC) and warm dry southwest, will end with an all-time warmest December for the United States (3rd warmest in the satellite era since 1979 globally). This is thanks in part due to a strong El Nino.
On the morning of December 17 the thermometer at Antero Reservoir dropped to an astounding -51F. The last time that happened was on Feb. 8, 1989.
But like last year when December and Christmas were warm, the pattern will flip. The change will come a bit earlier than 2014/15. There are a lot of reasons to believe this. Warm November and December El Ninos often flip in January to March.
In the strong El Nino of 1965 the Upper Midwest including the Great Lakes and Minnesota and Iowa went from +7.9F in December to -7.2 in January. The second year El Nino of 1987/88 went from +6.5 to -1.8F in January and -3.7F in February. Last year it took a little longer in the weaker Modoki going from +6.1F in December to -8.4 by February. In the 10 northeast states plus DC we went from +5.9F in December to -2.6F in January, an amazing -10.4F in February and -4.5F in March. That made the region the coldest ever since 1895.
The media downplayed this away from the buried cities and NOAA in their winter highlights focused first on the warmth and dryness in California. In the prior winter, which featured record snow in the Great Lakes area and the coldest December to March in Chicago’s long history, it got a media attention during the coldest days mainly because of the term ‘polar vortex’, which sounded like something unique and that we somehow caused.
We hear references to 1997/98 as proof super NINOs bring blow torch winters and high confidence that this will be one. However there are more than subtle differences with 1997/98 as JB, TD and I have discussed.
The cooler east and warmer central makes it more Modoki like which means the east is able to see the arctic air come south around the retrogressing western and central Canada ridge into the developing eastern (southeastern) CONUS trough.
Next we have good agreement on the seasonal tools we trust. The CPC CFSv2 as it always does, will be last to ‘see the light’. But our 22 input Pioneer Model, the CPC CA and JAMSTEC agree with the change.
Then as I posted a few days ago, the EPO which has been positive (which favors warm central and eastern US), is not favored with the warm water off the west coast. Cold water like we had 1998-2002 and again 2011 to 2013 favors a +EPO. Warm water, which came on in 2002/03 and 2013/14 favors a -EPO.
I had indicated the pattern would start to appear, somewhat inconsistently, in the models by the solstice. Indeed they have. The EPS long range shows it in late January. Come to Weatherbell and see the daily, weekly and even the 45 day European high resolution data.
The op run EC shows an impressive cold outbreak and developing east coast threats and widespread snows next month.
Note: Our team does daily briefings of which the above is an abbreviated version of. We do daily videos as well, explaining and further expounding on our forecasts and the reasoning them. We specialize in long range and correctly forecast up to 9 months in advance the last two winters and summers. If weather is of interest or affects your business please consider becoming party of the Weatherbell clients family, 4000 strong.
China leads the world in 2015 with a growth of 7%. India is not far behind at 5.5%. As China and India have spurred growth to become centers of industry, they have employed cheap energy such as coal without, in many cases, the investment in scrubbing or removal of particulates and chemicals from the effluence that the industrialized west has invested in after similar pollution episodes 60 years ago.
In winters, as cold air settles in, inversions often form in the long nights and daytimes of feeble sun when the winds are light, trapping the pollution. Areas of China and India are suffering from severe pollution episodes this month.
In places like Beijing and other populous areas or eastern China, a cold outbreak with snow helped to ensure the inversions when the cold air aloft moved on.
The high-pressure overhead gets replaced with gusty northwest winds will clean out the air the next week but then cresting of high pressure overhead by week 2 will allow fog and smog to return.
Even with the attention to China, India is suffering too. Of the top 10 most polluted cities in the world, six are in India.
Though environmentalists make a big deal about the small particulate matter content as the problem because that is the ‘carbon pollution’ they are riding to their hoped for Paris agreement, in reality the real damage comes from chemical reaction of effluent gases like sulfur dioxide with water droplets in the ‘fog/smog’ that forms sulfuric acid mist. It is joined by hydrochloric acid. You will read that it is a CO2 problem but one has to remember with every breath, we emit 40,000ppm into air with around 400 ppm CO2 and that CO2 is 0.04% of the atmosphere.
In Europe and North America, we went through similar incidents that forced necessary changes to our air quality control. That improvement continues. We have decreased the small particulate loading of the air by 50% the last two decades to well below the target standards.
That brings to mind some of those trigger incidents.
THE GREAT LONDON SMOG OF DECEMBER 1952
As the UKMO described it “The weather in November and early December 1952 had been very cold, with heavy snowfalls across the region. To keep warm, the people of London were burning large quantities of coal in their homes. Smoke was pouring from the chimneys of their houses.
Under normal conditions, smoke would rise into the atmosphere and disperse, but an anticyclone was hanging over the region. This pushes air downwards, warming it as it descends. This creates an inversion, where air close to the ground is cooler than the air higher above it. So when the warm smoke comes out of the chimney, it is trapped. The inversion of 1952 also trapped particles and gases emitted from factory chimneys in the London area, along with pollution, which the winds from the east had brought from industrial areas on the continent.
Fog formed in the calm air as the ground cooled. During the period of the fog, huge amounts of impurities were released into the atmosphere and trapped in the fog beneath the inversion. On each day during the foggy period, in addition to the small particulates from the combustion of coal, the UKMO estimates 140 tonnes of hydrochloric acid and 14 tonnes of fluorine compounds. In addition, and perhaps most dangerously, 370 tonnes of sulphur dioxide were converted into 800 tonnes of sulphuric acid.”
That acid fog is what did most of the damage.
Government medical reports in the following weeks estimated that up until 8 December 4,000 people had died prematurely and 100,000 more were made ill because of the smog’s effects on the human respiratory tract. More recent research suggests that the total number of fatalities was considerably greater, at about 12,000.
As the UKMO reports “This kind of smog has now become a thing of the past, thanks partly to pollution legislation and also to modern developments, such as the widespread use of central heating.”
DONORA PA SMOG EVENT OF 1948
Noontime smog in Donora. Pennsylvania in October 1948
The Donora killer smog event of 1948 was the result of a low level inversion in late October of 1948 resulting in a wall of particulate and chemical laden fog that killed 20 people and sickened 7,000 more in Donora, Pennsylvania, a mill town on the Monongahela River, 24 miles southeast of Pittsburgh. Sixty years later, the incident was described by the New York Times as “one of the worst air pollution disasters in the nation’s history”. The Donora smog event, the worst air pollution disaster in U.S. history, let the public know that industrial pollution could kill. It eventually led to the Clean Air Act.
No one is opposed to clean air. I did my doctoral studies grant work on air resources (after a masters on explosive development in east coast storms). We had real pollution issues back then (CO, SO2, NOx, hydrocarbons), largely resolved now. They need to do the same in China and India.
But it is NOT carbon dioxide that is the killer. CO2 is a plant fertilizer that has helped feed the growing world population.
Clean coal plants are being built now in China and in places like Japan and Germany as they have discovered that renewables are unreliable and expensive energy sources for not only the populace but also for industry that requires steady, dependable and economical energy sources to compete in the global economy.
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President Obama wasted no crises on the occasion of the U.N.’s climate fear-fest earlier this month. Associating murderers of 129 people there two just weeks previously with agents of man-made global warming Armageddon, he observed that by fostering “dangerous” ideologies, climate change “in some ways is akin to the problem of terrorism and ISIL.”
He even hailed the conference as “a powerful rebuke of terrorists.”
These dangerous culprits presumably include all who challenge the existence of any rational scientific basis for climate hysteria...along with disbelievers of pixie dust premises that planetary salvation demands replacing affordable, abundant, and reliable fossil energy with costly, puny and intermittent windmills and sunbeams.
Even if the climate hadn’t warmed over 19 years prior to the run-up to that conference, feverish rhetoric certainly did. Yale Professor Timothy Snyder’s September New York Times op-ed titled “The Next Genocide” compared those who doubted dangerous man-made climate change with a Nazi commander slaughtering a Jewish baby.
He referred to “these deniers [who] tend to present the empirical findings of scientists as a conspiracy and question the validity of science - an intellectual stance that is uncomfortably close to Hitler’s.”
Last February Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Ariz., the top Democrat on the House Natural Resources Committee, attempted to launch a congressional witch hunt against climate alarm skeptics.
He requested that universities turn over documents about grants, congressional testimony and other activities involving seven dangerously doubting scientists who have testified at climate hearings.
My good friend Dr. Willie Soon, a distinguished and extensively published scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics was targeted for receiving “more than $1 million from [evil] U.S. energy companies over the past decade.”
Not mentioned was that half of that money received over those ten years was paid to his organization for administration, while the rest covered Dr. Soon’s salary and research expenses.
U.S. Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, D-R.I., followed suit by publicly encouraging legal prosecution of those who buck a so-called scientific global warming doom and gloom “consensus.”
Following in his presumably carbon-free footprints, Jagdish Shukla, a professor of climate dynamics at George Mason University, along with 19 other academics, sent a Sept. 1st letter to President Obama, Attorney General Loretta Lynch, and White House Office of Science Policy Director John Holdren which called for “a RICO investigation of corporations and other organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change.” (The “Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act” (RICO) was primarily directed at Mafia figures that ordered, but didn’t actually commit crimes such as murder.)
The “RICO-20” letter was originally posted on a website of the Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES), a “nonprofit, tax-exempt research institute” founded by Dr. Shukla. It was later removed.
And where did IGES get its own more than $63 million - 98 percent of its total revenue since 2001? A report in The Washington Free Beacon says that a lot came from taxpayers in the form of grants.
According to IRS Form 990 and other documents, 99.6 percent of its 2014 funding ($3.8 million) was provided by the National Science Foundation, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA), and NASA.
What’s more, a huge amount of that generous IGES non-profit, tax-exempt largess went into Shukla family pockets. According to tax filings, together with his “business manager” and wife Anastasia and “assistant business manager/assistant to the president” daughter Sonia they drew $5.6 million in compensation since 2001 (not including Sonia’s unreported earnings).
Although his IGES employment was “part time” this was all on top of Jagadish’s $314,000 2014 salary from George Mason University which IGES joined as part of its College of Science in 2013.
As reported by Ian Tuttle in the National Review, the only other member of the IGES staff is longtime Shukla associate James Kinter who runs George Mason’s Center for Ocean-Land-Atmosphere Studies (COLA).
Kinter (who didn’t sign the RICO-20 letter) added $180,038 from IGES to his $171,320 George Mason University salary in 2014. Shukla also reportedly funneled $100,000 in U.S. IGES grants to his “Institute for Global Education, Equality of Opportunity, and Prosperity,” an “educational charity” located in his hometown in India.
Meanwhile, as satellites show no statistical warming for nearly two decades despite rising CO2 levels while overheated climate models have gone berserk, transparent agendas of glass house residents who attack alarm skeptics warrant reverse scrutiny.
Let’s remember who is paying the bills for a multi-billion fear-dependent climate industry which imposes ever-increasing tax and consumer cost hikes for uneconomical and unreliable “green energy” pipe dreams.
In case there’s any lingering doubt, it’s the rest of us.
U.S. Climate Network Shows a Lower Temperature Trend when high quality stations included
Update: see HERE how weather satellites show no ‘global warming’ for 18 1/2 years. No N. Pole warming for nearly 14 years. No S. Pole warming for 37 years! U.S. has had no warming for 18 years!
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SAN FRANCISO, CA - A new study about the surface temperature record presented at the 2015 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union suggests that the 30-year trend of temperatures for the Continental United States (CONUS) since 1979 are about two thirds as strong as officially NOAA temperature trends.
Figure 1 - Comparisons of 30 year trend for compliant Class 1,2 USHCN stations to non-compliant, Class 3,4,5 USHCN stations to NOAA final adjusted V2.5 USHCN data in the Continental United States
Using NOAA’s U.S. Historical Climatology Network, which comprises 1218 weather stations in the CONUS, the researchers were able to identify a 410 station subset of “unperturbed” stations that have not been moved, had equipment changes, or changes in time of observations, and thus require no “adjustments” to their temperature record to account for these problems. The study focuses on finding trend differences between well sited and poorly sited weather stations, based on a WMO approved metric Leroy (2010)1 for classification and assessment of the quality of the measurements based on proximity to artificial heat sources and heat sinks which affect temperature measurement.
An example is shown in Figure 2 below, showing the NOAA USHCN temperature sensor for Ardmore, OK.
Figure 2 - USHCN Temperature sensor located on street corner in Ardmore, OK in full viewshed of multiple heatsinks.
Following up on a paper published by the authors in 2010, Analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends2 which concluded:
Temperature trend estimates vary according to site classification, with poor siting leading to an overestimate of minimum temperature trends and an underestimate of maximum temperature trends, resulting in particular in a substantial difference in estimates of the diurnal temperature range trends....this new study is presented at AGU session A43G-0396 on Thursday Dec. 17th at 13:40PST and is titled Comparison of Temperature Trends Using an Unperturbed Subset of The U.S. Historical Climatology Network
A 410-station subset of U.S. Historical Climatology Network (version 2.5) stations is identified that experienced no changes in time of observation or station moves during the 1979-2008 period. These stations are classified based on proximity to artificial surfaces, buildings, and other such objects with unnatural thermal mass using guidelines established by Leroy (2010)1. The United States temperature trends estimated from the relatively few stations in the classes with minimal artificial impact are found to be
collectively about 2/3 as large as US trends estimated in the classes with greater expected artificial impact. The trend differences are largest for minimum temperatures and are statistically significant even at the regional scale and across different types of instrumentation and degrees of urbanization. The homogeneity adjustments applied by the National Centers for Environmental Information (formerly the National Climatic Data Center) greatly reduce those differences but produce trends that are more consistent with the stations with greater expected artificial impact. Trend differences are not found during the 1999- 2008 subperiod of relatively stable temperatures, suggesting that the observed differences are caused by a physical mechanism that is directly or indirectly caused by changing temperatures.
Key findings:
Google Earth imagery, and curator interviews have yielded a well-distributed 410 station subset of the 1218 station USHCN network that is unperturbed by Time of Observation changes, station moves, or rating changes, and a complete or mostly complete 30-year dataset. It must be emphasized that the perturbed stations dropped from the USHCN set show significantly lower trends than those retained in the sample, both for well and poorly sited station sets.
1. Comprehensive and detailed evaluation of station metadata, on-site station photography, satellite and aerial imaging, street level These differences are significant in Tmean, and most pronounced in the minimum temperature data (Tmin). (Figure 3 and Table 1)
2. Bias at the microsite level (the immediate environment of the sensor) in the unperturbed subset of USHCN stations has a significant effect on the mean temperature (Tmean) trend. Well sited stations show significantly less warming from 1979 - 2008.
3. Equipment bias (CRS v. MMTS stations) in the unperturbed subset of USHCN stations has a significant effect on the mean temperature (Tmean) trend when CRS stations are compared with MMTS stations. MMTS stations show significantly less warming than CRS stations from 1979 2008. (Table 1) These differences are significant in Tmean (even after upward adjustment for MMTS conversion) and most pronounced in the maximum temperature data (Tmax).
4. The 30-year Tmean temperature trend of unperturbed, well sited stations is significantly lower than the Tmean temperature trend of NOAA/NCDC official adjusted homogenized surface temperature record for all 1218 USHCN stations.
5. We believe the NOAA/NCDC homogenization adjustment causes well sited stations to be adjusted upwards to match the trends of poorly sited stations.
6. The data suggests that the divergence between well and poorly sited stations is gradual, not a result of spurious step change due
to poor metadata.
The study is authored by Anthony Watts and Evan Jones of surfacestations.org , John Nielsen-Gammon of Texas A&M , John R. Christy of the University of Alabama, Huntsville and represents years of work in studying the quality of the temperature measurement system of the United States.
Lead author Anthony Watts said of the study: “The majority of weather stations used by NOAA to detect climate change temperature signal have been compromised by encroachment of artificial surfaces like concrete, asphalt, and heat sources like air conditioner exhausts. This study demonstrates conclusively that this issue affects temperature trend and that NOAA’s methods are not correcting for this problem, resulting in an inflated temperature trend. It suggests that the trend for U.S. temperature will need to be corrected.” He added: “We also see evidence of this same sort of siting problem around the world at many other official weather stations, suggesting that the same upward bias on trend also manifests itself in the global temperature record”.
Figure 3 - Comparisons of well sited (compliant Class 1&2) USHCN stations to poorly sited USHCN stations (non-compliant, Classes 3,4,&5) by CONUS and region to official NOAA adjusted USHCN data (V2.5) for the entire (compliant and non-compliant) USHCN dataset.
[1] Leroy, M. (2010): Siting Classification for Surface Observing Stations on Land, Climate, and Upper-air Observations JMA/WMO Workshop on Quality Management in Surface, Tokyo, Japan, 27-30 July 2010
[2] Fall et al. (2010) Analysis of the impacts of station exposure on the U.S. Historical Climatology Network temperatures and temperature trends
Dec 13, 2015
The UN is celebrating at COP 21, but what did they really achieve?
Craig Rucker reports “The UN is celebrating at COP 21, but what did they really achieve?”
President Obama called the Paris climate agreement the best chance we’ve had to “save” the planet. Not even close, Mr. President. We’ll put that bit of hyperbole right up there with your election being “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal.”
The good news is that the final agreement is substantially weaker than the drafts that led up to it. French Soclialist Laurent Fabius, who presided over COP 21, must have spent all of Friday night yanking the teeth out of it to come up with a document everyone would sign. China and India will be pleased that this agreement permits them to go on burning coal and expanding their economies all they want.
The President will be pleased that the agreement is weak enough that he can attempt to bypass Senate ratification. Marc Morano asked, “Does this mean we never have to hear about ‘solving’ global warming again!?” Marc’s full commentary was posted to the top of the Drudge Report.
CFACT senior policy advisor Paul Driessen warns that although he believes the final agreement is no more than “mush,” attempting to voluntarily abide by it will cause terrible economic harm and human suffering. You can read his full analysis here.
This agreement will not meaningfully alter the temperature of the Earth, even under the UN’s own computer models. The bad news is that it plants the seeds of a new UN climate regime that left unchecked will swell into a bureaucratic behemoth. The good news is that the agreement’s soft commitments, lack of penalties for noncompliance, and long dates buy time for more scientific data to come in.
The more scientific evidence we examine, the weaker the case for economy-wrecking global warming policies becomes. Science may provide the way out. If we can keep the data honest.
Reprieve! Binding Paris treaty now voluntary mush
But Obama still wants to send US energy use and living standards backward
Paul Driessen and Roger Bezdek
Paris climate talks this week descended into madcap all-night negotiations, as delegates desperately tried to salvage some kind of agreement beyond empty promises to do something sometime about what President Obama insists is the gravest threat to our planet, national security and future generations.
He gets far more energized about slashing energy use than about Islamist terrorism, even after the Paris and San Bernardino butchery. Determined for once to lead from upfront, he took a 500-person greenhouse gas-spewing entourage to the City of Light, to call for preventing increasing droughts, floods, storms, island-swallowing rising acidic ocean levels and other disasters conjured up by alarmist computer models.
Legally binding carbon dioxide emission targets were too contentious to pursue. So was modifying the concept of “differentiated responsibilities.” It holds that countries that historically caused the recent atmospheric carbon dioxide build-up must lead in cutting their emissions, while helping developing countries eventually do likewise, by pouring trillions of dollars in cash and free technology into the Green Climate Fund for supposed climate change adaptation, mitigation and compensation. Developing countries had insisted on that massive wealth redistribution as their price for signing any binding document.
Although China now emits far more CO2 and other greenhouse gases (GHG) than the USA or EU, it refused to fast-track reducing those emissions. China and wealthy petro-states also opposed paying into the Climate Fund. Other major bones of contention were likewise never resolved.
Thus, in the end, what we apparently got out of Paris is voluntary emission caps, voluntary progress reviews, no international oversight of any voluntary progress, and voluntary contributions to the Fund.
Of course, the entire climate cataclysm mantra is based on the claim that carbon dioxide has replaced the solar and other powerful natural forces that have driven climate change throughout Earth and human history. Now, merely tweaking CO2 emissions will supposedly stabilize climate and weather systems.
President Obama fervently believes this delusion. He will likely use the voluntary Paris gobbledygook to say America somehow has a “moral obligation” to set an example, by de-carbonizing, de-industrializing and de-developing the United States. Thankfully, Congress and the states will have something to say about that, because they know these anti-fossil fuel programs will destroy jobs and living standards, especially for poor, working class and minority families.
The impacts would be far worse than many news stories and White House press releases suggest. Those sources often say the proposed climate treaty and other actions seek GHG reductions of 80% below predicted 2050 emission levels. The real original Paris treaty target is 80% below actual 1990 levels.
That means the world would have to eliminate 96% of the greenhouse gases that all humanity would likely release if we reach world population levels, economic growth and living standards predicted for 2050. The United States would likely have to slash it CO2 and GHG reductions to zero.
Moreover, current 2050 forecasts already assume and incorporate significant energy efficiency, de-carbonization and de-industrialization over the next 35 years. They are not business-as-usual numbers or extrapolations of past trends. Further CO2 reductions beyond those already incorporated into the forecasts would thus be increasingly difficult, expensive, and indeed impossible to achieve.
As we explain in a MasterResource.org analysis, there is a strong positive relationship between GDP and carbon-based energy consumption. Slashing fossil energy use that far would thus require decimating economic growth, job creation and preservation, and average per-person incomes. In fact, average world per capita GDP would plummet from a projected $30,600 in 2050 to a miserable $1,200 per year.
Average per capita GDP in 2050 would be less than what Americans had in 1830! Many futuristic technologies would still exist, but only wealthy families and ruling elites could afford them.
That would be catastrophic for jobs, health and welfare in developed countries and lethal to millions in poor nations, who would be denied the blessings of electricity and fossil fuels for decades to come. That is indefensible, inhumane and immoral. And for what?
Mr. Obama and the alarmists in Paris insisted that drastic GHG reductions will hold global temperature increases to 2 degrees Celsius (3.5 F) and prevent climate and weather disasters. Now some even claim that the upper safety limit is actually 1.5 degrees C (2.7 F), which would require even more draconian energy and emission cutbacks. Otherwise, Earth could become uninhabitable, they assert. Nonsense.
EPA’s own analyses suggest that its fully implemented Clean Power Plan would bring an undetectable, irrelevant reduction of perhaps 0.02 degrees Celsius (0.05 F) in average global temperatures 85 years from now assuming carbon dioxide actually does drive climate change.
In the Real World, climate changes regularly, and recent climate and weather trends and events are in line with historic experience. In fact, average global temperatures haven’t risen in nearly two decades; no category 3-5 hurricane has struck the USA in a record ten years; Greenland and Antarctic ice are at record levels; and still firmly alkaline sea levels (8.1 pH) are rising at barely seven inches per century.
Many scientists believe the sun and other powerful natural forces may soon usher in a new era of colder temperatures, regardless of whether atmospheric CO2 rises above 0.40% (400 ppm). That would pose much greater threats to human health, agriculture and prosperity (and wildlife) than global warming.
We must never forget: Fossil fuels facilitated successive industrial revolutions and enabled billions to live better than royalty did a century ago, helped average incomes to increase eleven-fold, and helped average global life expectancy to soar from less than 30 in 1870 to 71 today.
Carbon-based energy still provides 81% of world energy, and supports $70 trillion per year in world GDP. It will supply 75-80% of global energy for decades to come, Energy Information Administration, International Energy Agency and other studies forecast. Carbon-based energy is essential if we are to bring electricity to the 1.3 billion people who still do not have it, and end the rampant poverty and lung, intestinal and other diseases that kill millions of people in poor countries every year.
Furthermore, thousands of coal-fired power plants are built, under construction or in planning around the world. China and India will not consider reducing GHG emissions until 2030, and even then it will be voluntary and dependent on how their economies are doing. That means atmospheric carbon dioxide levels will continue to climb, greening the planet and spurring faster crop, forest and grassland growth.
President Obama and the 40,000 climate alarmists gathered in Paris largely these inconvenient realities, and whitewashed the adverse consequences of anti-hydrocarbon policies. Even binding targets would have had minimal or illusory health, climate and environmental benefits.
Instead, they would have horrendous adverse effects on human health and environmental quality, while doing nothing to prevent climate change or extreme weather events. What alarmists wanted in Paris would have let unelected, unaccountable activists and bureaucrats decide which industries, companies, workers, families, states and countries win the Climate Hustle game, and which ones lose.
And it’s not just President Obama, who wants to slash America’s carbon dioxide emissions by 26-28% below 2005 levels by 2025 and 80% below 1990 levels by 2050! Every Democrat presidential candidate demands similar actions: Hillary Clinton wants one-third of all US electricity to come from wind and solar by 2027; Bernie Sanders wants 80% by 2050; Martin O’Malley wants 100% by 2050.
Obligating the United States to slash its fossil fuel use, and send billions of taxpayer dollars annually to dictators, bureaucrats and crony industrialists in poor countries would be disastrous. Thank goodness it did not happen. But we are not out of the woods yet.
Dr. Roger Bezdek is an internationally recognized energy analyst and president of Management Information Services, Inc., in Washington, DC. Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow and author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death.
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See also this summary of feedback after the Paris COP21 UN Fiasco.
Satellite data shows the per cent amount that foliage cover has changed around the world from 1982 to 2010.
Increased levels of carbon dioxide (CO2) have helped boost green foliage across the world’s arid regions over the past 30 years through a process called CO2 fertilization, according to CSIRO research.
In findings based on satellite observations, CSIRO, in collaboration with the Australian National University (ANU), found that this CO2 fertilization correlated with an 11 per cent increase in foliage cover from 1982-2010 across parts of the arid areas studied in Australia, North America, the Middle East and Africa, according to CSIRO research scientist, Dr Randall Donohue.
“In Australia, our native vegetation is superbly adapted to surviving in arid environments and it consequently uses water very efficiently,” Dr Donohue said. “Australian vegetation seems quite sensitive to CO2 fertilisation.
This, along with the vast extents of arid landscapes, means Australia featured prominently in our results.”
“While a CO2 effect on foliage response has long been speculated, until now it has been difficult to demonstrate,” according to Dr Donohue.
“Our work was able to tease-out the CO2 fertilisation effect by using mathematical modelling together with satellite data adjusted to take out the observed effects of other influences such as precipitation, air temperature, the amount of light, and land-use changes.”
The fertilization effect occurs where elevated CO2 enables a leaf during photosynthesis, the process by which green plants convert sunlight into sugar, to extract more carbon from the air or lose less water to the air, or both.
If elevated CO2 causes the water use of individual leaves to drop, plants in arid environments will respond by increasing their total numbers of leaves. These changes in leaf cover can be detected by satellite, particularly in deserts and savannas where the cover is less complete than in wet locations, according to Dr. Donohue.
“On the face of it, elevated CO2 boosting the foliage in dry country is good news and could assist forestry and agriculture in such areas; however there will be secondary effects that are likely to influence water availability, the carbon cycle, fire regimes and biodiversity, for example,” Dr Donohue said.
“Ongoing research is required if we are to fully comprehend the potential extent and severity of such secondary effects.”
This study was published in the Geophysical Research Letters journal and was funded by CSIRO’s Sustainable Agriculture Flagship, Water for a Healthy Country Flagship, the Australian Research Council and Land & Water Australia.
Dec 22, 2015
Mr. President, Here’s Why That Claim of a 97% Climate Change Consensus Is Bunk
Recently, President Obama scrapped the “97% consensus of scientists believe in climate change” claim - and raised it 99.5%:
While the president noted that “99.5 percent of scientists and experts [and] 99 percent of world leaders” agree human-caused climate change needs to be reckoned with.
If the President relied on facts rather than hyperbole, he would admit that there is no study claiming that 99.5% of scientists agree with the climate change thesis, and that even the study claiming a 97% consensus of scientists is total bunk.
The study reporting the 97% consensus, “Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature,” by John Cook and friends, under the halo of the University of Queensland was published in 2013 and, according to Watts Up With That, when the source data for the study was published online, the University of Queensland got so worried they threatened a lawsuit over use of Cook’s “97% consensus” data for a scientific rebuttal.
That threat is antithetical to the scientific method, which says that, for a study to be valid, it must be possible to repeat it and achieve the same results as the initial study. But, the University of Queensland is hiding the fact that Cook’s study was a qualitative study which relied on opinion and produced biased results.
Cook and his buddies looked at peer-reviewed studies and classified them as either agreeing or disagreeing with the climate change hypothesis. The 97% figure was really 97% of the hand-picked studies they reviewed. Even worse, investigative journalists at Popular Technology reported that the 97% Study falsely classifies scientists’ papers as supporting the global warming hypothesis - according to the scientists who published the papers.
Popular Technology looked into precisely which papers were classified within Cook’s asserted 97 percent. The investigative journalists found Cook and his colleagues strikingly classified papers by such prominent, aggressive climate change skeptics as Willie Soon, Craig Idso, Nicola Scafetta, Nir Shaviv, Nils-Axel Morner and Alan Carlin as supporting the 97 percent consensus.
Cook and his colleagues, for example, classified a peer-reviewed paper by scientist Craig Idso as explicitly supporting the “consensus” position on global warming “without minimizing” the asserted severity of global warming. When Popular Technology asked Idso whether this was an accurate characterization of his paper, Idso responded:
“That is not an accurate representation of my paper. The papers examined how the rise in atmospheric CO2 could be inducing a phase advance in the spring portion of the atmosphere’s seasonal CO2 cycle. Other literature had previously claimed a measured advance was due to rising temperatures, but we showed that it was quite likely the rise in atmospheric CO2 itself was responsible for the lion’s share of the change. It would be incorrect to claim that our paper was an endorsement of CO2-induced global warming.”
A more extensive examination of the Cook study by the New American reported that, out of the nearly 12,000 scientific papers Cook’s team evaluated, only 65 endorsed Cook’s alarmist position. That is less than 0.97%.
The crucial point here is the qualifying clause, “of those who have an opinion.” In other words, even the highly questionable Cook study doesn’t actually claim, as President Obama does, that “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree.” In fact, when examined closely, one finds that the study says only one-third of the authors of the published research papers they examined expressed an opinion that the Cook team interpreted as either an implicit or explicit endorsement of AGW. So now its 97 percent of one-third of selected scientists in a sampling of research papers. That’s a far cry from the 97 percent of all scientists claimed by President Obama and many of the media stories. And, as we will show below, even this admitted dramatically lower consensus claimed by the study is fraught with problems and falls apart further under examination.
Another criticism of the Cook’s paper is it didn’t define the “consensus” they were looking for. Is the 97% for people who believe the global warming is real, or people who believe it’s real and caused by mankind?
In fact popular technology listed 97 papers refuting Cook’s study here.
There are scientists, for example, who believe the Earth just went through a warming period caused by high sunspot activity. Many of those scientists blaming sunspots either work or consult for the U.S. or British Governments. Those scientists believe that we have entered a period of low sunspot activity and that might cause a mini-ice age.
Any objective examination of the data and methodology Cook and the University of Queensland have allowed the public to see will conclude that the 97% consensus figure has no basis in fact.
The ‘pause’ in global warming that this administration pressured NOAA to disavow is still present.
Here in his last Dragnet show, Jack Webb schools a young man on reality. It is obvious no one ever had that kind of talk with Obama or young people today who march and complain when we don’t respect their opinion or feelings.
Back in the 1970s, the world was facing an energy crisis (Arab oil embargo) and the scientists, the government (CIA) and media were hyping the coming of the next ice age. Back then we had real pollution problems. Cars, homes and apartments, factories and power plants all were emitting real pollution into the air, and industry into the air, ground or water. The first environmentalists found a cause. I was one of them.
Many scientists were blaming the air pollution (called the ‘human volcano’ ) for the worrisome 1.35F cooling.
At the same time, some environmentalists warned millions would die as the exploding world population would deplete resources and lead to crop failures and massive starvation beginning in the 1980s even here in the United States.
Instead, thanks to exploration of energy and other resources and rapidly advancing technology, an explosion of industrialization improved the lives of Americans and billions in the west. We have in the last 4 decades, made huge progress in cleaning up the water and the air from particulates, hydrocarbons, sulphur dioxide, carbon monoxide and nitrogen oxides.
You may have seen stories of how China and India recently suffered from serious air pollution. They know that their rapid economic growth depends on cheap energy. In this story that I wrote last week, I explained here how this is like the west 60 years ago at the beginning of the post war boom. As their economies grow, they will make some of the same changes we made to improve their situation.
ATTENTION TURNS TO CARBON DIOXIDE
In the 1980s, global temperatures rebounded in the 60-year cycle seen back hundreds of years. Environmentalists and population control fanatics searched for blame, settling on fossil fuels and a new demon, carbon dioxide.
Is CO2 really a problem? No, for a lot of reasons. First of all it is a trace gas. When I give a talk and ask people how much of our air is CO2. I usually get answers like 30%, 50% or even higher numbers. The real answer is 0.04%. Yes, man through, respiration, burning fossil fuels, deforestation and cement production add CO2 but the natural cycles still dominate. The oceans are the greatest storehouse and source/sink of atmospheric CO2. The bubbles in cold, soda or champagne you enjoy is CO2. You know how these bubbles come out and the drink gets flat when it warms. The same happens in the oceans. On land, animals, and soils produce CO2 during respiration and CO2 and methane during their decomposition. Plants clearly play a key role in absorbing CO2.
Second, though CO2 is a greenhouse gas, it is a minor one. Water vapor, which ranges up to 4% of our air by volume, accounts for over 97% of the greenhouse effect. You see the effect in summer when humid days are muggy and warm at night. Dry, warm days are more pleasant or even cool at night.
Without the greenhouse effect, the planet would be a lot colder, and in places uninhabitable. The climate models have failed miserably because they overestimate CO2’s importance and ignore the sun and oceans, the real drivers. They projected major warming that has not occurred. The full earth coverage satellites tell us there has been no measurable warming globally for 18 years and 9 months now even as CO2 has increased 10%. Models projected a 1.3F warming in that period.
Routine claims of the ‘warmest ever’ is clearly shown by comparison to previous data sets to be due to massive data cooling of the past data not by your local hard working NWS but by a few ideologues at the National Climate Data Center controlled by the administration.
Greenhouse models tell us the warming should be greatest in the tropics but there has been no warming in the atmosphere or oceans there back to when satellite measurement began in 1979. Also the forecast increases in extremes have not materialized. Even though it may seem like it has in this internet and international media age where we see reports instantly on every storm or other natural catastrophic event.
I just finished authoring a paper with an Indian PhD climatologist from Canada showing how the only extreme that has really increased in any statistically significant way globally is winter cold and snow (remember the last few years?).
The reality is that carbon dioxide is a beneficial gas (too often people confuse it with the dangerous carbon monoxide). Plants use CO2 with water and nutrients from the ground and sunlight to produce plant cells and the fruits and vegetables and that feed us and the animals we eat. CO2 enriched plants are more vigorous and are drought resistant. Crop yields have increased three to five-fold at least in part due to this CO2 enrichment. Plant life emits oxygen, also critical for life as they remove more and more CO2.
CO2 levels are actually coming off the lowest levels in the entire history of the planet, just above the threshold for plant growth. It has been as much as 20 times higher over the last 650 million years.
But isn’t it harmful to our health? Not at all. Smogs and air quality events have become a rarity in the United States and soot and other small particulates have declined in half and are well below air quality standards. CO2 is not the problem. Every breath you take emits 100 times more CO2 than is in the air. In the classroom and your workplaces, CO2 concentrations reach levels 4 to 5 times higher than in the outside air. The ‘carbon pollution’ term refers to the soot that comes from the old dirty coal, once a problem here, now one in China and India.
The ecologist and former co-founder of Greenpeace, Dr. Patrick Moore talks about the hypocrisy of the CO2 demonization and other environmentalist lies in this powerful video and in his book, Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout.
Merry Christmas and Happy New Years. It may not feel like late December weatherwise east of the Rockies, but that is typical of stronger El Ninos, which get of to a notoriously late start but in many cases wild finish. I’ll have more on that soon.
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You can see that as the number of pirates in the world has decreased over the past 130 years, global warming has gotten steadily worse. In fact, this makes it entirely clear that if you truly want to stop global warming, the most impactful thing to do is - become a pirate.
Hope you’re laughing. My husband told me this wonderful premise a few months ago, and I couldn’t resist sharing it with you, for a very specific reason. I’m fascinated by why it’s so funny. I believe it’s because it’s an only slightly more extreme version of the fake logic we hear every day - the conclusions that pass for critical thinking in these days of completely unleashed 24-7 communication. For example:
Someone who has cancer drinks gallons of lemon water and their cancer goes into remission: they create a website to talk about how lemon water cures cancer.
A business is doing badly and they move to a new building and things start to pick up: the CEO writes a book about how changing your environment is the key to success.
Statistics show that people who leave their jobs after less than a year are more likely to smoke: someone starts a campaign to reduce smoking by encouraging people to stay at their jobs longer.
My older sister, a very wise and smart woman who is a political scientist at Syracuse University, teaches a statistics class to freshmen, where she endeavors to teach them critical thinking. She talks about this as being the most common error in logic: confusing simultaneity with causality. In other words, assuming that because two things are happening at the same time, they exist in a cause and effect relationship with each other.
Because anyone can say anything anywhere these days (pretty much), there’s a lot of fuzzy thinking floating around that seems more legitimate than it would have in former times because it’s in print. Now, don’t get me wrong: I’m a huge proponent of free speech. I just feel we all have to be more discriminating than ever before about what we believe. Not cynical or negative: discriminating.
So, when someone proposes a cause and effect relationship between two things - reduction in pirates causing global warming; Obama creating the global economic crisis; young people ruining American business - ask for the data that shows they’re related, rather than simply that they’re happening at the same time.
But if you’re dead set on becoming a pirate, I’m not going to stop you.
By Frank Bosse and Fritz Vahrenholt
(Translated/edited by P Gosselin)
In November our sun was once again below normal in activity. The 84th month since the current solar cycle started in December 2008 saw a solar sunspot number (SSN) of 63.2, which was 72% of what is the mean for month 84 into a cycle since observations began in 1755.
Figure 1: Our current solar cycle (SC) 24 (red) compared to the mean cycle (blue) of the previous 23 cycles. The current cycle over the past year or so as been very similar to solar cycle number 5 (black) which occurred from 1798 to 1810.
What follows is a comparison of all cycles:
Figure 2: The accumulated monthly deviations anomaly from the mean value (blue curve in Figure 1) for each cycle.
The current solar cycle 24 is weak compared to the previous cycles beginning with solar cycle 18 (1945). The books are practically closed for the current cycle as it is not expected to become more active and activity is expected to trail off. We are experiencing the weakest solar cycle since the Dalton Minimum 1790-1830, which involved solar cycles 5, 6 and 7.
What’s ahead?
For estimating the solar sunspot activity of the next upcoming cycle, observing the polar fields during times of activity minima provides strong indications. We reported on this here. So what can we expect some three years before the awaited minimum?
Figure 3: The polar fields of the sun since 1976. (Source: stanford.edu)
Early indications of a modestly active solar cycle 25
Especially the south polar field (show in red in Figure 3) is beginning to show signs of strengthening a little, yet is still behind the values of the very active cycles that occurred during the second half of the 20th century. This could be an indication that solar cycle number 25 may not be much weaker than the current cycle, but also not stronger. We will know more in about 3 years.
I am pasting below a copy of an email that I’ve sent to many members of the National Academy of Sciences. I’ve also sent a version of it to the board members of the AAAS. And I have posted it to the National Association of Scholars website here.
It explains itself pretty clearly, but it will help to give a little background. We were drawn into this by James Enstrom, a former UCLA senior scientist and a National Association of Scholars member. We championed his case when he was fired for blowing the whistle on a major fraud at the California Air Resources Board (CARB). CARB had issued research findings (and ultimately regulations) based on a study that Enstrom demonstrated was fraudulent. The main author of the study had a mail order Ph.D. - as it happens, the address of the phony degree-granting institution is on Madison Avenue two blocks from my office. There was other mischief too, involving several of Enstrom’s colleagues who had seats at CARB.
Enstrom sought to publish some account of this in Science under the editorship of Marcia McNutt. He didn’t get anywhere. But he did end up making the acquaintance of other scientists who had similar experiences with McNutt. McNutt is now the only candidate to be president of the National Academy of Sciences. Enstrom hoped that if he could draw attention to her record of bolting the door against scientific dissent from establishment positions, the members of the Academy might have second thoughts.
I don’t want to put the National Association of Scholars into a campaign against McNutt’s election, but it does seem to me a good opportunity to raise broader questions about how science is now conducted in the United States - and how public policy is being built on it.
For several years I’ve been trying to get some traction for the National Association of Scholars on the threats to the integrity of contemporary science arising from entrenched political interests. We.ve made relatively little headway with this, although our studies of the sustainability movement and its subsidiary the fossil fuel divestment movement have attracted considerable attention. There are, of course, a handful of people in Congress who have enunciated their skepticism about the global warming orthodoxy and now the reliability of the Marks paper that claims that the pause in global warming never happened.
Breaking through the barriers to open scientific discussion requires finding 1) champions who can command public attention and respect; 2) factual narratives that are relatively easy for the public to grasp; and 3) vulnerabilities that the establishment cannot trivialize. I would think the best way to deal with the three issues mentioned in my letter would be to get the press interested in the enormous costs of the regulations that have been based on these spurious - or at least dubious - theories.
Yours,
Peter Wood
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December 9, 2015
Dear Members of the National Academy of Sciences,
This is an NAS to NAS letter - which requires some “disambiguation.” I am president of the National Association of Scholars, founded in 1987, and whose organizers apparently didn’t give much thought to the space already occupied by those initials by the National Academy of Sciences, founded 124 years earlier. I’ll defer to the Academy’s seniority by reserving NAS in what follows for the body of scientists who incorporated during President Lincoln’s tenure. The National Association of Scholars is a broad-based group of academics that includes professors in the humanities and social sciences (I’m an anthropologist) as well as the natural sciences.
The occasion for this letter is Dr. Marcia K. McNutt, Editor-in-Chief of Science. We are concerned that she is the only official candidate to be the next NAS president. To be clear, the National Association of Scholars does not oppose Dr. McNutt’s candidacy. We simply believe that members of an important national organization like NAS should have at least two candidates to consider when voting for your next president. Indeed, the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), which publishes Science, always has two candidates for president and its other elected positions. Other scientific organizations also have two candidates for their elected positions.
Also, we want to bring to your attention our serious concerns about the current state of discourse in the sciences. Dr. McNutt has played a significant role in three active controversies involving national regulatory policy that deserve attention in themselves and that are also part of a larger problem. The larger problem is how the scientific establishment, particularly Science and NAS, should evaluate and respond to serious dissent from legitimate scientists. This is an especially important consideration for NAS, which was established to provide “independent, objective advice on issues that affect people’s lives worldwide.”
The three controversies are:
1. The status of the linear no-threshold (LNT) dose-response model for the biological effects of nuclear radiation. The prominence of the model stems from the June 29, 1956 Science paper, “Genetic Effects of Atomic Radiation,” authored by the NAS Committee on the Biological Effects of Atomic Radiation. This paper is now widely questioned and has been seriously critiqued in many peer-reviewed publications, including two detailed 2015 papers. These criticisms are being taken seriously around the world, as summarized in a December 2, 2015 Wall Street Journal commentary. In August 2015 four distinguished critics of LNT made a formal request to Dr. McNutt to examine the evidence of fundamental flaws in the 1956 paper and retract it. However, on August 11, 2015 Dr. McNutt rejected this request without even reviewing the detailed evidence. Furthermore, Dr. McNutt did not even consider recusing herself and having independent reviewers examine evidence that challenges the validity of both a Science paper and an NAS Committee Report.
This is a consequential matter that bears on a great deal of national public policy, as the LNT model has served as the basis for risk assessment and risk management of radiation and chemical carcinogens for decades, but now needs to be seriously reassessed. This reassessment could profoundly alter many regulations from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Environmental Protection Agency, and other government agencies. The relevant documents regarding the 1956 Science paper and Dr. McNutt can be examined at www.nas.org/images/documents/LNT.pdf.
2. Extensive evidence of scientific misconduct in the epidemiology of fine particulate air pollution (PM2.5) and its relationship to mortality. Since 1997 EPA has claimed that lifetime inhalation of about a teaspoon of particles with diameter less than 2.5 microns causes premature death in the United States and it established an national regulation based on this claim. Science has provided extensive news coverage of this issue and its regulatory significance, but has never published any scientific criticism of this questionable claim, which is largely based on nontransparent research.
Earlier this year, nine accomplished scientists and academics submitted to Science well-documented evidence of misconduct by several of the PM2.5 researchers relied upon by EPA. The evidence of misconduct was first submitted to Dr. McNutt in a detailed June 4, 2015 email letter, then in a detailed July 20, 2015 Policy Forum manuscript “Transparent Science is Necessary for EPA Regulations,” and finally in an August 17, 2015 Perspective manuscript “Particulate Matter Does Not Cause Premature Deaths.” Dr. McNutt and two Science editors immediately rejected the letter and the manuscripts and never conducted any internal or external review of the evidence. This a consequential matter because many multi-billion dollar EPA air pollution regulations, such as, the Clean Power Plan, are primarily justified by the claim that PM2.5 is killing Americans. The relevant documents regarding this controversy can be examined here.
3. Science promotes the so-called consensus model of climate change and excludes any contrary views. This issue has become so polarized and polarizing that it is difficult to bring up, but at some point the scientific community will have to reckon with the dramatic discrepancies between current climate models and substantial parts of the empirical record. Recent evidence of Science bias on this issue is the June 26, 2015 article by Dr. Thomas R. Karl, “Possible artifacts of data biases in the recent global surface warming hiatus”; the July 3, 2015 McNutt editorial, :The beyond-two-degree inferno”; the November 13, 2015 McNutt editorial, “Climate warning, 50 years later”; and the November 25, 2015 AAAS News Release, “AAAS Leads Coalition to Protest Climate Science Inquiry.”
Dr. McNutt’s position is, of course, consistent with the official position of the AAAS. But the attempt to declare that the “pause” in global warming was an illusion has not been accepted by several respected and well-informed scientists. One would not know this, however, from reading Science, which has declined to publish any dissenting views. One can be a strong supporter of the consensus model and yet be disturbed by the role which Science has played in this controversy. Dr. McNutt and the journal have acted more like partisan activists than like responsible stewards of scientific standards confronted with contentious claims and ambiguous evidence. The relevant documents and commentary regarding the Karl paper and McNutt editorials can be examined here.
All three of these controversies have arisen on issues in which a strong degree of scientific consensus became intertwined with public policy and institutional self-interest. That intertwining can create selective blindness.
Dr. McNutt has in her career found herself faced more than once with the challenge of what to do when an entrenched orthodoxy meets a substantial scientific challenge. The challenge in each case could itself prove to be mistaken, but it met what most scientists would concede to be the threshold criteria to deserve a serious hearing. Yet in each case Dr. McNutt chose to reinforce the orthodoxy by shutting the door on the challenge.
The three areas that I sketched above, however, seem to have such prominence in public policy that they would warrant an even greater investment in time, care, and attention than would be normally the case. In that light, Dr. McNutt’s dismissive treatment of scientific criticisms is disturbing.
I bring these matters to your attention in the hope of accomplishing two things: raise awareness that the three issues represent threats to the integrity of science arising from the all-too-human tendency to turn ideas into orthodoxies; and suggest that it might be wise for NAS to nominate as a second candidate for president someone who has a reputation for scientific objectivity and fairness and who does not enforce orthodoxy.
I welcome your responses. The National Association of Scholars will present an open forum on these matters with a section reserved specifically for NAS members. Furthermore, I will put you in contact with NAS members who are concerned about Dr. McNutt becoming the next NAS president.
Thank you for your consideration.
Yours sincerely,
Peter Wood
President
National Association of Scholars
8 W. 38th Street, Suite 503
New York, NY 10018
www.nas.org
(917) 551-6770
People’s main disagreement over global warming was never regarding whether the climate changes. No one argues that. The main contention was over whether humans are the main cause of that change.
Global warming alarmists claim that humans are making the earth hotter through their use of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas.
Alarmists are taking something that is observable and repeatable such as the idea that the climate changes naturally through cycles and turning it into a political issue by “blaming” an entire sector of the economy for the changing weather. Politicians have hijacked legitimate environmental stewardship to demonize their political enemies in the private sector, to eliminate their competition, and to grant the failed green industry a government-sponsored monopoly, all at the expense of the taxpayer.
But it’s a little difficult to blame humanity for the changing climate when apparently, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA), the highest temperatures sustained by this planet were long ago, before man even existed. These are the same people who tell us that man is to blame for global warming. But they also argue that “millions” of years ago, before there was any such thing as mankind or SUVs, before there were fossil fuels, the earth’s temperature was at its hottest, upwards of 3,600 degrees Fahrenheit.
From CNS News:
An Aug. 12, 2014 article posted on climate.gov and titled, “What’s The Hottest The Earth’s Ever Been,” stated, “Earth’s hottest periods - the Hadean, the late Neoproterozoic, the PETM - occurred before humans existed.” It added, “Those ancient climates would have been like nothing our species has ever seen.”
The article noted that the Arctic Circle was once a tropical hot spot:
“Stretching from about 66-34 million years ago, the Paleocene and Eocene were the first geologic epochs following the end of the Mesozoic Era. (The Mesozoic-the age of dinosaurs - was itself an era punctuated by ‘hothouse’ conditions.)
Geologists and paleontologists think that during much of the Paleocene and early Eocene, the poles were free of ice caps, and palm trees and crocodiles lived above the Arctic Circle. The transition between the two epochs around 56 million years ago was marked by a rapid spike in global temperature.”
In its earliest days “when [Earth] was still colliding with other rocky debris,” the temperature was “upward of 3,600 degree Fahrenheit,” the article noted.
During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, or PETM, “the global temperature appears to have risen by as much as 5-8 degrees” Centigrade (9 to 14 degrees Fahrenheit), the article stated. (Note: the Paris climate change agreement is designed to stop Earth’s temperature from rising 2 degrees Fahrenheit, an increase caused by human activity, according to the U.N.).
My point is not to say that now I believe that “billions of years ago,” “before man existed,” the earth was thousands of degrees Fahrenheit. These kinds of evolutionary explanations are man’s desperate attempts at explaining the world without God. The fairy tale will only get more and more absurd, and its adherents more and more dogmatic.
My point is to show the inconsistency. The same people who argue that man is to blame for 1-degree global warming - something they call “catastrophic” - are the same people who believe that earth’s hottest period in history had nothing to do with man. Their own words condemn them.
Also note the hottest temperatures in the records back into the 1800s in the 50 states tell a non warming tale. 23 of the 50 stat all time record highs occurred in the 1930s, 38 before 1960. there have been more all time cold records since the 1940s than highs.
’Greenpeace has made itself the sworn enemy of all life on Earth’
Greenpeace, in furtherance of what is in effect its war against every species on the planet, has now turned to what, on the face of things, looks to me like outright breach of the RICO, wire-fraud, witness-tampering and obstruction-of-committee statutes. I have called in the FBI.
Greenpeace appears to have subjected Dr Will Happer, Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University, to a maladroit attempt at entrapment that has badly backfired on it.
Greenpeace used this dismal rent-by-the-hour office block in the Beirut souk for its entrapment scam
The organization I co-founded has become a monster. When I was a member of its central committee in the early days, we campaigned - usually with success - on genuine environmental issues such as atmospheric nuclear tests, whaling and seal-clubbing.
When Greenpeace turned anti-science by campaigning against chlorine (imagine the sheer stupidity of campaigning against one of the elements in the periodic table), I decided that it had lost its purpose and that, having achieved its original objectives, had turned to extremism to try to justify its continued existence.
Now Greenpeace has knowingly made itself the sworn enemy of all life on Earth. By opposing capitalism, it stands against the one system of economics that has been most successful in regulating and restoring the environment.
By opposing the use of DDT inside the homes of children exposed to the anopheles mosquito that carries malaria, Greenpeace contributed to the deaths of 40 million people and counting, most of them children. It now pretends it did not oppose DDT, but the record shows otherwise. On this as on so many issues, it got the science wrong. It has the deaths of those children on what passes for its conscience.
By opposing fossil-fueled power, it not only contributes to the deaths of many tens of millions every year because they are among the 1.2 billion to whom its campaigns deny affordable, reliable, clean, continuous, low-tech, base-load, fossil-fueled electrical power: it also denies to all trees and plants on Earth the food they need.
Paradoxically, an organization that calls itself “Green” is against the harmless, beneficial, natural trace gas that nourishes and sustains all green things. Greenpeace is against greenery. Bizarrely, it is opposed to returning to the atmosphere a tiny fraction of the CO2 that was once present there.
In November 2015, out of the blue, Professor Happer received an email from “Hamilton Ellis”, a soi-disant “business consultancy” operating out of rent-by-the-hour offices in a crumbling concrete block in the Beirut souk.
The bucket-shop “consultancy’s” email said that a “client”, an energy and power company “concerned about the impacts of the UN climate talks”, wanted to commission Professor Happer to prepare a “briefing” to be released early in 2016 “which highlights the crucial role that oil and gas have to play in the developing economies, such as our client’s Middle East and North Africa region”.
The email smarmed on:
“Given your influential work in this area and your position at Princeton we believe a very short paper authored or endorsed by yourself could work strongly in our client’s favour. Does this sound like a project you would be interested in discussing further?”
Will Happer replied enclosing a white paper written, with major input from him, by the CO2 Coalition, a new group that he had helped to establish earlier in 2015. He also sent a copy of testimony on the “social cost of carbon” that he had given at a regulatory hearing in St Paul, Minnesota. Crucially, he added: “I would be glad to try to help if my views, outlined in the attachments, are in line with those of your client.”
In short, he was not prepared to be bought. He would help the “client” of the “business consultancy” if and only if he was not asked to attest to anything that he did not already believe.
The “consultancy” replied:
“It certainly sounds like you and our client are on the same page.” It went on to ask whether Professor Happer’s two papers had been “part of the same initiative on CO2 reported on [by Matt Ridley] in the London Times recently, and added: “The focus we envisage for this project comes from a slightly different angle. Our client wants to commission a short briefing paper that examines the benefits of fossil fuels to developing economies, as opposed to a switch to so-called clean energy”.
The “consultancy” also wanted to know whether it “would be able to reference you as Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics at Princeton University if this project were to go ahead?”
It also tried to smoke out the identity of Professor Happer’s contacts in the U.S. media, and ended with a classical entrapment line:
“It would be useful to know, in your experience, whether you would need to declare the source funding when publishing research of this kind”.
Professor Happer replied that Matt Ridley was “someone the CO2 Coalition is in close touch with” and said: “The article also mentions Patrick Moore, like me a member of the CO2 Coalition, and my friend from Princeton, Freeman Dyson, who shares our views.”
He confirmed that his official title is Cyrus Fogg Brackett Professor of Physics, Emeritus. He also reinforced his earlier message indicating he could not be bought by stating, very clearly:
“To be sure your client is not misled on my views, it is clear there are real pollutants associated with the combustion of fossil fuels, oxides of sulfur and nitrogen for most of them, fly ash and heavy metals for coal, volatile organics for gasoline, etc. I fully support regulations for cost-effective control of these real pollutants. But the Paris climate talks are based on the premise that CO2 itself is a pollutant. This is completely false. More CO2 will benefit the world. The only way to limit CO2 would be to stop using fossil fuels, which I think would be a profoundly immoral and irrational policy.”
Professor Happer added that he no longer had external funding following his retirement, and went on:
“My activities to push back against climate extremism are a labor of love, to defend the cherished ideals of science that have been so corrupted by the climate-change cult. If your client was considering reimbursing me for writing something, I would ask that whatever fee would have come to me would go directly to the CO2 Coalition. This was the arrangement I had with the attorneys representing the Peabody Coal Company in the regulatory hearings in Minnesota. The fee I would have received was sent instead to the CO2 Coalition, a 501(c)(3) tax exempt educational organization. The CO2 Coalition covers occasional travel expenses for me, but pays me no other fees or salary.”
The “consultancy” replied that the “client” was “completely comfortable with your views on fossil-fuel pollution”. It asked whether Matt Ridley might “help to disseminate our research when it is ready”, and whether the briefing could be peer-reviewed. “On the matter of reimbursement, we would of course remunerate you for your work and would be more than happy to pay the fee to the CO2 Coalition.”
Then another classic entrapment line:
“Our client does not want their name associated with the research as they believe it will give the work more credibility. What provisions does the CO2 Coalition provide? Would this be an issue?”
Professor Happer replied that he was sure Matt Ridley would be interested in the briefing and that Breitbart would be among blogs and syndicated columnists that could also be interested.
As for peer review, he explained that
“this normally refers to original work submitted to a scientific journal for publication, and not to the sort of articles that Ridley writes for the media, or what I think you are seeking to have written. If you like, I could submit the article to a peer-reviewed journal, but that might greatly delay publication and might require such major changes in response to referees and to the journal editor that the article would no longer make the case that CO2 is a benefit, not a pollutant, as strongly as I would like, and presumably as strongly your client would also like.”
He said his fees were $250 per hour, and that his Minnesota testimony had required four eight-hour days, so that the total cost was $8000. He said that, if he wrote the paper alone, he did not think there would be any problem stating that “The author received no financial compensation for this essay”. He added that he was pretty sure that the “client’s” donation to the CO2 Coalition would not need to be public according to US regulations of 503(c)(3) educational organizations, but that he could get some legal advice to confirm this if asked.
The “consultancy” replied:
“The hourly rate works for us and, as previously discussed, we are happy to make a direct donation to the CO2 Coalition, providing it is anonymous. We can look into the official disclosure regulations, but it would be useful to know whether the CO2 Coalition voluntarily discloses its funders? Presumably there are other donors in a similar position to us?”
They added:
“With regards to peer review, I raised this issue because Matt Ridley’s article on Dr Indur Goklany’s recent CO2 report said that it had been thoroughly peer reviewed. Would it be possible to ask the same journal to peer review our paper given that it has a similar thrust to Goklany’s? It’s not a deal-breaker, but I felt that it helped strengthen that piece of work.”
Professor Happer replied that early drafts of Goklany’s paper had been reviewed by him and by many other scientists; that he had suggested changes to which the author had responded; that Matt Ridley might also have been a reviewer; and that, although some members of the academic advisory board of the Global Warming Policy Foundation might have been too busy to respond to a request to comment on the first draft, “The review of Golkany’s paper was even more rigorous than the peer review for most journals”. Professor Happer said he would be glad to ask for a similar review for the first drafts of anything he wrote for the “client”.
He said he would double-check on the regulations, but did not think the CO2 Coalition, a 501(3)c tax-exempt educational organization, was required to make public any donors, except in Internal Revenue Service returns.
He checked with the CO2 Coalition, which replied that the Coalition was not obliged to identify any donors, except to the IRS, who would redact the list of donors if it received a request for the Coalition’s form 990.
On December 7 he received an email from one Maeve McClenaghan of Greenpeace, telling him that they had conducted what she grandiosely described as an “undercover investigation” - actually a criminal entrapment scam contrary to the RICO and wire-fraud statutes, and a flagrant attempt both to tamper with a Congressional witness (he is due to testify today, 8 December) and to obstruct committee proceedings and that they intended to publish a “news article ... regarding the funding of climate sceptic science.
She said: “Our article explores how fossil fuel companies are able to pay academics to produce research which is of benefit to them” and added that the story would be published on a Greenpeace website and “promoted widely” in the media. She gave Professor Happer only hours to respond.
Many of the points she said she proposed to include in the article were crafted in such a way as to distort what the above correspondence makes plain were wholly innocent and honest statements, so as to make them sound sinister. The libels Ms McClenaghan proposed to circulate will not be circulated here.
I am profoundly dismayed that the organization I founded - an organization that once did good work addressing real environmental concerns - has descended to what I consider to be criminality and also proposes to descend to libel.
Accordingly, I have decided to inform the Federal Bureau of Investigation of Greenpeace’s dishonest and disfiguring attempt at entrapment of Professor Happer, whom I know to be a first-rate scientist, one of the world’s half-dozen most eminent and experienced physicists, and one who would never provide any scientific advice unless in his professional opinion that advice was correct.
The organization’s timing was clearly intended to spring the trap on Professor Happer hours before he was due to appear in front of Congress. This misconduct constitutes a serious - and under many headings criminal interference with the democratic process that America cherishes.
I have reported Greenpeace to the FBI under 18 USC 96 (RICO statute); 18 USC 1343 (wire fraud); 18 USC 1512 (tampering with a witness due to appear at a Congressional hearing); and 18 USC 1505 (obstruction of proceedings before committees).
I shall also be asking the Bureau to investigate Greenpeace’s sources of funding. It is now an enemy of the State, an enemy of humanity and, indeed, an enemy of all species on Earth.
"After a week of discussions on the causes of climate change, an assembly of specialists from several continents seems to have reached unanimous agreement on only one point: it is getting colder.”
No, that’s not a recent quote from a group of global warming dissenters. It’s the first line of an article published in The New York Times on Jan. 30, 1961.
The article was topped with one bold declaration of a headline: “Scientists Agree World Is Colder.” Yep. Fifty years ago, before deciding to scare the world witless with prophesies of planetary heating, scientists were afraid of freezing to death.
The only problem was, the scientists in question couldn’t seem to reach a consensus on why the planet’s temperature was allegedly dropping.
In the article, scientists from America to Australia to Hungary blamed everything under the clearly-not-hot-enough sun for the impending glacial apocalypse, including the “shape of the Earth’s orbit around the sun,” “the tilt of the earth’s axis,” the solstices, the sun, “changes in transparency of the atmosphere,” dust spewed from volcanic eruptions, industrial smoke blocking sunlight, and the presence of too much or not enough ice in the Arctic.
By November of 1974, the Earth’s chilling situation appeared even more dire. An article published in the Ukiah Daily Journal, and dug up by Climate Depot, reported the United States and Russia were considering damming up the Bering Strait in an effort to deliberately warm the Earth’s temperature and avoid a catastrophic ice age.
The newspaper quoted a former arms technologist named Lowell Ponte, who pointed to global cooling as “the primary cause of world food shortages.”
Sounds like he’d had gotten along well with Sen. Bernie Sanders, who likes to blame global warming for everything from droughts to famines to the number of terrorists running around with bombs.
Back in 1974, Ponte warned of a global ice age that could last anywhere from 200 to 10,000 years, and result in “rivers of solid ice again as far south as Yosemite in California and Cincinnati, Ohio.” The paper added that scientists had proposed about 60 theories to explain the cooling phenomenon.
According to Ponte - who was basically the Al Gore of the 1970s - global powers needed to combine efforts and point a manmade space heater toward Mother Earth in order to “convert the American southwestern deserts into verdant green valleys” and “stave off worldwide famine.” He further detailed how the Earth would basically morph into the Planet Hoth in his book “The Cooling: Has the Next Ice Age Already Begun? Can We Survive It?”
If the threats of global warming are anything like scientists’ cooling predictions of the 60’s and 70’s, we’ll probably survive it just fine.
Australia PM’s adviser: climate change is UN hoax to create new world order
Maurice Newman, chairman of Tony Abbott’s business advisory council, says UN is using debunked climate change science to impose authoritarian rule.
The Australian prime minister’s chief business adviser has accused the United Nations of using debunked climate change science to lead a new world order - provocative claims made to coincide with a visit from the top UN climate negotiator.
Christiana Figueres, who heads the UN framework convention on climate change, touring Australia this week, urged the country to move away from heavily polluting coal production.
Under Tony Abbott’s leadership, Australia has been reluctant to engage in global climate change politics, unsuccessfully attempting to keep the issue off the agenda of the G20 leaders’ summit in Brisbane last year.
Maurice Newman, the chairman of Abbott’s business advisory council and a climate change sceptic with a history of making provocative statements, said the UN was using false models showing sustained temperature increases to end democracy and impose authoritarian rule.
“The real agenda is concentrated political authority,” Newman wrote in an opinion piece published in the Australian newspaper. “Global warming is the hook. It’s about a new world order under the control of the UN....
“It is opposed to capitalism and freedom and has made environmental catastrophism a household topic to achieve its objective.”
Figueres used an address in Melbourne to urge Australia to move away from coal, the country’s second-largest export, as the world grapples with global warming.
“Economic diversification will be a challenge that Australia faces,” she said.
Abbott has described coal as “good for humanity” and the “foundation of prosperity” for the foreseeable future.
Figueres also urged Australia to play a leading role at the climate summit in Paris in December, a call unlikely to be heeded given Abbott’s track record.
At the Brisbane G20 meeting, he warned that the Paris summit would fail if world leaders decided to put cutting carbon emissions ahead of economic growth.
At home, Abbott, who in 2009 said the science behind climate change was “crap”, repealed a tax on carbon pricing and abolished the independent Climate Commission advisory body.
Asked on the Canberra leg of her trip if the politics around renewable energy was as toxic elsewhere in the world, Figueres said: “No. At the global level what we see is increased participation of renewables, increased investment in renewables, increased excitement about renewables.”
Abbott’s office and the UN did not immediately respond to requests for comment.
From: Malcolm Roberts [mailto:malcolmr@conscious.com.au]
Sent: Friday, 24 April 2015 12:07 PM
To: UQ VC OFFICE
Cc: John Cook; Ove Hoegh-Guldberg; FORBES VIV; Carter Bob; Plimer Ian; Jennifer Marohasy
Subject: D15/7927: Complaint of serious corruption of science by UQ’s John Cook and Ove Hoegh-Guldberg
Dear Professor Hoj:
As an honours engineering graduate from the University of Queensland I am inquiring of you as to the reasons our university supports the work of John Cook who serially misrepresents climate and science? Specifically, why is our university wasting valuable funds to mislead the public through a free course and by producing associated international video material? Course
Please refer to the lower half of page 4 of Appendix 5, here.
It details John Cook’s fabrication of an unscientific ‘consensus’. Science is not decided by claims of consensus. Resorting to claims of consensus is unscientific and contradicts the scientific process.
Fabricating false claims of scientific consensus is not honest.
Science is decided by empirical scientific evidence. John Cook has repeatedly failed to provide any such evidence that use of hydrocarbon fuels is causing the entirely natural climate variability we experience.
A succinct summary of John Cook’s fabrication of a consensus, and of the corruption of science upon which his claims rely and that is furthered by his claims, and of the empirical scientific evidence he blatantly contradicts, are discussed in pages 6-18 of my report to federal MPs Senator Simon Birmingham and Bob Baldwin. It is available at this link.
My seven years of independent investigation have proven that there is no such empirical scientific evidence anywhere in the world. Climate alarm is unfounded and is a purely political construct pushing a political agenda. Please refer to Appendices 2, 6, 6a, 7 and 8 at this link.
John Cook’s core public climate claims are false and blatantly contradict empirical scientific evidence. Please refer to appendix 4 at the same link.
Further, John Cook and / or his employer are receiving funds in return for his deceiving the public, politicians and journalists and I’m wondering if that would make his work a serious offense.
As you likely know, John Cook works closely with the university’s Ove Hoegh-Guldberg who reportedly has many serious conflicts of financial interest surrounding his false climate claims. These are discussed on pages 54-59 of Appendix 9 at this link and briefly on pages 16 and 17 of my report to Senator Birmingham and Bob Baldwin MP.
I draw your attention to my formal complain dated Wednesday 10 November 2010 to the university senate about the work of Ove Hoegh-Guldberg misrepresenting climate and science. That was not independently investigated by then Vice Chancellor Paul Greenberg who was subsequently dismissed over another event, reportedly for a breach of ethics. My formal complaint is discussed on pages 57 and 58 of Appendix 9 at this link.
Ove Hoegh-Guldberg’s responses to my request for empirical scientific evidence of human causation of climate variability have repeatedly and always failed to provide such evidence.
This email is openly copied to both Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and John Cook and to reputable Australian scientists and academics expert on climate and to Viv Forbes an honours graduate in geology from our university. Viv Forbes understands the key facts on climate and on the corruption of climate science by beneficiaries of unfounded climate alarm perpetrated falsely by Ove Hoegh-Guldberg and John Cook.
Please stop John Cook’s misrepresentations and restore scientific integrity to our university. I please request a meeting with you to discuss our university’s role in deceiving the public and to discuss restoring scientific integrity. I would be pleased for that meeting to be in the company of John Cook and Ove Hoegh-Guldberg if that suits you.
Pages 19-26 of my report to Senator Birmingham and Bob Baldwin discuss the serious damage to our nation and to humanity and our natural environment worldwide as a result of unfounded climate alarm spread by our university’s staff. I hope that you will fulfil your responsibility for investigating and ending such corruption. To neglect to do so will mean that you condone such damage and dishonesty. I seek confidence that you will restore the university’s scientific integrity and look forward to your reply.
Yours sincerely,
Malcolm Roberts
BE (Hons) UQ, MB U Chicago, Member Beta Gamma Sigma Honours Society
The 97% “consensus” study, Cook et al. (2013) has been thoroughly refuted in scholarly peer-reviewed journals, by major news media, public policy organizations and think tanks, highly credentialed scientists and extensively in the climate blogosphere. The shoddy methodology of Cook’s study has been shown to be so fatally flawed that well known climate scientists have publicly spoken out against it,
“The ‘97% consensus’ article is poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed. It obscures the complexities of the climate issue and it is a sign of the desperately poor level of public and policy debate in this country [UK] that the energy minister should cite it.”
Mike Hulme, Ph.D. Professor of Climate Change, University of East Anglia (UEA)
Only 65 Scientists of 12,000 Make up Alleged 97% on Climate Change and Global Warming Consensus According to Breakdown of Cook et al study, say Friends of Science
In response to multiple inquiries from media and global warming advocates, Friends of Science issue this release to expose the statistical manipulation evident from the break down of the Cook et al paper. Friends of Science decry the linking of this flawed study with alleged danger from man-made carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) as there has been no global warming in 16 years despite a rise in CO2 levels; Friends of Science say the sun and oceanic oscillations are the main drivers of climate change, not CO2.
The following is a list of 97 articles that refute Cook’s (poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed) 97% “consensus” study. The fact that anyone continues to bring up such soundly debunked nonsense like Cook’s study is an embarrassment to science. See the list here.
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See the Galileo Movement here.Visit Then click on the blue text: “9.2.12 Evidence of Political Fraud - Malcolm Roberts”
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See Dr. Doug Hoyt’s Greenhouse Scorecard on Warwick Hughes site here.
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From Jack Black’s Climate Change Dictionary
PEER REVIEW: The act of banding together a group of like-minded academics with a funding conflict of interest, for the purpose of squeezing out any research voices that threaten the multi-million dollar government grant gravy train.
SETTLED SCIENCE: Betrayal of the scientific method for politics or money or both.
DENIER: Anyone who suspects the truth.
CLIMATE CHANGE: What has been happening for billions of years, but should now be flogged to produce ‘panic for profit.’
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE: Leftist Nutcase Prize, unrelated to “Peace” in any meaningful way.
DATA, EVIDENCE: Unnecessary details. If anyone asks for this, see “DENIER,” above.
CLIMATE SCIENTIST: A person skilled in spouting obscure, scientific-sounding jargon that has the effect of deflecting requests for “DATA” by “DENIERS.’ Also skilled at affecting an aura of “Smartest Person in the Room” to buffalo gullible legislators and journalists.
JUNK SCIENCE: The use of invalid scientific evidence resulting in findings of causation which simply cannot be justified or understood from the standpoint of the current state of credible scientific or medical knowledge
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Speaking of junk science, see Lubos Motl’s excellent point by point counter to the John Cook 104 talking points document attacking the skeptical science here.
NOTE:
See all the talks at the latest ICCC9 Conference in Las Vegas in 2014 here.
Heartland has the presentations and powerpoints posted for the Heartland ICCC IV. If you could not go, there is plenty to see there. Please remember the goldmine of videos and PPTs at the Heartland ICCC proceeding sites for 2008 NYC here, 2009 NYC here and 2009 DC here. Here is a PPT I gave at the Heartland Instutute ICCC Meeting in 2008 and here is the follow up in 2009. Here is an abbreviated PPT in two parts I presented at a UK conference last month: Part 1, Part 2.
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See C3 Headlines excellent collection of graphs and charts that show AGW is nonsense here.
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See Climate Theater with a collection of the best climate skeptic films and documentaries here. See additional scientific youtubes here.
“The above papers support skepticism of “man-made” global warming or the environmental or economic effects of. Addendums, comments, corrections, erratum, replies, responses and submitted papers are not included in the peer-reviewed paper count. These are included as references in defense of various papers. There are many more listings than just the 900-1000 papers. Ordering of the papers is alphabetical by title except for the Hockey Stick, Cosmic Rays and Solar sections which are chronological. This list will be updated and corrected as necessary.”
The less intelligent alarmists have written a paper allegedly connecting the scientists to Exxon Mobil. Here is the detailed response from some of the featured scientists. Note that though this continues to be a knee jerk reaction by some of the followers, there is no funding of skeptic causes by big oil BUT Exxon has funded Stanford warmists to the tune of $100 million and BP UC Berkeley to $500,000,000. Climategate emails showed CRU/Hadley soliciting oil dollars and receiving $23,000,000 in funding.
Many more papers are catalogued at Pete’s Place here.
The science and economics of global warming are not too complicated for the average person to consider and make up his or her own mind. We urge you to do that. Go here and view some of the articles linked under “What’s New” or “A Primer on Global Warming.” Or go here and read about the new report from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), which comprehensively rebuts the claims of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Go here for the sources for the factual statements in the ads.
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See the ICECAP Amazon Book store. Icecap benefits with small commission for your purchases via this link.
Go to and become a member of WeatherBell Analytics here.
Website of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) here. It’s latest report (2013) details information from almost 4,000 papers.
The Weather Wiz here. See how they have added THE WIZ SCHOOL (UPPER LEFT) to their website. An excellent educational tool for teachers at all class levels. “Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel” - Socrates (470--399 BC)