One of the vilest, most venomous pieces of writing masquerading as journalism was the Newsweek cover story on August 13, 2007. With the sun as the backdrop, which in the piece got a minor supporting role for global warming, compared to man-produced CO2, the magazine screamed “Global Warming is a Hoax” * and the asterisk led to the clincher as a large enough footnote: “ Or so claim well-funded naysayers who still reject the overwhelming evidence of climate change. Inside the denial machine”.

Had the writer attempted even remote due diligence, just by asking some of the 800 “authors” of the IPPC report to produce just one reference, she would discover that there is not one paper in the peer reviewed heat transfer or thermodynamic literature that shows the causal relationship between the presumably observed and, especially, forecasted global warming and the increased CO2 at the 300 parts per million levels. Correlation does not prove causation. That’s what I thought until now. I am even willing to accept that global warming can cause enhanced CO2 in the atmosphere by reducing the solubility of the gas in the oceans. But the other way around is what is at issue.

Second, while slogans and magazine articles lament what they consider to be a looming catastrophe, other than saying oil, gas and coal are bad for you, they are not really suggesting what else can be done because if they did they would quickly find the insurmountable costs. Unless committing economic suicide is what’s in their mind. If the recent virtual economy hiccup can cause the problem that it did, imagine what a forced energy supply disruption will mean for the world.

I have calculated that sequestering just the expected incremental CO2 between today’s levels and 2030 will require 1.7 million wells at a cost of over $7 trillion. Alternative energy sources will cost more. I am sure that all this nonsense will be swept away by the economy and reality. There is no need to worry. Oil and gas will be the dominant sources of energy for another 50 years, at least.

Read this insightful op ed here.

In Hansen’s own words:

The deceit behind the attempts to discredit evidence of climate change reveals matters of importance. This deceit has a clear purpose: to confuse the public about the status of knowledge of global climate change, thus delaying effective action to mitigate climate change. The danger is that delay will cause tipping points to be passed, such that large climate impacts become inevitable, including the loss of all Arctic sea ice, destabilization of the West Antarctic ice sheet with disastrous sea level rise later this century, and extermination of a large fraction of animal and plant species (see “Dangerous”, “Trace Gases”, and “Gorilla” papers).

Make no doubt, however, if tipping points are passed, if we, in effect, destroy Creation, passing on to our children, grandchildren, and the unborn a situation out of their control, the contrarians who work to deny and confuse will not be the principal culprits. The contrarians will be remembered as court jesters. There is no point to joust with court jesters. They will always be present. They will continue to entertain even if the Titanic begins to take on water. Their role and consequence is only as a diversion from what is important.

Read more here.

Icecap note: More likely in the next few years, Hansen, Gore and their cronies will be seen as the fabled Emporer with no clothes

Newsweek’s Aug. 13 cover story on what it snidely calls “the denial machine” of people who doubt the dogma of global warming borders on the scandalous.  It is another distressing example of arguing over difficult and disputed ideas not according to evidence or theories for or against but on the basis of who supports or opposes them. In real science, results do not depend on who is doing the work.

In this case, skepticism about global warming is supposed to be laughed out of court because some industries have supported some conservative think tanks in casting doubt on the greenhouse dogma, or much of it. That’s the notion that catastrophe looms because carbon dioxide from combustion of fossil fuels is building up in the atmosphere and trapping heat like the glass walls and ceilings of a greenhouse.
And unlike the tobacco researchers, climate skeptics have a reasonable candidate theory to explain the data, a theory that Newsweek totally distorts. (The hypothesis is that solar variations amplify variations in the earth’s cloud cover - more clouds, more warming; fewer clouds, less warming.)

Maybe the skeptics are all wrong and the true believers 100 percent correct. But the believers would do better to keep calm and advocate policies that could be reversed later if it turns out that they are the ones who are wrong or largely so. Read full editorial here.

NBC has fully joined the most radical group of the global warming jihadists. It’s kind of amazing but in these 2 minutes and 34 seconds, a form of the word “denier” appears seven times - a higher frequency than the apparance of “infidels” in the Islamic jihadists’ speeches. They probably want to make sure that you won’t miss it. Prof Patrick Michaels is chosen as the representative of all of us, the deniers. They show him walking above a caption saying “IN DENIAL”.

Anne Thompson even accuses Michaels of not believing that global warming will flood one third of Florida! Well, Michaels must be a truly fringe denier, indeed. Would you believe that someone would deny such an obvious prediction. They uncritically cite an extreme political activist group, the Union for Concerned Scientists, to sling mud at everyone who doesn’t agree with the tenets of the global warming jihad. The “deniers” are surely paid by ExxonMobil, and so forth. I wonder whether they realize that these corrupt journalists themselves have earned more money through this gigantic worldwide fraud than the money that they are incorrectly associating with the “deniers”. 

Read more of this blog here.

It was never supposed to be a trick question. Which year is the hottest on record? Depending where one looks, there are three different answers: 2006, 1998 or 1934. Until last week, the answer was supposed to be 2006, but it might have been 1998. Now, citing corrections of faulty data, NASA says it was actually 1934. The National Climactic Data Center disagrees; it still says 1998.

Here’s what we know: The National Climatic Data Center reported in mid-January that 2006 was the hottest year on record. Then, in May, it revised the numbers, concluding that 1998, in fact, was the hottest on record. NASA’s old numbers echoed that last contention. But last week, it emerged that NASA had quietly restated its numbers, without fanfare or so much as a press release, after a blogger pointed out faulty methodology. Now, per NASA: 1934 is hottest, followed by 1998, 1921, 2006 and 1931.

Here’s another hysteric, The Washington Post, in January: “Last year was the warmest in the continental United States in the past 112 years,” read its front-page story, “capping a nine-year warming streak ‘unprecedented in the historical record’ that was driven in part by the burning of fossil fuels, the government reported yesterday.” Funny, but we thought “unprecedented” would require an absence of, well, precedents, such as the 1920s and 1930s. These years were similarly warm decades, like the present. Alas, when the source of data that prompted this story, the National Climatic Data Center, adjusted its numbers in May, The Post did not correct its shrieking January story. Nor has The Post yet bothered to report NASA’s latest data restatement. Instead, on Friday, we get: “Did Global Warming Cause NYC Tornado?”

If we cannot get through 2007 without a data restatement so fundamental that it dethrones the “hottest year on record,” we should not keep hearing angry intonations that “The debate is over.” The debate is not over — not if such basic climate data is so disputed. Read full story here.

Anthropogenic global warming is a scientific hypothesis, not an article of religious or ideological dogma. Skepticism and doubt are entirely appropriate in the realm of science, in which truth is determined by evidence, experimentation, and observation, not by consensus or revelation. Yet when it comes to global warming, dissent is treated as heresy—as a pernicious belief whose exponents must be shamed, shunned, or silenced.

Newsweek is hardly the only offender. At the Live Earth concert in New Jersey last month, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. denounced climate-change skeptics as “corporate toadies” for “villainous” enemies of America and the human race. “This is treason,” he shouted, “and we need to start treating them now as traitors.”

This is the zealotry and intolerance of the auto-da-fé. The last place it belongs is in public-policy debate. The interesting and complicated phenomenon of climate change is still being figured out, and as much as those determined to turn it into a crusade of good vs. evil may insist otherwise, the issue of global warming isn’t a closed book. Smearing those who buck the “scientific consensus” as traitors, toadies, or enemies of humankind may be emotionally satisfying and even professionally lucrative. It is also indefensible, hyperbolic bullying. That the bullies are sure they are doing the right thing is not a point in their defense.

“The greatest dangers to liberty,” Justice Louis Brandeis wrote, “lurk in insidious encroachment by men of zeal, well-meaning but without understanding.” Read full op ed here.

The complexities of global warming, (renamed as climate change) should be the domain of scientific discussions. Such discussions should be held within the constraints of science, the scientific methods, the careful collection, management, and analyses of the climate data. There should include careful resolutions and explanations of conflicting data, replication, and passing the essential demands of explaining the observations of the climate data.

We have been told by Al Gore and others that there should be a grand debate about global warming. Yet there has been precious little debate worthy of the name. In fact the alarmists have spent much of their time hurling insults, ad hominem attacks, suppression of speech, termination of miniscule funding, calling for Nuremburg Trials, treating opponents as traitors, etc.  The professionals in this group remain silent about these insults in apparent silent support of the nastiness and unprofessional conduct. This is not a debate, this is not science, this is bullying. This suggests there are weaknesses in the global warming theory which can’t stand scrutiny.

One explanation of this may be described by John Ray (M.A., Ph.D.), writing from Brisbane, Australia: “The Holy Grail for most scientists is not truth but research grants. And the global warming scare has produced a huge downpour of money for research. Any mystery why so many scientists claim some belief in global warming?” This is not a scientific debate, it is not even science. It is too many people, some which Ph.D.s, hardwired into the $5 billion annually spent in the US on global warming issues. Read more here.

Some aspects of AGW have a history lost (often intentionally) in the mists of time. But Rupert Wyndham (from Camborne, Cornwall, U.K.) has just drawn my attention to one of the true historic origins of the semantic switcheroo between “global warming” and “climate change”. And - yes, again - it’s the U.K. Met Office and their scientific cohorts that were to the fore.  Here it is a brief extract from Working Paper No. 58 of the Tyndall Centre (The Social Simulation of the Public Perception of Weather Events and their Effect upon the Development of Belief in Anthropogenic Climate Change – Dennis Bray & Simon Shackley, Sept. 2004.

- Only the perception of positive anomalies will be registered as an indication of change, if the issue is framed as global warming.

- Both positive and negative temperature anomalies will be registered in experience as an indication of change, if the issue is framed as ‘climate change’. (Hence cold weather can be blamed on CO2.)

- We propose that in those countries where climate change has become the predominant popular term for the phenomenon, unseasonably cold temperatures, for example, are also interpreted to reflect climate change/global warming.

What this extract from a British working paper highlights yet again is the cynical and shameless propaganda campaign that is being run by the very government agencies that purport to be scientific centres of excellence and providers of disinterested advice in the public interest.