The following editorial appeared on the Huffington Post website today (italicized entries, below) and I couldn’t help but give the writer some of his own medicine (my responses not italicized, & in parentheses).

WHY TO DENY ON CLIMATE CHANGE

By Peter Dykstra

A dozen reasons why climate change deniers are the way they are:

1) Compassion fatigue: No one really denies world hunger, but we sure are good at turning away from it. People have been hearing about climate for two decades now, and they’d really not think any more about it.

(Americans give more to charity than any country in the world, and they are perfectly willing to help out when there is a REAL crisis. They are not so crazy about supporting those who profit off of imaginary ones.)

2) Stigma: Pick one guy and stick with him as the personification of evil. That would be Al Gore, who plays the same role for climate that Jane Fonda did, and still does nearly 40 years later, for Vietnam. Jane has admitted that she made a huge mistake by posing with the North Vietnamese, and neither her multiple apologies, the fact that she was right about the war, nor the otherwise-accepted concept of Christian Forgiveness will ever let her off the hook for millions of Americans.

(Stigma? You mean like labeling us “deniers”? Or “flat-Earthers”? Or “corporate toadies?” Or “Holocaust deniers”?)

3) Dogma: Those who talk about climate change are the same ones who occupy the tenth circle of Hell for many Americans: Politicians, the Media, Scientists, Educators, Hippies, and Showbiz types. So it’s a moral imperative to be agin what they’re for.

(If the shoe fits.)

4) Fear Factor: Losing your SUV, or ATV, is more of a fright than phenology (the effect of climatic changes on the seasons), or melting permafrost, or polar bears.

(Losing liberty over a theoretical threat is the main concern here (no one has ever been killed by manmade global warming because there is no way to distinguish manmade warming from natural).

5) Manufactured denial: Marc Morano is a Senate staffer for James Inhofe, the Oklahoma Republican who’s said that climate change is a “hoax.” In that role, Morano’s been the Drum Major of the denial parade. The Marc Moranos of the world function for climate the way that Johnnie Cochran functioned for OJ Simpson: Raise enough shreds of doubt, even if you do it in reckless and theatrical ways, and climate change can win an acquittal, or at least a mistrial no matter how strong the rest of the evidence is. (It was reported last week that Morano’s career as a public servant will soon end, and he’ll take the denial machine to the private sector).

(I think a better analogy is one person, Marc Morano posting information, maybe with some spin, versus hundreds or thousands of journalists who are doing the same thing on the other side. Are those odds still not good enough for you?)

6) Devotion: The corollary to not believing anything Al Gore and his ilk is that you must believe everything that a crackpot like Glenn Beck says. [Blogger’s Note: The word “ilk” is a very special one. A nonscientific Googling of the terms “Al Gore” and “Ilk” yielded 705 results. “Al Gore” and “Antichrist” got 693 hits, but that’s misleading, since the “Antichrist” in question in many of those hits was either Hillary or Obama, and Gore was just mentioned as a henchman.]

(Actually, WE are the ones who tolerate a variety of theories for what causes climate change. We just don’t believe the first place you should look is in the tailpipe of an SUV, or up some bovine orifice.)

9) Credentials: Peer review means nothing to the general public. And it’s unreasonable to expect a casual reader to make a huge distinction between a respected and peer-reviewed climate scientist like Steve Schneider, and the “coal monkeys” (Schneider’s term) who staff the Denial Labs.

(We have peer reviewed science, too, but it is you journalists who don’t have the backbone to report on it. How convenient.)

11) Ideology: Environmentalists often make the mistake of tarring all skeptics with the same brush. Not everyone’s on the take from Exxon and Peabody Coal. Not by along shot. But policy fixes to climate change are absolutely toxic to many freemarketers and libertarians.

("Policy fixes to climate change” is like saying, “let’s outlaw gravity”.)

12) Ossified science: William Gray, the hurricane guy, is the best example of an old-line scientist who has complete contempt for any science that’s not generated in a lab or on a chalkboard. He’ll go to his grave not believing in any global warming, nor anything else that relies on computer models for its science. Chris Mooney’s book “Storm World” tells this story very well.

(Actually, I think Bill Gray has the best answer to ultimately what causes most climate fluctuations, including global warming (and cooling): changes in ocean circulation. In fact, we now have satellite evidence that a major mode of this kind of change - the Pacific Decadal Oscillation - has caused most of the warming we’ve seen in the last century. But don’t look for it in the news when it finally gets published.)

So there’s a dozen reasons for denying climate change, and I didn’t even mention Creationists.

(So, there’s a dozen reasons why a journalist can be misinformed on climate science, and I didn’t even mention Athiests.) Read all dozen here.

Imagine a film in which an Asian businessman who spoke loftily of ‘eradicating poverty’ was cast as the villain, while an insufferably middle-class wind-turbine developer from Cornwall was held up as the hero.

Imagine a film in which the audience was encouraged to giggle at the sight of the wealthy Asian using a red carpet to board his plane - ha ha, who do these foreigners think they are! - and was then cajoled into crying when the wind-turbine developer phoned his mum to break the news that Bedford Council refused him permission to build 10 new windmills. Imagine a film which played so promiscuously fast and loose with the ‘scientific facts’ that it strongly implied that the Asian businessman’s penchant for flying was responsible for fatal rainstorms in Mumbai, and that Bedford Council’s rejection of our heroic wind-turbine developer’s planning application led to Bedford’s ‘worst ever floods’ in 2007.

No one would make such a morally warped film, right? Wrong. All of the above comes from The Age of Stupid, a half-documentary, half-’peril porn’ hybrid, which has been hailed by commentators as ‘the most powerful piece of cultural discourse on climate change ever produced’, but which left this reviewer feeling more than a little nauseous at its solar-powered, carbon-lite premiere in London yesterday. The film is so cretinous it makes Michael Moore look like a modern-day Bergman; so scientifically vacuous it makes Lysenko look like Einstein; so achingly middle-class it makes The Good Life look like a kitchen-sink drama about miners’ wives.

Indeed, the film’s only virtue - and admittedly this is a big plus in its favour - is that it has exposed finally, beyond all reasonable doubt, the ugly elitism and end-of-days mania of the environmentalist movement.

The only solution to our ‘more, more, more’ culture, the film says, is a system of government-enforced carbon rationing to make us in the West consume less and to allow people in the Third World to consume a little more. This is what they would like the world to look like under their ‘Not Stupid’ governance: a vast system of official control of our personal habits and freedom of movement, and an ‘equality’ based on sharing out the misery.

This is one of the worst films I have ever seen. And bear in mind that I have seen both Digby the Biggest Dog in the World and Miss Congeniality II. It strikes me that where officialdom and the environmentalist lobby have created a new elite language to validate their petty and pious political outlook - talking about ‘tipping points’, ‘future generations’, ‘The Science’, ‘denial’ - there is currently no clear, positive cultural defence of aspiration, ambition, the desire for material wealth and more personal choice. So in The Age of Stupid the grinning Indians boarding a GoAir flight can be presented as so many deluded picaninnies and even a Nigerian woman living in poverty can be subtly chastised for wanting more. We urgently need to stand up for the concrete interests of humanity over the paper-plotted fantasy interests of The Planet, if we are to prevent ours from fully becoming the Age of Rationing, of Restraint, of the Rule of the Few. Read full review here.

March 15, 2009 debate challenge made by: Chemical Scientist Dr. Brian G. Valentine, consulting engineer for U.S. Department of Energy, who has studied computational fluid dynamics and modeling of complex systems. 

“I cordially, and respectfully, invite Bob Ryan to consider discussion of the subject matters of the six-part Series in a public forum that would invite audience participation,” Valentine wrote on March 15, 2009.

[Note: Meteorologist Bob Ryan, who served as the Chair of the Committee of Broadcast Meteorology for AMS, recently wrote a series on global warming which concluded: “The overwhelming evidence and the studies being done by the leading scientists of the world do indicate that children, our grandchildren and we will be living in a warmer world in the future. Warmer by probably 1-5 Fahrenheit within the next 50-100 years. Ryan implied to the Washington Post that “political views” were influencing the science of skeptics. “We all have political views on what should, or should not be done, but we should be able to keep that separate from what the current scientific research is telling us,” Ryan stated. Ryan has now been publicly praised by Al Gore’s producer Laurie David. “Ryan speaks honestly and frankly about weather forecasters who can’t see the truth about global warming,” Laurie David wrote on March 6, 2009. “So bravo Bob Ryan,” David added. ]

Full Text of Dr. Valentine’s Challenge:  “In his six-part Series on global warming, Washington DC metropolitan area chief meteorologist for NBC4 Bob Ryan presents an overview of factors that influence the Earth’s global climate, including factors that supposedly arise from human activity.  Although many physical observations are described, such as North Polar ice disappearing and glacial recession on Kilimanjaro, Ryan ultimately connects these to primarily one cause:  human activity such as fuel combustion and the co-production of carbon dioxide with the energy that is derived from fuel combustion.  Ryan may or may not be aware that that ALL phenomena he discusses have different scientific interpretations with regard to the relationship of ‘cause’ and ‘effect’; in any case no viewer of the Series would be aware of such differing scientific interpretations - and this remains a disservice to the viewers of the Series. 

As a matter of enlightenment and fairness to viewers of the Series, I cordially, and respectfully, invite Bob Ryan to consider discussion of the subject matters of the six-part Series in a public forum that would invite audience participation.  The venue could be any that Bob considers appropriate within the DC area and could be as public as he chooses with televised coverage.  These matters weigh heavily on proposed legislation in these United States, and the public has the complete right to understand all sides of issues that will influence their lives so greatly.”

With due consideration,
Brian G Valentine PhD PE
US Department of Energy
Washington, DC

See notice in the Washington Post about the debate callenge here.

Be still my beating heart. There is hope for honest science, even in the gruesome Age of Algore. But only if we really grasp what’s happening with the Global Horror Picture Show these days. The biggest danger to good science is that rational skeptics will continue to be outgunned by the fear peddlers: A big lie can go around the world before the truth can get its boots on. The fear merchants just have to make up new scares faster than they can be knocked down, and honest scientists will always get there too late. Thoughtful skepticism takes thought. New alarmist scenarios can be made up by science fiction scribblers on an assembly line. It’s the Nazi panzers against the Polish cavalry. Sure it’s heroic, but it’s not really a contest.

So here’s the good news. The skeptics are winning against the global warming mythogogues. The polls show a drop in public faith in the global warming meme. Last week a stellar skeptics’ conference was held in New York City and the New York Times actually covered it - in its usual bitchy fashion, but they decided to cover it anyway. There are many excellent talks at this website, notably by Viscount Monckton, Margaret Thatcher’s former adviser, who provides a truly elegant and devastating deconstruction of the infamous IPCC “consensus statement” - done for the bureaucrats, by the bureaucrats, and of the bureaucrats. Any real scientific analysis and debate was left out of the IPCC statement, and Lord Monckton simply shoots it out of the water with a satisfying bang. Others like Fred Singer and Richard Lindzen were there as well, and you can listen to their presentations online. They are heroes.

But that’s not why I think the skeptics are winning. The rational skeptics are winning because the global warming crowd has simply dropped the two words “global warming” from its vocabulary.  No more official global warming! This is like the old Soviet Communist Party. You have to analyze not just what’s said but what’s not said. You have to look to see who has been airbrushed out of the pictures of the Politburo waving on top of Lenin’s tomb watching the May Day parade. And “global warming” has disappeared from respectable scientific discourse. Only the elementary school teachers of the world will keep teaching about global warming, because their lesson plans are already written, and they’re a little slow on the uptake.

Somehow it’s all morphed into climate change. What’s “climate change?” It’s a scientific surrender by the Algore-James-Hansen Planetary Fear Brigade.  No more global warming, folks. Nothing to see here. Move along, move along. But it’s a silent surrender, so millions of readers of the New York Times will never notice a thing. Al Gore just has to drop one solitary slide from his infamous PowerPoint lecture. James Hansen just needs to pretend that all those horrific mistakes over at the NASA Climate Playstation Center were tiny computer glitches. Anybody can make an honest mistake, right? And they always fixed the published data after they were caught - I mean, after the errors were called to their attention. That’s what honest scientists do. Funny thing, though, how those glitches always favored the global warming faith?)

Still, real scientists have to use words with precision, and when all the big science journals change the words “global warming” to “climate change,” all at the same time, you know somethin’s up. It is. The real scientists have simply, silently acknowledged that the skeptics were right all along, as a child of six might have figured out. And since everybody knows that “climate change” has been going on for a half billion years, it’s sure to keep happening. Now there’s a solid scientific prediction for you. Nobody can object to “climate change.”

The eco-props have figured out they don’t really need global warming, but I don’t know whether the skeptics have figured out how to keep pace with the assembly line production of ever-new “scientific” scare stories. It’s a matter of supply and demand, and the fear industry is constantly cranking out new models to be greedily gobbled up by the scare-hungry masses. It’s a new genre of fiction parading as science, and until a whole new generation learns how to exercise rational skepticism, to laugh at the frauds on their own initiative, they are going to get suckered over and over again.

President Obama just sent $400 million to replenish the eco-scare industry. With that kind of money coming in on a regular basis, and the new “science czar” in the White House who is one of the true believers, the climate horror industry is not going to decline anytime soon. We may be losing our banks, the dollar may crash, and you’ve just lost half your savings, but here is a growth industry with fabulous prospects for the indefinite future. Read full story here.

Prominent hurricane forecaster Dr. William M. Gray, a professor at Colorado State University, appeared at The Heartland Institute’s 2009 International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC) in New York on March 11 to elaborate on his theory that a natural cycle of ocean water temperatures related to the salinity (the amount of salt) in ocean water was responsible for some global warming that has taken place.

Gray also distributed a document containing a scathing critique of Dr. James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who is widely known for his outspokenness on the issue of manmade global warming. Gray’s document criticized the American Meteorological Society (AMS), an organization that issues a “seal of approval” to broadcast meteorologists, for awarding Hansen the 2009 Carl-Gustaf Rossby Research Medal. “I am appalled at the selection of James Hansen as this year’s recipient of the AMS’s highest award - the Rossby Research Medal,” Gray wrote. “James Hansen has not been trained as a meteorologist. His formal education has been in astronomy. His long records of faulty global climate predictions and alarmist public pronouncements have become increasingly hollow and at odds with reality. Hansen has exploited the general public’s lack of knowledge of how the globe’s climate system functions for his own benefit. His global warming predictions, going back to 1988 are not being verified.”

According to Gray’s statement, Hansen’s famous 1988 prediction of global warming had turned out “to be very much less than he had projected,” but Hansen is still out campaigning about the issue as a global crisis. “Hansen and his legion of environmental-political supporters (with no meteorological-climate background) have done monumental damage to an open and honest discussion of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) question,” Gray wrote. “He and his fellow collaborators (and their media sycophantic followers) are responsible for the brainwashing of a large segment of the American public about a grossly exaggerated human-induced warming threat that does not exist.”

Although many have called for Hansen’s dismissal, including his former supervisor John Theon, a retired senior NASA atmospheric scientist, Gray explained why he thought Hansen has survived at NASA with his political stances concerning global warming. “It is surprising that Hansen has been able to get away with his unrealistic modeling efforts for so long,” Gray wrote. “One explanation is that he has received strong support from Senator/Vice President Al Gore who for over three decades has attempted to make political capital out of increasing CO2 measurements. Another reason is the many environmental and political groups (including the mainstream media) who are eager to use Hansen’s modeling results as justification to push their own special interests that are able to fly under the global warming banner.”

Gray also wrote that the AMS had been commandeered by a number of global warming activists, hence the decision to bestow Hansen with the organization’s highest honor. We AMS members have allowed a small group of AMS administrators, climate modelers, and CO2 warming sympathizers to maneuver the internal workings of our society to support AGW policies irrespective of what our rank-and-file members might think,” Gray wrote. “This small organized group of AGW sympathizers has indeed hijacked our society.” Read more here.

Andy

I was flying home all day yesterday and just now saw your story on some of the things I said at the conference in NY.  You very astutely got my point that no matter what the cause of global warming, the world is going to face huge energy and other resource problems (e.g., food production, water, etc.) in the coming decades with fewer and fewer resources.  But that isn’t the whole story - take a look at the attached satellite image of March 9, 2009 and compare it to the satellite image of June, 2008.  Notice that cool water in the Pacific that extends from the equator all the way up the west coast of North America into the Gulf of Alaska is still firmly entrenched.  This is the cool water phase of the PDO and it isn’t going to change for at least 2-3 decades (at least it never has in the past)and it is unaffected by atmospheric CO2 as shown by the three PDO switches this century that occurred before atmospheric CO2 increased significantly.  What this means is that no matter what the cause of global warming and cooling, we cannot escape the conclusion that the Earth is in for global cooling for the next 2-3 decades and will bring increasing energy and resource demands at a time of rapidly escalating population growth. 

Satellite image of March 9, 2009 show the cool PDO in the eastern Pacific firmly entrenched.

Satellite image of June 19, 2008 show the cool PDO in the eastern Pacific.

Here is where Holdren and I part company - he wants carbon cap and trade that will cost hundreds of billions of dollars to curb ‘global warming’ that the PDO shows isn’t going to happen in the next several decades (no matter what the cause).  The PDO data shows conclusively that global cooling is going to continue for several decades, causing increasing demands of energy and resources (while population escalates), but if we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on cap and trade (as Holdren is pushing), we will have little left with which to handle the real problems of increasing demands on dwindling resources.  Holdren’s path will lead to a real global catastrophe.

Dr. Don Easterbrook

Assume that man-made global warming exists. So what? That was the premise of a fascinating presentation by Indur Goklany during the second day of sessions at the International Conference on Climate Change. Goklany, who works in the Office of Policy Analysis of the U.S. Department of the Interior and is the author of The Improving State of the World: Why We’re Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet, made it clear that he was not speaking on behalf of the federal government.

Goklany’s talk looked at three common claims: (1) Human and environmental well-being will be lower in a warmer world than it is today; (2) our descendants will be worse off than if we don’t stop man-made global warming; and (3) man-made global warming is the most important problem in the world. Goklany assumed that the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) consensus view on future temperature trends is valid. For his analysis, he used data from the fast track assessments of the socioeconomic impacts of global climate change sponsored by the British government, the Stern Review on the Economics of Climate Change, global mortality estimates from the World Health Organization (WHO), and cost estimates from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

From the Stern Review, Goklany took the worst case scenario, where man-made global warming produces market and non-market losses equal to 35 percent of the benefits that are projected to exist in the absence of climate change by 2200. What did he find? Even assuming the worst emissions scenario, incomes for both developed and developing countries still rise spectacularly. In 1990, average incomes in developing countries stood around $1,000 per capita and at aroud $14,000 in developed countries. Assuming the worst means that average incomes in developing countries would rise in 2100 to $62,000 and in developed countries to $99,000. By 2200, average incomes would rise to $86,000 and $139,000 in developing and developed countries, respectively. In other words, the warmest world turns out to be the richest world.

Looking at WHO numbers, one finds that the percentage of deaths attributed to climate change now is 13th on the list of causes of mortality, standing at about 200,000 per year, or 0.3 percent of all deaths. High blood pressure is first on the list, accounting for 7 million (12 percent) of deaths; high cholesterol is second at 4.4 million; and hunger is third. Clearly, climate change is not the most important public health problem today. But what about the future? Again looking at just the worst case of warming, climate change would boost the number of deaths in 2085 by 237,000 above what they would otherwise be according to the fast track analyses. Many of the authors of the fast track analyses also co-authored the IPCC’s socioeconomic impact assessments.

Various environmental indicators would also improve. For example, 11.6 percent of the world’s land was used for growing crops in 1990. In the warmest world, agricultural productivity is projected to increase so much that the amount of land used for crops would drop to just 5 percent by 2100, leaving more land for nature. In other words, if these official projections are correct, man-made global warming is by no means the most important problem faced by humanity.

Every time I hear someone say something about “saving the Earth” I want to say, “Are you out of your mind?” The Earth is some 4.5 billion - that’s billion with a b - years old. How did it ever manage to exist without us? How did it survive ice ages, meteor impacts, and all the other stuff that went on before homo sapiens decided to climb down out of the trees and walk upright?

If human beings are responsible for “global warming” how did the Earth manage to get through various earlier stages such as the Permian, Triassic, Jurassic, Paleocene, Eocene, Oligocene, Miocene, Pleistocene, and our era, the Holocene which reaches back a mere 10,000 years; a period that matches up with the ending of the last major ice age. One of the distinguishing features of these and other earlier periods of Earth’s history is the repeated evidence of mass extinctions. Since humans weren’t around to take the blame for them, what did cause them? There is evidence that it was the result of magnetic reversals.

For far too long I have been listening to people who are absolutely convinced that human beings are “destroying” the Earth. Three quarters of the Earth is under water. Oceans are the largest part of the Earth’s surface. Most of the land is uninhabitable or not arable. You can’t farm it and you probably wouldn’t want to live there.

The parts, mostly cities, where human beings congregate range from being vast slums to gleaming towers of commerce or condos. If you’re wealthy, living in such places can be very enjoyable. If you live in the slum, you hope you can find a tasty tidbit at the neighborhood garbage dump.

Virtually none of these people, rich or poor, spends a lot of time thinking about “saving the Earth” unless, of course, there’s a buck to be made while allegedly doing so. There’s lots of money to be made these days in “saving the Earth.” If you’re the owner of a solar or wind farm, the government can’t wait to lavish millions of taxpayer’s - other people’s - dollars on your enterprise. Same holds true if you make moonshine…oops, I mean ethanol.

Then, if you’re Al Gore, Nobel Peace Prize winner, Oscar winner, Grammy winner, winner of the Nashville Bingo Night Jamboree, you are going to score millions by telling people that the Earth is coming to an end any day now and, to prevent this, you need to buy the lighter-than-air “carbon credits” he’s selling. The government wants to get in on this bonanza with a “cap-and-trade” program to limit greenhouse gas emissions in order to prevent a global warming that is not happening.

Meanwhile, other charlatans are busy selling an interest in their carbon sequestration scams or just selling you anything that comes packaged as “eco” anything. Paying more for something “Green” just marks you as a chump. So who are these people kidding when they talk about saving the Earth? YOU!

And who do these people dislike for despoiling Gaia or Mother Earth? YOU!

None of us, individually or all six billion, can “save the Earth”, but there are a few things we can avoid doing. At the top of the list is littering. Did you see the photo of the Capitol Mall after everyone got through celebrating the inauguration of the Anointed One? Ugh. In fact, that is pretty much the entire list as far as I am concerned. Don’t litter. Clean up after yourself. And for those still preaching to other people about saving the Earth, just stop. It makes you look and sound like an idiot. See blog here.