Even at this early stage of the year, there is a concerted effort to make it the “warmest evah”.

Joe Romm has this graph of the GISS numbers for the first three months of the year, and Gavin has clearly been busy!

Enlarged

Predictably, Seth Borenstein has gleefully reported that NOAA has also shown the warmest first quarter of the year ahead of 2002.

Unfortunately, the more comprehensive and accurate satellites show no such thing.

Enlarged
Data source

For January to March, UAH rank this as only 4th warmest behind 2010, 1998 and even 2007.

Enlarged
Data source

According to RSS, this year so far is even lower down the rankings in 8th place. See in this WAPO story how the nonsense from Seth and Romm and the warmists and enviro extremists in the capitol, have cost DC gardeners and horticulturalists dearly the last two years.

Given the weak El Nino conditions in place since last April, there is nothing out of the ordinary about the satellite rankings.

We have been repeatedly assured for the past year that satellite temperatures would catch up with the surface datasets. They have not, and instead the latter continue to diverge more and more.

The alarmist tactic now is to tell us to simply ignore the satellite data, as it is “not measuring the same thing”, and is therefore somehow irrelevant. This is all highly amusing, as the UK Met Office, back in 2013, was reassuring us that the surface datasets were reliable as:

“Changes in temperature observed in surface data records are corroborated by records of temperatures in the troposphere recorded by satellites”

This divergence is now becoming the elephant in the room, which the likes of NASA and their media allies are desperately trying to ignore.

It is time that the matter was fully investigated by a properly independent inquiry.

Icecap Note: The theory remember has the warmth trapped in the atmosphere by CO2 and H2Ov and other gases and some of the heat rerdiated back. The modles have the warming greater aloft than at the ground. The greater warming at the surface is the signature of the UHI effect.

Also see this on how elitists are ”Oppressing the Poor in the Name fo Global Warming.”

Democrats’ attempts to paralyze climate skeptics in academia, think tanks, and companies, using intimidating letters threatening a federal investigation into their funding connections, backfired. They opened a Pandora’s Box of questions concerning where climate alarmists get their money. Now Democrat Senators Barbara Boxer (CA), Ed Markey (MA), and Sheldon Whitehouse (RI) and Democrat Arizona Rep. Raul Grijalva have egg on their faces.

Public-choice economics explains politicians and bureaucrats are as self-interested as anyone. They seek expanded authority and bigger budgets. Because the federal government and left-wing foundations provide the vast bulk of climate research funding, funding from these two sources certainly should undergo at least as much scrutiny as funding from private industry.

Nearly all university-based climate scientists are funded mainly by federal grants, and the ideological and political goals of those authorizing the grants could reasonably be expected to affect the kind of research universities and researchers undertake. The conflict between gaining research money and scientific integrity puts sound but nonconformist science at a crushing disadvantage.

Michael Mann, Pennsylvania State University’s notorious ClimateGate email scandal figure, has garnered close to $6 million promoting scary scientific conclusions serving government’s goal of control over energy sources, $3.6 million of it from the National Science Foundation. Both PSU and the NSF conducted investigations absolving Mann of any wrongdoing in ClimateGate, but with the offending institutions effectively investigating one of their own, would anyone expect a different outcome?

Influence, Conflicts of Interest

Princeton professor Michael Oppenheimer has written more than 100 peer-reviewed papers and testified before Congress on multiple occasions. He was the Environmental Defense Fund’s senior scientist (1981-2002) and remains as science advisor to the multimillion-dollar lobbying group (2013 assets: $208.7 million). EDF has received $2.8 million in federal grants since 2008, spent $11.3 million on lobbying, and has 55 people on 32 federal advisory committees.

Since 2008, EDF has received 3,332 grants from 600 foundations, totaling $544,487,562. EDF is deeply rooted in left-wing foundation agendas. Oppenheimer’s professorship is supported in part by private equity tycoon Carl Ferenbach’s High Meadows Foundation, which has given Princeton $6.5 million and the Environmental Defense Fund $6 million. Ferenbach is both EDF’s Chairman of the Board and a trustee of Princeton, suggesting a strong conflict of interest.

The proudly progressive Center for American Progress (CAP) has five people on federal advisory committees, spent $3.6 million on lobbying, and gave $312,400 to Democrat candidates in 2014. CAP Senior Fellow and Chief Science Advisor Joe Romm has testified before Congress on global warming and coauthored numerous peer-reviewed studies. Yet Romm failed to file conflict-of-interest disclosures for an article in Environmental Research Letters although the journal explicitly requires it.

Since 2004, CAP has been supported by left-wing foundations including Marilsa (Getty Oil fortune, $7 million), Rockefeller (Standard Oil fortune, $5 million), Sea Change (ties to Russian oil money laundering, $4.8 million), and 200 other left-wing foundations.

Government and foundation monies go only toward research advancing a pro-regulatory climate agenda. That is the greatest threat to the integrity of scientific research.

Ron Arnold (arnold.ron@gmail.com) is a free-enterprise activist, author, and commentator.

See this story on why arctic ice changes can be explained totally with natural variability - cycles in the oceans and sun. I have extracted a short segment from that story and added to it.

See how well arctic temperatures correlate with ocean (Pacific Decadal Oscillation or PDO and Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation or AMO) and solar (TSI) cycles.

Enlarged

In the record-setting (since satellite monitoring began in 1979) summer melt season of 2007, NSIDC noted the importance of both oceans in the arctic ice.

“One prominent researcher, Igor Polyakov at the University of Fairbanks, Alaska, points out that pulses of unusually warm water have been entering the Arctic Ocean from the Atlantic, which several years later are seen in the ocean north of Siberia. These pulses of water are helping to heat the upper Arctic Ocean, contributing to summer ice melt and helping to reduce winter ice growth.

Another scientist, Koji Shimada of the Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology, reports evidence of changes in ocean circulation in the Pacific side of the Arctic Ocean. Through a complex interaction with declining sea ice, warm water entering the Arctic Ocean through Bering Strait in summer is being shunted from the Alaskan coast into the Arctic Ocean, where it fosters further ice loss. Many questions still remain to be answered, but these changes in ocean circulation may be important keys for understanding the observed loss of Arctic sea ice.”

Frances et al. (GRL 2007) showed how the warming in the arctic and the melting ice was related to warm water (+3C) in the Barents Sea moving slowly into the Siberian arctic and melting the ice. She also noted the positive feedback of changed “albedo” due to open water then further enhances the warming.

The International Arctic Research Center at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks showed how arctic temperatures have cycled with intrusions of Atlantic water -cold and warm.

Enlarged

See how the Atlantic has cooled and though the Pacific (PDO) has spiked, there are signs that this is temporary like the late 1950s and it will turn cold again in two years. When both oceans cool, the arctic, we predict will recover. Some may try and delay the truth by adjusting how and where they measure ocean ice (redefining the arctic region or what percentage of ice/ or level of satellite brightness qualifies).

Enlarged

Phil Klotzbach and Bill Gray have a variant of the water temperature based AMO that factors in atmospheric pressure. JB sparked this post with this ‘musings on the arctic ice’, a bit to long to post in its entirety on Icecap.


Enlarged

Enlarged

Perhaps the recovery has started.

Enlarged

As JB’s PDF shows, CFS climate model has a higher minimum than 2014 (20%). See his post for how this model has done last year.

Enlarged

Yesterday, a paper was released from Mann and Rahmstorf showing the Atlantic Conveyor Belt slowing cauding the ‘pause’.

From the “we told you so yesterday” and the “settled science” department. This study was released in 2010, and they used actual measurements, rather than proxy data and reconstructions like Mann did. Gee, what a concept!

NASA Study Finds Atlantic ‘Conveyor Belt’ Not Slowing
03.25.10

Enlarged
Illustration depicting the overturning circulation of the global ocean. Throughout the Atlantic Ocean, the circulation carries warm waters (red arrows) northward near the surface and cold deep waters (blue arrows) southward. Image credit: NASA/JPL

PASADENA, Calif. New NASA measurements of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, part of the global ocean conveyor belt that helps regulate climate around the North Atlantic, show no significant slowing over the past 15 years. The data suggest the circulation may have even sped up slightly in the recent past.

The findings are the result of a new monitoring technique, developed by oceanographer Josh Willis of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., using measurements from ocean-observing satellites and profiling floats. The findings are reported in the March 25 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.

The Atlantic overturning circulation is a system of currents, including the Gulf Stream, that bring warm surface waters from the tropics northward into the North Atlantic. There, in the seas surrounding Greenland, the water cools, sinks to great depths and changes direction. What was once warm surface water heading north turns into cold deep water going south. This overturning is one part of the vast conveyor belt of ocean currents that move heat around the globe.

Without the heat carried by this circulation system, the climate around the North Atlantic - in Europe, North America and North Africa - would likely be much colder. Scientists hypothesize that rapid cooling 12,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age was triggered when freshwater from melting glaciers altered the ocean’s salinity and slowed the overturning rate. That reduced the amount of heat carried northward as a result.

Until recently, the only direct measurements of the circulation’s strength have been from ship-based surveys and a set of moorings anchored to the ocean floor in the mid-latitudes. Willis’ new technique is based on data from NASA satellite altimeters, which measure changes in the height of the sea surface, as well as data from Argo profiling floats. The international Argo array, supported in part by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, includes approximately 3,000 robotic floats that measure temperature, salinity and velocity across the world’s ocean.

With this new technique, Willis was able to calculate changes in the northward-flowing part of the circulation at about 41 degrees latitude, roughly between New York and northern Portugal. Combining satellite and float measurements, he found no change in the strength of the circulation overturning from 2002 to 2009. Looking further back with satellite altimeter data alone before the float data were available, Willis found evidence that the circulation had sped up about 20 percent from 1993 to 2009. This is the longest direct record of variability in the Atlantic overturning to date and the only one at high latitudes.

The latest climate models predict the overturning circulation will slow down as greenhouse gases warm the planet and melting ice adds freshwater to the ocean. “Warm, freshwater is lighter and sinks less readily than cold, salty water,” Willis explained.

For now, however, there are no signs of a slowdown in the circulation. “The changes we’re seeing in overturning strength are probably part of a natural cycle,” said Willis. “The slight increase in overturning since 1993 coincides with a decades-long natural pattern of Atlantic heating and cooling.”

If or when the overturning circulation slows, the results are unlikely to be dramatic. “No one is predicting another ice age as a result of changes in the Atlantic overturning,” said Willis. “Even if the overturning was the Godzilla of climate 12,000 years ago, the climate was much colder then. Models of today’s warmer conditions suggest that a slowdown would have a much smaller impact now.

“But the Atlantic overturning circulation is still an important player in today’s climate,” Willis added. “Some have suggested cyclic changes in the overturning may be warming and cooling the whole North Atlantic over the course of several decades and affecting rainfall patterns across the United States and Africa, and even the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic.”

With their ability to observe the Atlantic overturning at high latitudes, Willis said, satellite altimeters and the Argo array are an important complement to the mooring and ship-based measurements currently being used to monitor the overturning at lower latitudes. “Nobody imagined that this large-scale circulation could be captured by these global observing systems,” said Willis. “Their amazing precision allows us to detect subtle changes in the ocean that could have big impacts on climate.”

Source

-------

Steve McIntyre remarks about the Mann/Rahmstorf’s paper:

“The proxy data used to reconstruct AMOC is the same data as Mann et al 2009 - i.e. includes strip bark bristlecones and contaminated Tiljander sediments. in other words, bristlecones not only are a magic thermometer for NH temperature and SH temperature, but now Gulf Stream flow rates. Remarkable.”

Pierre Gosselin over at “No Tricks Zone” is reporting that within a day of its publication, the paper from the German Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research has now been debunked and denounced by German climate scholars, some of whom side with the warmer view of climate. 

Malaria has afflicted mankind for thousands of years. It sickened millions of Americans into the 1930s and was finally eradicated in the United States in 1952, with DDT playing a critical role in reducing mosquitoes that carried the disease from one victim to the next. Malaria was wiped out in Canada, Europe, Russia and many other regions over the next two decades. However, it is still prevalent in Africa, many parts of Asia and even in South America due largely to intense opposition to DDT and other pesticides by radical Big Green environmentalists.

A new documentary film, 3 Billion and Counting, chronicles the devastation and death perpetuated by anti-DDT campaigns that have removed this vital disease prevention weapon from many malaria control arsenals. Dr. Rutledge Taylor’s self-financed film also lays out the facts about the chemical’s actual safety and environmental record, through his own research and comments by malaria and DDT experts from around the world.

Thank you for posting my article, quoting from it, and forwarding it to your friends and colleagues. 

Best regards,

Paul

Its anti-DDT war is a lethal “death-rate solution” imposed on Third World countries

Paul Driessen

The terms racism, white supremacy, crimes against humanity are bandied about so often that they have become almost meaningless. But they are absolutely appropriate in an arena where they are too rarely applied: radical environmentalism’s campaigns that perpetuate poverty, disease and death, by denying Earth’s most impoverished and powerless people access to modern life-saving technologies.

Imagine activist groups preventing you from having your child vaccinated against polio or hepatitis, or from starting her on chemotherapy for leukemia - because they are “concerned” about “possible side-effects” and the “ethics” of permitting such “risky” procedures. Absurd! you say. Outrageous!

Of course it is. But that is what radical environmentalists are doing to Third World countries. By denying people access to abundant, reliable, affordable electricity, modern fertilizers and biotech seeds, and especially DDT to prevent malaria and other insect-borne diseases, they are killing millions every year.

Many of my articles have documented this. Now a new film written, self-financed and produced by Dr. D. Rutledge Taylor, MD graphically presents powerful new evidence of how the Audubon Society, Sierra Club, other predominantly white environmentalist pressure groups and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency conspired to hide and discredit scientific evidence, and wage a campaign of disinformation and outright lies, to ban the most effective weapon yet devised to prevent malaria and other vicious diseases.

3 Billion and Counting: The death toll is mounting shows how DDT was invented on the eve of World War II and became a secret weapon that kept Allied soldiers on the battlefield, instead of in hospitals or graves. After the war, it was sprayed on millions of Europeans to prevent typhus. It then eradicated malaria in Europe, the United States and other developed nations. No one ever got sick from DDT.

Available on demand and through Amazon.com, You Tube, Google Play, iTunes and elsewhere, the film chronicles how Rachel Carson’s wildly inaccurate book Silent Spring helped persuade the Audubon Society to launch the Environmental Defense Fund for the sole purpose of demanding a DDT ban.

Why would Audubon do such a thing? Its own research and Department of the Interior studies showed that bird and animal populations were exploding during the two decades when DDT was used most widely. Countless other studies documented that the life-saving chemical was safe for humans and most wildlife, including bald eagles. People actually tried to kill themselves with DDT and repeatedly failed.

An EPA scientific panel conducted six months of hearings, compiled 9,312 pages of studies and testimony, and concluded that DDT was safe and effective, was not carcinogenic, and should not be banned. Nevertheless, without attending a single hour of hearings or reading a single page of the panel’s report, EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus banned U.S. production and use of DDT in 1972 - at a time when over 80% of the chemical was being exported for disease control.

Then why the attacks? As EDF scientist Charles Wurster said 1969, “If the environmentalists win on DDT, they will achieve a level of authority they have never had before.” When asked later how he justified human deaths from pesticides that replaced DDT, versus the “mere loss of some birds,” he said “organophosphates act locally and only kill farm workers, and most of them are Mexicans and Negroes.”

Ruckelshaus said he had a political problem, and fixed it. He never considered the plight of malaria victims, and anti-DDT activists still ignore their agony and deaths. Audubon, EDF, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund, Pesticide Action Network, Natural Resource Defense Council and other radical groups that oppose DDT just don’t give a damn even as they have become filthy, callously rich by opposing the life-saving chemical and other technologies.

Sierra Club executive director David Brower, Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich and other arch-environmentalists believed the biggest problem facing Planet Earth was “uncontrolled growth” in human populations. Ehrlich argued that the “instant death control” provided by DDT exports was “responsible for the drastic lowering of death rates” in underdeveloped countries. Those countries were not practicing a “birth rate solution” and thus needed to have “death rate solutions” imposed on them, via campaigns against energy, Golden Rice and other biotech crops, and especially DDT.

Almost 3.5 billion people worldwide are at risk of getting this horrific disease, 207 million are actually infected every year, and over 800,000 die year after year from malaria. The vast majority are children and pregnant women, and some 90% of them are in Sub-Saharan Africa. In that region, a child still dies every minute from malaria, and most African children have been brain-damaged to some degree by malaria. Worldwide, nearly 80% of all infectious diseases are spread by insects.

Malaria is certainly a disease of poverty. But poverty is a disease of malaria. It leaves victims too sick to work or care for their families, for weeks on end. Medicines and hospital stays drain families’ meager savings. The disease costs tens of millions of lost work hours, billions in lost wages, and tens of billions for medicines and care in antiquated hospitals. It leaves entire nations impoverished.

However, spraying small amounts of DDT on the walls and eaves of cinderblock and mud-and-thatch homes, once or twice a year puts a long-lasting mosquito net over entire households. It keeps 80-90% of mosquitoes from even entering the homes; irritates any that do enter, so they leave without biting; and kills any that land. No other chemical, at any price, can do all this.

In response to these facts, anti-DDT pressure groups rail about risks that are trivial, illusory or fabricated. DDT is associated with low birth-weights, slow reflexes and weakened immune systems in babies, and could cause premature birth and lactation failure in nursing mothers, they claim.

Not one peer-reviewed scientific study supports any of this fear-mongering. Every one of these alleged problems is definitely associated with malaria and other endemic Third World diseases. And compared to the death and devastation that DDT could prevent, the alleged DDT risks are irrelevant.

However, constant deception and harassment by these groups have caused many health agencies and aid organizations to not use or fund DDT, and often other pesticides. Instead, they focus on bed nets, education, “capacity building,” and treatment with drugs that are too often unavailable, counterfeit, or ineffective because the malaria parasites have become resistant to them.

Still, the efforts have been somewhat successful. Millions of women and young children now sleep under insecticide-treated nets. Millions now get diagnosed more quickly and receive better care and medicines, often at clinics where two doctors examine up to 400 patients a day. In 2010, the World Health Organization and Roll Back Malaria boasted of an 18% reduction in child mortality, compared with 2000.

But that is not nearly good enough. We would never tolerate 18% as “good enough,” if American or European children’s lives (or Greenpeace and EDF kids’ lives) were at stake and a 90% reduction were possible as it would be, if health workers were also eradicating mosquitoes and spraying DDT.

Instead, they protect Africans and Asians from minimal or illusory risks, by condemning them to agonizing deaths from readily preventable diseases. “They are using us in anti-DDT experiments,” says Ugandan human rights activist Fiona Kobusingye. “They are playing with our lives.”

They are also playing with American lives. Spraying clothes with DDT once a year would keep infected ticks away and prevent Lyme disease that leaves tens of thousands battling chronic, debilitating pain and illness for years, Dr. Taylor explains. But the same anti-pesticide radicals are dead-set against that.

Dr. Taylor ends his film by drinking 3 grams of DDT...in 2008 - with no ill effects, then or today.

Watch 3 Billion and Counting. Then contact these Big Green pressure groups and their staffs and board members, and the foundations, politicians and bureaucrats who support them. Tell them it’s time to end their eco-manslaughter.

Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death, and coauthor of Cracking Big Green: Saving the world from the Save-the-Earth money machine. He is a featured expert in 3 Billion and Counting.

WEATHERTORIAL:

A few weeks ago, returning from an AAAS (American Association For The Advancement of Science) Conference in San Jose, CA, I had the pleasure of meeting another conference attendee at a San Jose airport restaurant. The gentleman, a biologist from the University of Wisconsin, recognized me as a conference attendee because I had a “brain hat” with me. One of the exhibitors at Family Science Days, a major public outreach part of the conference, had provided attendees a chance to learn about the brain and then wear their newly made “brain hats” as they roamed the exhibit area. The gentleman asked if he could join me for dinner and I agreed.

Somehow, the conversation turned to “climate change.” My guest expressed his concerns about the issue, primarily from a plant growth and population feeding perspective. I listened intently because the information he shared was new to me. Then it was my turn.

I told the gentleman about my credentials - Certified Consulting Meteorologist, science writer, blogger, tutor and more. I then proceeded to explain that I was not sure that humans were THE cause of climate change, although I frankly admitted that we humans, are NOT good planetary stewards. I explained that I had reviewed numerous climate-based articles, attended conference presentations about climate change and even done some independent research on matters that were related to climate change. I noted that I prefer to share both sides of the climate change story and let people decide. I almost concluded by noting that I felt that we could spend far less money (I believe I somewhat jokingly said, “gazillions") on climate change and still make very significant strides in lessening human impact on Planet Earth.

Before I could finish my thoughts, the gentleman slammed me, claiming that I was clearly the type of Republican that Fox News just loved. Further, he chided me for sowing seeds of discontent and doubt and then charged me with doing a disservice to the 99 percent of scientists who had proven that humans caused climate change. How dare I write about non-human caused climate change! I needed to come over to the right side and support the prevailing scientific viewpoint in my writing.

It was then that I was able to sneak in these few words, “I don’t name call.” In fact, I noted that I preferred to discuss the matter, as scientists should do, to ensure that all sides receive a fair hearing. Maybe no one will change his/her mind, but I was ready to talk with anyone regardless of his/her point of view.

Finally, I was able to note that, “once, the best scientists of the time thought the planets and the Sun orbited the Earth.”

Our interaction went on for some 20 minutes and I was name called several more times, as my guest continued to berate me for being a bad journalist and a non-scientist. Never did I name call in retaliation; however, I remained true to my position.

The gentleman finally stood up and announced he was leaving and just walked away.

Still, it is ironic that a brain brought the two of us scientists together and the use of a brain was what separated us.

Some of my fellow scientists have scolded me on various occasions for my position on climate change. Never, however, had I been made to feel so small. I now knew one of the many ways that climate change alarmists have managed to silence the masses of opponents.

Another way of silencing opposition is to control the governmental purse-strings. This is typically evident in medicine, environmentalism and other programs in which the government defines the issue and the desired outcomes (collectively referred to as the, “rules") and then doles out funding primarily to those who support the “rules.” Hence, one set of groups and businesses which stand to benefit from the “rules,” act to support the, “rules.” The opposing camp has no choice but to move toward non-governmental support. In the case of climate change, the only group that can support the opposition involves companies that mine fossil fuels and/or benefit from their use.

Yet, new research is always occurring. Recently, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) may have become the bright spot in updating information based on new research. The DGAC, whose information is used in setting government dietary guidelines, just reported that, “available evidence shows no appreciable relationship between consumption of dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol .. Cholesterol is not a nutrient of concern for overconsumption.” Hence, cholesterol was found NOT to be as bad as previously thought and it was now okay to consume eggs.

Surely, a large percent of doctors and researchers in this medical arena agreed with the old findings. Now, the rules had changed by 180 degrees and the prevailing wisdom had changed accordingly. The minority was now moving toward becoming the majority! However, the issue is still not “proven” and probably never will. I am sure that additional research is underway to verify and/or refute the new findings. This is how science is supposed to work.

Coming back to climate change, what is to stop scientists from discovering that the climate change findings, and proposed solutions the government and the climate community have been pushing for some 20 years, are wrong? What if carbon dioxide is NOT the cause of the recent warming, but asphalt paving and urbanization are? What if the deforestation of the Amazon and other places has allowed regional and global temperatures to rise? The list of potential contributions toward a warming planet is endless and some or all may be at work, as much as, or even more so, than carbon dioxide.

The Heartland Organization is fully opposed to the current thinking on climate change. Not surprisingly, they just posted an article about Dr. Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon, a distinguished solar astrophysicist. The article describes how the climate change community, the so-called 99%, are uniting to discredit Soon. In past years, the non-believing community tried to discredit some in the climate change community, too. Most of the human-caused climate community use intimidation and personal attacks. For the most part, the opposing side attacks the research process, funding and the media and governmental hype.

In my opinion, it is these tactics and approaches to indoctrination (such as spending on biased government research and publicity, slanting school textbook content, and supporting a biased mass media), which are aimed at silencing scientific discussion and isolating dissenters that are the real problem. The brain, which is supposed to help us humans sort fact from fiction, is, instead, being asked to believe (in a religious way) or else.

I am nowhere the stature of Dr. Soon, but have been subjected to these same tear down, degrading tactics. I have stood up against these and will continue to do so, regardless of any professional or other attacks. By my thinking, the freedom of the press and the freedom to use one’s mind to investigate science are far more important than “saving the planet,” from a yet unproven threat.

Alex Epstein’s long-anticipated book, The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels, published by Penguin, comes out today! I reviewed it as, “simply the best popular-market book about climate, environmental policy, and energy that I have read.  Laymen and experts alike will be boggled by Epstein’s clarity.”

Alex recently sent us a brief essay based upon material in the book. Alex Epstein is President and Founder of the Center for Industrial Progress - an organization sowing the seeds of energy enthusiasm to counter the tide of climate alarmism. We asked Alex to share a few thoughts with our readers here at Cato; find them below.

If you are in Washington, you might want to meet Alex. He will be giving a Hill Briefing in B-369 Rayburn at 9am on Friday, November 21.

If you ever get asked the vague but morally-charged question “Do you believe in climate change?” someone is trying to put something over on you.

Climate change is a constant of nature and everyone agrees that fossil fuels have some impact on our naturally variable, volatile, and often vicious climate.

The question is whether it will have a catastrophic impact - one so bad it justifies restricting the only practical way to get energy in the foreseeable future to the 3 billion people who have next to none of it: fossil fuels. (No country relies on the sun and wind for energy, but rich countries can afford to pay tens or hundreds of billions to install and accommodate allegedly virtuous wind turbines and solar panels on their grids.)

The real issue is climate catastrophe. I’m not a climate-change skeptic. I’m a climate catastrophe skeptic-and here’s one graph that shows why you should be, too.

No, it’s not showing temperatures have gone up half a degree in the 80 years we’ve used a lot of fossil fuels, which is barely more than they went up the prior 80 years. Nor does it show temperatures have flattened in the past eighteen years while the world’s leading climate catastrophists predicted dramatic, accelerating, runaway warming. Dr. James Hansen predicted that temperatures would increase between two-and-a-half and five degrees in 20 years!

Okay, I’ll show that graph, too.  Here it is:

Enlarged.
Sources: Met Office Hadley Centre HadCRUT4 dataset; Etheridge et al. (1998); Keeling et al. (2001); MacFarling Meure et al. (2006); Merged IceCore Record Data, Scripps Institution of OceanographySources: Met Office Hadley Centre HadCRUT4 dataset; Etheridge et al. (1998); Keeling et al. (2001); MacFarling Meure et al. (2006); Merged IceCore Record Data, Scripps Institution of Oceanography

But that’s not the graph that really matters. There is no intrinsically perfect global temperature and, if there was, we would expect it to be warmer. Until it became politically correct for temperature trends to warm, people around the world prayed for far more warming than we’ve experienced. There is no time in human history when it has been considered “too warm” for human beings.

What matters is: is the climate becoming more or less livable? The key statistic here, one that is unfortunately almost never mentioned, is “climate-related deaths.”

The best source I have found for this data is the U.S. Office of Foreign Disaster Assistance and Centre for Research on the Epidemiology of Disasters International Disaster Database (OFDA/CRED EM-DAT), based in Brussels.1 It gathers data about disasters since 1900.

Here is a graph comparing CO2 emissions, the alleged climate danger, to the number of climate-related deaths, which reflects actual climate danger to humans. It’s striking as CO2 emissions rise, climate-related deaths plunge.

Sources: Boden, Marland, Andres (2013); Etheridge et al. (1998); Keeling et al. (2001); MacFarling Meure et al. (2006); Merged IceCore Record Data, Scripps Institution of Oceanography; EM-DAT International Disaster DatabaseSources: Boden, Marland, Andres (2013); Etheridge et al. (1998); Keeling et al. (2001); MacFarling Meure et al. (2006); Merged IceCore Record Data, Scripps Institution of Oceanography; EM-DAT International Disaster Database

To make matters better, in reality the trend is even more dramatically downward, as before the 1970s many disasters went unreported. One big reason for this was lack of satellite data - we can now see the whole world, enabling us to track icecaps and disaster areas with relative ease. In 1950, if there was a disaster in the middle of what is now Bangladesh, would information have been accurately collected? In general, we can expect in more recent years, more deaths were recorded and in earlier years, fewer deaths were recorded. For some countries there is simply no good data, because in underdeveloped places like Haiti or Ethiopia we do not even know exactly how many people lived in a particular place before a disaster struck. Today we have much better information - and because disaster statistics are tied to aid, there is incentive to overreport.

And the more we dig into the data, the stronger the correlations get.

Here are a couple of striking numbers from the data: in the decade from 2004 to 2013, worldwide climate-related deaths (including droughts, floods, extreme temperatures, wildfires, and storms) plummeted to a level 88.6 percent below that of the peak decade, 1930 to 1939.2 The year 2013, with 29,404 reported deaths, had 99.4 percent fewer climate-related deaths than the historic record year of 1932, which had 5,073,283 reported deaths for the same category.3

That reduction occurred despite more complete reporting, an incentive to declare greater damage to gain more aid, and a massively growing population, particularly in vulnerable places like coastal areas, in recent times.

The climate catastrophists don’t want you to know this because it reveals how fundamentally flawed their viewpoint is. They treat the global climate system as a stable and safe place we make volatile and dangerous. In fact, the global climate system is naturally volatile and dangerous - we make it livable through development and technology - development and technology powered by the only form of cheap, reliable, scalable reliable energy that can make climate livable for 7 billion people.

As the climate-related death data show, there are some major benefits - namely, the power of fossil-fueled machines to build a durable civilization highly resilient to extreme heat, extreme cold, floods, storms, and so on. Why weren’t those mentioned in the discussion when we talked about storms like Sandy and Irene, even though anyone going through those storms was far more protected from them than he or she would have been a century ago?

I have debated representatives of the three leading environmental organizations in the world - Greenpeace, Sierra Club and 350.org - including 350.org’s Bill McKibben, the leading environmentalist in the world today - and every time, I have repeatedly mentioned the climate livability statistics. I raised it to Bill McKibben before I debated him and half a dozen times during my debate with him - he didn’t acknowledge it. He just called it “one number.” Yeah, one number, based on billions of empirical observations, that destroys billions of dollars worth of speculation.

Why? Because the dogma that man is ruining the planet rather than improving it is a religion, a source of prestige, and a career for too many people. But for the rest of us, the statistic climate catastrophists don’t want us to know is very, very good news.

THE debate about climate change is finished because it has been categorically proved NOT to exist, one of the world’s leading meteorologists has claimed.

John Coleman, who co-founded the Weather Channel, shocked academics by insisting the theory of man-made climate change was no longer scientifically credible.

Instead, what ‘little evidence’ there is for rising global temperatures points to a ‘natural phenomenon’ within a developing eco-system.

In an open letter attacking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, he wrote: “The ocean is not rising significantly.The polar ice is increasing, not melting away. Polar Bears are increasing in number.”

“Heat waves have actually diminished, not increased. There is not an uptick in the number or strength of storms (in fact storms are diminishing).”

“I have studied this topic seriously for years. It has become a political and environment agenda item, but the science is not valid.”

I have studied climate change seriously for years. It has become a political and environment agenda item, but the science is not valid.

John Coleman, co-founder of the Weather Channel

Mr Coleman said he based many of his views on the findings of the NIPCC, a non-governmental international body of scientists aimed at offering an ‘independent second opinion of the evidence reviewed by the IPCC.’

He added: “There is no significant man-made global warming at this time, there has been none in the past and there is no reason to fear any in the future.

“Efforts to prove the theory that carbon dioxide is a significant greenhouse gas and pollutant causing significant warming or weather effects have failed.

“There has been no warming over 18 years.”

The IPCC argue their research shows that man-made global warming will lead to extreme weather events becoming more frequent and unpredictable.

US News and World Report noted that many of the world’s largest businesses, including Coke, Pepsi, Walmart, Nestle, Mars, Monsanto, Kellogg, General Mills, Microsoft, and IBM, “are now engaged and actively responding to climate science and data.”

Mr Coleman’s comments come as President Barack Obama came under fire from climatologists as federal data revealed The United State’s energy-related carbon pollution rose 2.5 per cent despite the President’s pledges to decrease it.

President Obama told 120 world leaders at the United Nations climate summit last month that America had done more under his watch in cutting greenhouse gases than any other country.

Despite this, the Energy Information Administration’s Monthly Energy Review showed an increase in the use of energy from coal.

World leaders have pledged to keep the global average temperature from rising two degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels to prevent the worst consequences of climate change.

The US, along with the UK and other developed countries, is expected to pledge further actions on climate change early next year.

Global warming climate change lieThere has been no recorded global warming for 18 years [GETTY]

Climate expert William Happer, from Princeton University, supported Mr Coleman’s claims.

He added: “No chemical compound in the atmosphere has a worse reputation than CO2, thanks to the single-minded demonisation of this natural and essential atmospheric gas by advocates of government control and energy production.”

“The incredible list of supposed horrors that increasing carbon dioxide will bring the world is pure belief disguised as science.”

In 2010 a high-level inquiry by the InterAcademy Council found there was “little evidence” to support the IPCC’s claims about global warming.

It also said the panel had purposely emphasised the negative impacts of climate change and made “substantive findings” based on little proof.