Despite the failure of predictions (Gore’s 10 claims all failed here) and the top 11 climate alarmist claims (updated rebuttal here), democrats and weak kneed republicans are exploring carbon sequester solutions and energy limitations and some even the Green New Deal.
It is a political hoax and it endangers our future. Electricity prices would rise 3 to 5 fold and more and gasoline prices if the UN suggested carbon taxes were imposed would be $50/gallon.
See the results where it has already been tried here (northeast states Regional Greenhouse Initiative and California environmental mandates) and abroad.
I have two grown children and three grandchildren. I was fortunate to have been brought up in America. Europe has been the first globalization - one world government and anti fossil fuel experiment. it has failed on many levels. You will never hear about it in the MSM which has strong socialist tendencies..
Unemployment reached a new high in Europe in 2013. Joblessness in the 17-nation EU currency area rose to 12.2 percent in the spring, EU statistics office Eurostat said, marking a new record since the data series began in 1995. The risk is high that will be your future unless you open your mind and...do your homework on government and the economy.
Deepening unemployment crisis is a threat to the social fabric of the euro zone. Almost two-thirds of young Greeks are unable to find work, exemplifying southern Europe’s ‘lost generation’. In France, Europe’s second largest economy, the number of jobless rose to a record in April, while in Italy, the unemployment rate hit its highest level in at least 36 years, with 40 percent of young people out of work. In Spain, the overall unemployment reached a record 27.2% due to a combination of the progressive big government anti-business policies and the enviro pushed green energy subsidies. This green push (wind power is not only a health hazard to humans and deadly to birds (killing millions worldwide including many endangered species like eagles and condors), but among the most inefficient of all energy sources) caused energy prices to skyrocket, shutting businesses or forcing manufacturers overseas.
In Spain, 2.2 jobs were lost for every green job created and only 1 in 10 green job was permanent. In Italy it was 3.4 jobs lost for every temporary green job, Spain ceased subsidization, but the damage has been done. In Germany where electricity prices have doubled, 800,000 homes had their electricity turned off during the last brutal winter, the 5th straight such throwback winter to the Little Ice Age. In the UK 25 to 50% are still in energy poverty. Many pensioners have had to choose between heating and eating. Bet you did not hear about the many tens of thousands of deaths in the cold. The German government remarked that solar provide 0% of the electrical needs that winter. In December 2010, when the UK had the second coldest December since the Little Ice Age in 1659, the massive wind farms produced less than 0.5% of their energy needs.
Sadly, even as Europe has soured on the green dream and are furiously building coal and gas power plants, our government was using Europe as a model. After you graduate with the burden of tens of thousands or in some cases well over $100,000 in college loans, you will find it difficult getting the job you need and deserve and the home you dream about. You can thank your liberal progressive teachers and professors and the last progressive administration for misleading you into the direction this country should head and for the way you voted. Academics have tenure and don’t have to worry about losing their jobs. They are ideologues who refuse to concede the policies they and the administration in Washington (mostly Academics without real world experience) support, have caused the number of people working today to be lower than in 2008, and will limit the hiring of graduates in the foreseeable future. When I was a college professor, I taught my students how to think not what to think. Is that happening at your school? If not you are not being educated, just brainwashed.
Votes have consequences. The health care bill hurting the middle class (insurance was not down $2,500 as promised but up by that amount for most families for less coverage). You will bear the cost of this monstrosity in the future. You will pay for it big time or if you opt out, you paid a penalty. And you will be burdened with supporting social security and medicare because the government already used the deductions to pay for its spending spree. Retirees paid for their support but that money is long gone. The ACA took social security and medicare to a whole new level.
Despite what you have been told, corporations big and small are not evil. Entrepreneurs are demonized for being successful, but they are the job creators. Penalizing them diminishes the potential you have for getting a rewarding job and successful career. You have been lied to since elementary school in your science classes with the liberal green curriculum on climate change that demonizes fossil fuel energy. It is perfectly reasonable to be green minded and work towards conservation of our resources. But CO2 has been incorrectly blamed for the natural cycles of temperatures and weather extremes of drought, flood, hurricanes, tornadoes, heat and cold. It has been called carbon pollution, a term that really should apply to particulate matter, largely removed from even coal plant effluence with scrubbers.
In fact, EPA’s own charts show a 30% decline in these small particles and ozone the last three plus decades. Natural gas burns clean. The US is exporting fuel oil but no thanks to the administration, which has blocked drilling on all federal lands and offshore and has blocked the Keystone Pipeline. It is the heavy drilling and fracking in states on private land that has made the US as big as OPEC. After destroying the coal industry, the radicals at the EPA wanted to stop this and block natural gas by blocking the long used fracking process. The last administration admitted openly they want $8 gasoline and heating oil to make their renewables cost seem less onerous.
Instead of a health hazard (inconceivable since every breathe you take emits 100 times more CO2 than is present in the atmosphere), CO2 is plant food and has helped greatly improve global crop yields and feed the increasing population. In future stories, we will show you how all the claims made demonizing CO2 have been falsified by real data (see this rebuttal of 11 top alarmist claims here).
But isn’t there a consensus of scientists on global warming? Sure among the scientists and modelers on the receiving end of some of the hundreds of billions in grants - worldwide $2 trillion is spent on this scam. The Green New Deal would cost more than our entire budget - $32 trillion the next decade that would bankrupt our country (especially if combined with Medicare for all) for no benefit and great pain with unreliable, unaffordable energy supply, brownouts and blackouts, a huge rise in taxes, unemployment, a collapsed health care system.
But among those not feeding at the trough. 31,487 American scientists have signed a petition, including 9,029 with PhDs that concluded “There is no convincing scientific evidence that human release of carbon dioxide, methane or other greenhouse gases is causing or will in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the earth.”
The great author and medical doctor Dr. Michael Crichton said about consensus:
“Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had. Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics.”
This is a critical time for our country. Please help support our efforts to get the truth to the decision makers and save our Country. DONATE button on the left takes you to Paypal. We are working overtime pro bono to try and get the truth exposed, with no help from the media.
A new paper in Nature Climate Change by Santer et al. (paywalled) claims that the 40 year record of global tropospheric temperatures agrees with climate model simulations of anthropogenic global warming so well that there is less than a 1 in 3.5 million chance (5 sigma, one-tailed test) that the agreement between models and satellites is just by chance.
And, yes, that applies to our (UAH) dataset as well.
While it’s nice that the authors commemorate 40 years of satellite temperature monitoring method (which John Christy and I originally developed), I’m dismayed that this published result could feed a new “one in a million” meme that rivals the “97% of scientists agree” meme, which has been a very successful talking point for politicians, journalists, and liberal arts majors.
John Christy and I examined the study to see just what was done. I will give you the bottom line first, in case you don’t have time to wade through the details:
The new Santer et al. study merely shows that the satellite data have indeed detected warming (not saying how much) that the models can currently only explain with increasing CO2 (since they cannot yet reproduce natural climate variability on multi-decadal time scales).
That’s all.
But we already knew that, didn’t we? So why publish a paper that goes to such great lengths to demonstrate it with an absurdly exaggerated statistic such as 1 in 3.5 million (which corresponds to 99.99997% confidence)? I’ll leave that as a rhetorical question for you to ponder.
There is so much that should be said, it’s hard to know where to begin.
Current climate models are programmed to only produce human-caused warming
First, you must realize that ANY source of temperature change in the climate system, whether externally forced (e.g. increasing CO2, volcanoes) or internally forced (e.g. weakening ocean vertical circulation, stronger El Ninos) has about the same global temperature signature regionally: more change over land than ocean (yes, even if the ocean is the original source of warming), and as a consequence more warming over the Northern than Southern Hemisphere. In addition, the models tend to warm the tropics more than the extratropics, a pattern which the satellite measurements do not particularly agree with.
Current climate model are adjusted in a rather ad hoc manner to produce no long-term warming (or cooling). This is because the global radiative energy balance that maintains temperatures at a relatively constant level is not known accurately enough from first physical principles (or even from observations), so any unforced trends in the models are considered “spurious” and removed. A handful of weak time-dependent forcings (e.g. ozone depletion, aerosol cooling) are then included in the models which can nudge them somewhat in the warmer or cooler direction temporarily, but only increasing CO2 can cause substantial model warming.
Importantly, we don’t understand natural climate variations, and the models don’t produce it, so CO2 is the only source of warming in today’s state-of-the-art models.
The New Study Methodology
The Santer et al. study address the 40-year period (1979-2018) of tropospheric temperature measurements. They average the models regional pattern of warming during that time, and see how well the satellite data match the models for the geographic pattern.
A few points must be made about this methodology.
As previously mentioned, the models already assume that only CO2 can produce warming, and so their finding of some agreement between model warming and satellite-observed warming is taken to mean proof that the warming is human-caused. It is not. Any natural source of warming (as we will see) would produce about the same kind of agreement, but the models have already been adjusted to exclude that possibility.
Proof of point #1 can be seen in their plot (below) of how the agreement between models and satellite observations increases over time. The fact that the agreement surges during major El Nino warm events is evidence that natural sources of warming can be mis-diagnosed as an anthropogenic signature. What if there is also a multi-decadal source of warming, as has been found to be missing in models compared to observations (e.g. Kravtsov et al., 2018)?
John Christy pointed out that the two major volcanic eruptions (El Chichon and Pinatubo, the latter shown as a blue box in the plot below), which caused temporary cooling, were in the early part of the 40 year record. Even if the model runs did not include increasing CO2, there would still be agreement between warming trends in the models and observations just because of the volcanic cooling early would lead to positive 40-year trends. Obviously, this agreement would not indicate an anthropogenic source, even though the authors methodology would identify it as such.
Their metric for measuring agreement between models and observations basically multiplies the regional warming pattern in the models with the regional warming pattern in the observations. If these patterns were totally uncorrelated, then there would be no diagnosed agreement. But this tells us little about the MAGNITUDE of warming in the observations agreeing with the models. The warming in the observations might only be 1/3 that of the models, or alternatively the warming in the models might be only 1/3 that in the observations. Their metric gives the same value either way. All that is necessary is for the temperature change to be of the same sign, and more warming in either the models or observations will cause an diagnosed increase in the level of agreement metric they use, even if the warming trends are diverging over time.
Their metric of agreement does not even need a geographic “pattern” of warming to reach an absurdly high level of statistical agreement. Warming could be the same everywhere in their 576 gridpoints covering most the Earth, and their metric would sum up the agreement at every gridpoint as independent evidence of a “pattern agreement”, even though no “pattern” of warming exists. This seems like a rather exaggerated statistic.
These are just some of my first impressions of the new study. Ross McKitrick is also examining the paper and will probably have a more elegant explanation of the statistics the paper uses and what those statistics can and cannot show.
Nevertheless, the metric used does demonstrate some level of agreement with high confidence. What exactly is it? As far as I can tell, it’s simply that the satellite observations show some warming in the last 40 years, and so do the models. The expected pattern is fairly uniform globally, which does not tell us much since even El Nino produces fairly uniform warming (and volcanoes produce global cooling). Yet their statistic seems to treat each of the 576 gridpoints as independent, which should have been taken into account (similar to time autocorrelation in time series). It will take more time to examine whether this is indeed the case.
In the end, I believe the study is an attempt to exaggerate the level of agreement between satellite (even UAH) and model warming trends, providing supposed “proof” that the warming is due to increasing CO2, even though natural sources of temperature change (temporary El Nino warming, volcanic cooling early in the record, and who knows what else) can be misinterpreted by their method as human-caused warming.
Greenland is melting faster than scientists previously thought, with the pace of ice loss increasing four-fold since 2003, new research has found.
Enormous glaciers in Greenland are depositing ever larger chunks of ice into the Atlantic ocean, where it melts. But scientists have found that the largest ice loss in the decade from 2003 actually occurred in the southwest region of the island, which is largely glacier-free.
This suggests surface ice is simply melting as global temperatures rise, causing gushing rivers of meltwater to flow into the ocean and push up sea levels. South-west Greenland, not previously thought of as a source of woe for coastal cities, is set to “become a major future contributor to sea level rise” the research states.
“We knew we had one big problem with increasing rates of ice discharge by some large outlet glaciers,” said Michael Bevis, lead author of the paper (no doubt with Butthead) and a professor of geodynamics at Ohio State University. “But now we recognize a second serious problem: increasingly, large amounts of ice mass are going to leave as meltwater, as rivers that flow into the sea.
The research provides fresh evidence of the dangers posed to vulnerable coastal places as diverse as Miami, Shanghai, Bangladesh and various Pacific islands as climate change shrinks the world’s land-based ice.
“The only thing we can do is adapt and mitigate further global warming - it’s too late for there to be no effect,” Bevis said. “This is going to cause additional sea level rise. We are watching the ice sheet hit a tipping point.
“We’re going to see faster and faster sea level rise for the foreseeable future. Once you hit that tipping point, the only question is: How severe does it get?”
The study, published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, used data from NASA’s gravity recovery and climate experiment (known as Grace) and GPS stations scattered across Greenland to analyze changes in ice mass.
This showed that Greenland lost around 280bn tons of ice per year between 2002 and 2016, enough to raise the worldwide sea level by 0.03 inches annually. If all of Greenland’s vast ice sheet, 3km thick in places, was to melt, global sea levels would rise by seven meters, or more than 20ft, drowning most coastal settlements.
When the long term numbers are not scary enough, concentrate on one year’s weather instead!
I will explain.
Science Daily has more detail on the Bevis paper here. For some reason, it does not appear on the PNAS site yet.
Science Daily elaborate on the “faster than 2003” claim:
Bevis’ team used data from GRACE and from GPS stations scattered around Greenland’s coast to identify changes in ice mass. The patterns they found show an alarming trend - by 2012, ice was being lost at nearly four times the rate that prevailed in 2003.
Bevis said a natural weather phenomenon - the North Atlantic Oscillation, which brings warmer air to West Greenland, as well as clearer skies and more solar radiation - was building on man-made climate change to cause unprecedented levels of melting and runoff. Global atmospheric warming enhances summertime melting, especially in the southwest. The North Atlantic Oscillation is a natural - if erratic - cycle that causes ice to melt under normal circumstances. When combined with man-made global warming, though, the effects are supercharged.
“These oscillations have been happening forever,” Bevis said. “So why only now are they causing this massive melt? It’s because the atmosphere is, at its baseline, warmer. The transient warming driven by the North Atlantic Oscillation was riding on top of more sustained, global warming.”
But what happened in 2012?
Due to that weather event, the NAO, Greenland experienced an unusually mild year, with in particular a sunny summer.
Bevis asks:
“These oscillations have been happening forever. So why only now are they causing this massive melt? “
Because we have only been monitoring the melt for the last decade or two!
We know that global sea level rise was just as great in the early to mid 20th century, and there is therefore no evidence whatsoever that melting of the Greenland ice sheet was not just as great back then.
However, that was the exception. Last year, for instance, the SMB grew much more than the long term mean, as it did the year before.
Bevis’ claim that ice loss in 2012 was greater than in 2003 is based on one year’s weather, and not the long term trend.
It is worth emphasizing here that the SMB reflects both snowfall and ice melt, but not calving of glaciers. It is, of course, ice melt that Bevis is mainly concerned about here.
As we can see from the above temperature chart for SW Greenland, with the exception of 2012, temperatures since 2003 are little different to the 1920s to 40s, the last time the AMO was in warm phase, as it presently is.
There is simply no evidence at all of Greenland’s climate getting any warmer over the long term.
As for the lurid threats of multi meter sea level rise, according to DMI loss of ice from the Greenland ice sheet (from all causes) since 2003 has accounted for about 0.65mm a year of global sea level rise, little more than 2 inches per century.
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Media Ignore Inconvenient Truths When Pushing Polar Bear Invasion Stories
This story could very well be headlined: “When the internet came to Novaya Zemlya.”
Locals started to post photos and video of the more than 50 polar bears in their neighborhood.
Over the last week, social media, as well as online newspapers globally, have gone mad over the news coming out from one of the remotest towns on the planet, the closed military settlement of Belushaya Guba.
The little-known town on the Russian Arctic archipelago has since last autumn been struggling with polar bears walking the streets and around the corners of the apartment - and office buildings. Even walking by a baby-stroller inside an entrance, one of the video-recordings show.
Regional authorities have declared a state of emergency after the bears no longer react to noise - and light signals from guards trying to scare them off.
Belushaya Guba, like the entire Novaya Zemlya, is closed off military area. The newly upgraded air base Rogachevo is just a few kilometers outside of town.
But why don’t the bears want to leave the settlement? As previously reported by the Barents Observer, the Kara Sea off the east coast of Novaya Zemlya is this winter packed with very close drift ice.
Now, it appears like the human food-waste has a much more central role in the story than just the warming Arctic.
But first a look at the many media, including the Barents Observer, that last week jumped to conclusions pointing at climate changes when the stories about polar bears in trouble, or making trouble, found its way to global newsrooms.
The blog portal Polar Bear Science has collected links to many of the newspapers reporting about the sensational images from Novaya Zemlya.
The Guardian writes, “What polar bears in a Russian apartment block reveal about the climate crisis.”
The Washington Post writes under the headline, “A ‘mass invasion’ of polar bears is terrorizing an island town. Climate change is to blame” and the CBC makes a similar conclusion, headlining its article: “Russian Arctic town overrun by polar bears, climate change blamed.”
Mats Forsberg has sailed expeditions since 1982 and has assisted in TV productions about the polar bears in the Arctic. He has first-hand knowledge of polar bears’ behavior.
“These bears are well-fed,” he says to the Barents Observer after reviewing some of the videos.
“I would say these bears are not hanging around the houses due to climate changes. They have a huge amount of food dumped into nature by humans,” Forsberg says and concludes: “This is purely an on-site human-made problem.”
Some of the videos posted by local residents on Vkontakte show how tens of polar bears are eating garbage at the local dump site in Belushaya Guba. The bears actually look fat.
Evaluating media’s reporting, the blog site Polar Bear Science concludes: “Global warming is blamed for the problem but as is so often the case, that claim does not stand up to scrutiny.”
The blog is run by Susan Crockford, a zoologist with more than 35 years experience, including published work on the Holocene history of Arctic animals.
It is urgent that all Australian politicians understand the dangers in the Paris Climate Agreement. Here are TEN REASONS to EXIT PARIS NOW:
1. The science is NOT settled - hundreds of scientists in Australia and thousands more throughout the world reject the theory that human production of carbon dioxide is driving dangerous global warming. And the 102 computerized climate models have always predicted more warming than has occurred. (They got it right once, 39 years ago.)
2. There is no unusual global warming. Since the last ice age ended there have been warm eras hotter than today’s modern warming - the warm peaks are getting lower, not higher. Climate has always changed in response to forces far greater than human activities. The endless procession of man-made scare campaigns about cooling, warming, ice melting, sea levels, ocean acidity, cyclones and droughts have all proved false.
3. Carbon dioxide is NOT a pollutant - it is an invisible natural gas that supplies the whole food chain. More carbon dioxide is beneficial to the biosphere - forests, grasses and crops grow better thus benefitting all animal life that relies on plants.
4. The populous world nations are unlikely to curb their CO2 emissions - China, India, Russia, Brazil, USA, Japan, SE Asia, Indonesia, Africa and the Arab world will ignore Paris limits.
5. Despite 20 years of favorable promotion, subsidies, taxes, targets and propaganda the contribution of the intermittent energy producers (wind and solar) to world energy supplies is trivial - about 3% (see if you can find “solar” in the graph below.)
6. Australian energy policies, taxes and targets are making electricity more costly and less reliable, hurting consumers and driving industry off-shore. And once they have ruined electricity and coal their next targets will be agriculture and motorists.
7. With no nuclear power, no geothermal power, limited hydro potential and increasing barriers to gas exploration, Australia has few options except coal for cheap reliable grid power, and oil products for transport.
8. With a huge continent, a small population and heavy reliance on exports, each Australian will be heavily penalized by the Paris Agreement for the emissions associated with exports consumed by others.
9. Compliance with the Paris Agreement will destroy industries and jobs, encourage bureaucracy and transfer controls and money to affiliates of the United Nations.
10.Should the world experience even modest cooling in the decades ahead Australia will urgently need increased supply of reliable power for homes and industry and the global atmosphere will need more carbon dioxide plant food.
Viv Forbes
Executive Director
www.saltbushclub.com
forbes@saltbushclub.com
https://saltbushclub.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/01/saltbush-founding-members.pdf
This is the first Saltbush Chain Letter entitled Exit Paris Now.
Make sure you pass it on to at least FIVE recipients within 48 hours or the fleas of one thousand camels from the Saltbush country will infect your armpits.
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Hundreds of Consumers, Business people and Scientists say: “Get out of the Paris Agreement.”
“The Saltbush Club”
Skilled and Thinking Australians concerned at the huge costs and unproven benefits of the climate, energy and infrastructure policies on both sides of Federal Parliament.
A new lobby group comprising scientists, farmers, consumers, small business and big business is urging both sides of Australian politics to put aside party interests and global agendas to focus on what’s best for Australian business, workers, consumers and the environment.
The Saltbush Club calls for Australia to withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement and to cease financing or supporting the international bodies promoting it.
It challenges the whole idea of a consensus on man-made global warming.
Jerry Ellis, retired chairman of BHP, and Founding Chairman of the Saltbush Club says:
“It is clear that Australia’s push to meet the Paris carbon dioxide emission targets is leading to higher electricity prices and unreliable supply. We have lost the balance between working for environmental outcomes and working for economic outcomes. These things need to be balanced, and this balance is missing with the Paris Agreement. The world would be a better placed with strong economies generating money to spend on poverty, health, infrastructure and the environment.”
Hugh Morgan, CEO of Western Mining 1990-2003 and a director of the Saltbush Club agrees:
“People think the Paris Accord is just about commitments to lower CO2. It is really about transferring wealth via the UN to the so-called Less Developed Countries. It’s about advancing centralized control of people’s lives on a global scale. This climate alarm movement has got so far because of backing by Western millennials who have been indoctrinated during their education. Enjoying living standards unprecedented in world history, they have embraced alarmism as a new secular religion.”
Ellis and Morgan are supported by a large, skilled and experienced group of other Australians calling themselves “The Saltbush Club”. The group was organized by Viv Forbes (with a few helpers), from a country farm-house in Queensland with no landline, no NBN and less than $3,000 in financial support.
Forbes says:
“The Saltbush Club has over 200 foundation members, plus a bigger group of “silent” members. It will be a voice for those who are rarely heard in the climate and energy debate - those consumers of electricity who are concerned that the war on hydro-carbon energy has increased the costs and reduced the reliability of electricity for industry and private consumers. It welcomes anyone with a similar view, regardless of their political affiliations or leanings. We must reject the UN Agenda which is crippling western industry with high-cost unreliable electricity in a futile attempt to control global climate. Our top priority is to have Australia withdraw from the Paris Climate Agreement and to cease financing or supporting the international bodies promoting it.”
Jo Nova (a well-read blogger and Saltbush Media Director) added”
“Who speaks for consumers? Our elected reps are supposed to, but few are willing to speak up. There is a $1.5 trillion dollar global industry that wants Australia to accept Paris, but no debate about the vested interests that stand to profit while Australian consumers and businesses pay carbon taxes they have voted against every time they had the chance.”
Environmentalists first predicted impending climate disaster in the 1970s, but they didn’t call it global warming. Back then, it was “Global Cooling” that would end life on earth as we knew it. The smog of industrial pollutants was blocking out sunlight so severely, we were warned, that our planet would enter a new ice age unless we acted quickly. Magazine covers featured pictures of snowball earth.
In the eighties, we cleaned up our air, the threatened the ice age did not occur, and thousands of people with time on their hands and seeking purpose in life had discovered that they could make a career out of disaster prophecy. Thus, it was time for a new catastrophe: “Global Warming” Well, maybe not so new. Same villain: us and our machines. Same victim: our delicate planet earth. Same threat: the end of life as we know it. Only the predicted temperature had changed.
Global warming appealed to the press’s appetite for calamity and became an instant hit. The headlines wrote themselves: The poles will melt! The oceans will rise! Lakes and rivers will dry up! Farmlands will become deserts! Millions will starve to death! This was big. Government would have to join the fight.
In the nineties, environmentalists switched their emphasis to “Climate Change” This was a marketing move. Global warming could credibly be blamed for warming, but climate change could be blamed for anything. If hurricanes increase one year, that’s evidence of climate change. If they decrease the next year, well, that’s climate change too. Droughts are caused by climate change, but so are exceptional rains. Warmer winters prove climate change, but so do colder winters. (Claiming that frigid temperatures are caused by global warming would sound ridiculous.) “Climate Change” was disaster gold. It couldn’t be disproved.
Which is exactly why it’s not science. It’s pseudo-science, according to the great philosopher of science, Karl Popper, who pointed out that for any theory to be considered scientific, it must be falsifiable. There must be something within the theory itself that can be disproved.
This may be technically true, but what was far more important was that “Climate Change” had already been proven-- by three decades of data, by the computer models of climate experts, and by the overwhelming consensus of scientists.
But those “proofs” aren’t science either. Looking backward, climate change the phenomenon has been a constant feature of our planet. Real climate science tells us that temperatures have been much colder and much hotter in the past. (Canada once had a tropical climate.). For the past ten thousand years, we’ve been living in an interglacial period. These pleasant periods have tended to last for ten to fifteen thousand years, so real climate science predicts that we can enjoy about (up to) five thousand more years of temperate weather until the next ice age hits.
The theory of “Climate Change” is entirely different. To claim that it has been proven is to entirely misunderstand how science works. No scientific theory is ever proven. Theories that appear to accurately describe how nature works—like Darwin’s theory of evolution or Einstein’s relativity—are assigned the provisional status of not yet disproven, with the understanding that the discovery of a single contrary fact could throw a wrench into the works.
Strictly speaking, “Climate Change” theory isn’t really a scientific theory at all. It doesn’t take into relevant account factors which arguably have a far stronger effect upon climate than CO2, like the sun, ocean currents, and the greatest greenhouse gas of them all, water vapor.
What “Climate Change” is, is a bunch of doomsday predictions. Now, predictions are the critical part of the scientific method. They are what enable a theory to be proven or disproven. If they prove false, they’re also the best way to refute a theory.
Climate change alarmists have made lots of predictions. Perhaps too many, because not one of their predictions whose expiration date has passed has proven correct. Here’s a sampling, courtesy of Anthony Watts at wattsupwiththat.com:
1988, Dr. James Hansen. Asked by author Rob Reiss how the greenhouse effect was likely to affect the neighborhood below Hansen’s office in NYC in the next 20 years, Hansen replied: “The West Side Highway [which runs along the Hudson River] will be under water. And there will be tape across the windows across the street because of high winds. And the same birds won’t be there. The trees in the median strip will change...There will be more police calls [since] you know what happens to crime when the heat goes up.”
Sept 19, 1989, St. Louis Post-Dispatch: “New York will probably be like Florida 15 years from now.”
1990, Michael Oppenheimer, The Environmental Defense Fund: “By 1996, the Platte River of Nebraska would be dry, while a continent-wide black blizzard of prairie topsoil will stop traffic on interstates, strip paint from houses and shut down computers...The Mexican police will round up illegal American migrants surging into Mexico seeking work as field hands.”
October 15, 1990, Carl Sagan: “The planet could face an ecological and agricultural catastrophe by the next decade if global warming trends continue.”
1990, Actress Meryl Streep: “By the year 2000 - that’s less than ten years away—earth’s climate will be warmer than it’s been in over 100,000 years. If we don’t do something, there’ll be enormous calamities in a very short time.”
July 26, 1999, The Birmingham Post: “Scientists are warning that some of the Himalayan glaciers could vanish within ten years because of global warming. A build-up of greenhouse gases is blamed for the meltdown, which could lead to drought and flooding in the region affecting millions of people.”
April 1, 2000, Der Spiegel: “Good bye winter. Never again snow”
March 29, 2001, CNN: “In ten years’ time, most of the low-lying atolls surrounding Tuvalu’s nine islands in the South Pacific Ocean will be submerged under water as global warming rises sea levels.”
Oct 20, 2009, Gordon Brown, UK Prime Minister (referring to the Copenhagen climate conference): “World leaders have 50 days to save the Earth from irreversible global warming.”
To suggest that the scientific validity of “Climate Change” is debatable is to speak charitably. But there’s never been a debate, not for want of trying. Many skeptics have called for debates. In particular, Christopher Walter Monckton, 3rd Viscount Monckton of Brenchley, a hereditary peer, journalist, political advisor, inventor, and a skeptic well-versed in the details of climate science, has repeatedly challenged Al Gore to debate. That Al Gore has never replied to these requests is difficult to reconcile with his comments on the CBS “Early Show” (May 31, 2006):
“...the debate among the scientists is over. There is no more debate. We face a planetary emergency. There is no more scientific debate among serious people who’ve looked at the science… Well, I guess in some quarters, there’s still a debate over whether the moon landing was staged in a movie lot in Arizona, or whether the Earth is flat instead of round.”
These are not the words of a person who understands science. They are the tactics of a person who realizes he doesn’t have a scientific leg to stand on.
There must be another nonscientific reason for the “Climate Change” agenda. That reason may involve the billions of dollars that proponents have demanded for solving this “problem.”
