The US house and New Hampshire house and senate have bills pushing a zero emission goal. Since CO2 is not a pollutant and we have shown conclusively that CO2 has no measurable effect on temperatures, this is lunacy given the significant effect it has on energy prices and our ability to heat and cool our homes and drive our cars, we have responded.
The dump of arctic air to parts of Europe , briefly into China and Japan and this month the central U.S. has shown we need dependable and cheap clean natural gas or nuclear for baseload.
See here in New Hampshire SB71, HB 172, SB115
“The general court finds that New Hampshire’s public health, economy, natural resources and quality of life are threatened by increased air pollution and emissions impacting public health and climate change...based on scientific evidence and health data presented, New Hampshire should develop an emission reduction goal for 2050 of net zero emissions...in order to mitigate the impacts of climate change and protect public health, including the health of New Hampshire’s most vulnerable residents.”
Support Icecap efforts with generous donation via a secure access to Paypal. All work is done pro bono. Be sure to check out the search engine for many stories on any topic. We have 9000 entries with 145 million page views. Our team is fact checking the alarmist claims now that 2020 has ended. We are publishing a paper also on the topic. .
Going to be a wild ride the next few years. Politics and science pushed by globalists and the media are corrupted and young people are being misled by a failing education system. So many honest scientists are being attacked or punished. The battle started nearly 25 years ago when 31,487 American scientists signed this petition, including 9,029 with PhDs. It will continue. It must continue.
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Who are the Energy Fools?
By Viv Forbes
They are the fools who though Germany could run its industry on wind and solar energy (they found they needed nuclear from France, gas from Russia and hydro from Scandinavia.)
The same fools thought wind and solar could cope with a polar vortex on the Great Plains.
And they think that with mirrors, windmills, batteries, transmission lines, electric vehicles and hydrogen bubbles, Australia can reach Net Zero without destroying our basic industries.
Nothing can survive ridicule so let’s start the laughter and ridicule.
Can you help by reading this ditty anywhere and passing it on to friends, opinion leaders, media contacts or post on any media. And write some yourself. We are in a desperate battle for public opinion. This is just another sneaky shot with a daisy air rifle.
Wall Street Journal is pushing junk science that will lead to bad policies. The latest is one of the favorite fake scare - disappearing ice. “World’s Ice Is Melting Faster Than Ever, Climate Scientists Say”
Leonard Gaston opined:
Just a dozen years ago On November 28, 2009, the U.K.Telegraph carried this headline: “Climate change: this is the worst scientific scandal of our generation.”
The newspaper went on to say “What we are looking at here is the small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not least through the role they play at the heart of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”
Why would they do this?
On December 1, 2009 The Wall Street Journal answered that question in “Climategate: Follow the Money”: hil Jones, the director of the Climate Research Unit has been the recipient or co-recipient of some $19 million in research grants just since 2000. The money poured in because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly.The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?”
But why support from the larger scientific community outside the IPCC? The Wall Street Journal went on to say, “Universities, research institutes, advocacy groups, and their various spin-offs and dependents have emerged from the woodwork to receive them. Today these groups form a kind of ecosystem of their own.
As the WSJ explained, “None of these outfits are corrupt...but they depend on an inherently corrupting premise… that the hypothesis on which their livelihood depends has in fact been proved. Absent that proof, everything they represent - including the thousands of jobs they provide - vanishes. That is what’s known as a vested interest, and vested interests are an enemy of sound science.
They have given into heavy pressure from the left and other media. Still they must be confused by this new NASA release here.
Here is our reply to the WSJ:
The Arctic includes the Arctic Ocean, Greenland, Iceland, and part of Siberia and northern Alaska. Because of the absence of any land mass in the Arctic Ocean, most of area lacks glaciers, which require a land mass. Thus, most of the Arctic contains only floating sea ice. Greenland, Iceland, northern Alaska, and northern Siberia contain the only glaciers in the general Arctic region.
Arctic warming and the melting of the arctic ice are not at all unprecedented (they happen predictably on multidecadal scales with a period of around 60 years) and are in fact entirely natural. Warming results in part from the reduction of arctic ice extent because of flows of warm water into the arctic from the Pacific through the Bering Straits and from the Atlantic from the far North Atlantic Current. The warmer water thins the ice from beneath, slows the refreezing and limits to varying degrees the depth and extent of the ice.
The arctic ice unlike the Glaciers on land in Greenland, the Antarctic and in the world’s mountain ranges is floating on water and the melting has no effect on sea level (much as ice in cold beverages doesn’t cause the liquid to overflow the glass when it melts).
The Monthly Weather Review in 1922 alerted to the start of this warming period “a radical change in climatic conditions, and hitherto unheard-of high temperatures”
Polyakov et al (2002) created a temperature record using stations north of 62 degrees N. The late 1930s-early 1940s were clearly the warmest of the last century. In addition, the numbers of available observations in the late 1930s-early 1940s (slightly more than 50) is comparable to recent decades.
The Japan Agency for Marine-Earth Science and Technology in Yokosuka, Kanagawa Prefecture observed in a story in Yahoo Asia News in 2005 an ice shrinkage in the western Arctic Ocean from 1997 to 1998 that they attributed to “...by the flow to the area of warm water from the Pacific Ocean, not by atmospheric impact as previously thought”. This was related to the super El Nino of 1997/98. JAMSTEC’s Koji Shimada, the group’s sub-leader, said the shrinkage was particularly severe in the Pacific side of the Arctic Ocean. The ocean]s ratio of area covered with ice during the summer stood at about 60-80 percent from the 1980s to mid-1990s, but it went down to 15-30 percent after 1998, he said. Trenberth (1999) also has acknowledged this warming effect of El Nino on the arctic.
The cycle with respect to arctic temperatures and ice relate to multidecadal cycles in ocean temperatures in both the Pacific (Pacific Decadal Oscillation or PDO) and Atlantic (Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation or AMO).
The Pacific warm mode favors more El Ninos and warmer water in the far northern Pacific including the Bering Straits. The PDO flipped into its warm mode in 1978 and the arctic temperatures began to warm and ice began to melt repeating what happened in the 1910s to early 1940s time period.
In the winter 0f 2019/20, at Fairbanks average daytime high was -2.1F, while the daytime low -20F, average daily mean was -11F! The coldest was -43F while the warmest was 31F December 9. 33 days were at or below -30F, 5 were at or below -40F. The winter averaged 4.7F below normal, the 3rd coldest since before the Great Pacific Climate Shift (a shift of the so called Pacific Decadal Oscillation to positive) in the late 1970s when warmer Pacific waters favored warmth in Alaska and western North America.
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 beneath the ice.
Of the two oceans, for the larger arctic basin, the Atlantic may be more important.
Pryzbylak (2000) says:
“There exists an agreement in estimating temperature tendencies prior to 1950. Practically all (old and new) of the papers which cover this time period concentrate on the analysis of the significant warming which occurred in the Arctic from 1920 to about 1940....In the Arctic, the highest temperatures since the beginning of instrumental observation occurred clearly in the 1930s. Moreover, it has been shown that even in the 1950s the temperature was higher than in the last 10 years.”
“For arctic temperature, the most important factor is a change in the atmospheric circulation over the North Atlantic” The influence of the atmospheric circulation changes over the Pacific (both in the northern end and in the tropical parts) is significantly lower”
As is the case for US temperatures, the combination of the PDO and AMO Indexes (PDO+AMO) again has considerable explanatory power for Arctic average temperature.
Arctic basin wide temperatures from Polyakov (2003) versus PDO+AMO (STD). Dark blue is annual and purple 5 year running means.
“In approximately the last 140 years, there have been two periods of significant temperature increases in the Arctic. The first began in around 1918-1920 and lasted until 1938 and has been called the ‘1930s warming’ (Bengtsson et al. 2004). Other works have referred to this period as the ‘Early Twentieth Century Warming’ (ETCW, Bronnimann 2009) or the Early Twentieth Century Arctic Warming’ (ETCAW, Wegmann et al. 2017, 2018)
Karlen (2005) reported on historical temperatures in Svalbard (Lufthavn, at 78 deg N latitude), claiming that the area represents a large portion of the Arctic. It is reported that the “mean annual temperature increased rapidly from the 1910s to the late 1930s.” Later, temperatures dropped, “and a minimum was reached around 1970.” Once again, “Svalbard thereafter became warmer, but the mean temperature in the late 1990s was still slightly cooler than it was in the late 1930s.”
Drinkwater (2006) concluded that “in the 1920s and 1930s, there was a dramatic warming of the air and ocean temperatures in the northern North Atlantic and the high Arctic, with the largest changes occurring north of 60N,” which “led to reduced ice cover in the Arctic and subarctic regions and higher sea temperatures.” This was “the most significant regime shift experienced in the North Atlantic in the 20th century.”
Hanna, et al (2006) estimated Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) near Iceland over a 119-year period based on measurements made at ten coastal stations located between latitudes 63N and 67N. They concluded that there had been “generally cold conditions during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; strong warming in the 1920s, with peak SSTs typically being attained around 1940; and cooling thereafter until the 1970s, followed once again by warming - but not generally back up to the level of the 1930s/1940s warm period.”
THE EFFECT ON ICE COVER
Both the Atlantic and Pacific play roles in arctic ice extent. The sea ice extent diminished following the Great Pacific Climate Shift (flip of the PDO to positive) in the late 1970s. It stayed relatively stable until early 2000s when a more precipitous decline began, related to a spike in North Atlantic warmth and a positive AO.
Dmitrenko and Polyokov (2003) observed that warm Atlantic water in the early 2000s from the warm AMO that developed in the middle 1990s had made its way under the ice to off of the arctic coast of Siberia where it thinned the ice by 30% much as it did when it happened in the last warm AMO period from the 1880s to 1930s.
The University of Colorado’s National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) summarized the role of the ocean cycles very well in October 2007 in this way:
“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.”
THE SUN AS THE ULTIMATE DRIVER FOR CLIMATE IN ARCTIC
As to the driver for the multidecadal ocean cycles it may well be the solar cycles. Soon (GRL 2005) showed how the Arctic temperatures (Polyakov) correlated extremely well with the total solar irradiance (Hoyt-Schatten) (r-squared of 0.79). This compared to an r-squared correlation of just 0.22 with the CO2.
Greenland is often considered a sign of climate change. The data here too suggests it is cyclical and relates to ocean cycles on century scales and longer. Note the current interglacial period ice core data tells us the last 10,000 years shows 1000-year cycles. They have slowly declined as we move towards the end of the interglacial period (usually just over 10,000 years in length). The last warm period called the Medieval Warm Period saw ice retreat in Greenland enough to entice the Vikings to settle Greenland and grow crops including grapes for wine. They abandoned it as we cooled towards the Little Ice Age.
The figure below shows temperature changes during the past 30 years, compared to temperatures recorded between 1950 and 1980. Most of Antarctica is cooling, with warming occurring over just a small portion of the continent that juts out into the Southern Ocean. That region is volcanic with both surface and sea bottom vents. It is also subject to periodic warming from winds that blow downslope and locally warm by compression.
Previous studies showed cooling across all of the much larger East Antarctic Ice Sheet and warming limited to the Antarctic Peninsula of west Antarctica. In 2009, Steig et al. published a controversial paper, “Warming of the Antarctic Ice-Sheet Surface Since the 1957 International Geophysical Year,” in Nature contending that warming instead was occurring.
Antarctic temperatures show that Antarctica is cooling, not warming
Measured satellite and surface temperatures confirm the lack of warming over most of Antarctica. The UAH and RSS satellite records are the most comprehensive.
Enlarged
UAH Antarctic satellite temperatures show no warming for 37 years.
The Southern Ocean showing sharp cooling since 2006.
WEST ANTARCTIC ICE SHEET
The West Antarctic Ice Sheet occupies a deep basin west of the main East Antarctic Ice Sheet. It comprises only about 8% of glacial ice in Antarctica. The Antarctic Peninsula has been cooling sharply since 2006. Ocean temperatures have been plummeting since about 2007, sea ice has reached all-time highs, and surface temperatures at 13 stations on or near the Antarctic Peninsula have been cooling since 2000. A plot of temperature anomalies at 13 Antarctic stations on or near the Antarctic Peninsula show that the Antarctic Peninsula was warming up until 2000 but has been cooling dramatically since then.
The Larsen Ice Shelf Station has been cooling at an astonishing rate of 1.8 C per decade (18C per century) since 1995. Nearby Butler Island records even faster cooling at 1.9 C/decade. Sea ice around Antarctica is increasing because ocean temperature from the surface to 100 m dropped below the freezing point in 2008 and has stayed there since.
Annual average temperature at the Larsen Ice Shelf shows sharp cooling (1.8C/decade). (Easterbrook, 2016) (From GISTemp.)
SUMMARY
Multidecadal Oscillations in the Pacific and the Atlantic are acknowledged to be the result of natural processes. The warm mode of the Pacific results in warm water off Alaska that can enter the arctic through the Bering Strait and produce arctic ice melt. The warm mode of the AMO also results in warming in the North Atlantic waters, which are carried by the North Atlantic current into the arctic reducing ice depth and extent. When you combine the two cycles, you can explain the temperature and ice cover variances of the past 110 years for the Arctic.
Greenland data suggests the recent warming falls far short of earlier warming periods during the current interglacial and short of the warming early in the 20th century. The Antarctic has cooled and ice has increased in recent years although volcanism near the Antarctic peninsula leads to local water warmth and sea ice melting. Prior to the recent melting, the ice cover reached a long-term record high.
Also we should note that the prescribed melting reported in the Science Journal can’t be claimed a long time record as global ocean data prior to the satellite (1980) and Argo Buoy era (post 2004) is spotty at best.
Even if the claims about water released were true, computations show global sea level would rise just 4 inches/century (agreeing with global data) and not the up to 24 feet promised decades ago. See the sea level story here.
Note the looney Green Dealers are claiming had green energy been in place, this would not happened. Actually it would have been far worse. Wind turbines encased in ice and and snow covered solar panels accounted for 20% of the energy for Texas. ERCOT has some splaining to do. But 100% wind and solar would not have helped.
First it drives up energy costs:
They have found out in other places with similar climate exposure like Germany it is expensive and unreliable and Germany built coal plants and now are buying a natural gas pipeline from Russia to provide reliable base load. France set up a network of safe nuclear plants for that same reason.
See thee real flaws and issues with wind farms here.
Snow covered the solar farms like recently in Germany below. Photos showing the same in the U.S. can be found on the web.
Texas. It is the number one energy producing state in the United States. It is both the largest producer of oil, and the largest producer of natural gas, and has been for decades. Texas also has abundant coal reserves. It has been ground zero of the fracking revolution, which has revolutionized oil and gas production, vastly increased supplies, driven prices down by around two-thirds since 2014, and turned the U.S. into a net energy exporter for the first time in decades. By all rights, Texas should be the shining beacon of fossil fuel energy abundance for everyone else to envy.
And yet in Texas this week, there has been a good blast of cold air, accompanied by some meaningful ice and snow storms, and suddenly Texas finds itself with widespread power blackouts covering much of the state. Although the levels of cold and ice have been somewhat unusual, they have also been well within the range of historical experience. Meanwhile, other states farther north have been colder and have had more snow and more ice and yet the power has not gone out. What gives?
The simple answer is that despite its great abundance of fossil fuel energy, Texas nevertheless fell big for the ridiculous scam of trying to produce a high percentage of its electricity from wind. Yes, the story is somewhat more complicated than that, as stories always are. But not much more complicated. Basically, with its grid stressed in many ways in the past week, the wind was useless to carry the load that needed to be carried.
The Wall Street Journal in an editorial today collects some basic data from Texas as to electricity supply capacity and usage. Total winter generation capacity for the state is about 83 GW, while peak winter usage is about 57 GW. That’s a margin of over 45% of capacity over peak usage. In a fossil-fuel-only or fossil-fuel-plus-nuclear system, where all sources of power are dispatchable, a margin of 20% would be considered normal, and 30% would be luxurious. This margin is well more than that. How could that not be sufficient?
The answer is that Texas has gone crazy for wind. About 30 GW of the 83 GW of capacity are wind. That means that even if all the fossil fuel and nuclear facilities are running at full tilt, you still need at least some wind at all times. And the fossil-fuel and nuclear facilities are not going to run all the time at full tilt. You are going to have scheduled outages, and also breakdowns from time to time. That’s why you would like to have a margin of up to 30%. It turns out that the cold weather and icy conditions brought some serious breakdowns on the fossil fuel side.
So how how did the wind do at covering the gaps? The answer is, it’s completely useless. From the WSJ:
Winds this past month have generated between about 600 and 22,500 MW. Regulators don’t count on wind to provide much more than 10% or so of the grid’s total capacity since they can’t command turbines to increase power like they can coal and gas plants.
Yes, sometimes the wind turbines only generate at a rate of 600 MW - which is about 2% of their capacity. And you never know when that’s going to be.
Texas has its own electrical grid, run by something called the Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT). ERCOT of course is probably the single most responsible entity for Texas getting into a situation of great over-reliance on intermittent wind energy. Thus it is not surprising that ERCOT is spinning like a top to try to make it look like its own bad bet on wind energy has not been the main cause of the current disaster. The official line is that the “great majority” of power facility “outages” in Texas over the past week have been other than wind facilities. For example, here we have an article from Renewable Energy Magazine today with the headline “ERCOT finds that frozen wind turbines were the least significant factor in Texas blackouts.” Excerpt:
The Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) has released data showing that the vast majority of power plant outages in Texas were gas-fired generators. As multiple experts have documented, the vast majority of power plant capacity outages in Texas are at gas generators. Read more at
Texas: Time To Get Rid Of This Ridiculous Wind Power
Let’s have yet another go at trying to apply the scientific method to the subject of causation of climate change. This is just basic logic, and not that complicated. We can do it.
As simple and basic as this is, you will shortly see that the agglomeration of all of the world’s leading “climate scientists” can’t figure it out. They are completely lost and befuddled. Check me and see if I’m wrong.
The proposition we are addressing is the one for which you see a constant drumbeat of advocacy. It runs something like, “the climate is changing, and we are the cause.” OK, nobody denies that the climate is changing; but how about the “we are the cause” part? What is the proof?
Let’s apply the scientific method. We start with the basic maxim that “correlation does not prove causation.” Instead, causation is established by disproof of all relevant alternative ("null") hypotheses.
Everybody knows how this works from drug testing. We can’t prove that drug A cures disease X by administering drug A a thousand times and observing that disease X almost always goes away. Disease X might have gone away for other reasons, or on its own. Even if we administer drug A a million times, and disease X almost always goes away, we have only proved correlation, not causation. To prove causation, we must disprove the null hypothesis by testing drug A against a placebo. The placebo represents the null hypothesis that something else (call it “natural factors") is curing disease X. When drug A is significantly more effective at curing disease X than the placebo, then we have disproved the null hypothesis, and established, at least provisionally, the effectiveness of drug A.
Back to climate change. The hypothesis is “humans are causing significant climate change.” An appropriate null hypothesis would be “observed climate change can be fully explained by some combination of natural factors.” How might you test this?
The Upcoming Biden Administration Calls For Extreme Levels Of Reality Denial
December 18, 2020/ Francis Menton
The Upcoming Biden Administration Calls For Extreme Levels Of Reality Denial
As discussed here in a recent post, being a climate “believer” requires basic refusal to deal with the real world as it exists. And no matter how crazy it has been up to now, with the incoming Biden administration, get ready for the make believe to move up to a whole new level.
Can we actually change the weather by throwing trillions of taxpayer dollars into windmills and solar panels? That’s what we are all now going to pretend. Kim Strassel sees where it’s going in today’s Wall Street Journal:
[I]t’s all about green. Climate will be the driving priority of this White House - Mr. Biden’s make-nice to progressives. He’ll have a climate envoy ( John Kerry ), a climate czar ( Gina McCarthy ), and climate obsessives leading every department ( Janet Yellen, Pete Buttigieg, Jennifer Granholm ).
Where Is The Criticism Of China From Environmentalists?
December 14, 2020/ Francis Menton
You undoubtedly are aware that the international environmental movement has almost entirely been taken over and consumed by the climate change scare; and you also cannot help but be aware of the constant drumbeat of attacks by environmentalists on the U.S. government, particularly under President Trump, for its failure to reduce carbon emissions sufficiently to “save the planet.”
At the same time, you are a reader of the Manhattan Contrarian. Therefore, you know that China is not only not reducing its own carbon emissions, but instead has well more than tripled them over the past twenty years (during which period U.S. emissions have declined modestly by about 15%); and today China is in the midst of a new round of massive expansion of its fossil fuel energy generation capacity, particularly with respect to the most carbon-intensive fuel, coal…
So then surely the major environmental organizations must be coming down hard on China? Wrong.
Note see this excellent library of 27 stories on scientific fraud that Buddy has compiled.
October 05, 2020/ Francis Menton
The Greatest Scientific Fraud Of All Time—Part XXVII
It has been more than a year since I last added a post to this series. The previous post in the series, Part XXVI, appeared on August 20, 2019. For all of the prior twenty-six posts, go to this composite Link.
There are two reasons for a new post at this time. The first is that there is some new work out from a guy named Tony Heller. The new work can be found at Heller’s website here, with a date of October 1. Heller also indicates that he intends to continue to add to and supplement this work.
Heller is an independent researcher who particularly focuses on the subject of this series: alterations to past government climate data to create an impression of warming that does not exist in the data as originally reported.
Heller is quite skilled at going through reams of government climate data, and turning those data into useful graphs to demonstrate his points.
My colleagues and I have given many lectures about the myths, misconceptions and outright lies in the global warming arena the last few decades. After an hour of graphs, charts and pictures detailing how a tiny trace gas, carbon dioxide, has no relationship to whatever warming and cooling or weather extremes has occurred we get the inevitable statement from someone in the audience.
“How can you deny that man made global warming and its effects are real when 97 percent of climate scientists agree that it is true?”
At that point we have to explain that the 97 percent figure is not what it appears to be. It is a convenient fiction to imply a consensus.
It is now the rule in the schools. Our students are not being taught the scientific method. In the classroom they are taught what to think and not how to think.
THE SCIENTIFIC METHOD AND THE PHONEY CONSENSUS
The scientific method does not involve a poll or vote by scientists (that is in the realm of politics where you vote on a law or candidate), but validation of a theory with facts.
Michael Crichton, PhD, MD, famous author, producer, screenwriter and lecturer often talked about claims of a consensus.
“Historically the claim of consensus is the first refuge of scoundrel; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming 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. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus… Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics.”
The fact that a VP and a failed presidential candidate who had a D in the only science class he ever took produced the movie An Inconvenient Truth seen by our children numerous times in schools even in gym class should raise eyebrows. It did in the UK where the courts ruled in order for the film to be shown that teachers must make clear that the film is a political work and promotes only one side of the argument, and if teachers present the film without making this plain they may be in breach of the 1996 Education Act and guilty of political indoctrination. They required the eleven most egregious inaccuracies had to be specifically drawn to the attention of school children.
WHAT DO SCIENTISTS REALLY THINK?
There have been many polls and declarations that demonstrate a large percentage of real scientists believe in climate change BUT that natural factors are the primary driver.
Climatology wasn’t a recognized specialty or profession even at colleges when I first taught weather and climate in the 1970s into the early 1980s. It was mostly a small part of introductory classes on weather or in geography or geology courses. When climate change became part of an anti fossil fuel agenda and big money suddenly appeared, teachers never trained in climate suddenly became ‘climate scientists’. Environmental sciences emerged as a career path.
The UN, politicians, industry and the mainstream and on-line media would want you to believe that all scientists have now seen the light, that there is a consensus. That is not the case. Most honest scientist know so. Many are forced into silence or if they vocalize their dissent, find their careers endangered or even destroyed. Still many when past the stage of their career where they can speak the truth or when they can do so anonymously, will do so.
A Global Warming Petition was signed by 31,487 scientists including 9,029 with PHDs in their fields. The petition states that: “There is no convincing scientific evidence that the 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”.
1100 Climate Realists signed ‘’The Manhattan Declaration on Climate Change” from 40 countries demanding an end to climate hysteria. 1000+ International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims to the U.S. Senate, 300+ Eminent Scientists Reject U.N. Climate Change Treaty (Paris Accord). A recent survey found 1350 peer review papers questioning global warming and 1000 papers believing cooling has begun. See my team’s effort to fact-check popular alarmist claims here. We have many other peer review papers disprove the theory.
Scientists are aware of the failures too and now have proposed 54 excuses and counting as to why their models have failed. See this interesting series on the Great Scientific Fraud here.
There are many well-educated people who do not agree with the survey and its 97% figure. In a 2011 Scientific American opinion poll on the state of climate science provided the eye-opening results cast by their “scientifically literate” readership. With a total of 5190 respondents, a consensus of 81.3% think the IPCC is “a corrupt organization, prone to group-think, with a political agenda” and 75% think climate change is caused by solar variation or natural processes vs. 21% who think it is due to greenhouse gases from human activity. 65% think we should do nothing about climate change since “we are powerless to stop it,” and the same percentage think science should stay out of politics. When asked, “How much would you be willing to pay to forestall the risk of catastrophic climate change?”.76.7% said “nothing.” Scientific American removed the poll when pressured by environmental groups.
In a 2013 Forbes article, it was reported only 36 percent of earth scientists and engineers believe that humans are creating a global warming crisis, according to a survey reported in the peer-reviewed Organization Studies. By contrast, a strong majority of the 1,077 respondents believe that nature is the primary cause of recent global warming and/or that future global warming will not be a very serious problem. The survey results show earth scientists and engineers hold similar views as meteorologists.
Even a global UN survey of the public, received over 9.7 million votes and found in prioritizing what should be focused on, action on climate change finished last.
The first quoted source was an online survey that was published in 2009 by Peter Doran and Maggie Kendall Zimmerman from the University of Illinois. The survey was sent to 10,257 scientists to, which 3,146 scientists responded to.
There were two primary questions in the survey. The first “When compared to pre-1800 levels, do you think mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant? ”
History has recorded a prolonged global cold era know as “The Little Ice Age” that lasted from about 1400 to 1850 AD. Since that time the global average temperature has risen. I know of no meteorologist, climatologist or anyone involved in the study of the earth’s temperature, who would argue this point.
Question number two asked “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?”
BUT what constitutes “human activity”? The burning of fossil fuels to make energy is one. The changing of land surfaces to make cities, farmland and deforestation is “human activity” that can change temperature as well. Changing mean temperature can be accomplished by changing the environment around a climate recording station. This is also “human activity”. As rural stations are increasingly surrounded by urban sprawl, roads and buildings, the temperature of the site will warm due to the “Urban Heat Island (UHI)” effect. This has nothing to due with fossil fuel. The results from the survey do not address just what constitutes “human activity”. A “yes” response to question two implies the responder is referring to fossil fuels but that is not necessarily the case. It is however, what the survey likely wanted to convey.
Question number two also does not address what the word “significant” means to each individual respondent. What constitutes significant can be very different from person to person.
The 97% figure from the on-line survey comes from a whittling down of the accepted number of responses from 3,146 to 79. The 79 scientists are those that said they have recently published 50% of their papers in the area of climate change. Of these, 76 of 79 answered “risen” to questions one (96.2%). How this number is not 100% was a surprise. As to question two, 75 of 77 answered ‘yes” (97.4%).
An attempt at a more rigorous approach to confirm the 97% number followed and failed. Cook et al. (2013) attempted to categorize 11,944 abstracts [brief summaries] of papers (not entire papers) to their level of endorsement of AGW. They found 7930 (66%) held no position on AGW, while only 64 papers (0.5% of the total) explicitly endorsed humans are the primary (50%+) as the cause. This was 97% of those who explicitly identified a cause. A later analysis by Legates et al. (2013) found there to be only 41 papers (0.3%) that supported this definition.
Cook et al. (2013) was published in the journal Environmental Research Letters (ERL) which conveniently has multiple outspoken alarmist scientists on its editorial board (e.g. Peter Gleick and Stefan Rahmstorf) where the paper likely received substandard “pal-review” instead of the more rigorous peer-review. The paper has since been refuted five times in the scholarly literature by Legates et al. (2013), Tol (2014a), Tol (2014b), Dean (2015) and Tol (2016).
All the other “97% consensus” studies: e.g. Doran & Zimmerman (2009), Anderegg et al. (2010) and Oreskes (2004) have been refuted by peer-review.
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AN UPHILL BATTLE
Alarmists have the advantage of virtually all the massive funding for climate change research ($1.65Byear) and they have a huge ‘social support’ group of
(1) Agenda driven or ratings driven journalists, environmentalists and corporations that have realized green is their favorite color and see this as a way to keep green paper flowing into their coffers and pockets
(2) Traders and major market firms licking their chops at the prospects of big time money from alternative energy companies that have realized this is the vector to bigger profits and
(3) Politicians and political activists who see it as a way to accomplish ulterior goals about changing society and increasing their powerbase.
Some Saw This Coming
“The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed - and hence clamorous to be led to safety - by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.” And, “he urge to save humanity is almost always only a false face for the urge to rule it.” H.L. Mencken
Well before the climate change scare started, we were warned in 1961:
“… [In] the technological revolution during recent decades...research has become central ... complex, and costly. A steadily increasing share is conducted for, by, or at the direction of, the Federal government ... the solitary inventor ... has been overshadowed by task forces of scientists in laboratories and testing fields ... the free university, historically the fountainhead of free ideas and scientific discovery, has experienced a revolution in the conduct of research. Partly because of the huge costs involved, a government contract becomes virtually a substitute for intellectual curiosity. The prospect of domination of the nation’s scholars by Federal employment, project allocations, and the power of money is ever present and is gravely to be regarded.”
- President Eisenhower in his Farewell address
His words have been proven remarkably prophetic. Look at the real motivations in their own words.
“The common enemy of humanity is man. In searching for a new enemy to unite us, we came up with the idea that pollution, the threat of global warming, water shortages, famine and the like would fit the bill.”
- The Club of Rome Premier environmental think-tank and consultants to the United Nations.
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“We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.”
- Timothy Wirth, President of the UN Foundation
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“No matter if the science of global warming is all phony...climate change provides the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
- Christine Stewart, former Canadian Minister of the Environment
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“It doesn’t matter what is true, it only matters what people believe is true.”
- Paul Watson, co-founder of Greenpeace
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“The only way to get our society to truly change is to frighten people with the possibility of a catastrophe.”
- Emeritus professor Daniel Botkin
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“The future is to be [One] World Government with central planning by the United Nations. Fear of environmental crises - whether real or not - is expected to lead to compliance.”
- Former Washington State Democratic governor Dixy Lee Ray
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“Urgent and unprecedented environmental and social changes challenge scientists to define a new social contract...a commitment on the part of all scientists to devote their energies and talents to the most pressing problems of the day, in proportion to their importance, in exchange for public funding.”
NOAA’s Administrator Jane Lubchenko, when she was president of AAAS in 1999
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“Our aim is not to save the world from ecological calamity but to change the global economic system… This is probably the most difficult task we have ever given ourselves, which is to intentionally transform the economic development model, for the first time in human history.” In simpler terms, replace free enterprise, entrepreneurial capitalism with UN-controlled centralized, One World government and economic control.
- UN Climate Chief Christiana Figueres
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“One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. “It is not. It is actually about how “we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth.”
-IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer
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“We must make this an insecure and inhospitable place for capitalists and their projects. We must reclaim the roads and plowed land, halt dam construction, tear down existing dams, free shackled rivers and return to wilderness millions of acres of presently settled land.”
- David Foreman, co-founder of Earth First
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“Giving society cheap, abundant energy would be the equivalent of giving an idiot child a machine gun.”
- Prof Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University
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The Green New Deal was not conceived as an effort to deal with climate change, but instead a “how-do-you-change-the-entire economy thing” (nothing more than a thinly veiled socialist takeover of the U.S. economy) “The interesting thing about the Green New Deal is it wasn’t originally a climate thing at all,”
-Saikat Chakrabarti, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s chief of staff.
The universities, professional societies and even congress has taken serious and alarming steps to eliminate (punish) doubters and public opinion. They attack any of their own, who speak out. That includes formerly outspoken environmentalists like Dr. Patrick Moore, co founder of Greenpeace and Michael Shellenberger formerly Time Magazine’s ‘Hero of the Environment’ whose apology for the false scare which was published by Forbes but then forced to be removed. They even have threatened to use RICO against any vocal doubters that remain. See why attention to this is important for our future here.
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hil Jones, the director of the Climate Research Unit has been the recipient or co-recipient of some $19 million in research grants just since 2000. The money poured in because the climate alarm kept ringing so loudly.The louder the alarm, the greater the sums. And who better to ring it than people like Mr. Jones, one of its likeliest beneficiaries?”
