Now that the mainstream media are hyperventilating over global warming being responsible for the heat wave, fires and thunderstorms hitting the US, it is a good time to check if they are applying the same science they used to explain winter cold snaps, like the one we saw just 2 years ago.

If they were serious, you’d at least think their science would remain consistent when explaining weather extremes. Anything else, after all, is just quackery.

Two years ago, the AP and scientists blamed the unusually cold winter weather on “natural variability”; they began:

Beijing had its coldest morning in almost 40 years and its biggest snowfall since 1951. Britain is suffering through its longest cold snap since 1981. And freezing weather is gripping the Deep South, including Florida’s orange groves and beaches.

Whatever happened to global warming? experts say the cold snap doesn’t disprove global warming at all ‘It’s part of natural variability,’ said Gerald Meehl, a senior scientist at the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colo. With global warming, he said, ‘we’ll still have record cold temperatures. We’ll just have fewer of them.’

Scientists say man-made climate change does have the potential to cause more frequent and more severe weather extremes...and even cold spells.”

The AP then quoted scientists to explain the cause of the cold snap of 2010, saying that it was just a “big outbreak of Arctic air over populated areas of the Northern Hemisphere”, and then went on to provide the details about natural variability, which of course is reasonable.

But to explain the current 2012 heat wave near DC, they completely abandoned the reasonable science and went off and blamed CO2 witchcraft and Big Oil sorcerers summoning a heat wave.

So it’s up to us to use the rest of the AP’s 2010 story to explain the heat wave, changing only a few words:

“We basically have seen just a big outbreak of Arctic tropical air’ over populated areas of the Northern Hemisphere, Arndt said. ‘The Arctic tropical air has really turned itself loose on us.’

In the atmosphere, large rivers of air travel roughly west to east around the globe between the Arctic and the tropics. This air flow acts like a fence to keep Arctic tropical air confined.

But recently, this air flow has become bent into a pronounced zigzag pattern, meandering north south and south north. If you live in a place where it brings air up down from the south north, you get warm cold weather. In fact, record highs lows were reported this week in Washington state and Alaska West Coast.

But in the eastern United States, like some other unlucky parts of the globe, Arctic tropical air is swooping down in from the north southwest. And that’s how you get a temperature of 3 104 degrees in Beijing Washington DC, a reading of minus-42 +104 in mainland Norway Norfolk, and 18 inches of snow rain in parts of Britain the South, where a member of Parliament Congress who said the snow heat ‘clearly indicates a cooling warming trend’ was jeered by colleagues.

The zigzag pattern arises naturally from time to time, but it is not clear why it’s so strong right now, said Michelle L’Heureux, a meteorologist at the Climate Prediction Center of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. The center says the pattern should begin to weaken in a week or two.

Jeff Masters, director of meteorology for Weather Underground, a forecasting service, said he expects more typical winter summer weather across North America early next week.

That will be welcome news in the South, where farmers have been trying to salvage millions of dollars’ worth of strawberries and other crops.

Why Borenstein and the quack scientists he interviewed didn’t use the same 2010 cold-snap science to explain the general atmospheric dynamics behind the current heat is sort of a mystery. Now that we are dealing with heat, they are blaming it all on CO2 without even citing a single paper to back it up.

So what are we left with? We have to assume that it’s a few fringe charlatans trying to fan the flames of fear. It’s as sad an example of sham science as you’ll ever find.

For these catastrophe-mongers, warm weather in the winter means global warming, cold weather in the winter also means global warming, heat in the summer of course means global warming, and so does cold in the summer. It is nothing more than the irresponsible perpetuation of an increasingly obvious fraud.

Folks,

A simply astonishing attack on two recent critical US campus lectures on DAGW, published in EOS - the weekly news sheet of the American Geophysical Union, the largest professional geoscience organisation in the world; followed by Lord Monckton’s pithy reply.

Professor Robert (Bob) M. Carter

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Eos Forum, Vol. 93, No. 27, 3 July 2012

Effective Strategies to Counter Campus Presentations on Climate Denial

By Jeffrey D. Corbin, Department of Biological Sciences, Union College, Schenectady, N. Y.; E-mail: corbinj@union.edu; and Miriam E. Katz, Department of Earth and Environmental Sciences, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, N. Y.

PAGES 252-253 2012. American Geophysical Union. All Rights Reserved.

Although 97%- 98% of the climate researchers most actively publishing in the field accept the basic tenets of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) findings [Anderegg et al., 2010], there is a consistent undercurrent of doubt among the general public (A. Leiserowitz et al., Global warming’s six Americas in May 2011, online report, 57 pp., Yale Project on Climate Change Communication, Yale University, New Haven, Conn., 2011). To some extent, this doubt is fueled by high-profile climate change deniers who offer “the real view” of climate science

[Oreskes and Conway, 2010]. Our campuses recently hosted two such speakers: Ivar Giaever at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute (RPI) and Christopher Monckton (also known as Lord Monckton) at Union College. (Monckton’s presentation can be seen at http:// union.campusreform.org/ group/ blog/ live -webinar-lord -monckton-at -union-college.)

While such speakers often intend to muddy the waters with respect to climate science [McCright and Dunlap, 2010], the effect at our campuses was to galvanize our students and colleagues to highlight the widely accepted facts of climate change and the nature of expert scientific consensus on this topic. This communication was achieved using social media and followup events that raised the profile of climate change discussions. These events proved to be so successful that we offer our experiences so that others can capitalize on similar visits by climate change deniers by converting them into “teachable moments.”

It is our intention neither to address the content of the lectures nor to expand on the extensive rebuttals to their arguments [e.g., Nordhaus , 2012] (see also http:// www .realclimate.org/ wiki/index.php?title=ChristopherMonckton and http://courseweb.stthomas.edu/ jpabraham/globalwarming/Monckton/Monckton%20Presentation%20June %2022/ index.htm).

Instead, we describe the successful use of multiple strategies to present an accurate picture of climate science. The attention and publicity surrounding the presentations by the climate change deniers almost certainly engaged both of our institutions in a discussion of climate science to a far greater extent than would have occurred if controversial speakers were not brought to campus. The announcement of each upcoming lecture was a cause for concern for us and our colleagues because - let us be clear - there is damage to be done by such (misre)presentations.

Educating the public so that people understand the science of climate change, including its causes and potential consequences, is a difficult task. By distorting the scientific process or attacking the legitimacy of scientists, such as those involved in the presentation of the United Nations’ IPCC reports, these speakers have a chance to undo much of the work we have done. It was neither practical nor desirable to block either speaker from making his presentation at our campuses.

Giaever, for example, is a member of the RPI faculty, and neither speaker received speaking fees from our institutions for his appearance. Furthermore, colleges and universities exist for the very purpose of exchanging ideas. Rather, the most effective way to counter such distorting presentations is to provide a more accurate picture of climate science and to point out flaws in the speakers’ analyses. We did this along with a diverse coalition of students and faculty from a variety of departments. Strategies included public displays with information and illustrations related to climate change science, the use of social media sites such as Twitter and Reddit to exchange information and ideas, and the organization of follow- up events that focused on the science of climate change.

The follow-up events, in particular, were essential to our efforts’ success. The RPI event, called “The Science of Climate Change,” took place approximately 2 weeks after the presentation by Giaever (http://approach.rpi .edu/ 2012/ 03/ 09/ the -big -picture-of -climate-change -science/). The format was close to that of a lecture, with an opportunity for members of the approximately 150- person audience to ask questions. The Union College follow-up event was mostly organized around questions from the more than 60 students who attended. Significantly, Monckton came to the Union College follow-up and sat in the first row. This forum allowed students to ask questions of various members of the Union College faculty and carry on a high- level discussion of climate change, the threats it poses, and possible solutions. They were also able to engage Monckton in extensive exchanges about his arguments.

The principal lesson from our experiences is that our students are some of the most effective counters to such presentations by climate change deniers. Largely on their own, students at each of our institutions organized sophisticated campaigns to present a coherent message about the science of climate change. They engaged with each speaker during the question- and-answer periods that followed the lectures, used social media to communicate with one another and with their peers, and organized alternative forums in which the science of climate change was effectively presented.

They displayed highly sophisticated critical thinking skills and the passion and energy to organize, to engage with the speakers, and to rebut arguments that misrepresented the state of climate science. On the other hand, faculty involvement in the presentation of climate science can be critical as well. It is likely too much to ask that students shoulder the entire burden of rebutting prominent speakers who have well practiced arguments. Even in the case of the student-organized question-and-answer forum at Union College, two members of the faculty, along with one student, moderated the discussion. Faculty members from several other departments were also in attendance to help answer questions.

The final challenge, and the one for which we were least prepared, was to deal with postevent publicity. While we had effectively used social media tools to organize and communicate within our own communities, the Union College event was subject to a well- organized campaign that used those same tools to discredit our efforts. (See comments at http:// www .concordy.com/ article/opinions/march -7 -2012/ a -lords -opinion-cant-compete-with -scientific-truth/4222/, http://wattsupwiththat.com/ 2012/ 03/ 10/ moncktons-schenectady-showdown/, and http:// opinion.financialpost.com/ 2012/ 04/ 20/aristotles-climate/.)

Such campaigns have been mounted against a variety of other communicators of climate science as well [e.g., Mann , 2012]; yet we would have been far better prepared for the postevent publicity if we had anticipated that Twitter and other Internet tools can effectively nationalize discussions that take place even at small colleges. The time and, more important, the expertise required to mount such an organized challenge can be daunting. The need for skills in social and media communications that typically fall outside scientists’ graduate training is well described [e.g., Bowman et al., 2010; Moser , 2010; Pidgeon and Fischhoff, 2011]. Yet, when we faculty engage climate science deniers, we make clear to our students and the entire community that we believe that much is at stake. If we yield the argument to speakers who attempt to discredit our research and contradict what we teach in our classes, then we risk giving the impression that scientific literacy and public awareness of climate science are of little importance to us.

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Right of reply

We are grateful to the editors of Eos for this right of reply to Corbin and Katz (Effective Strategies to Counter Campus Presentations on Climate Denial, Eos, 2012 July 3), a 1200-word melange or smørgasbord of the shop-worn logical fallacies of argument ad populum, ad verecundiam, and, above all, ad hominem.

The authors, arguing solely from consensus (ad pop.) among scientific experts (ad vcd.), say without evidence that speakers like us “intend to muddy the waters with respect to climate science” (ad hom.); they serially cite politicized websites and tendentious non-peer-reviewed presentations by non-climate-scientists against us as though they were authoritative (ad vcd.), while omitting to cite published rebuttals (e.g. Monckton of Brenchley, 2006, 2010) to these dubious sources (ad hom.); they accuse us of misrepresentation, distortion, and flawed analysis without adducing a single instance (ad hom.); and they four times brand us as “climate change deniers” (ad hom.) - a hate-speech comparison with Holocaust denial. Because these irrational allegations are so serious, we have insisted upon this right of reply.

The authors also say we attempt to discredit their research when, as philosophers of science from al-Haytham via Huxley to Popper (1934) make clear, error-elimination by questioning of hypotheses is essential to the scientific method. They describe “strategies” to counter us - including “public displays” and “social media” - which surely belong more in the realm of political propaganda than of scientific discourse.

Our argument against the Party line is that catastrophic manmade global warming has not been occurring at anything like the predicted rate; that there is no sound scientific reason to expect that it will; and that, even if it did, future adaptation would be at least an order of magnitude more cost-effective than heavy spending today.

In the generation since 1990, the observed warming rate has turned out below the least estimate projected by the IPCC in that year. The models agreed with one another, but events have proven the consensus wrong. Despite rapidly-increasing CO2 concentration, there has been no statistically-significant warming for a decade and a half. The post-1950 warming rate, as the least-squares trend on the Hadley/CRU surface temperature series (HadCRUt3, 2011), is just 1.2 K/century. Yet IPCC (2007, table SPM.3 and fig. 10.26) implicitly predicts as the mean of all six emissions scenarios that Man’s influence, including an increase in CO2 concentration from 368 ppmv in 2000 to 713 ppmv by 2100, will cause 2.8 K warming by 2100 - 0.6 K previously committed, 1.5 K from CO2 emitted in this century, and 0.7 K from other greenhouse gases. This predicted (though unalarming) more-than-doubling of the post-1950 warming rate depends upon at least three implausible assumptions: that other gases augment CO2’s contribution to warming by as much as 43%; that as much as half of the warming caused by our past sins of emission has not yet come through the pipeline; and, above all, that unmeasured and unmeasurable temperature feedbacks will near-triple the small direct warming from greenhouse gases. Therefore, two-thirds of the consensus warming is based on a guess: and that is a poor basis for consensus.

The first assumption lacks credibility now that methane, the most significant non-CO2 greenhouse gas we emit, has stabilized: its concentration grew by only 20 parts by billion over the past decade. The second and third assumptions imply a volatility in surface temperatures that is belied by the paleoclimate record, which - allowing for great uncertainties - indicates that absolute temperature has not fluctuated by more than 3% or 8 K either side of the mean in the past 64 million years (Scotese, 1999; Zachos et al., 2001). That is enough to cause an ice age at one era and a hothouse Earth at another: but the inferred temperature variability is far too small to permit the closed-loop feedback gains of as much as 0.64[0.42, 0.74] that are implicit in the projected warming of 3.26[2, 4.5] K per CO2 doubling (IPCC, 2007, p. 798, box 10.2). In process engineering, where the mathematics of feedbacks adopted by climate science has its origins (see Bode, 1945; Roe, 2009), electronic circuits intended to be stable are designed to permit closed-loop gains of no more than 0.1. Given the Earth’s formidable temperature stability, the IPCC’s implicit interval of loop gains is far too close to the singularity in the feedback-amplification equation to be credible: for across that singularity, at a loop gain of 1, strongly net-positive feedback becomes as strongly net-negative. Yet the inferred paleo-temperature record shows no such pattern of violent oscillation. Empirical evidence (e.g. Lindzen and Choi, 2009, 2011; Spencer and Braswell, 2010, 2011), though hotly contested (e.g. Trenberth et al., 2010; Dessler et al., 2010, 2011), indeed suggests what process-engineering theory would lead us to expect: that feedbacks in the temperature-stable climate system, like those in a well-designed circuit, are at most barely net-positive and are more likely to be somewhat net-negative, consistent with a harmless continuance of the observed warming rate of the past 60 years but inconsistent with the far greater (though not necessarily harmful) warming rate predicted by the IPCC.

Even if we assume ad argumentum (and per impossibile) that our unmitigated emissions will greatly accelerate the observed warming rate, the very high cost of measures intended to mitigate CO2 emissions exceeds the likely cost of climate-related damage arising from our failure to act now. To take a single topical and typical example, carbon trading in Australia will cost $10.1 bn/year, plus $1.6 bn/year for administration (Wong, 2010, p. 5), plus $1.2 bn/year for renewables and other costs, a total of $13 bn/year, rising at 5%/year, or $130 bn by 2020 at n.p.v., to abate 5% of current emissions, which represent 1.2% of world emissions (derived from Boden et al., 2010ab). Thus the Australian measure, if it succeeded as fully as its promoters intend, would abate 0.06% of global emissions over its 10-year term. CO2 concentration would fall from a business-as-usual 410 to 409.988 ppmv by the end of the term. Forcing abated is 0.0002 W m–2; warming consequently abated is 0.00006 K; mitigation cost-effectiveness, which is the cost of abating 1 K global warming by measures of equivalent cost-effectiveness, is $2,000 tr/K. On the same basis, the cost of abating all projected warming over the ten-year life of the policy is $300 trillion, or $44,000/head, or 58% of global GDP over the period. The cost of mitigation by such measures would exceed the cost of climate-related damage consequent upon inaction by a factor of approximately 50.

The very high costs of CO2 mitigation policies and the undetectable returns in warming abated imply that focused adaptation to any adverse consequences of such warming as may occur will be far more cost-effective than attempted mitigation today. CO2 mitigation strategies inexpensive enough to be affordable will be ineffective: strategies costly enough to be effective will be unaffordable. The question arises whether CO2 mitigation should any longer be attempted at all.

Readers of Eos may now decide for themselves to what extent the unsupported attack upon our reputations by Corbin and Katz was justifiable, and whether the editors of any respectable scientific journal of opinion should ever have printed it. True science is founded not upon invective and illogic but upon reason. Lose that: lose all.

CHRISTOPHER MONCKTON OF BRENCHLEY, Chief Policy Advisor, Science and Public Policy Institute, Washington, DC, USA; monckton@mail.co

Recently, in conjunction with publication of my new book, Merchants of Despair, which exposes the crimes of the global Malthusian movement, I was interviewed on the radio by a liberal talk show host. When I brought up the issue of race- or caste-targeted forced sterilization programs instituted in Peru, India, and many other Third World countries with USAID and World Bank funds, the host chose to deal with the matter by pooh-poohing the existence of these atrocities.

I was shocked. These programs are not secret, and their horrors have received some, if less-than-deserved, coverage in the mainstream media. Indeed, the members of the Fujimori government were brought to trial and convicted of genocide for their enforcement of such policies. Yet here was this liberal gentleman, supposedly an anti-racist and feminist, a self-proclaimed defender of the poor and the helpless, shrugging off massive violations of human rights and extraordinary crimes directed against women, infants, and people of color. In amazement I blurted out, “This is a holocaust, and you should not be denying it!”

Then it hit me. I was dealing with a holocaust denier.

Indeed, the entire environmentalist movement consists of holocaust deniers, who continue to refuse to look at or admit the existence of the carnage they have created and continue to perpetuate worldwide.

So let’s look at the record.

Some of the worst atrocities can be laid at the feet of the population control ideologues such as Paul Ehrlich and his co-thinkers who argued - in direct contradiction to historical fact - that human well-being is inversely proportional to human numbers. As a result of their agitation, since 1966 U.S. foreign aid and World Bank loans to Third World countries have been made contingent upon those nations implementing population control programs. In consequence, over the past four decades, in scores of countries spanning the globe from India to Peru, tens of millions of women have been rounded up and subjected to involuntary sterilizations or abortions, often under very unsafe conditions, with innumerable victims suffering severe health effects or dying afterwards.

Ehrlich also called for the United States to create a Bureau of Population and Environment which would have the power to issue or deny permits to Americans to have children. While rejected here, this idea was adopted by the leaders of the Chinese Communist Party, who were convinced of the necessity of such measures by the writings of the Club of Rome after these were plagiarized and republished in China under the name of one of its top officials. Thus was born China’s infamous “one-child policy,” which has involved not only hundreds of millions of involuntary abortions and forced sterilizations, but infanticide and the killing of “illegal children” on a mass scale.

The anti-technology wing of the antihuman movement also has its share of human extermination to account for. The pesticide DDT was first employed by the U.S. Army to stop a typhus epidemic in Naples which had been created by the retreating Germans through their destruction of that city’s sanitation system. Subsequently, Allied forces used it in all theaters to save millions of diseased-ravaged victims of Axis tyranny, and after the war employed it to wipe out malaria in the American south, southern Europe, and much of south Asia and Latin America. The benefits of these campaigns were unprecedented. As the National Academy of Sciences put it in a 1970 report:

To only a few chemicals does man owe as great a debt as to DDT. It has contributed to the great increase of agricultural productivity, while sparing countless humanity from a host of diseases, most notably perhaps, scrub typhus and malaria. Indeed, it is estimated that in little more than two decades, DDT has prevented 500 million deaths due to malaria that would otherwise have been inevitable.

But the role of DDT in saving half a billion lives did not positively impress everyone. On the contrary, as Alexander King, the co-founder of the Club of Rome put it in his 1990 biography, “my chief quarrel with DDT in hindsight is that it has greatly added to the population problem.” Of course, such reasoning would carry little appeal to the American public. Much better ammunition was provided by Rachel Carson, who in her 1962 book, Silent Spring, had made an eloquent case that DDT was endangering bird populations. This was false. In fact, by eliminating their insect parasites and infection agents, DDT was helping bird numbers to grow significantly.  No matter. Using Carson’s book and even more wild writing by Ehrlich (who in a 1969 Ramparts article predicted that pesticides would cause all life in the Earth’s oceans to die by 1979), a massive propaganda campaign was launched to ban DDT.

In 1971, the newly formed Environmental Protection Agency responded by holding seven months of investigative hearings on the subject, gathering testimony from 125 witnesses. At the end of this process, Judge Edmund Sweeney issued his verdict: “The uses of DDT under the registration involved here do not have a deleterious effect on freshwater fish, estuarine organisms, wild birds, or other wildlife. DDT is not a carcinogenic hazard to man.” No matter. EPA administrator William Ruckelshaus (who would later go on to be a board member of the Draper Fund, a leading population control group), chose to overrule Sweeney and ban the use of DDT in the United States. Subsequently, the U.S. Agency for International Development adopted regulations preventing it from funding international projects that used DDT. Together with similar decisions enacted in Europe, this effectively banned the use of DDT in many Third World countries. By some estimates, the malaria death toll in Africa alone resulting from these restrictions has exceeded 100 million people, with 3 million additional deaths added to the toll every year.

The harm done by the EPA, itself a creation of the environmental movement, has not been limited to stopping DDT. It is no coincidence that U.S. oil production, which had been growing at a rate of 3 percent per year through the 1940s, 50s, and 60s, peaked in 1971, immediately after the EPA’s creation, and has been declining ever since. In 1971, the U.S. produced 9.6 million barrels of oil per day (mpd).  Today we are down to 5.6 mpd. Had we continued without environmentalist interference with our previous 3 percent per year growth in the period since - as the rest of the non-OPEC world actually did - we would today be producing 35 mpd, and the world economy would not be groaning under the extremely regressive tax represented by $100 per barrel oil prices. The environmentalist campaign against nuclear power has made its promise for plentiful, cheap electricity impossible as well.

The genocidal effect of such support for energy price-rigging should not be underestimated. Increasing the price of energy increases the price of all other products. It is one thing to pay $100 per barrel for oil in a nation like the USA which has an average income of $45,000 per year. It is quite another to pay it in a Third World country with an average income of $1500 per year. An oil price stiff enough to cause recession in the advanced sector can cause mass starvation among the world’s poor.

European greens also have much horror to account for, notably through their campaign against genetically modified crops. Hundreds of millions of people in the Third World today suffer from nutritional deficiencies resulting from their cereal-dominated diets. This can now readily be rectified by employing genetically enhanced plants, such as golden rice, which is rich in vitamin A.  Other genetically modified crops offer protection against iron or other vitamin deficiency diseases, dramatically increased yields, self-fertilization, and drought or insect resistance. But as a result of political pressure from the green parties, the European Union has banned the import of crops from countries that employ such strains, thereby blackmailing many governments into forbidding their use. In consequence, millions of people are being unnecessarily blinded, crippled, starved, or killed every year.

Taken together, these campaigns to deny billions of people the means to a decent existence have racked up a death toll exceeding that achieved by Hitler, Stalin, Mao, or any of the other tyrants whose crimes fill the sordid pages of human history.  It is ironic that the perpetrators of this holocaust have chosen to affix the term “deniers” to those who refuse to endorse their proposal to radically expand it via a global program of mass human sacrifice for the purpose of weather control. In fact it is they, who call upon us to harden our hearts to “the inconvenient truth” that allegedly requires such suffering, who are the real new deniers; deniers not just of a past holocaust that rightfully commands our grief, but a present one, whose desperate victims still plead for our action.

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Tue, 03 Jul 2012 09:02:00
Top academic sacked over climate change views

Alan Jones speaks with American academic Dr Nicholas Drapela about his recent dismissal from OSU. PODCAST

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach

The Arabunna people live in the area around Lake Eyre in Southern Australia. It is a hot, hostile desert region, which is no surprise, because… well ... it’s in Australia. Here’s the general area where they live:

Figure 1. Lake Eyre region in South Australia. Yellow line show the area from 25-30S, 135-140E

A new report from the University of Everybody-Panic is a study of the horrendous future faced by these poor folks:

The first stage of University of Adelaide research released today shows that South Australia’s Arabunna country, which includes Lake Eyre in the far north, is likely to get both drier and hotter in decades to come.

“Temperatures could increase up to four degrees Celsius in Arabunna country in the next century, threatening the survival of many plants and animals,” says the author of the report, Dr John Tibby from the University of Adelaide’s Discipline of Geography, Environment and Population. SOURCE: PhysOrg

Yes, temperatures “could” increase...and I could win the lottery, but I’m not quitting my day job just yet. Meanwhile, back in the real world, what’s been happening in the Lake Eyre region in the last thirty years? Figure 2 shows the satellite-derived temperature trends for the lower troposphere in the area around Lake Eyre, from both the University of Alabama Huntsville (UAH) and Remote Sensing Services (RSS).

Figure 2. Satellite temperatures for the lower troposphere in the Lake Eyre Region of Southern Australia. Photo shows the approach to Lake Eyre. Temperatures are the average of the region outlined in yellow in Figure 1. All data from KNMI

So… here’s the deal. We have no evidence that the temperatures are rising in the Lake Eyre region. There has been little change in the area temperatures since the satellite records began. Despite that, University of Adelaide professors are selling their fantasies of a terrifying future to the Arabunna, the aboriginal people who live in the area.

Meanwhile, the temperatures in the region are currently lower than they have been in the entire satellite record…

The professors seem to find nothing wrong with scaring the aboriginal people who have lived there for generations. And where do their projections of a 5C temperature rise originate? Well, as usual, it’s models all the way down, and even the modelers say that their models are useless at the regional level ...but despite that, these professors from the University of East Wankerton or wherever it is are more than happy to use these useless models to terrify the local folks.

I find this kind of crying wolf reprehensible, particularly when it is aimed at indigenous people, but hey, that’s just me.

w.

The truth is always compelling. However, more often than not, the truth compels global warming alarmists to simply abdicate reason and engage instead in smear campaigns and the politics of personal destruction.

When does the ‘debate strategy’ of the global warming alarmists cease to work? When they lose popular support. Their support has been steadily falling to the point they’re pretty much out of the game. Pretense to authority and their petty liberal fascism seems to be about all they have left.

Facts are facts. The sun was very active throughout the 20th century and, nominally, this has lead to global warming. It’s happened before. Now the sun is anomalously quiet. And, it has been quiet for a while now. It is not surprising to many scientists that the combined satellite and radiosonde temperature data now indicate that there has been a cooling trend for years corresponding with this observed nominal change in solar activity.

Nature has a way of having the last word. If we are willing to listen, Nature will teach us that the increase in atmospheric CO2 level is not correlated with global warming. However, it is inescapable that changes in solar activity explain both global warming AND cooling. Everything else is dogma.

Accounting for Mother Nature, what’s left…

Nature has cycles on decadal, centennial and millennial time scales. Add to that the role of the moon and big planets, Jupiter and Saturn, and the effects on the geomagnetic field and galactic cosmic radiation and little is needed - indeed little room is left - for postulating a human causation as an additional factor let alone a rational explanation for all or even most of observed climate change.

It is well known that the Sun plays the fundamental role as our energy source… To date, the only proxy providing information about the solar variability on millennial time scales are cosmogenic radionuclides stored in natural archives such as ice cores. They clearly reveal that the Sun varies significantly on millennial time scales and most likely plays an important role in climate change. (J. BEER, et al. Solar variability over the past several millennia. 11-Nov-2005))

The disengagement that historical perspective affords gives wings to skepticism. Curiosity not consensus is what opens up myriad possibilities. It is skepticism that gives value to science and is what separates true seekers of truth from government science authoritarians.

The fallibility of methods is a valuable reminder of the importance of skepticism in science. Scientific knowledge and scientific methods, whether old or new, must be continually scrutinized for possible errors… Organized and searching skepticism as well as an openness to new ideas are essential to guard against the intrusion of dogma or collective bias into scientific results. (US National Academy of Sciences)

Real scientists are lovers of truth.  Their skepticism is driven by curiosity and a desire to break down barriers of supersition and ignornace. Government science authoritarians are in it for power and money and like the global warming alarmists, they have made similar mistakes in the past:

History offers a gloomy precedent of such poisoning of science by ideology and special interests: the infamous Lysenko affair in the former Soviet Union, the ruthless opposition to genetics headed by Trofim D. Lysenko and his cohorts between the 1930s and 1960s. In addition to the physical elimination of stubborn scientists who resisted the ‘consensual official line’ (the ‘skeptics’ of the time), the price of such an irrationality pandemics was enormous, costing the Soviet biological and agricultural sciences a half a century hold-up whose consequences are felt still today. The AGW scare and its political agenda of restricting the use of fossil fuels are serious candidates to the condition of post-modern equivalents of ‘Lysenkoism.’ Geraldo Luis Lino