Between June 10-13, Rasmussen surveyed 900 likely voters and, with a margin of error of 3%, found that only 29% agreed with Biden that climate change was the “greatest threat” facing the nation. Disagreeing with that assessment were 54% of Americans, while 17% were unsure either way.
Interestingly, only about 42% of Democrats agreed with Biden on climate change being the “greatest threat,” while roughly one-third of Democrats disagreed. Meanwhile, 76% of Republicans and 56% of independents also disagreed with the president’s ranking of climate change as the biggest threat facing the United States.
----------
CO2 not Pollution but the Gas of Life
By Joseph D’Aleo, CCM
I have always considered myself an environmentalist and conservationist. I worked on my doctorate in the 1970s with an atmospheric chemistry grant dealing with pollution.
In the post war boom, we had problems with air pollution from factories, coal plants, cars, inefficient home heating systems and incinerators in apartments.
We had air quality issues with pollutants like soot, SO2, ozone, hydrocarbons, NOx, and lead. Smog events in Donora PA 1948 saw 6,000 of the 14,000 population suffer damaged lungs, and the great London 1952 event which led to 6000 deaths helped drive global action.
The problem was soot (particulates including carbon) and sulfur dioxide. When there is a fog with a low-level inversion preventing dispersion traps the particulates and the sulfur dioxide reacts with the water droplets to form sulfuric acid mist, which causes lung damage as well as damage to property. Today in a similar industrial boom with heavy coal use in places like China, they are experiencing similar issues.
My colleagues who became part of the EPA or their advisory boards helped them set standards that had to be met by industry and automakers. We were hugely successful.
The EPA reports:
“Between 1970 and 2019, the combined emissions of the six common pollutants (PM2.5 and PM10, SO2, NOx, VOCs, CO and Pb) dropped by 77 percent. For nearly 50 years, the Clean Air Act has brought Americans cleaner air and lower risks of adverse health effects.”
The EPA tracks the Air Quality Trends common pollutants nationally and reports that concentrations of air pollutants have dropped significantly since 1990:
* Carbon Monoxide (CO) 8-Hour, down 78%
* Lead (Pb) 3-Month Average, down 85% (from 2010)
* Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) Annual, down 59%
* Nitrogen Dioxide (NO2) 1-Hour, down 51%
* Ozone (O3) 8-Hour, 25%
* Particulate Matter 10 microns (PM10) 24-Hour, down 46%
* Particulate Matter 2.5 microns (PM2.5) Annual, down 43% (from 2000)
* Particulate Matter 2.5 microns (PM2.5) 24-Hour, down 44% (from 2000)
* Sulfur Dioxide (SO2) 1-Hour, down 90%
You should note CO2 is not on the list of criteria pollutants.
We have the cleanest air in my lifetime and well below the EPA health standards. In fact, the global trend of PM2.5 from NASA and the WHO shows the U.S. with reliance on clean natural gas has the lowest small particulate count (along with Scandinavia and Australia) in the world.
Enlarged
‘
The EPA notes “During this same period, the U.S. economy continued to grow, Americans drove more miles, and population and energy use increased.”
The IER agrees see “Breathe a Little Easier, Why America’s Air is Among the Cleanest in the World” here.
CO2 is not carbon. CO2 is not a pollutant. Shown here the other CO2 driven climate claims are either demonstrably false or can be entirely explained by natural factors. World prosperity and decreased poverty and death have resulted from the measurable benefits of the use of fossil fuels to mankind as shown below.
NOAA, NASA, EPA associated with the CO2 and the supposed weather impacts have been altering data to support their theories and models. The media plays along as if it was actually even worse than forecast although not any of the 50 climate scares have come close to verifying.
See the temperature problems in this peer review paper. We listed uncertainties here. With Anthony Watts and many others, we did this thorough review over a decade ago. We have fact checked alarmist claims of CO2 increased extremes here.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) brought back its Climate Change Indicator’s platform last week under the new Biden administration. In the new web presentation, EPA has simply disappeared data that was inconvenient to the narrative that humans are causing dangerous climate change. By not presenting the full historical data-set EPA previously showed, the agency is misleading the public by playing fast and loose with climate facts. Climate Realism first demonstrated this Biden administration data disappearing act in our report National Fire Center Disappears ‘Inconvenient’ U.S. Wildfire Data.
Now the EPA is doing the same thing - erasing important historic temperature data. EPA has deleted its earlier web page Climate Change Indicators: High and Low Temperature and replaced it with a new one. Previously, they showed the U.S. Heat Wave Index from 1895 to 2015 that clearly established the unique drought and heat period of the 1930s.
Fortunately, the Internet never forgets, and as recently as May 1st, 2021, the original EPA page was archived on the Internet, as shown as Figure 1.
Figure 1. Previous EPA graph before the Biden administration change with data from 1895 to 2015. Enlarged
Note in Figure 1 that there is a very prominent spike of temperatures during the 1930s during the so-called “dust bowl” period in United States history. According to the National Weather Service,
“The “Dust Bowl” years of 1930-36 brought some of the hottest summers on record to the United States, especially across the Plains, Upper Midwest and Great Lake States. For the Upper Mississippi River Valley, the first few weeks of July 1936 provided the hottest temperatures of that period, including many all-time record highs.
The string of hot, dry days was also deadly. Nationally, around 5000 deaths were associated with the heat wave.”
That long-standing heat wave index chart has now been replaced by a new chart which simply “disappears” any notion of the great heat wave period of the 1930s. The EPA erased the previous data, substituting data more favorable to an alarmist narrative, as Figure 2 below shows.
Figure 2. New EPA chart after the Biden administration change with data from 1910 to 2015. Enlarged
The EPA has also added another new page Climate Change Indicators: Heat Waves that does not even contain the 1930s “dust bowl.” Instead, EPA’s report starts in the 1960s, a low-point for heatwaves in the 20th century, as seen in Figure 3. By starting the new graphs in the 1960s, rather than using all the available data back to 1895, EPA ensures a positive and uninterrupted upward trend in heat waves.
Figure 3, EPA’s new page showing data only from 1960, totally eliminating the 1930s dust bowl period Enlarged
On a positive note, the EPA has retained the original page, Climate Change Indicators: Drought seen in Figure 4, which remains the same and shows no worsening drought trend in the United States. Given the recent changes EPA’s other charts, this non-alarming drought chart is probably short-lived on EPA’s webpage.
At the outset of its Climate Change Indicator’s page EPA makes some demonstrably false statements
“The Earths climate is changing. Temperatures are rising, snow and rainfall patterns are shifting, and more extreme climate events - like heavy rainstorms and record high temperatures - are already happening. Many of these observed changes are linked to the rising levels of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, caused by human activities.”
The decision to erase weather and climate data history makes it clear EPA’s opening argument is weak, based on cherry picking data that only agrees with their premise.
It appears that we have entered the Soviet style era of “disappearing” charts and data. If the EPA’s new Climate Change Indicators Series is any indication of the future government climate reports, it appears we are now entering the era of the “Biden inconvenient climate data purge.”
Anthony Watts is a senior fellow for environment and climate at The Heartland Institute. Watts has been in the weather business both in front of, and behind the camera as an on-air television meteorologist since 1978, and currently does daily radio forecasts. He has created weather graphics presentation systems for television, specialized weather instrumentation, as well as co-authored peer-reviewed papers on climate issues. He operates the most viewed website in the world on climate, the award-winning website wattsupwiththat.com.
The Science Channel on Discovery is an enjoyable and educational channel and covers many topics including about the universe and earth’s anomalies and mysteries.
They featured a recent show on Svalbard, an island in the far North Atlantic. The island sits between 77 and 81N It’s climate varies as it sits in a regions where warm currents from south, and colder currents from the north and northeast converge. And these currents vary on decadal cycles.
The story interviewed inhabitants and scientists about the recent warming since 1970, said by some to be the largest on earth and often attributed to greenhouse driven global warming. Alarmists have referred to it as the Canary in the coal mine.
There has been warming from 1970 to 2010s but it mirrors the warming from 1910 to 1940 (both about 8F). Both cycles track with the 60 year North Atlantic Oscillation (AMO).
Svalbard had an 8F warming in the last 2 warm intervals and a 7C cooling in the cooler phase. The AMO is nearing the end of its warm phase and with aid of the declining solar cycles 24 and 25 and the next overdue major volcanic eruption should begin it decline this decade.
The AMO cycle is depicted here by Ole Humlum (Climate4you).
See the cold phase is cold in the arctic and Atlantic (and globally on average). The warm cycle is warm though it favors the -NAO which can deliver cold and snow to the east.
See how the warm water is carried under the arctic ice during the warm part of the cycle, thinning the ice and reducing its extent. In the cold cycle, the melting from beneath is less and the ice extent expands.
That is the effect of the latest La Nina that started last summer. Ocean temperature cycles like ENSO and the ENSO multidecadal cycle (PDO) and the Atlantic cycle (AMO) are clearly driving changes. See how PDO reflects the ENSO state.
The more persistent a cold or warm state, the more the cooling or warming. El Ninos have a cold mode with the warmth displaced to the dateline - called Modoki (right side).
See “Imprint of the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation and Pacific Decadal Oscillation on southwestern US climate: past, present, and future” by Petr Chylek etal here.
“The surface air temperature increase in the southwestern United States was much larger during the last few decades than the increase in the global mean. While the global temperature increased by about 0.5C from 1975 to 2000, the southwestern US temperature increased by about 2C. If such an enhanced warming persisted for the next few decades, the southwestern US would suffer devastating consequences. To identify major drivers of southwestern climate change we perform a multiple-linear regression of the past 100 years of the southwestern US temperature and precipitation. We find that in the early twentieth century the warming was dominated by a positive phase of the Atlantic Multi-decadal Oscillation (AMO) with minor contributions from increasing solar irradiance and concentration of greenhouse gases. The late twentieth century warming was about equally influenced by increasing concentration of atmospheric greenhouse gases (GHGs) and a positive phase of the AMO. The current southwestern US drought is associated with a near maximum AMO index occurring nearly simultaneously with a minimum in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) index. A similar situation occurred in mid-1950s when precipitation reached its minimum within the instrumental records.”
--------
What drives the ENSO and larger scale oscillations?
Many months ago, I posted this chart from NASA of the SSN the last three cycles and marked the El Nino and La Nina years. Note that El Ninos appeared during the declines from solar max (go back a cycle and you find 1982/83 there too). Also El Ninos appear coming off a minimum (and before the minimums). La Ninas occur at the minimum and during the rapid rise phases.
We asked the question would the declining solar bring a stronger El Nino to 2015/16. The answer was yes and indeed a super El Nino ensued. We have been in La Nina mode the last two years at solar min but like in 2009/10, 1997/98, 1986/88, 1976/78, 1965/66, 1957/59, we might expect an El Nino to follow. Models are uncertain, typical of most springs.
It could be driven by the changes in pressure of the subtropical high pressures systems with the solar cycles which would affect the strength of the easterlies in the trade winds and equatorial zones and allow for upwelling in the east to increase or decrease.
OFFICE OF MANAGEMENT AND BUDGET
Notice of Availability and Request for Comment on ‘’Technical Support Document: Social Cost of Carbon, Methane, and Nitrous Oxide Interim Estimates Under Executive Order 13990’’
AGENCY: Office of Management and Budget, Executive Office of the President.
ACTION: Notice of availability and request for comments.
SUMMARY: The Office of Management and Budget (OMB), on behalf of the co- chairs of the Interagency Working Group on the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases, including the Council of Economic Advisors (CEA) and the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP), request comments on ‘’Technical Support Document: Social Cost of Carbon, Methane, and Nitrous OxideInterim Estimates under Executive Order 13990,’’ released on February 26, 2021, available here . The estimates of the social cost of carbon (SC-CO2), social cost of methane (SC-CH4), and social cost of nitrous oxide (SC-N2O), collectively called the Social Cost of Greenhouse Gases (SC-GHG), are used to estimate the value to society of marginal reductions in greenhouse gas emissions, or conversely, the social costs of increasing such emissions, in the policy making process.
DATES: To ensure consideration, comments must be in writing and received by June 21, 2021.
ADDRESSES: Submit comments by one of the following methods:
Federal eRulemaking Portal: (our preferred method). Follow the online instructions for submitting comments.
Please note that we cannot provide an option for written or faxed comments at this time due to COVID-19 protocols. Please submit comments electronically.
All comments and recommendations submitted in response to this notice will be made available to the public. For this reason, please do not include in your comments information of a confidential nature, such as sensitive personal information or proprietary information. The www.regulations.gov website is an ‘’anonymous access’’ system, which means OMB will not know your identity or contact information unless you provide it in the body of your comment.
We submitted numerous comments back in 2008 that wee summarily ignored. The Endangerment Finding from NOAA was never peer reviewed but the EPA used it as gospel and ignored comments to the contrary. They ignored the enormous benefits that fossil fuels and the gas of life CO2 provide - greening the earth and exploding food supplies. We plan to flood them again and resubmits old ones as a reminder.
On January 8, 2014, at New York University in Brooklyn, there occurred a unique event in the annals of global warming: nearly eight hours of structured debate between three climate scientists supporting the consensus on manmade global warming and three climate scientists who dispute it, moderated by a team of six leading physicists from the American Physical Society (APS) led by Dr. Steven Koonin, a theoretical physicist at New York University. The debate, hosted by the APS, revealed consensus-supporting climate scientists harboring doubts and uncertainties and admitting to holes in climate science - in marked contrast to the emphatic messaging of bodies such as Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).
At one point, Koonin read an extract from the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report released the previous year. Computer model-simulated responses to forcings - the term used by climate scientists for changes of energy flows into and out of the climate system, such as changes in solar radiation, volcanic eruptions, and changes in the concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere “can be scaled up or down.” This scaling included greenhouse gas forcings.
Some forcings in some computer models had to be scaled down to match computer simulations to actual climate observations. But when it came to making centennial projections on which governments rely and drive climate policy, the scaling factors were removed, probably resulting in a 25 to 30 percent over-prediction of the 2100 warming.
The ensuing dialogue between Koonin and Dr. William Collins of the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory - a lead author of the climate model evaluation chapter in the Fifth Assessment Report - revealed something more troubling and deliberate than holes in scientific knowledge:
Dr. Koonin: But if the model tells you that you got the response to the forcing wrong by 30 percent, you should use that same 30 percent factor when you project out a century.
Dr. Collins: Yes. And one of the reasons we are not doing that is we are not using the models as [a] statistical projection tool.
Dr. Koonin: What are you using them as?
Dr. Collins: Well, we took exactly the same models that got the forcing wrong and which got sort of the projections wrong up to 2100.
Dr. Koonin: So, why do we even show centennial-scale projections?
Dr. Collins: Well, I mean, it is part of the [IPCC] assessment process.
Koonin was uncommonly well-suited to lead the APS climate workshop. He has a deep understanding of computer models, which have become the workhorses of climate science. As a young man, Koonin wrote a paper on computer modeling of nuclear reaction in stars and taught a course on computational physics at Caltech. In the early 1990s, he was involved in a program using satellites to measure the Earth’s albedo - that is, the reflection of incoming solar radiation back into space. As a student at Caltech in the late 1960s, he was taught by Nobel physicist Richard Feynman and absorbed what Koonin calls Feynmans “absolute intellectual honesty.”
On becoming BP’s chief scientist in 2004, Koonin became part of the wider climate change milieu. Assignments included explaining the physics of man-made global warming to Prince Philip at a dinner in Buckingham Palace. In 2009, Koonin was appointed an under-secretary at the Department of Energy in the Obama administration.
The APS climate debate was the turning point in Koonin’s thinking about climate change and consensus climate science ("The Science").
“I began by believing that we were in a race to save the planet from climate catastrophe,” Koonin writes in his new book, “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, And Why It Matters.”
“I came away from the APS workshop not only surprised, but shaken by the realization that climate science was far less mature than I had supposed.”
“Unsettled” is an authoritative primer on the science of climate change that lifts the lid on The Science and finds plenty that isn’t as it should be.
“As a scientist,” writes Koonin, “I felt the scientific community was letting the public down by not telling the whole truth plainly.”
Koonin’s aim is to right that wrong.
Koonin’s indictment of The Science starts with its reliance on unreliable computer models. Usefully describing the earth’s climate, writes Koonin, is “one of the most challenging scientific simulation problems.” Models divide the atmosphere into pancake-shaped boxes of around 100km wide and one kilometer deep. But the upward flow of energy from tropical thunder clouds, which is more than thirty times larger than that from human influences, occurs over smaller scales than the programmed boxes. This forces climate modellers to make assumptions about what happens inside those boxes. As one modeller confesses, “it’s a real challenge to model what we don’t understand.”
Inevitably, this leaves considerable scope for modelers’ subjective views and preferences. A key question climate models are meant to solve is estimating the equilibrium climate sensitivity of carbon dioxide (ECS), which aims to tell us by how much temperatures rise from a doubling of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Yet in 2020, climate modelers from Germany’s Max Planck Institute admitted to tuning their model by targeting an ECS of about 3 degrees Centigrade. “Talk about cooking the books,” Koonin comments.
The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating. Self-evidently, computer projections can’t be tested against a future that’s yet to happen, but they can be tested against climates present and past. Climate models can’t even agree on what the current global average temperature is. “One particularly jarring feature is that the simulated average global surface temperature,” Koonin notes, “varies among models by about 3C, three times greater than the observed value of the twentieth century warming they’re purporting to describe and explain.”
Another embarrassing feature of climate models concerns the earlier of the two twentieth-century warmings from 1910 to 1940, when human influences were much smaller. On average, models give a warming rate of about half of what was actually observed. The failure of the latest models to warm fast enough in those decades suggest that it’s possible, even likely, that internal climate variability is a significant contributor to the warming of recent decades, Koonin suggests. “That the models can’t reproduce the past is a big red flag - it erodes confidence in their projections of future climates.” Neither is it reassuring that for the years after 1960, the latest generation of climate models show a larger spread and greater uncertainty than earlier ones - implying that, far from advancing, The Science has been going backwards. That is not how science is meant to work.
The second part of Koonin’s indictment concerns the distortion, misrepresentation, and mischaracterization of climate data to support a narrative of climate catastrophism based on increasing frequency of extreme weather events. As an example, Koonin takes a “shockingly misleading” claim and associated graph in the United States government’s 2017 Climate Science Special Report that the number of high-temperature records set in the past two decades far exceeds the number of low-temperature records across the 48 contiguous states. Koonin demonstrates that the sharp uptick in highs over the last two decades is an artifact of a methodology chosen to mislead. After re-running the data, record highs show a clear peak in the 1930s, but there is no significant trend over the 120 years of observations starting in 1895, or even since 1980, when human influences on the climate grew strongly. In contrast, the number of record cold temperatures has declined over more than a century, with the trend accelerating after 1985.
Notes Koonin, “temperature extremes in the contiguous U.S. have become less common and somewhat milder since the late nineteenth century.” Similarly, a key message in the 2014 National Climate Assessment of an upward trend in hurricane frequency and intensity, repeated in the 2017 assessment, is contradicted 728 pages later by a statement buried in an appendix stating that there has been no significant trend in the global number of tropical cyclones “nor has any trend been identified in the number of U.S. land-falling hurricanes.”
That might surprise many politicians.
“Over the past thirty years, the incidence of natural disasters has dramatically increased,” Treasury secretary Janet Yellen falsely asserted last month in a pitch supporting the Biden administration’s infrastructure package. “We are now in a situation where climate change is an existential risk to our future economy and way of life,” she claimed.
The sacrifice of scientific truth in the form of objective empirical data for the sake of a catastrophist climate narrative is plain to see. As Koonin summarizes the case:
“Even as human influences have increased fivefold since 1950 and the globe has warmed modestly, most severe weather phenomena remain within past variability. Projections of future climate and weather events rely on models demonstrably unfit for the purpose.”
Koonin also has sharp words for the policy side of the climate change consensus, which asserts that although climate change is an existential threat, solving it by totally decarbonizing society is straightforward and relatively painless.
“Two decades ago, when I was in the private sector,” Koonin writes, “I learned to say that the goal of stabilizing human influences on the climate was ‘a challenge,’ while in government it was talked about as ‘an opportunity.’ Now back in academia, I can forthrightly call it ‘a practical impossibility.’
Unlike many scientists and most politicians, Koonin displays a sure grasp of the split between developed and developing nations, for whom decarbonization is a luxury good that they can’t afford. The fissure dates back to the earliest days of the U.N. climate process at the end of the 1980s. Indeed, it’s why developing nations insisted on the U.N. route as opposed to an intergovernmental one that produced the 1987 Montreal Protocol on ozone-depleting substances.
“The economic betterment of most of humanity in the coming decades will drive energy demand even more strongly than population growth,” Koonin says.
“Who will pay the developing world not to emit? I have been posing that simple question to many people for more than fifteen years and have yet to hear a convincing answer.”
The most unsettling part of “Unsettled” concerns science and the role of scientists.
“Science is one of the very few human activities - perhaps the only one - in which errors are systematically criticized and fairly often, in time, corrected,” Karl Popper wrote nearly six decades ago.
That condition does not pertain in climate science, where errors are embedded in a political narrative and criticism is suppressed. In a recent essay, the philosopher Matthew B. Crawford observes that the pride of science as a way of generating knowledge - unlike religion - is to be falsifiable. That changes when science is pressed into duty as authority in order to absolve politicians of responsibility for justifying their policy choices ("The science says,” we’re repeatedly told). “Yet what sort of authority would it be that insists its own grasp of reality is merely provisional?” asks Crawford. “For authority to be really authoritative, it must claim an epistemic monopoly of some kind, whether of priestly or scientific knowledge.”
At the outset of “Unsettled,” Feynman’s axiom of absolute intellectual honesty is contrasted with climate scientist Stephen Schneider’s “double ethical bind.” On the one hand, scientists are ethically bound by the scientific method to tell the truth. On the other, they are human beings who want to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climate change.
“Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest,"Schneider said.
“Being effective” helps explain the pressure on climate scientists to conform to The Science and the emergence of a climate science knowledge monopoly. Its function is, as Crawford puts it, the manufacture of a product - political legitimacy - which, in turn, requires that competing views be delegitimized and driven out of public discourse through enforcement of a “moratorium on the asking of questions.” This sees climate scientist gatekeepers deciding who can and cannot opine on climate science. “Please, save us from retired physicists who think they’re smarter and wiser than everyone in climate science,” tweeted Gavin Schmidt, NASA acting senior climate advisor, about Koonin and his book. “I agree with pretty much everything you wrote,” a chair of a university earth sciences department tells Koonin, “but I don’t dare say that in public.” Another scientist criticizes Koonin for giving ammunition to “the deniers,” and a third writes an op-ed urging New York University to reconsider Koonin’s position there. It goes wider than scientists. Facebook has suppressed a “Wall Street Journal” review of “Unsettled.” Likewise, “Unsettled” remains unreviewed by the “New York Times,” the “Washington Post” (though it carried an op-ed by Marc Thiessen based on an interview with Koonin) and other dailies, which would prefer to treat Koonin’s reasoned climate dissent as though it doesn’t exist.
The moratorium on the asking of questions represents the death of science as understood and described by Popper, a victim of the conflicting requirements of political utility and scientific integrity. Many scientists take this lying down. Koonin won’t. For his forensic skill and making his findings accessible to non-specialists, Koonin has written the most important book on climate science in decades.
----------
Rupert Darwall is a senior fellow of the RealClear Foundation and author of Green Tyranny and Capitalism, Socialism and ESG.
Back just over 40 years ago in the incredible cold of the late 1970s, the world was worrying about the cooling which began in the late 1950s was returning to the climate regime that persisted from 1600 to the 1850s, a period called ‘The Little Ice Age” (The Weather Conspiracy, the Coming of the New Ice Age)
Leonard Nimoy (Spock) presented this story in videos like this.
While I worked on my BS and MS at the University of Wisconsin with my Master’s Thesis on Explosive Redevelopment In East Coast Cyclones), the scientists were blaming fossil fuel burning and man introduced particulate matter acting as a ‘human volcano’ which like volcanos reflected the sun’s rays and lead to cooling that enhanced natural forces.
The solutions were thought to be eliminating pollutants and for even then a quest to find alternatives to fossil fuels. The second goal focus during the 1973 Arab Oil embargo induced shortages and price rises but renewables were not then ready for prime-time and and as the Texas debacle showed even today not reliable for providing the base load and will lead to soaring energy prices and life-threatening blackouts.
THEN THE PACIFIC CHANGED MODES
But after the Great Pacific Climate shift in the late 1970s, warming ensued as stronger, longer lasting El Ninos which produce global warming suddenly were favored over the La Ninas whose dominance lead to the cooling that had dominated in the 1960s to mid 1970s.
By 1988, many began to think this new mode might be the golden opportunity to take control of our energy policies and redirect media coverage.
SHOWTIME
In 1988 the democrats orchestrated a hearing orchestrated by then Senator Al Gore and stagecrafted by Senator Tim Wirth (later headed up the UN Foundation - see Chris Horner’s Red Hot Lies) featuring NASA scientist James Hansen who had traded in his ice age hat for one advertising man-made global warming.
As the NYT reported:
Senator Timothy E. Wirth, the Colorado Democrat who presided at hearing today, said:
‘’As I read it, the scientific evidence is compelling: the global climate is changing as the earth’s atmosphere gets warmer. Now, the Congress must begin to consider how we are going to slow or halt that warming trend and how we are going to cope with the changes that may already be inevitable.’’
NYT 1988
As the stagecrated link stagecrafted shows, Tim had other reasons to pursue this path.
“We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”
Timothy Wirth quoted in Science Under Siege by Michael Fumento, 1993
The politicians and media began their 30-year warm cycle attack on fossil fuels and our way of life at that meeting. Fed by a sudden flood of grant money, many people in a wide array of disciplines jumped aboard as self proclaimed climatologists, environmental scientists and modellers.
So at both ends of the warm and cold cycle, the enemy was the same - people and fossil fuel.
Notice the flatlining since the late 1990s. My guess if a cooling ensues as the oceans both cool in the second straight dud of a solar cycle, the leaders and media will find a way to try and convince the gullibles it was their own fault.
See this one of several papers on the new Grand Solar Minimum we may have entered.
Note the greatest scientific fraud belies the truth about the blessing increased CO2 levels have provided to mankind.
