By Steve Goreham
Originally published in Communities Digital News
Business has been captured by Climatism, the belief that humans are causing dangerous global warming. Leading businesses announce plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, purchase renewable energy, use vehicle biofuels, and buy carbon credits. But there is no evidence that commercial policies to “fight” climate change have any measureable effect on global temperatures.
Apple and Google, the darling companies of the millennial generation, have spent billions trying to halt global warming. Apple has brought us the Mac personal computer, the I-Phone, the I-Pad, and other trend-setting electronic devices, becoming the world’s highest-valued company. Google has been called the most innovative technology company in the world, delivering the Google search engine that revolutionized use of the internet, Google Books, Google Maps, and now developing a self-driving car. But both of these leading companies have swallowed the misguided theory of human-caused climate change, hook, line, and sinker.
Apple’s 2015 Environmental Responsibility Report states, “We don’t want to debate climate change. We want to stop it.” Former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson now heads up Apple’s environmental efforts. The firm boasts that it measures its carbon footprint “rigorously,” estimating it emitted 34 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalents in in 2014. But somehow Apple missed the fact that carbon dioxide is a gas emitted in huge volumes by nature. According to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of the United Nations, nature puts 25 times as much carbon dioxide into the atmosphere every day as all of the world’s industries.
Apple is spending more than two billion dollars on renewable energy to power its data centers. In February, the company announced an investment of $848 million for electricity from the California Flats solar farm from electricity provider First Solar. Apple claims it now purchases 100 percent renewable energy for all of its US operations and 87 percent for worldwide operations. But the firm is paying a sizeable premium for solar electricity over the price of traditional energy.
Last year, Google Chairman Eric Schmidt said, “Everyone understands that climate change is occurring, and the people who oppose it are really hurting our children and grandchildren and making the world a much worse place.” Google has reportedly committed more than $1.8 billion to
renewable energy projects. But these renewable projects typically provide little actual electricity output at very high prices.
An example is the Ivanpah Solar Facility located in the California Mojave Desert, south of Las Vegas. Google invested $168 million in the Ivanpah project developed by Brightsource Energy, which began operations in January 2014. Ivanpah is a concentrating solar facility that has made headlines for its tendency to ignite birds in flight near its towers.
In addition to scorching more than 1,000 birds a year, Ivanpah is a poor electricity-generating station. During 2014, the Ivanpah facility delivered only about half of the electricity it was designed to deliver, which is only about one-tenth of the output of a typical gas-fired power plant. Ivanpah generates electricity at the whopping price of 16 to 17 cents per kilowatt-hour, four times the California wholesale price of 4 cents per kilowatt-hour. Ivanpah owners NRG and Google have asked for a federal grant of $539 million to pay off much of the $1.6 billion federal loan that was used to build the plant. US taxpayers and California electricity users are paying for the Ivanpah boondoggle.
In their rush to fight climate change, Apple, Google, and other engineering companies don’t seem to realize that the theory of global warming fails the first test of maintenance-of-the-line (MOL) product engineering. Many product engineers spend time in MOL engineering early in their career, handling field calls about the company’s product. When a customer calls to report a product failure, the first question an MOL engineer needs to answer is, “Is the product behaving normally, or is it performing abnormally?”
There is no evidence that Earth’s surface temperatures today are abnormally warm when compared to temperatures of history. Temperature proxy data from many sources shows that Earth’s temperatures have actually been declining for the past 8,000 years. Temperatures have been rising for the last century, but Earth experienced warmer times when the Romans conquered the Mediterranean 2,000 years ago and when the Vikings settled southwest Greenland 1,000 years ago.
Ever notice how actual climate results are never part of the claimed benefits of green energy? Measures of success are always carbon emissions reduced, houses powered, kilowatts generated, and carbon credits purchased. No one ever talks about actual reductions in temperature or about droughts, floods, or hurricanes to be averted by using renewable energy. Adoption of green policies is as hollow as building a hospital and never curing a patient or raising an army and never taking a hill.
In fact, changes in Earth’s climate are dominated by natural factors. Earth’s greenhouse effect is dominated by water vapor and natural emissions of carbon dioxide. History shows that hurricanes, floods, droughts, and heat waves are neither more numerous nor extreme than those of the past. There is no empirical evidence that human emissions have a measureable influence on Earth’s climate. All of the green measures by global business will have a negligible effect on global temperatures.
If Apple, Google, and other companies want to invest in renewable energy and fight climate change, they should place green initiatives in their public relations budget. Such programs don’t have any other effect.
Steve Goreham is Executive Director of the Climate Science Coalition of America and author of the book The Mad, Mad, Mad World of Climatism: Mankind and Climate Change Mania.
Papal Advisor Naomi Klein admits in her much-publicized screed that ‘Global Warming’ is all about anti-capitalism being nothing to do with science.
Klein admits progressive policies on the environment are really about what Marx and Lenin said the communist revolution desired 100 years ago the overthrow of capitalism. This is not about science, or health, at all. “Our economic model is at war with the Earth,” writes Klein. “We cannot change the laws of nature. But we can change our economy. Climate change is our best chance to demand and build a better world.”
Could the message be any clearer? “This [man-made climate change] is not about science, or health, at all.”
Please note that Klein uses the ambiguous term “climate change” when she really means “man-made climate change”; it’s a classic case of misleading the public at large that any change in the climate is the fault of human emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2).
Here’s further insight into Naomi Klein’s world via Martin Hertzberg’s review of Naomi Klein’s book “This Changes Everything.” Dr Hertzberg, a respected scientist and author on climate change, writes:
It is tragic that what should have been a debate among objective scientists evaluating the data on weather and climate, has degenerated into a partisan political diatribe. Unfortunately, Klein’s most recent book only adds to the tragedy. In pursuit of her political agenda, facts are distorted and distinguished scientists are denigrated. Here are some examples.
Klein states: “Carbon Dioxide stays in the atmosphere one to two centuries with some of it remaining for a millennium or more”.
Some 50 published papers give at most 5 years for its lifetime in the atmosphere with the best estimate from C-14 decay observed after Russian above ground tests.
Klein states that the “Medieval Warm Period was thoroughly debunked long ago”.
Not true! Hundreds of studies have established the existence of the world wide Medieval Warm period with temperatures exceeding current ones at a time when human CO2 emission was nil. Her discussion of the weather effect of volcanic eruptions neglects to mention the real big ones: Tambora and Krakatoa.
Klein completely discounts the “climategate” scandal.
Not true! Climategate reveals a disgraceful lack of scientific integrity on the part of the climate change advocates. For all the relevant data go to my lecture at www.youtube.com/watch?v=vPTiTFMhZrg. For factual data rather than her fear mongering cherry picking, go to www.climate4you.com and see for yourself. There is nothing unusual happening with temperatures, ice area coverage, sea level rise, or snow cover: just the normal variability in weather related parameters.
To her credit, Klein actually listened to talks by skeptics at a Heartland Conference, but instead of trying to learn from the distinguished scientist’s presentations, she denigrates them.
Thus, for example, she refers to “the denial movement being littered with characters like the old time physicist...S. Fred Singer”.
Instead of noting his achievements as Deputy Secretary of the EPA, his establishment of the Weather Bureau’s Satellite Service and his work in Space Research and Atmospheric Physics and in designing the first Earth Observation Satellite for meteorological observations, she refers to him as a “character” and limits his work to “rocket technology for the U. S. military”.
As an aside, I first met Fred over 50 years ago and indeed he just celebrated his 90th birthday. He left Austria just ahead of the Nazi takeover and really resents being labelled as a “denier” as though he were a holocaust denier. I lost many relatives in the holocaust and also find that denier label to be particularly obnoxious. She also completely fails to mention the series of articles in the Nation by Alexander Cockburn that preceded her work. Cockburn completely discredited the fear-mongering hysteria of the global warmers.
The global warming/climate change theory postulates that human emission of CO2 from fossil fuel combustion is causing an increase in atmospheric CO2 and a concomitant increase in global temperatures and climate disruptions via the greenhouse effect.
Klein accepts that paradigm without question.
But if you read her book carefully you realize that she doesn’t really care much about its validity. To quote: “lowering emissions is just one example of how the climate emergency could - by virtue of its urgency and that the fact that it impacts virtually everyone on earth - breathe new life into a political goal...(such as) raising taxes on the rich, blocking harmful trade deals, to reinvesting in the public sphere...”
“Even more importantly, the climate moment offers an overarching narrative in which everything from the fight for good jobs to justice for immigrants, reparations for the injustice of slavery...all becomes a grand project of building a non-toxic shock-proof economy before it is too late”. So there it is: the science is not that important. What really matters is the social justice we can get from it.
She learned well from her “Shock Doctrine” book. Just as the world’s international bankers took advantage of the debt crises in smaller countries to dismantle their social justice and welfare economies, so does she propose to use the climate change “crisis” to achieve social justice. I agree with most of her social justice goals, but as a scientist, I cannot abide by getting there with a fear-mongering fraud.
So here are the simplest arguments to counter the climate change paradigm. Draconian measures to control CO2 emissions are based on three fictions:
First, that it is a “greenhouse gas”. Neither the EPA nor anyone else has ever provided a scientifically valid definition of such an entity. The atmosphere is not the confining top of a greenhouse, nor can it “retain heat”. Instead it cools the earth by natural convection and radiation to free space.
Secondly, at only 0.04 percent of gases in the atmosphere, CO2 is supposed to control the earth’s temperature and climate. That is an absurdity and there is not one iota of reliable evidence that it does.
Thirdly, the paradigm postulates that human emission determines atmospheric CO2. The data is overwhelming that natural sources and sinks such as ocean emission and absorption, photosynthesis, vegetative decay, volcanic eruptions, forest fires, carbonate rock weathering and many other processes overwhelm human emission. Human emissions are trivial in comparison and they dissolve rapidly into the cold oceans.
The “climate justice” movement, by conflating the justified desire to advance social justice with the phoney theory of man-made climate change, will only serve to discredit social justice as the truth about climate change finally emerges.
Extreme environmental solutions can have unintended consequence (blowback).
The work of Rachel Carson, Klein’s heroine, resulted in the world-wide ban on the use of DDT. The result was about 100,000 more annual fatalities of children in Africa as a result of malaria. That malaria epidemic subsided several years later as soon as DDT use was resumed.
Challenge yourself to realize what harmful unintended consequences would result from the measures to eliminate the use of fossil fuels. The reality is that such a measure will have no effect on weather or climate.
******
Dr Martin Hertzberg is a long time climate writer, a former U.S. Navy meteorologist with a PhD in Physical Chemistry from Stanford University and holder of a Fulbright Professorship. Hertzberg is an internationally recognized expert on combustion, flames, explosions, and fire research with over 100 publications in those areas.
By E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D.
An Open Letter on Climate Change to the People, their Local Representatives, the State Legislatures and Governors, the Congress, and the President of the United States of America
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Human-induced climate change, also known as anthropogenic global warming (AGW), is real. Crucial questions facing the public and policymakers are its magnitude, its benefits and harms relative to the benefits and harms of the activities that drive it, and the benefits and harms of proposed responses to it.
As the American people and their political representatives formulate policy regarding AGW, they should consider the following:
Human Exceptionalism and Humanity’s Role in the Earth
Severe poverty, widespread hunger, rampant disease, and short life spans were the ordinary condition of humankind until the last two-and-a-half centuries. These tragedies are normal when human beings act and are treated as if they were mere animals, which need to submit to nature. The Judeo-Christian heritage (Genesis 1:28; 2:15), in agreement with common sense, teaches instead that human beings are exceptional, able to rule over nature, freeing ourselves from poverty and hunger to live long and healthy lives. Our rule over nature should express not the abusive rule of a tyrant but the loving and generous rule of God the Creator (Genesis 2:15). It should thus express itself by enhancing the fruitfulness, beauty, and safety of the earth (Genesis 1:1-31; 2:4-14), to the glory of God and the benefit of our neighbors (Matthew 22:36-38).
How Societies Overcome Poverty
Our Judeo-Christian moral tradition puts a high priority on protecting and helping the poor (Psalm 41:1; Galatians 2:10). It also teaches, along with economic history, that what delivers people from absolute material poverty is a combination of moral, social, political, scientific, and technological institutions. These include science and technology grounded on a view of the physical world as an ordered cosmos that rational creatures can understand and harness for human betterment; private property rights, entrepreneurship, and widespread trade, protected by the rule of law enforced by limited and responsive governments; and abundant, affordable, reliable energy generated from high-density, portable, constantly accessible sources. By replacing animal and human muscle and low-density energy sources like wood, dung, and other biofuels, and low-density, intermittent wind and solar, fossil and nuclear fuels have freed people from the basic tasks of survival to devote time and bodily energy to other occupations.
Empirical Evidence Suggests that Fossil Fuel Use Will Not Cause Catastrophic Warming
Many fear that carbon dioxide emissions from fossil fuel use endanger humanity and the environment because they lead to historically unprecedented, dangerous global warming. This has led many well-meaning people to call for reduced carbon dioxide emissions and hence reduced use of fossil fuels.
Computer climate models of the warming effect of enhanced atmospheric carbon dioxide are the basis for that fear. However, to validly inform policymaking, computer climate models must be validated by real-world observation, and they have not been. Over time, observed global average temperature (GAT) diverges increasingly from modeled GAT.
On average, models simulate more than twice the warming observed over the period during which anthropogenic warming is supposed to have been the greatest (about the last 35 years). None simulate the complete absence of observed warming over approximately the last 20 years at Earth’s surface and 17 to 27 years in the lower troposphere (where we live). Over 95 percent simulate more warming than observed. These data confirm the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) observation that we are currently experiencing an absence of global warming long enough to be nearly impossible to reconcile with the models.
All of this makes it increasingly clear that the models greatly exaggerate the warming effect of carbon dioxide. The models’ errors are not random - as often above as below observed temperatures, and by similar magnitudes - but consistently above observed temperatures, making it apparent that the models are biased. The large and growing divergence between model simulations and observed GAT severely reduces the models’ credibility both for predicting future GAT and for informing policy.
The Judeo-Christian worldview provided the basis for scientific method by teaching that a rational God designed an ordered universe to be understood and controlled by rational persons made in His image (Genesis 1:26), which is why science as a systematic activity arose in medieval Europe. One of Christ’s apostles, Paul, even asserted the essence of science when he wrote, “Test all things, hold fast what is good” (1 Thessalonians 5:21). In that spirit, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman explained “the key to science” this way:
In general we look for a new law by the following process. First we guess it. Then we compute the consequences of the guess to see what would be implied if this law that we guessed is right. Then we compare the result of the computation to nature, with experiment or experience, compare it directly with observation, to see if it works. If it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. In that simple statement is the key to science. It does not make any difference how beautiful your guess is. It does not make any difference how smart you are, who made the guess, or what his name is - if it disagrees with experiment it is wrong. That is all there is to it. [ii]
We would add to Feynman’s statement that it also makes no difference how many people agree with your guess. The scientific method never appeals to consensus. It demands that theories be tested by empirical observation. By that test, the models are wrong. They therefore provide no rational basis to forecast dangerous human-induced global warming and no rational basis for efforts to reduce warming, whether by restricting the use of fossil fuels or by any other means.
For the Foreseeable Future, Wind and Solar Energy Cannot Effectively Replace Fossil Fuel and Nuclear Energy
Fossil fuels, because of their lower costs and higher efficiency, account for over 85 percent of total global energy use, and nuclear energy for about 6 percent. Wind and solar energy, because of their higher costs and lower efficiency, account for only a few percent. Mandated substitution of low-density, intermittent energy sources like wind and solar for high-density, constant sources like fossil fuels, before the former technologies become economically competitive, would be catastrophic to the world’s poor. It would simultaneously raise the cost and reduce the reliability and availability of energy, especially electricity. This, in turn, would raise the cost of all other goods and services - especially food - since all require energy to produce and transport. It would destroy scores to hundreds of thousands of jobs in America and, by slowing economic growth, prevent the creation of millions more here and abroad, especially in the developing world. It would slow the rise of the poor out of poverty and threaten to return millions to it. And it would make electricity grids unstable, leading to more frequent and widespread, costly and often fatal, brownouts and blackouts -events mercifully rare in wealthy countries but all too familiar to billions of people living in countries without comprehensive, stable electric grids supplied by stable fossil or nuclear fuels.
The Poor Would Suffer Most from Attempts to Restrict Affordable Energy Use
The poor, whether in America or elsewhere, will suffer most from such policies. The world’s poorest - the 1.3 billion in developing countries who depend on wood and dried dung as primary cooking and heating fuels, smoke from which kills 4 million and temporarily debilitates hundreds of millions every year -will be condemned to more generations of poverty and its deadly consequences. Instead, they desperately need to replace such primitive and dirty fuels with electricity, the most affordable sources of which are fossil fuels.
The poor in the developed world, too, need more, and cheaper, electricity and other energy from fossil fuels. On average, they spend two or more times as much of their incomes on energy as the middle class. When governments mandate substitution of wind and solar for fossil fuels, the affected poor lose access to decent food, housing, education, health care, and more as their energy costs rise. Some freeze to death, as tens of thousands did in the United Kingdom in several recent winters due to that nation’s rush to substitute wind and solar for coal to generate electricity, because they are unable to pay their electricity bills and still buy enough food.
Affordable Energy Can Help Millions of the World’s Poor Emerge from Poverty
The same computer climate models that exaggerate the warming effect of atmospheric carbon dioxide nonetheless rightly simulate that greater economic development driven by growing use of fossil fuels will add more carbon dioxide to the atmosphere. Consequently, the IPCC finds that the warmest scenarios for the future are also the richest, especially for those societies that are now the poorest.
The risks of poverty and misguided energy policies that would prolong it far outweigh the risks of climate change. Adequate wealth enables people to thrive in a wide array of climates, hot or cold, wet or dry. Poverty undermines human health and life even in the best of climates. It follows that because reducing fossil fuel use means reducing economic development, it also means condemning poor societies to remain poor, and requiring poor people of today to sacrifice for richer people of the future - a clear injustice.
Rising Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Enhances Plant Growth
While adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere causes far less warming than previously feared, it has a positive effect on plant life. Scientifically understood, carbon dioxide is not a pollutant but a gas harmless at twenty times its current atmospheric concentration and vital to all life on the earth.
With more carbon dioxide in the air, plants grow better in warmer and cooler temperatures and wetter and drier soils, make better use of soil nutrients, and resist diseases and pests better, increasing their fruit production, expanding their range, and greening the earth. This makes more food available to all other creatures, especially - as agricultural yields rise, making food more affordable - the world’s poor. Substituting wind, solar, and other low-density energy sources for coal, oil, and natural gas therefore hurts the poor not only by raising energy (and all other) prices but also by reducing food production. It also hurts the rest of life on earth by depriving it of the fertilizing effect of heightened carbon dioxide.
By using fossil fuels to generate energy to lift billions of God’s precious children out of poverty, we liberate from the tomb of the earth the carbon dioxide on which plants and therefore all the rest of life depend. This beautifully reveals the Creator’s wisdom and care for all of His creation - people, animals, plants, and the earth itself.
Summary and Call to Action
Climate change is overwhelmingly natural and cyclical; human contribution to it is slight and not dangerous; attempts to reduce human contribution by reducing CO2 emissions would cause more harm than good; and expanded use of fossil fuels is necessary to provide the abundant, affordable, reliable energy indispensable to lifting and keeping societies out of poverty. Although CO2 emissions warm the earth slightly, they do not warm it dangerously, and the benefits of fossil fuel use, especially in enabling whole societies to rise, and remain, out of poverty, far outweigh whatever risks might accompany their small contribution to global warming.
In light of these considerations,
We call on the American people to speak out against policies aimed at curbing global warming and make their views known to opinion leaders at local, state, and national levels.
We call on local, state, and federal policymakers to speak out against and refuse to endorse any global agreements that require such policies.
We call on the news media both to resist demands by climate alarmists to conform their coverage of climate science and policy to any consensus that human activity is causing dangerous climate change and to refuse to characterize those who challenge any such consensus on scientific grounds as “deniers,” a pejorative term incompatible with rational, open, respectful discussion of scientific issues.
It is both unwise and unjust to adopt policies, whether at local, state, or federal levels, let alone a global agreement, requiring reduced use of fossil fuels for energy. Such policies would condemn hundreds of millions of our fellow human beings to ongoing poverty, and put hundreds of millions more at risk of returning to the poverty from which they rose, while achieving no significant climate benefit. We respectfully appeal to you to reject them.
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