FOX NEWS
Los Angeles Times endorses censorship with ban on letters from climate skeptics
By Professor J. Scott Armstrong
Published October 18, 2013
Censorship of skeptic global warming views by the press has been going on for many years. This week, Paul Thornton, letters editor for the Los Angeles Times announced the paper will “no longer publish letters from climate change deniers,” as reported by Poynter.org.
Thornton says, “Simply put, I do my best to keep errors of fact off the letters page; when one does run, a correction is published. Saying ‘there’s no sign humans have caused climate change’ is not stating an opinion, it’s asserting a factual inaccuracy.”
Really? Is this kind of censorship good public-service policy for the Los Angeles Times?
It is a good policy for the global warming alarmist movement because those who are more knowledgeable about climate change are more likely to dismiss the alarm as unfounded.
It is not so good for citizens who would otherwise benefit from the freedom to make up their own minds after being exposed to different arguments and diverse evidence.
Is such censorship good business for newspapers and other mass media? Given that most people in the U.S. do not believe that there is a global warming problem, this seems doubtful.
One-sided coverage loses readers who do not share the editorial viewpoint. Aristotle suggested that persuasiveness is higher when both sides of an issue are presented. Later research found that Aristotle’s suggestion only works when one can rebut the other side.
Failing that, it is best to try to prevent the other side from being heard.
If persuasion is the goal, and not science, then it is sensible for the warming alarmists to avoid two-sided discussions.
In our study of situations that are analogous to the current alarm over global warming, Kesten Green and I identified 26 earlier movements based on scenarios of manmade disaster (including the global cooling alarm in the 1960s). None of them were based on scientific forecasts. And yet, governments imposed costly policies in response to 23 of them.
In no case did the forecast of major harm come true.
Will it be different this time?
Isn’t it important for the public to be informed about scientific evidence on the issue? And because the alarm is based on the fear of future harm, shouldn’t the public insist on scientific forecasts?
The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) uses models that provide computer scenarios, not forecasts, of dangerous manmade global warming.
When we assessed the scenarios as if they were forecasts of what would actually happen, Kesten Green and I found that they violated 72 of 89 relevant scientific forecasting principles.
Would you go ahead with your flight, if you overheard two of the ground crew discussing how the pilot had skipped 80 percent of the pre-flight safety checklist?
For rational policy-making and regulating, scientific forecasts are necessary.
We are astonished that there is only one published peer-reviewed paper that claims to provide scientific forecasts of long-range global mean temperatures. The paper is a 2009 article in the International Journal of Forecasting by Kesten Green, Willie Soon, and me.
When we tested our forecasts against the IPCC scenarios using data from 1850 to the present, our forecasts, based on a model that adhered to scientific principles, were more accurate over all forecast horizons from 1 to 100 years. They were especially more accurate for long-term forecasts.
For example for forecasts 91 to 100 years ahead, the IPCC forecast errors were over 12 times larger than our forecast errors. Perhaps that qualifies as relevant evidence for citizens. And it would be “news” for 99% of them. Yet our forecasts received virtually no mass media coverage. Meanwhile, non-scientific climate-scare “forecasts” regularly get widespread attention from the mass media.
Want to bet which forecast of global mean temperatures is going to be correct? Mr. Gore did not want to bet against me in 2007 when he was warning that the world was at a climate “tipping point.” That was wise decision on his part. Scientific forecasting methods tend to be more accurate than political forecasting methods.
Fortunately, with many mass media outlets attempting to influence people by using censorship, citizens are able turn to alternative sources of information and argument on the Internet to inform their decisions. And many have. The polls provide evidence that the alarmist case is so weak that even with widespread censorship, citizens are not persuaded.
Professor J. Scott Armstrong teaches at the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia. He is a founder of the two major journals on forecasting methods, author of Long-Range Forecasting, editor of the Principles of Forecasting handbook, and founder of forecastingprinciples.com. He is the world’s most highly cited author on forecasting methods. He has been doing research on forecasting methods for over half a century. Fox News was the first to cover the bet that he proposed to Mr. Albert Gore in 2007 (see theclimatebet.com for the latest results).
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Fox News
The Los Angeles Times is giving the cold shoulder to global warming skeptics.
Paul Thornton, editor of the paper’s letters section, recently wrote a letter of his own, stating flatly that he won’t publish some letters from those skeptical of man’s role in our planet’s warming climate. In Thornton’s eyes, those people are often wrong and he doesn’t print obviously wrong statements.
“Simply put, I do my best to keep errors of fact off the letters page; when one does run, a correction is published,” Thornton wrote. Saying ‘there’s no sign humans have caused climate change’ is not stating an opinion, it’s asserting a factual inaccuracy.”
What amounts to a ban on discourse about climate change stirred outrage among scientists who have written exactly that sort of letter.
“In a word, the LA Times should be ashamed of itself,” William Happer, a physics professor at Princeton, told FoxNews.com.
“There was an effective embargo on alternative opinions, so making it official really does not change things,” said Jan Breslow, head of the Laboratory of Biochemical Genetics and Metabolism at The Rockefeller University in New York.
“The free press in the U.S. is trying to move the likelihood of presenting evidence on this issue from very low to impossible,” J. Scott Armstrong, co-founder of the Journal of Forecasting and a professor of marketing at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, told FoxNews.com.
Happer, Breslow and Armstrong are among 38 climate scientists that wrote a widely discussed letter titled “No Need to Panic About Global Warming,” which was published in The Wall Street Journal in Jan. 2012.
The letter argued that there was no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to “decarbonize” the world’s economy. It generated such extensive public debate about man’s role in global warming that the Journal published a second letter from the group a few weeks later.
Reached at his home on Friday, Thornton told FoxNews.com his policy was being misinterpreted.
“This is not a blanket ban on ‘skeptics.’ What it does ban is factual inaccuracy,” Thornton said. “I’ll put it this way: It’s fine to say that the Lakers are a terrible basketball team, but it would be factually inaccurate to say they’re bad because they put four guys out on the court every night instead of five. The latter ‘perspective’ also happen to be objectively false, so a letter containing it wouldn’t be considered for publication.”
“To say that no evidence exists when scientists have produced evidence is asserting a factual inaccuracy, and we try to keep errors of fact out of the paper,” he told FoxNews.com.
Thornton said he has already rejected letters that have argued that there is no evidence that human activity is driving climate change.
Other papers took up the LA Times cause, arguing that climate skeptics are too often kooks best kept off the pages and out of sight.
Citing a letter printed in an Australian newspaper, blogger Graham Readfearn of the Guardian suggested that he supported the ban.
“Wrongheaded and simplistic views like this are a regular feature on...no doubt hundreds of other newspapers around the world where readers respond to stories about climate change,” Readfearn wrote. “Thornton’s decision could well leave a few editors wondering if they should follow suit.”
Some climate skeptics said the move was an intentional effort to eliminate debate.
“My research on persuasion shows that persuasiveness of messages is higher when both sides of an issue are presented, but only when one has good arguments to defeat the other side,’ Armstrong told FoxNews.com. “If not, it is best to try to prevent the other side from being heard.”
The Poynter Institute, a journalism school in St. Petersburgh, Fl., took quizzical note of the policy in a post on its website on Wednesday. But editors for the school’s website did not acknowledge FoxNews.com questions about the ethics of such a policy, and Thornton himself did not respond to FoxNews.com in time for this article.
The writers of the Journal letter left no doubt about their feelings.
“The religion of Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming (CAGW) does not tolerate non-believers,” Breslow told FoxNews.com.
By Steve Goddard, Real Science
I located a 2007 version of the CU sea level error map, and its corresponding trend map.
Note the region north of New Guinea where the trend is 9 mm/year and the error is also 9 mm/year. This region severely skews the global numbers upwards. In other words, their 3mm/year trend claim is completely meaningless scientifically.
Animate the two
Global mean sea level results
Even worse is that they have taken the error map off their web site. Their fake 3 mm/year serves as the basis for many fraudulent claims by scientists that sea level rise rates have increased.
The most sophisticated satellite (ENVISAT) used to show 0.5 mm/year, before they quadrupled the numbers overnight , and then immediately euthanized the satellite.
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Meteorologists Continue Foreseeing Harsh European Winter, “The Worst in Decades” + Greenpeace Update
Pierre Gosselin, No Tricks Zone
The online Bild newspaper here quotes German meteorologist Dominik Jung: “For the coming winter give a probability of 70:30% that it’s going to be a colder-than-normal winter.”
Photo: SnowKing1, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported.
Jung is not the only meteorologist forecasting a colder-than-normal winter. Bild also reports that also Michael Klein of Donnerwetter.de expects better than even chances of bitter cold months: “The first trend points more to a colder-than-normal winter. At least it is not going to be mild.”
The southern Germany’s online Wasserburger Stimme reports here that the chances of an ‘extreme winter’ are as high as ever this year. The site also quotes German meteorologist Dominik Jung, who says that winters in Central Europe in general began to become milder after the 1960s thanks to mild winds coming in off the Atlantic. Jung adds that the highpoint was reached in the 1990s. But: “In the last 5 years the winters have been normal or slightly colder than normal. The series of extremely mild winters appears to be over.”
A meteorologist who believes anything?
Jung feels that this winter could be a really harsh one, the sort not seen in 50 years. But cautions that such a forecast cannot be made with high certainty. Jung adds:
But the probability of a new XXL winter has increased considerably. New theories claim that extended ice melt at the North Pole could lead to significantly colder winters in Europe. It is not that the climate over the whole world will warm up. There are regions that will indeed get warmer, and there are also regions that will get cooler.”
Here Jung is subscribing to the after-the-fact nonsensical theory that the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research (PIK) desperately had to cook after being caught off guard by cold winters that took Europe by surprise. It’s a dubious theory based solely on IPCC-quality models with no data to support it.
Jung adds that the US NCEP models are also forecasting a slightly colder normal winter than usual (1961-1990 mean).
UK meteorologist predicts possibly “the worst for decades”.
Forecasts of a harsh winter are also circulating in Britain. The online Express here bears the title: “Worst winter for decades: Record-breaking snow predicted for November.” It writes:
Long-range forecasters blamed the position of a fast-flowing band of air known as the jet stream near Britain and high pressure for the extreme conditions. Jonathan Powell, forecaster for Vantage Weather Services, said: ‘We are looking at a potentially paralysing winter, the worst for decades, which could at times grind the nation to a halt.
It’s hard to tell how much all of this is headline-grabbing. Some meteorologists may be getting carried away. My WAG is a more or less normal winter.
Greenpeace Arctic Activists Update
Complaints that the cell is too cold
The UK leftist Independent here writes that some of the 30 arrested Greenpeace activists are complaining of harsh conditions and that their cells are too cold. The Independent quotes the father of a detained activist:
‘There’s no regular access to such simple things as clean water, regular meals and a warm enough air temperature,’ Mr Golubok said.”
What do the activist expect from a Russian prison? Five-star resort accommodations, massages and a sauna?
Captain says he needs to go home because of heart problems
Meanwhile the English language Ria Novosti reports that the captain of the Arctic Sunrise ship Peter Wilcox now regrets going to the Arctic to protest:
RIA Novosti’s legal reporting agency RAPSI quoted Willcox as saying he had never faced such severe charges in 40 years of activism, and that he would have stayed in New York if he could choose to go back. [...] Denial of Willcox’s appeal came despite his lawyer expressing concern over his health complications stemming from a heart condition.”
Oh, now suddenly he has heart problems. Strange how just a month ago his heart had been in good enough shape to allow him to venture off into the harsh Arctic conditions for a little protest and boat ramming.
Lavrov warns external parties “not to interfere”
Yesterday Ria Novosti here wrote that Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov reiterated that the environmental activists “clearly violated the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea” and that “the issue should be left in the hands of the courts”. He also warned external parties “not to interfere”.
Ria Novosti writes that “All 30 have appealed their detention, seeking release on bail or home arrest. The Murmansk Regional Court has rejected all 11 appeals it has heard so far, ordering the activists to remain behind bars until a hearing on November 24.”
Looks to me like none are going to be released on bail. There’s just too much material to sort through and no one wants to decide prematurely. Besides, the Russians have lots of time and there’s no hurry.
by Larry Bell
October 11, 2013, 1:41am
DESPITE rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels, global climate temperatures have remained flat for the past 15 years, if not a good deal longer. And the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was last month forced to admit that its own climate models have grossly overestimated climate sensitivity to atmospheric CO2.
So why are some European countries, Germany in particular, but also Britain and Denmark, pursuing green policies that are pushing up the cost of energy, and which could prove seriously damaging to their long-term economic health?
Existing policy in Germany already forces households to fork out for the second highest power costs in Europe, often as much as 30 per cent above the levels seen in other European countries. Only the Danes pay more, and residential electricity costs in both countries are roughly 300 per cent higher than in the US. Circumstances in Germany are only likely to worsen following the re-election of Angela Merkel’s conservative Christian Democratic Union. She will continue with policies designed to wean the country off fossil fuels and nuclear power.
But even former proponents are beginning to see the damage being caused. Dr Fritz Vahrenholt, a father of Germany’s environmental movement and former head of the renewable energy division at utility company RWE, has joined the ranks of those now challenging this trend. In his new book, The Neglected Sun Precludes Catastrophe, he concludes that “renewable energies do have a big future, but not like this. It’s been a runaway train and too expensive. We are putting [our] industry in jeopardy.”
Approximately 7.8 per cent of Germany’s electricity comes from wind, 4.5 per cent from solar, 7 per cent from biomass, and 4 per cent from hydro. The government plans to increase the proportion from renewables to 35 per cent by 2020, and 80 per cent by 2050. Since hydro and biomass won’t grow, most of that expansion must come from wind and solar.
Denmark, meanwhile, which produces between 20 to 30 per cent of its electricity from wind and solar, hopes to produce half from those sources by 2020. As Denmark can’t use all the electricity it produces at night, it exports about half of its extra supply to Norway and Sweden. But even with those export sales, government wind subsidies have led Danish consumers to pay the highest electricity rates in Europe.
And what about Britain? In 2011, UK wind turbines produced energy at a meagre 21 per cent of installed capacity (not demand capacity) during good conditions. As in Germany, unreliability in meeting power demands has necessitated importation of nuclear power from France. Also similar to Germany, the government is closing some of its older coal-fired plants, any one of which can produce nearly twice the electricity of Britain’s 3,000 wind turbines combined.
Renewables are unreliable, and power interruptions are adding to buyer’s remorse. This is less of a problem when there are reliable backup sources like hydropower, coal and nuclear plants to meet demand. But most of Europe lacks the former, and is intentionally to its detriment cutting back on both of the latter.
Signs of constructive change are far more apparent in Australia. In September, the right-of-centre Liberal Party’s defeat of the Green Party-backed Labor Party was recognised as a referendum victory for dismantling and consolidating myriad anti-carbon schemes spawned under the previous government. Reining in that sprawling climate machine and eliminating an established energy carbon tax is expected to save the economy more than Au$100m (£57.6m) per week. Australia is seeing sense, there are lessons Europe can learn from its shining example.
And thanks to natural gas, coal and nuclear, the US has excess power-generating capacity, and generally adequate transmission and distribution systems unlike Europe. Today, just over 42 per cent of US electrical power comes from coal, 25 per cent from natural gas, and 19 per cent from nuclear. Only about 3.4 per cent comes from wind, and about 0.11 per cent from solar.
Whether renewable energy will be able to offer substantial cost-competitive alternatives rather than limited niches for US and international energy remains to be seen. But regardless, we can only hope that America learns from the ruinous green energy policies in Germany and other EU nations before such misguided policies wreak further social and economic damage.
Larry Bell is a professor at the University of Houston where he directs the Sasakawa International Center for Space Architecture.
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An Uncritical View Of EPA: Why I Agree With Obama
By Larry Bell, Forbes
Reprinted with permission from author
Okay, I admit that I’ve been pretty tough on the EPA in the past. Unlike most other Conservatives, I’ve now decided that I really do want clean air, land and water, and somebody’s got to do the dirty work of keeping capitalism from screwing it all up. Let there be no doubt that the agency takes every imaginable action to accomplish that.
Sure, maybe they might be faulted for going a little overboard occasionally in protecting us from ravages of excessive prosperity. Like, for example their regulatory efforts to put an end to many millions of years of climate change.
Still, we can all appreciate their good intentions. After all, think of all those critters that have frozen their butts off during previous Ice Ages lasting a hundred thousand years or so, then having to adapt to 12,000 to 15,000 years long warmer interglacial periods like our current one, then repeating the process all over again. Think about all those sweaty folks during the Medieval Warm Period a thousand years ago having to endure temperatures hotter than now, followed later by a “Little Ice Age” between about 1400-1859 AD causing Washington’s troops to suffer bitter cold at Valley Forge in 1777-78, as did Napoleon’s during their frigid retreat from Russia in 1812.
Heck, even during the past century alone the planet has had to endure two distinct climate changes...warming between 1900 and 1945 followed by a slight cool-down until 1975 when temperatures rose again at quite a constant rate until 1998.
So what if we humans really can prevent that climate change nuisance after all? Like be able to pick a time when temperatures are really great and there aren’t all those frequent severe weather events that past decades have witnessed?
Good news! It appears that we actually can. According to the UN’s last IPCC report, their scientists now claim they are virtually certain that we humans are primarily responsible for the past 17 years of flat global temperatures thanks to our record high atmospheric CO2 emissions.
Not only that, it seems that we have influenced the lack of increase in the strength or frequency of landfall hurricanes in the world’s five main hurricane basins over the past 50 to 70 years, and a lack of increase in the strength or frequency in tropical Atlantic hurricane development during the past 370 years. We’re also responsible for the longest U.S. period ever recorded without intense Category 3 to 5 hurricane landfall, and for no trend since 1950 of any increased frequency of strong (F3-F5) U.S. tornadoes.
Obviously we’re doing something right.
Then there’s the matter of those rising oceans. Remember when presidential candidate Obama declared during his June 8, 2008 victory speech as Democratic Party nominee that his presidency will be “the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal”?
If you think his red line in Syria was a big deal, you’ve certainly got to give him credit for drawing an ambitious line in the sand on that one. And even without Putin’s help, he’s held to that promise. Just as he said, the sea level rise hasn’t accelerated at all since the time he assumed control. Nope, it’s still increasing at the rate of about seven inches per century, just as it has ever since that Little Ice Age.
Granted, all this climate stuff is really complicated, and appearances of events can be deceiving. Imagine, for example the view from Al Gore’s new $9 million Montecito, California oceanfront villa, or from John Kerry’s yacht. It’s probably very difficult to discern whether the sky is falling, or it’s the ocean that is rising.
Whichever the case, after subtracting subsidence due to human water depletion from coastal water level changes, that lowering in addition to a seven inches-plus per century sea rise difference clearly does present a serious problem in some locations. However, the question is how much help EPA can be expected to afford in solving it.
Here’s a thought. What if the federal government got out of the business of using our taxes to subsidize cheap flood insurance in vulnerable low-lying areas which encourages irresponsible coastal development in the first place?
Yeah, I know. That’s a pretty radical idea.
Regardless, undaunted by reality, the EPA is determined to protect us, come hell and/or high water. It’s termed the “precautionary principle”, where regulatory economic costs and impacts aren’t their concern. Don’t believe me?
In 2011, the American Council for Capital Formation estimated that the new EPA regulations will result in 476,000 to 1,400,000 lost jobs by the end of 2014. Management Information Services, Inc. predicted that up to 2.5 million jobs will be sacrificed, annual household income could decrease by $1,200, and gasoline and residential electricity prices may increase 50% by 2030. The Heritage Foundation projects that the greenhouse gas regulations will cost nearly $7 trillion (2008 dollars) in economic output by 2029.
Yet EPA representatives have maintained that considerations regarding such regulatory economic and employment impacts fall outside the administration’s purview. Responding in a letter to a question raised by Rep. Vicky Hartzler (R-Mo), then-EPA Assistant Administrator Gina McCarthy (who now heads the agency) was very clear on this point, stating “Under the Clean Air Act, decisions regarding the National Ambient Air Quality Standards (NAAQS) must be based solely on evaluation of the scientific evidence as it pertains to health and environmental effects. Thus, the agency is prohibited from considering costs in setting the NAAQS.”
The U.S. Government Accounting Office has stated that it can’t figure out what benefits taxpayers are getting from the many billions of dollars spent each year on policies that are purportedly aimed at addressing climate change. Another 2011 GAO report noted that while annual federal funding for such activities has been increasing substantially, there is a lack of shared understanding of strategic priorities among the various responsible agency officials. This assessment agrees with the conclusions of a 2008 Congressional Research Service analysis which found no “overarching policy goal for climate change that guides the programs funded or the priorities among programs.”
As noted by H. Sterling Burnett, a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis (NCPA), “The EPA is in the process of codifying a whole slate of new air quality rules, the sheer number and economic impact of which have not been seen at any time in the EPA’s history.”
EPA’s relentless regulatory war is centrally targeted against fossil energy, applying permitting authority claimed through an “Endangerment Finding” under auspices of its Clean Air Act. That finding found that current and projected atmospheric concentrations of six greenhouse gases (including CO2) “threaten the public health and welfare of current and future generations.”
And how was that finding determined? Perhaps you correctly guessed that it was based upon global warming crisis projections put forth by the UN’s IPCC.
Yet that IPCC alarmism which Administrator Lisa Jackson admitted the agency’s finding was based upon was refuted at the time by EPA’s own “Internal Study on Climate” report conclusions. That report, authored by my friend Alan Carlin, a senior research analyst at EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics, stated: “...given the downward trend in temperatures since 1998 (which some think will continue until at least 2030), there is no particular reason to rush into decisions based upon a scientific hypothesis that does not appear to explain most of the available data.”
The EPA’s latest climate battle plan is to prohibit construction of new coal-fired power plants that can’t achieve 1,100 pound per megawatt hour carbon emission limits. To accomplish this will require plant operators to capture and store ("sequester") excess CO2, something that cannot be accomplished through affordable means, if at all. The Institute for Energy Research has estimated that this “regulatory assault” will eliminate 35 gigawatts of electrical generating capacity...10% of all U.S. power. As the Competitive Enterprise Institute observes, “If the carbon dioxide emissions standard for power plants proposed by the EPA today is enacted, the United States will have built its final coal-fired power plant.”
On September 18, Lisa Jackson’s replacement Gina McCarthy was invited to explain President Obama’s “Climate Plan” war on CO2 to members of the House Energy and Commerce Committee. I recently wrote about a notable exchange that took place between McCarthy and Rep. Mike Pompeo (R-Kan.) who asked her if EPA greenhouse gas regulations would be expected to impact any of 26 outcome indicators defined on their website.
At one point Pompeo asked: “Do you think it would be reasonable to take the regulations you promulgated and link them to those 26 indicators that you have on your website? That this is how they impacted us?”
McCarthy responded: “It is unlikely that any specific one step is going to be seen as having a visible impact on any of those impacts - a visible change in any of those impacts. What I’m suggesting is that climate change [policy] has to be a broader array of actions that the U.S. and other folks in the international community take that make significant effort towards reducing greenhouse gases and mitigating the impacts of climate change.”
In other words, the plan is to lead other nations off the same economic cliff America is rapidly approaching, with EPA heading the charge.
Oh, I nearly forgot. You’re probably wondering at this point where it is that I agree with President Obama regarding an uncritical view of EPA. Well, didn’t his administration determine with regard to the federal government shutdown that 93% of EPA employees weren’t critical...classified as non-essential?
So when the Big Fed starts up again, as I fear it will, let’s apply that precautionary principle to avoid further economic damage and just retain the 7% of the EPA that we apparently really need to keep our air, land and water clean, and sequester the rest? Isn’t that a huge national debt we owe to ourselves?