By Art Horn, Meteorologist
Proponents of man made global warming are being challenged more and more by scientists who don’t buy into the climate catastrophe scare. The arguments used to dismiss the challengers range from calling the non-believers names such as president Obama’s “flat earthers” and his use of the term “denier” which is meant to equate non-believers with holocaust deniers, very un-presidential. Al Gore is the champion of the name calling using terms such as racists, homophobes, alcoholics and smokers among others to describe those who dare dispute what he preaches, after all he was Vice-President. That means he’s smart right? Another attempt to marginalize the challengers is to site the various branches of government and scientific organizations that have issued proclamations about their belief in man made global warming. If they’re big and have lots of money they must be right, right?
Large institutions such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) the National Science Foundation (NSF) the National Academy of Science (NAS) the American Physical Society (APS) the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) along with many other government and academic institutions and societies have all issued statements touting their commitment to the man made global warming theory.
All of these organizations have stated that man made global warming is real and is caused by burning fossil fuels. Based on their unanimity we are therefore supposed to believe they are correct. By quoting the statements from these well known organizations we are supposed to believe that because they are large and well funded they are therefore exempt from making mistakes. Of course this is not true. As an example, in 2006 NASA predicted sunspot cycle 24, the current cycle we’re in now, would be the strongest in 300 years. The reality is that it will be the weakest in 100 years. They could not have been more wrong.
Computer models from the 1990s predicted that global average surface temperature would continue to increase after the year 2000. They were wrong. There has been no measured temperature increase since 1998. Actually I believe that large institutions are more likely to be wrong more often than individuals. Large institutions have giant budgets that must be fed making them vulnerable to political agendas. They have enormous institutional inertia that makes it very hard for them to change direction. Individuals can change direction on a dime if new evidence indicates the old way of thinking was wrong.
The truth is that we really don’t know what the thousands of people who make up large government agencies, organizations and institutions think of global warming. The department heads of government agencies and the boards of directors of academic institutions and societies may claim that their respective organizations support the man made global warming theory. The problem is that they never asked the people who actually make up these various entities what they think. For all I know 85% of all NASA employees may not believe in man made global warming, but nobody knows because nobody asked them. Just as President Obama does not speak for me and at least 57 million other Americans, the department heads and leaders of government agencies and other large institutions don’t necessarily speak for their membership.
The bottom line is that using declarative statements from large organizations, that have a vested interest in maintaining their massive funding from the federal government to study “the problem”, have no real meaning. Until someone actually polls the members of these entities we will never know just what the rank and file members actually believe about man made global warming. It is the thousands of working members of these organizations that define who these entities really are, not the presidents, CEO’s or department heads.
Another argument made by climate change alarmists is that we don’t hear anything in the media from the “deniers”. The reason for this is that news organizations such as NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN have no tolerance for any opinion that is not their own, much like president Obama, whom they overwhelmingly support. I worked in the television news business for twenty five years as a meteorologist, mostly for NBC stations. What I found was that many people who work in TV are utopian liberals. They see government as the supreme repository of good that can, with a few billion dollars here and there, solve our problems.
What I also found was what John Stossel found when working at ABC. If you challenge the network orthodoxy you risk alienation or termination. In Stossel’s new book “No They Can’t” he describes the limited range of thinking that exists in many news organizations across the nation. Once, when Stossel suggested that politicians love of socialism kept India poor, Peter Jennings said his bias was “an embarrassment” to ABC and demanded that he be fired. Because Stossel did not agree with the networks view of the world, Jennings would turn the other way when the two would meet in a hallway. The reason you don’t see climate change challenged on these networks is because they have made up their minds as to what is true and no amount of real truth will change that. I did a couple of interviews on MSNBC in New York a few years ago. One day I was contacted by a producer to see about coming down to New York for another interview. When I mentioned that global temperature had not increased since 1998 I never heard from them again.
I was in Montreal this past summer attending a climate change program at an Eco Park while on vacation. The program consisted of questions about climate change. It was a game show format. The room was divided into two groups. We all had buzzer buttons that we could push if we thought we had the correct answer to each climate change question. The side that got the most “correct” answers got the most points and won. As the game progressed I noticed many of the “correct” answers were wrong. I began to challenge the host, a young lady of about 25 years old. She put up with me saying things like “debate on this is good”. However a man in his 30s on the other side began to challenge me. I had said that global average surface temperature had not increased since 1998, He said temperature is continuing to rise. I said to him that even the United Nations IPCC has admitted that there has been a pause in the warming. He said temperature is rising. I asked for his data source. He had none. He was a firm believer that warming was continuing, probably due to viewing news programs and reading stories in newspapers.
Scrutiny of man made climate change arguments reveal why they are failing. Nature is showing us that carbon dioxide concentrations are not ruling global temperature. Since 1998 twenty eight percent of all carbon dioxide emissions released into the atmosphere since 1850 have occurred yet there has been no warming. World wide hurricanes are not increasing in number or strength. There has been no category 3 or higher hurricane strike in the United States since 2005. This year, in the United States, we are on our way to having the fewest number of tornadoes since modern record keeping began. Sea level is rising at the same rate is has for the last 100 years with no acceleration. Polar Bear populations are at record highs. Computer model temperature predictions are much too warm and the difference between them and measured temperature is increasing each year. Arctic sea ice loss at the end of the summer has leveled off. Man made climate change arguments are failing because they are wrong.
Thank you for supporting Icecap so that we can keep Art out there telling the truth. Art had this story posted in the Energy tribune and SEPP’s TWTW.
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Dr Gordon Fulk’s response to an left coast ivory tower ‘scientist’ trying to suppress skepticism
Dear Professor Alford,
Meteorologist Mark Johnson sent me a copy of your e-mail to him, where you say: “All the [climate] models reported there clearly demonstrate the same thing; namely, that there is climate change and that it is anthropogenic.”
And you ask him to “please be careful not to misrepresent studies in a way that gives the impression that there is debate in the scientific community about this [Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming]. There isn’t, and the sooner this debate gets put to rest the sooner we as a society can take effective action against climate change.”
Either you are living in an ivory tower completely cutoff from the real world or are willing to bear false witness. Your statements are naive in the extreme. Even the US National Academy of Sciences has admitted that the climate models are off by a factor of two. The attached comparisons of the temperature trends of 73 models versus the best temperature data show that the discrepancy is more like a factor of 3.5 in the tropical mid-troposphere.
If your world is limited to the University of Washington where purity of thought is apparently sooo important that all dissent has been stifled, I suppose that you can maintain “There isn’t” any debate . That is a pity, because the way that we really make progress in science is to allow, even to celebrate dissent. One of the greatest living physicists, Freeman Dyson at The Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, celebrates those whom he calls ‘heretics’.
Who are/were some of the most famous heretics?
Prior to 1905 there was effectively “no debate in the scientific community about” Classical Physics. Yet a little Jewish man changed all that with his famous papers in 1905. Then the same year a man by the name of J. Harlen Bretz graduated from Albion College in biology and took up high school teaching in Seattle. His interest in the geology of Eastern Washington and a presumed ice age Lake Missoula set him on a course to be one of the most famous geologists of all time, defeating the geological consensus of his day.
Then there was the Establishment headed by Sir Harold Jeffries that fought Plate Tectonics and Continental Drift, doing their best to ignore the data. Blackett and Runcorn, et al were the skeptics who eventually defeated the consensus with striking empirical data. And what about the Nobel Laureates in Medicine in 2005? Australians Barry Marshall and Robert Warren fought the medical consensus for many years over the cause of peptic ulcers, winning not by a vote of those tied to the establishment but by the ultimate arbiter in science: logic and evidence.
Would you have missed every single one of these dramatic advances in science, because you were unwilling to think beyond the safety of conventional wisdom? I hope not.
You are probably unaware yet that several of us who strongly disagree with the prevailing CO2 paradigm have agreed to participate in a seminar at UW this Fall, organized by Professor Cliff Mass. Cliff is by no means a skeptic. But he apparently sees the wisdom in scientific discussions. You might want to attend, so that you come to realize that there is vast and credible opposition to climate hysteria. And if you have ANY robust data linking man’s burning of fossil fuels to any change in Global Average Surface Temperature (GAST), I am sure everyone in attendance would love to see it.
You might also want to watch the news this Fall as the US Supreme Court is expected to take up the EPA’s Endangerment Finding on carbon dioxide. Eleven scientists (including me) have already filed arguments proving that the government’s arguments in favor of CAGW (their ‘three lines of evidence’
are completely false, based on robust empirical evidence not opinion.
But if you cannot wait until then, have a look at the attachment where more than one hundred of us wrote a letter to our Alarmist-in-Chief Obama objecting to his climate hysteria. Or go here.
Where you will find the great physicist Edward Teller and 31,000 other American scientists objecting to your presumed consensus.
How many scientists have to speak up before you realize that climate science is far from settled? Remember Albert Einstein’s famous comment: “One man can prove me wrong.” He was obviously not thinking of the University of Washington!
Gordon J. Fulks, PhD (Physics)
Corbett, Oregon USA
P.S. I’m an astrophysicist, just like James Hansen.
* Freeman Dyson’s climate skepticism is well known and was covered in a New York Times article about him.
From: Mark Johnson
Subject: [GWR] Who is Matthew Alford
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 21:17:14 -0400
So I tweeted out a link to this study when Forecast the Facts started its AGW taunting today. Here’s the tweet: ”Study find deep-sea waves that ‘play a crucial role in long-term climate cycles”
A few hours later I get this e-mail from the studies’ author. I was truly stunned by the sentence I highlghted at the end of the email. So, there it is guys, there is total aggreement in the scienitific community on CAGW. Move on.
“Hi Mark,
I saw your tweet wherein you appear to be using my article to attempt to undermine the evidence for climate change. I urge you not to do this. Breaking deep-sea waves such as the ones we observed do affect the specifics of predictions of climate change in the different climate models. In that sense, climate models are sensitive to getting these waves right as we attempt to make them more and more precise. However, the sensitivity is not great enough to affect the basic findings in the IPCC report. All the models reported there clearly demonstrate the same thing; namely, that there is climate change and that it is anthropogenic.
You have the right to your opinion, but please be careful not to misrepresent studies in a way that gives the impression that there is debate in the scientific community about this. There isn’t, and the sooner this debate gets put to rest the sooner we as a society can take effective action against climate change.
Best regards
Matthew Alford
Principal Oceanographer and Associate Professor
Applied Physics Laboratory and School of Oceanography
University of Washington
the thanks for painting a target on my back department comes word of a new paper that attempts to figure our the mapping of the climate skeptic blogosphere.
Bishop Hill writes:
Readers may remember Amelia Sharman as one of the authors of the “Entrepreneur” paper, about the disreputable shenanigans that led to the EU’s biofuels mandate.
Amelia is now in the midst of a PhD looking at global warming sceptics and has just published a working paper, describing the results of a social network analysis of sceptic blogs.
The paper abstract is (full paper link follows):
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Title: Mapping the climate sceptical blogosphere
Author: Amelia Sharmanab
Affiliation: a Department of Geography and Environment, London School of Economics and Political Science, Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment
Abstract
While mainstream scientific knowledge production has been extensively examined in the academic literature, comparatively little is known about alternative networks of scientific knowledge production. Online sources such as blogs are an especially under-investigated site of knowledge contestation. Using degree centrality and node betweenness tests from social network analysis, and thematic content analysis of individual posts, this research identifies and critically examines the climate sceptical blogosphere and investigates whether a focus on particular themes contributes to the positioning of the most central blogs. A network of 171 individual blogs is identified, with three blogs in particular found to be the most central: Climate Audit, JoNova and Watts Up With That. These blogs predominantly focus on the scientific element of the climate debate, providing either a direct scientifically-based challenge to mainstream climate science, or a critique of the conduct of the climate science system, and appear to be less preoccupied with other types of scepticism that are prevalent in the wider public debate such as ideologically or values-motivated scepticism. It is possible that these central blogs in particular are not only acting as translators between scientific research and lay audiences, but, in their reinterpretation of existing climate science knowledge claims, are filling a void by opening up climate science to those who may have been previously unengaged by the mainstream knowledge process and, importantly, acting themselves as public sites of alternative expertise for a climate sceptical audience.
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The full open access paper can be seen here.
There is only one little fatal mistake IMHO on sentence one of the paper:
Evidence supporting the reality of climate change and its anthropogenic cause is overwhelming in the peer-reviewed literature (J. Cook et al. 2013; Doran and Zimmerman 2009).
Apparently she’s not following just how messed up the Cook et al. paper is. Maybe she and Dr. Richard Tol can talk.
This made me laugh:
While the academic literature to date has focused on the manifestation of climate scepticism in mainstream media forums (Boykoff 2007; Schmidt et al. 2013), little work has been done to understand why climate sceptical blogs exist and what their role may be as public sites of knowledge contestation.
She has no idea why we exist? Better not tell her then, its a big Exxon-Mobil trade secret /sarc. Or, maybe she can ask her Grantham Institute co-worker and ex punk rocker Bob Ward, who I’m sure has an opinion about the matter.
On the plus side, there is this:
Table 7 shows that WUWT is an extremely central node according to this test. The results of this test are interpreted against the mean betweenness score. WUWT has a score of 3971.52, significantly higher than the mean score of 180.31. As anticipated, there was a large overlap between the results for this test and those for Freeman’s in-degree centrality, with six blogs appearing in both sets of results. Accordingly, Climate Audit, ICECAP, JoNova and No Frakking Consensus also join the short-list of the most central blogs.
I think the mean score of 180.31 is a typo, likely 1800 and change.
WUWT is an extremely prolific blog, with 190 posts for March 2012 alone; however, the posts analysed had several reoccurring sub-themes under the overall category of science, with a predominant interest in alternative explanations for climate models, temperature data or human-induced climate change, largely in the form of scientifically-based challenges to published science.
The conclusion is also interesting, an excerpt:
The most noteworthy finding of this research however is that the blogs identified as the most central predominantly focus on the scientific element of the climate debate. Within this overall focus, providing a direct scientifically-based challenge to mainstream climate science, or a critique of the conduct of the climate science system (such as individual climate scientists’ actions or institutional decision-making) appear to be particularly important themes. As highlighted above, the direct scientific challenge that the climate sceptical blogosphere provides may be thought of as either trend or attribution scepticism (Rahmstorf 2005). The blogosphere’s focus on the scientific element of climate scepticism is important because it stands in direct contrast to research carried out among the general public, where the prevalence of trend and attribution scepticism is low compared to other types of scepticism, such as scepticism regarding the need for mitigation policies (Akter et al. 2012). This result also contradicts claims that climate science is ‘adrift in the blogosphere’ (Schafer 2012: 529) because even though few climate scientists themselves blog and are suggested to mainly focus on addressing the “pseudoscience” implied as existing within the climate sceptic blogosphere (Schafer 2012) this does not mean that science itself is not an active topic of discussion.
Still, that won’t stop climate zealots like Joe Romm and others from claiming WUWT and other skeptical blogs are “anti-science”, since that’s a convenient label for them to pitch to their low-information readers.
As always, thanks to my contributors, readers, and moderators for helping to put WUWT at the center of the climate blogosphere.
Thank you to Icecap readers for helping us rank #2!!!
By Marlo Lewis
Months ago, indefatigable watchdog Anthony Watts called out Organizing for Action (OFA) for declaring, in a Tweet issued in President Obama’s name, that “Ninety-seven percent of scientists agree: Climate change is real, man-made and dangerous.”
OFA was invoking a study in Environmental Research Letters by John Cook and colleagues, who supposedly found that 97% of climate scientists accept the “consensus” position on climate change. Cook manages Skeptical Science, a Web site dedicated to debunking climate “skeptics.”
As Watts and others, such as Andrew Montford of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, point out, Cook et al. did not attempt to estimate the number or percentage of climate scientists who agree or disagree that climate change is “dangerous.”
But what about Cook et al.’s widely reported finding that 97% of climate scientists believe most of the 0.7C warming since 1950 is due to the buildup of anthropogenic greenhouse gases? Does the Cook team actually demonstrate overwhelming agreement with that core “consensus” position of the International Governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)?
Not by a long shot, argue University of Delaware climatologist David Legates and three colleagues in Climate “Consensus” and Misinformation. In fact, less than 1% of the 11,944 science papers (actually, just the abstracts) surveyed by the Cook researchers express agreement with the so-called consensus.
Of the 11,944 abstracts examined by Cook et al., 66.4% percent expressed no position. Cook and his colleagues claim that 97.1% of the 33.6% of the abstracts that expressed an opinion, or 32.6% of the entire sample, agree with the IPCC consensus position. “However,” contend Legates et al., “inspection of the authors’ own data file showed that they had themselves categorized only 64 abstracts, just 0.5% of the sample, as endorsing the standard [IPCC] definition. Inspection shows only 41 of the 64 papers, or 0.3% of the sample of 11,944 papers, actually endorsed that definition.”
So what is it that 97.1% of 33.6% of the science study abstracts actually agree on? The proposition that anthropogenic greenhouse gases are responsible for some unspecified portion of the warming of the past 50 years. And guess what? Just about every prominent skeptic, including John Christy, Roy Spencer, Patrick Michaels, and Richard Lindzen, agrees with that as well. As an attempt to discredit skeptics, the Cook et al. study is a complete bust.
In the Legates team’s press release, co-author Christopher Monckton cheerfully concedes that “more than 0.3% of climate scientists think Man caused at least half the warming since 1950.” Nonetheless, he observes, “only 0.3% of almost 12,000 published papers say so explicitly,” and “It is unscientific to assume that most scientists believe what they have neither said nor written.”
Cook et al. argue as if simply establishing a consensus that climate change is “real” is enough to justify “public support for climate policy,” such as carbon taxes, renewable energy mandates, greenhouse gas regulations, cap-and-trade, and the like. But not even a consensus that climate change is “dangerous” would settle the critical policy questions.
The world is a dangerous place, and the resources available to address its many perils are finite. What policy makers need to know is not whether X is dangerous but how dangerous X is compared to other problems, and how many lives can be saved via interventions addressing X versus interventions addressing those other challenges.
Bjorn Lomborg’s Copenhagen Consensus project repeatedly finds that many threats to global welfare such as malnutrition, trade barriers, and childhood diseases threaten more lives than climate change, and that proven methods for addressing those problems can save many more lives than can an optimal carbon tax, R&D in low-carbon technologies, or any other climate policy.
Indeed, since even a politically-impossible carbon tax that eliminated all U.S. carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions tomorrow would avert only at most a hypothetical 0.2C of warming by 2100, it is far from evident that any politically-feasible carbon tax or emission-control strategy would yield any discernible health or safety benefits.
Finally, Cook et al.’s fixation with “consensus” as a mandate for “policy” disregards the whole problem of unintended consequences. Responsible policy makers consider whether the potential side-effects of any proposed intervention might make corrective action a ‘cure’ worse than the disease.
For example, most people might agree that chemical weapons-wielding Syrian dictator Bashar Al-Assad is “dangerous.” That, however, hardly clinches the case for bombing Syria’s weapons stockpiles. Still less does it justify launching an Iraq-style invasion. Rightly or wrongly, many U.S. policymakers fear the potential repercussions of U.S. military intervention in the Mideast more than they fear Bashar.
Similarly, many “skeptics” see greater peril to human welfare from coercive de-carbonization than from mankind’s continuing use of fossil fuels. UCLA Prof. Deepak Lal expresses the point with his usual eloquence:
“The greatest threat to the alleviation of the structural poverty of the Third World is the continuing campaign by western governments, egged on by some climate scientists and green groups, to curb greenhouse gas emissions, primarily the CO2 from burning fossil fuels. To put a limit on the use of fossil fuels without adequate economically viable alternatives is to condemn the Third World to perpetual structural poverty.”
Deepak Lal, Professor Emeritus of International Development Studies at UCLA and Professor Emeritus of Political Economy at University College London, in his new book, Poverty and Progress: Realities and Myths About Global Poverty.