By Larry Bell, Forbes, reprinted with author permission
Although global temperatures have been pretty flat despite rising atmospheric CO2 levels since the big 1998 El Nino, no one that I know disputes that climate changes. Nor do they doubt that there has been very mild warming since the mid-19th century when our planet began thawing out of the last “Little Ice Age” (predating the Industrial Revolution). And while most acknowledge that greenhouse warming may well be a contributing factor, it is also true that a great many very informed scientists believe that any human contributions to that influence are negligible, undetectable and thereby grossly exaggerated by alarmists, while far more important natural climate drivers (both for warming and cooling), are virtually ignored. Particularly consequential among these are long-and short-term effects of ocean cycles along with changes in solar activity.
The pervasive hype that we are experiencing a known human-caused climate crisis is based upon speculative theories, contrived data and totally unproven modeling predictions. Much of this emanates from politically-corrupted processes and agenda-driven report conclusions rendered by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which is trumpeted in the media as authoritative gospel.
Fritz Vaherenholt, a socialist founder of Germany’s environmental movement who headed the renewable energy division of the country’s second largest utility company, was once a big IPCC believer. Recently, however, his new book titled The Cold Sun: Why the Climate Disaster Won’t Happen, charges the organization with gross incompetence and dishonesty… especially regarding fear-mongering exaggeration of human CO2 emission influences.
After serving as an IPCC reviewer for their report on renewable energy, he was stunned by the large number of errors and wondered if the other IPCC reports on climate change “were similarly sloppy.” This concern prompted Vahrenholt to dig into the IPCC’s 2007 climate report, and he was again horrified by what he found. He concluded in an interview which appeared in the German news publication Bild that: “...IPCC decision-makers are fighting tooth and nail against accepting the roles of the oceans, sun, and soot.” Accordingly, IPCC models are completely out of whack. “The facts need to be discussed sensibly and scientifically, without first deciding on the results.”
Many would attribute the beginning of rampant U.S. global warming alarmism with star witness testimony delivered by James Hansen of NASA, director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), at then-Senator Al Gore’s Committee on Science, Technology and Space during the particularly hot summer of 1988. Then and now, Hansen’s catastrophic predictions (based upon highly theoretical and unproven general circulation climate models and subjective tweaking of incomplete and unreliable surface temperature data) continue to be a huge embarrassment to NASA.
In a January 29, 2006 New York Times interview, he charged that NASA public relations people had pressured him to allow them to review future public lectures, papers and postings on the GISS website. Yet in January 15, 2009 testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works-Minority Committee, his former boss John S. Theon, retired chief of NASA’s Climate Processes Research Program, took issue with the interference charge, stating: “Hansen was never muzzled, even though he violated official agency position on climate forecasting (i.e., we did not know enough to forecast climate change or mankind’s effect on it). Hansen has embarrassed NASA by coming out with his claim of global warming in 1988 in his testimony before Congress.”
Theon also testified that: “My own belief concerning anthropogenic [man-made] climate change is that models do not realistically simulate the climate system because there are many very important sub-grid scale processes that the models either replicate poorly or completely omit”. He observed: “Furthermore, some scientists have manipulated the observed data to justify their model results. In doing so, they neither explain what they have modeled in the observations, nor explain how they did it…this is contrary to the way science should be done.” He then went on to say “Thus, there is no rational justification for using climate model forecasts to determine public policy”.
On April 10, forty-nine former NASA scientists and astronauts sent a letter to NASA Administrator Charles Bolden, admonishing the agency in general, and GISS under Hansen’s leadership in particular, for its role in advocating a high degree of certainty that man-made CO2 is a major cause of climate change...while neglecting basic empirical evidence that calls that theory into question. The group, which includes seven Apollo astronauts and two former directors of NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston, is dismayed over the failure to make an objective assessment of all available scientific data on climate change, charging that NASA is relying too heavily upon complex models that have proven to be scientifically inadequate for climate predictions.
Their criticism is well founded, supported by scandalous exchanges among prominent researchers exposed in e-mail files retrieved from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at Britain’s University of East Anglia. The communications reveal conspiracies to falsify and withhold information, to suppress contrary findings in scholarly publications, and to exaggerate the existence and threats of man-made global warming. Many of these individuals have had major influence over highly publicized summary report findings issued by the IPCC.
A GISS researcher confessed in one e-mail that “[the United States Historical Climate Network] data are not routinely kept up-to-date”, and in another that NASA had inflated its temperature data since 2000 on a questionable basis."NASA’s assumption that the adjustments made the older data consistent with future data...may not have been correct.”
Another scientist warned, “It is inconceivable that policymakers will be willing to make billion-and trillion-dollar decisions for adaptation to the projected regional climate change based on models that do not even describe and simulate the processes that are the building blocks of climate variability.” Still another admits: “...clearly, some tuning or very good luck [is] involved. I doubt the modeling world will be able to get away with this much longer.” Still another modeler complained: “Mike, the Figure you sent is very deceptive - there have been a number of dishonest presentations of model results by individual authors and by IPCC...”
All climate models, regardless how sophisticated, are hopelessly compromised when based upon poor global temperature records. Yet an e-mail posted by database programmer Ian “Harry” Harris reports: “[The] hopeless state of their [CRU] database. No uniform data integrity. It’s just a catalogue of issues that continues to grow as they’re found...There are hundreds if not thousands of pairs of dummy [surface temperature recording] stations...and duplicates...Aarrggghh! There truly is no end in sight. This project is such a MESS. No wonder I needed therapy!!”
Responsible science is expected to be uncontaminated by political policy agendas, however passionate those participants may be regarding personal ideological beliefs. That same reasoning should also apply to those who are empowered to sponsor and direct that science. All too often this has not been the case, as revealed in candid public admissions by influential government officials, international climate summit organizers and leading IPCC authors.
Dating back two decades ago to the 1992 Rio de Janeiro Earth Climate Summit, which codified the U.N.’s central theme for the famous (or infamous) Kyoto Protocol, chairman Maurice Strong proposed a remedy to solve what was regarded to be a man-caused climate crisis. Addressing the audience, he suggested, “We may get to the point where the only way of saving the world will be for industrialized civilization to collapse. Isn’t it our job to bring that about?”
Former Senator Timothy Wirth, then representing the Clinton-Gore administration as Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs, strongly endorsed using global warming to advance that cause: “We have 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.”
Wirth, a former senator, had been instrumental in helping to set up Al Gore’s 1988 Senate Science, Technology and Space hearings. In an interview with PBS Frontline he recounted: “We called the Weather Bureau and found out what was historically the hottest day of the summer...so we scheduled the hearing that day, and bingo, it was the hottest day on record in Washington, or close to it...we went in the night before and opened all the windows so that the air conditioning wasn’t working inside the room.”
Wirth now heads the U.N. Foundation which lobbies for hundreds of billions of U.S. taxpayer dollars to help underdeveloped countries fight climate change.
Also speaking at the Rio conference, Deputy Assistant of State Richard Benedick, who then headed the policy divisions of the U.S. State Department, agreed that the Kyoto Protocol should be approved whether it had anything to do with climate change or not: “ A global warming treaty must be implemented even if there is no scientific evidence to back the [enhanced] greenhouse effect.”
Christine Stewart, then Canadian Minister of the Environment, speaking before editors and reporters of the Calgary Herald in 1998, said, “No matter if the science of global warming is all phony…climate change [provides] the greatest opportunity to bring about justice and equality in the world.”
And as IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer admitted in November 2010, “...one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth...”
While climate is generally defined in at least three decade-long periods, consider that James Hansen’s 1988 testimony before then-Senator Al Gore’s carefully staged steamy spectacle that stirred up a frenzy about an alleged CO2-driven climate emergency occurred only slightly more than one decade after many scientists had predicted an opposite crisis. One of them was the late Stanford University Professor Stephen Schneider who authored The Genesis Strategy, a 1976 book warning that global cooling risks posed a threat to humanity. Schneider later changed that view 180 degrees, serving as a lead author for important parts of three sequential IPCC reports.
Schneider candidly summed up what appears to be a prevalent IPCC view of scientific responsibility: “On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, on the other hand, we are not just scientists, but human beings as well. And like most people, we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that, we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of the doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
In other words, trust not what we tell you, but believe that we have your best interests in mind, because our intentions, if not our methods, are ethical. Accept what we tell you for that reason alone. If we have to exaggerate and alarm to get your attention, recognize that this is for a righteous cause.
Nobel Physics laureate Ivar Giaever has called global warming (aka. climate change) a “new religion”. When scientists emulate spiritual prophets, they overstep all ethical bounds. In doing so, they forfeit our confidence.
by Donna Laframboise, Nofrakkingconsensus
The next IPCC report will include a chapter that discusses gender inequality, marginalized populations, and traditional knowledge. So much for providing “rigorous...scientific information.”
The upcoming Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report will contain a chapter titled Human Security. According to an official outline, this will examine the following topics:
•Social and economic activities, including employment
•Education
•Inequalities, gender, and marginalized populations
•Culture, values, and society
•Indigenous peoples
•Local communities
•Local and traditional knowledge
•Migration and population displacement
•Conflict
•Community resilience
We’re told that the IPCC is a scientific organization and that its job is to “provide rigorous and balanced scientific information to decision makers.” But what can science possibly tell us about Culture, values and society? Or about Local communities? Why is the IPCC going anywhere near subjects such as these?
The Human Security chapter is being led by Neil Adger, a professor of environmental economics at the University of East Anglia. In 2007 he co-authored a paper that declared:
climate change increasingly undermines human security in the present day, and will increasingly do so in the future…
Gee, given that this is the person in charge, do we really suppose the IPCC report will come to a different conclusion?
Is Adger a precise thinker, a scrupulously dispassionate researcher, the sort of person who’s likely to examine all the literature, pro and con, in a fair-minded manner? You decide. In 2009 he authored a blog post in which he declared:
we urgently need to decarbonize the global economy…
In his view, a “much more unstable climate” is a given rather than a mere possibility. He apparently understands every nuance of the big picture so thoroughly he feels no hesitation in declaring that human actions are “committing every part of the world to fundamental changes.”
His blog post insists we need to fix “our energy system.” Predictably, it criticizes fossil fuel subsidies but expresses no concern about the outrageous amount of money being wasted on not-yet-ready-for-prime-time alternative energy projects. It quotes a report that says “warming above 2C would be very difficult for contemporary societies and ecosystems to cope with” without acknowledging that it will be future societies that will deal with such warming should it, in fact, occur.
(The world has, after all, come a long way since the 1960s - when 8-track tapes were the latest invention, rotary telephones were the norm, and personal computers weren’t yet part of everyday life. Let’s give future generations some credit. They’ll be equipped with far more than our current tools.)
Adger has also co-authored a journal commentary that begins with these words:
Human-induced climate change is real and is likely to drive increasingly dramatic changes in this century and beyond.
It’s so good to know that IPCC-appointed experts approach these matters humbly, and with an open mind. That article, incidentally, relies on IPCC reports as well as a paper in which two of the authors are Greenpeace personnel. The full citation in the latter case is:
Meinshausen M, Meinshausen N, Hare W, Raper S C B, Frieler K, Knutti R, Frame D J, Allen M R, 2009, “Greenhouse-gas emission targets for limiting global warming to 2C” Nature 458 1158-1162 [bold added]
As I explain in this blog post, Malte Meinshausen and William Hare have long been regarded as “key members of the Greenpeace International climate team.”
The public is often told it can have confidence in the conclusion that human-caused climate change is a problem. We’re told that this is because this conclusion rests on multiple lines of independent evidence.
But the more you learn about how the IPCC operates the less true such statements appear to be.
In fact, the same small group of people are often involved. These people quote the IPCC in their own work and then turn around and write the next IPCC report. The fact that some of them are employed by Greenpeace doesn’t disqualify them from participating in the IPCC. Nor does it prevent other IPCC authors from citing their work.
In sum, climate science is a small, incestuous, inbred little community. In no way does it represent the world’s finest scientific minds.
And when the IPCC starts writing about gender equality, marginalized populations, and traditional knowledge, it provides ordinary people with one more reason not to take it’s so-called science seriously.
Donna is author of The Delinquent Teenager. Purchasing “The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert”
helps Donna and supports the maintenance of Icecap.
Alarmists rarely attack, or even mention the Climate Money paper I did in 2009. It’s an own goal to draw attention to the fact that skeptics are paid a pittance, while the alarm industry soaks in extended baths of cash, grants, and junkets, and the vested interests are a magnitude larger. Exxon might lose some money if a carbon tax comes in, but the world will still need oil. The same can’t be said for ACME-Solar. If a carbon scheme falls over, so does a Solyndra.
So yes, let’s do talk about The Money. As Climate Money pointed out: all Greenpeace could find from Exxon was a mere $23 million for skeptics over a decade, while the cash cow that is catastrophic climate change roped in $2,000 million a year every year during the same period for the scientists who called other scientists “deniers”.
John Timmer tried to debunk it with words like “bogus”, and “false” but lacked things like evidence and numbers to back up his case. As far as I can tell the arguments amount to saying that a massive wall of money doesn’t influence the scientific process because scientists are incorruptible, the peer review process is faultless, and the human process of science works in ways that no other human process does. There are no political aims, personal ambitions, or human failings in *The Science!*™
Here’s why each excuse doesn’t pan out:
Excuse 1 “this is not how science works”
If money doesn’t have any influence on researchers, by implication, climate scientists are not like the rest of the human race. (Why do we pay them at all, one wonders?) It would take a truly angelic mature being to welcome awkward results with a smile. Who would enjoy finding data that showed that they’d been barking up the wrong tree for two decades and was now an expert in a dead-end irrelevant topic? If the results did not support their theory, which superhuman scientists would willingly work to ensure that their own specialty would plummet off the public agenda from “The Greatest Moral Threat” down to 193rd on the list of hot topics needing public attention? After we figured out that CO2 was of minor importance, the funding would slow, the red carpet events would dry up, and the two week long annual UN coordinated junkets in exotic countries would invite other experts from other fields.
Periodically an alarmist will claim that “mainstream science” would welcome the discovery that man-made emissions were irrelevant. But we don’t need to do that thought experiment, we’ve tested it already. Scientists who publish papers supporting non-catastrophic conclusions get called Deniers, they quickly get a DeSmog/SourceWatch/Exxon Secrets smear page that investigates contracts they may or may not have made 20 years ago, makes fun of their religious beliefs, dissects their biography, and if they persist, Greenpeace sends letters to their employer suggesting they ought not have a job. What’s not to like about that?
The price for speaking out against global warming is exile from your peers, even if you are at the top of your field.
We need a real free market in climate science before we create free markets in the real economy based on those conclusions.
Excuse 2 The funding was mostly for “Climate Technology”
Funding for “technology” will not affect the science, says Timmer. Apparently Jo Nova misread her own graph (and “spectacularly too!") Except JoNova labelled the graph accurately, read it correctly and just drew different conclusions. Technology isn’t science research, but as far as the media, politicians and press are concerned, the difference is moot. The IPCC was happy to count those solar, wind power, biomass and geothermal scientists as “science experts” that made a consensus. (Remember 4000 scientists support the IPCC conclusions.) No one complained that the solar engineers were “not climate scientists” when they made statements on press releases saying “climate change is real”. Money for solar, wind and carbon sequestration fueled many press conferences and expo’s where the “threat” that CO2 poses was taken for granted. In universities those research groups added to the pressure on science faculties to “keep the alarm running”, if only because they adopted the same disdainful culture to scorn dissenters. None of any of these researchers spent ten minutes checking the modelers assumptions on water vapor feedback. Neither did any of the zoology majors who report on iguana habitats shifting either. They all became mindless cheerleaders for the message. Can someone explain how any of those technology (or biology) researchers had an interest in announcing flaws in the theory of man-made climate funding?
Excuse 3 It’s incomprehensible that money could affect science. Ergo science is uncorruptible?
I pointed out that “Thousands of scientists have been funded to find a connection between human carbon emissions and the climate. Hardly any have been funded to find the opposite.” Timmer responds that this is “an almost incomprehensible misunderstanding” (and there goes Adam Smith in the bin) but the effect of only funding one side of a theory is not just “comprehensible” but documented in peer reviewed journals. Anyone with eyes can see how adjustments to the data progressively shift the graphs in one direction. (See these sea level graphs for example.) The adjustments are non-random, just like the adjustments to global temperature sets, and ocean heat content. The trend is always shifted to be more like the models. That’s exactly what you’d expect if you funded hundreds of people to look for one answer. You get what you paid for.
Excuse 4 Timmer points out that some people are looking for solar effects on the climate.
True, a scattering of scientists funded through other areas are looking for natural causes of climate change, but they are not necessarily free to find it. Funding for climate change is so large, and the anti-skeptic culture is so strong that even in astronomy researchers know better than to speak their skeptical minds freely. The grants panels of national research committees almost always include someone who is a fan of the man-made theory, and when competition for a grant is so fierce that making one enemy on an assessment panel can make the difference between success and failure, researchers know that keeping their skeptical opinions to themselves is important. Hence, even distant fields are affected by the rivers of money flowing in the Climate Change Stream. I’m relaying this story direct from a researcher, though for obvious reasons I cannot name them.
Excuse 5 The government had been throwing lots of money at climate science for decades.
(So?) Timmer claims climate funding had not expanded out of nothing in 1989 though he has no numbers (that is always the way isn’t it?). Certainly, the US government had been studying climate science under many different agencies before then. But what the graph unmistakably shows is that money directed towards man-made global warming issue was expanding fast. The new “climate change” label plastered over hundreds of research grants, and underlying billions of dollars of spending, tells us that the emphasis, the motives, and the aim of international research had shifted. There was no “climate change” research project before then. In those days, people were mostly just trying to understand the climate.
Major Research Programs were created to solve preordained problems
Whole programs were created around 1990 to deal with a “risk” and “danger” from climate change. What previously was called “climate science” (or geography, geology, meteorology, and oceanography) now became part of a large campaign called the “climate change science program”. Note, sec 204 of the legislation that created the Global Change Research Act of 1990. Paraphrased:
The President shall establish an Office of Global Change Research Information. The purpose of the office is to supply information about the research and development related to:
1.reducing energy use,
2.promoting renewables,
3.solving the ozone hole,
4.reducing the amount of CO2,
5.helping poor countries use agricultural and industrial chemicals,
6.promoting recycling and decreasing greenhouse gas emissions.
In other words, before the research was even done, the government was funding it so that results could help them achieve policy goals that were already decided. The questions were not: 1. Figure out if reducing CO2 is worth the cost, or is even beneficial. 2. Make climate models that will predict the weather and help agriculture and town planning. The science was decidedly unsettled in 1990, yet the government knew that it wanted to reduce CO2, burn less fossil fuel, and promote renewables.
Excuse 6 Science is done by peer review, not auditing
Christopher Essex wrote to me to point out that when billions of dollars rests on research results, peer review is not enough, the work ought to be audited:
“Timmer is right that there is a difference between auditing and peer review. These things are very different and they have different purposes. Peer review is cursory in some sense. It is a compromise at best, but it is not intended to check or reproduce everything in a study, but provides an author and editor some feedback on the merit of a piece. The problem is that the peers are not school teachers marking a student’s assignment, because they are peers. They do not necessarily know better than the author. In fact even a peer with great reputation can be wrong, which is why publication is not adding to holy scripture, but an opportunity to allow peers to respond with their own papers. Peer reviewed papers can thus be terrible, while non-peer-reviewed papers of high quality can experience a very rough ride.
Independent auditing is an entirely different matter. It has limited place in normal scientific give and take. But it is crucial from a corporate or policy point of view. If you aim to adopt something out of the scientific literature as a basis of a business or government strategy or policy, the executive has a fiduciary responsibility to be sure that the work adopted is correct in terms of its internal consistency and credibility of the assumptions and interpretations. Peer reviewed literature must be subjected to that from a liability point of view. That means everything needs to be checked, with caveats fully discovered and reported. This is not science except in as much as reproducibility is legitimately important to science.
The problem here is that most adoptions of peer reviewed literature by the UN were not audited. That makes those responsible for the various UN IPCC howlers liable for the costs that have arisen as a result. Of course there is always a question of whether the UN can be sued, but that is the principle of it. All of the government policy stuff needs to be audited as some level, peer review is not sufficient. On that other hand non-peer-reviewed material might also be audited, and be fine.
One does not want suits over peer reviewed material in the science literature, because it is important that scientists do not get a chill over making mistakes. That would compromise the ability of the scientific community to work things out and to advance. But this caveat does not apply to corporate or government uses of science where people may be hurt financially or physically because of mistakes or bias.”
Cheap Shots that prove my point
The bottom line is that Timmer is so short of real arguments that he scratches for slurs, even resorting to associating a climate change skeptic to a HIV skeptic: “Like many other self-proclaimed skeptics, Nova...” (follow the link). There is no connection between the two topics. John Timmer’s attempt at denigration by association (of the non-existent kind) is more proof of just how unscientific, unenquiring and desperate the world of climate groupthink is. Why does the team that claims to do *The Science!* have to resort to baseless character attacks instead of reasoned arguments? Could it be they have no evidence?
Then there’s the standard of research”: Timmer claims I’m an “Australian journalist” but if he’d done ten seconds of research and read the “About” page on my site, he’d have seen that I’m not and have never been a journalist. It’s irrelevant in the big scheme of things, but emblematic of a sloppy mind. If he didn’t know or care what Jo Nova does, why say anything?
After ten years of hearing how Big-Oil was controlling the debate by funding experts, it took him two and half years to come up with the idea that money has no influence. Is he sending a memo to DeSmog? Is he telling them to call off the Exxon attack dogs?