By James Taylor, Forbes
Three environmental activists and a duck walk into a bar and start talking global warming with a dozen people who have no formal education in climate science. Sound like the beginning of a bad joke? Actually, it’s not. It’s what the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) would have us believe is an expert, objective, scientifically authoritative panel qualified to produce its latest report, America’s Climate Choices.
America’s Climate Choices asserts that humans are the primary cause of recent climate change that poses significant risks to human welfare and the environment. The report asserts we need to act now to fend off future harms.
Environmental activist groups and their media allies have had a field day claiming America’s Climate Choices is an unquestionably objective and expert report providing irrefutable proof that humans are causing a global warming crisis.
USA Today, for example, claimed the report was authored by “the nation’s pre-eminent scientific advisory group” and said the report “leave[s] the deniers in the same position as the ‘birthers’” who challenge President Obama’s reported birthplace.
Not to be outdone, the Washington Post referred to the report as “the scientific consensus of America’s premier scientific advisory group” and says “climate-change deniers, in other words, are willfully ignorant, lost in wishful thinking, cynical or some combination of the three.”
These are very strong assertions. Let’s see if the facts back them up.
Only 23 people served on the panel. This is hardly sufficient to form a “scientific consensus.”
Of the 23 panelists, only five have a Ph.D. in a field closely related to climate science. That’s less than 22%.
Five of the 23 panelists are or were staffers for environmental activist organizations. That means there are as many professional environmental activists on the panel as there are persons with climate-related science degrees.
Prior to publishing the report, 19 of the 23 made statements claiming global warming is a human induced problem and/or we need to take action to reduce carbon dioxide restrictions. That means 83% of the panel was clearly and obviously biased before being selected.
Two of the panelists are or were politicians.
One of the panelists was appointed by the Clinton administration as general counsel for the Environmental Protection Agency.
To claim that a report from such a small panel, comprised primarily of non-climate scientists and environmental activists, is objective and scientifically authoritative is a joke. The fact that 19 of the 23 panelists were clearly biased before even writing the report makes the report an even bigger joke. The only thing missing from such an “expert” and “objective” panel is the presence of Whoopi Goldberg and Joy Behar.”
When environmental activists lament the fact that public opinion has turned so forcefully against global warming alarmism, they need only look in the mirror to find the answer. You can’t trot out staffers from Environmental Defense Fund, WE ACT for Environmental Justice, and other environmental activist groups and claim this is authoritative, objective science. And if you are going to issue a global warming report and claim it is from impeccably qualified scientific sources, at least a quarter of the report’s authors should be climate scientists.
Environmental activists and their media allies repeatedly point out that America’s Climate Choices is a National Academy of Sciences publication. Rather than provide credibility for the panel of activists and non-climate scientists, the involvement of NAS merely illustrates how far away from quality, objective science NAS has travelled when the topic is a political one as well as scientific one. The fact that NAS chose to publish the report in no way changes the fact that the report was written by a very small panel of environmental activists and non-climate scientists. All the Washington Post and USA Today editorials in the world cannot change the fact that the NAS panel is about as close to representing an objective, authoritative scientific consensus on climate science as Donald Trump is to representing an objective, authoritative scientific consensus on the accuracy of President Obama’s birth claims.
Indeed, when three environmental activists and a duck walk into a bar to discuss global warming with non-climate scientists, the duck is most objective, qualified source in the room. Too bad the duck was the only entity left off the NAS panel.
James M. Taylor is senior fellow for environment policy at The Heartland Institute and managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
Marc Morano has compiled some links here.
Repulsive: National Research Council Chaired by Corrupted Warmist Ralph Cicerone: Turned Org. into political advocacy group: $6 million NAS study used to lobby for climate bill rcicerone@nas.edu
Flashback: MIT’s Lindzen Slams: ‘Ralph Cicerone of NAS/NRC is saying that regardless of evidence the answer is predetermined. If gov’t wants carbon control, that is the answer that the Academies will provide’
By Chris Horner
The Washington Post has a predictable, propagandistic lead Monday editorial - “Climate change underscored: A new report leaves little room for doubt” - that merits a fisking for the prominence given such admittedly non-newsy, if wildly spun and internally inconsistent, repetitiveness (emphases added throughout):
“CLIMATE CHANGE is occurring, is very likely caused by human activities, and poses significant risks for a broad range of human and natural systems.”
So says - in response to a request from Congress - the National Research Council of the National Academy of Sciences, the country’s preeminent institution chartered to provide scientific advice to lawmakers.
Ah, so - the implication is clear - it is a panel of scientists; wait, not just scientists, but climate scientists, and worthy of description as ‘preeminent’. But, then, the piece continues oddly without elaboration on this hint:
In a report titled “America’s Climate Choices,” a panel of scientific and policy experts also concludes that the risks of inaction far outweigh the risks or disadvantages of action.
Well, as Hoover fellow Paul Gregory notes, prompted by similar slop from the New York Times, “Of the first eight names, only one appears to be a climate scientist. The others are engineers, lawyers, and public policy types”.
But of course, we’re used to these gents being railroad engineers (the IPCC’s chief scientist, Rajendra Pachauri) and anthropology teaching assistants (see the IPCC ‘world’s leading climate scientists’
. By the next paragraph, however, surely the reader would begin wondering what is such a panel of scientists doing making these recommendations, which are in fact policy calls?
And the most sensible and urgently needed action, the panel says, is to put a rising price on carbon emissions, by means of a tax or cap-and-trade system. That would encourage innovation, research and a gradual shift away from the use of energy sources (oil, gas and coal) that are endangering the world.
Slippery, slippery. We need not belabor the ‘what if a skeptic trotted out such an ‘expert climate panel’ argument here. It’s just too obvious.
None of this should come as a surprise. None of this is news. But it is newsworthy, sadly, because the Republican Party, and therefore the U.S. government, have moved so far from reality and responsibility in their approach to climate change.
Oh. So it was the Republican-controlled Senate, with 60 and then 59 Democrat Senators, which refused to take up the issue last Congress? No. Just like the opposition in the House, then and now, Senate opposition is bipartisan, and strongly so. Though you’d never know that from reading the hyper-political WaPo:
Seizing on inevitable points of uncertainty in something as complex as climate science, and on misreported pseudo-scandals among a few scientists, Republican members of Congress, presidential candidates and other leaders pretend that the dangers of climate change are hypothetical and unproven and the causes uncertain.
Not so, says the National Research Council. “Although the scientific process is always open to new ideas and results, the fundamental causes and consequences of climate change have been established by many years of scientific research, are supported by many different lines of evidence, and have stood firm in the face of careful examination, repeated testing, and the rigorous evaluation of alternative theories and explanation.”
Climate-change deniers, in other words, are willfully ignorant, lost in wishful thinking, cynical or some combination of the three.
Ah, yes, ‘certainty’, and name-calling to prove the point. But then, as Jacobs, seizing on uncertainty also pointed out:
“The report tells us… the science is far from certain. I quote: ‘How will the climate system respond to increased greenhouse gases? The exact value of “climate sensitivity” - that is, how much temperature rise will occur for a given increase in atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration - is uncertain due to incomplete understanding of some elements of the earth’s climate system.’ Note the wobbly use of language, such as “exact” or “some elements,” to signal that the science is “almost certain.” I can imagine the illustrious committee members searching for appropriate qualifiers that would not let the cat out of the bag.
In fact, climate sensitivity to doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations is fairly summarized as the whole shootin’ match of the climate issue. Computer models on which policy types base their demands (and alarmists their prophesying) assume a climate sensitivity that is vastly greater than the les policy-relevant observations. You might know the latter as ‘reality’.
This group-grope “is not a study of climate science but of risk management”, per Jacobs, although I must add it is one accepting fairly well disproved assumptions (key among them: the climate’s sensitivity), which in itself is highly problematic.
I could go on. Because the Post surely did. But the point is that all of the tired name-calling and hyperventilation gets no more compelling the fifth or fiftieth time it is trotted out. These people demand a terrible imposition on society for no detectable climate impact. Let alone the subjective idea of ‘gain’ (as warming has historically been beneficial, indeed called a ‘climate optimum’.
But outlets like the Washington Post and its editorial board have always had a difficult time with good news. It’s just not news at all. Sort of like the NRC ‘report’ WaPo flogs, as it does each and every such one. Meanwhile, the sky remains just where we left it.
As just pointed out by an astute and disillusioned young climate scientist, James Hansen, the high priest of the global warming religion and defender of creation has recently produced a non-peer-reviewed paper finding that the net man-made effects on climate have been greatly exaggerated by computer models. Hansen claims most climate models have underestimated the cooling effect of man-made aerosols via cloud changes, although the fine print in the paper admits they really have no idea what is causing the cloud changes and resulting cooling effect. Hmmm, possibly the cosmic ray theory of Svensmark et al? Hansen also references estimates for climate sensitivity pulled out of the air by his brainwashed grandchildren in the amusing paper (p. 3).
Earth’s Energy Imbalance and Implications
James Hansen (1), Makiko Sato (1), Pushker Kharecha (1), Karina von Schuckmann (2)
((1) NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies and Columbia University Earth Institute, (2) Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique)
(Submitted on 5 May 2011)
Improving observations of ocean temperature confirm that Earth is absorbing more energy from the sun than it is radiating to space as heat, even during the recent solar minimum. The inferred planetary energy imbalance, 0.59 \pm 0.15 W/m2 during the 6-year period 2005-2010, provides fundamental verification of the dominant role of the human-made greenhouse effect in driving global climate change. Observed surface temperature change and ocean heat gain constrain the net climate forcing and ocean mixing rates. We conclude that most climate models mix heat too efficiently into the deep ocean and as a result underestimate the negative forcing by human-made aerosols. Aerosol climate forcing today is inferred to be -1.6 \pm 0.3 W/m2, implying substantial aerosol indirect climate forcing via cloud changes. Continued failure to quantify the specific origins of this large [negative] forcing is untenable, as knowledge of changing aerosol effects is needed to understand future climate change. A recent decrease in ocean heat uptake was caused by a delayed rebound effect from Mount Pinatubo aerosols and a deep prolonged solar minimum. Observed sea level rise during the Argo float era can readily be accounted for by thermal expansion of the ocean and ice melt, but the ascendency of ice melt leads us to anticipate a near-term acceleration in the rate of sea level rise.
Sorry Jimbo, near-term sea level rise is decelerating
Sea level rise is accelerating...to the downside
Following a long delay and some controversial “adjustments,” the University of Colorado sea level satellite data was recently released. A plot of the rate of sea level rise shows a stable rate between 2003 and 2007, and declining rates since 2007.
Rate of sea level rise in mm/year
Sea levels have been rising since the peak of the last ice age 22,000 years ago and have been decelerating over the past 8,000 years.
See also Inconvenient Truth: Sea Level Rise is Decelerating for evidence that the rate of sea level rise also decelerated in the 20th century. Holgate’s analysis is shown below (enlarged here).
