By Tom Harris & Dr. Jay Lehr
There’s an old saying that when presenting a legal case, if the facts are on your side, “pound the facts,” but if the facts are against you, “pound the table.” The report of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released on September 27th is an obvious example of pounding the table.
The facts, which the IPCC’s report admits to, albeit with obvious reluctance and a good deal of obfuscation, show that humanity’s impact on global climate is too small to justify concern and is certainly no reason for the costly programs governments are imposing. Yet the IPCC persists in asserting the opposite. They state that they are more convinced than ever that global warming is caused mainly by our greenhouse gas emissions and that the world face catastrophe if we don’t radically change our ways. Even though the IPCC’s past forecasts have been spectacularly wrong,
the UN panel claims even higher confidence today 95% that they’ve finally got it right.
They haven’t. The IPCC’s theatrics are clearly an attempt to misdirect public, media, and government attention away from the scientific fact that climate change is overwhelmingly due to natural forces. People are emitting more carbon dioxide (CO2) than ever, from power plants, automobiles, and industrial activity, but the earth has not warmed for at least the past 15 years.
None of the computer models the IPCC references predicted this. The world was warmer in the 13th century than now, yet CO2 levels then were far lower than today. Global ice cover a big concern of alarmists predicting rapid sea level rise hasn’t changed significantly since satellite measurements began in 1979, and Antarctic ice, which is eight times greater than Arctic ice, is not receding. Sea level rise has remained at roughly the same gradual rate for the past few centuries, and is now only 1/10th that of 8,000 years ago when large quantities of ice were melting. Extreme weather across the world has generally declined. For example, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reports that the U.S. is on pace for the fewest number of tornadoes in recorded history, while tropical cyclone activity (hurricanes in the North Atlantic) is near a thirty-year low.
Regardless, nobody, including the IPCC, knows what an ideal climate would be, or even whether there is such a thing. Attempting to stop climate change makes about as much sense as trying to halt the earth’s rotation: we can’t do it, and there’s no good reason to try.
IPCCs history of repeated and frequent mistakes
Given the IPCC’s history of repeated and frequent mistakes, it’s perfectly clear that they are a political organization, not a scientific one. Its primary purpose is to provide pseudo-scientific cover for a UN-led transfer of resources from people in wealthy countries to those in poor nations, while keeping poor nations from ever becoming rich. The IPCC should be disbanded and non-governmental scientists encouraged to publicize their conclusions without censor or intimidation from the UN, academia and other alarmists.
That’s not likely to happen soon, however. Too many people are profiting from global warming alarmism, as governments spend hundreds of billions of dollars each year attempting to overcome nature. Compliant scientists gain access to vast amounts of research funding if they characterize Western nations as the cause of every bad weather event. Instead of admitting that they made one of the biggest mistakes in history, governments continue to prop up the IPCC and pretend it’s findings are meaningful.
Global cooling or public apathy will eventually dry up IPCC funding and the organization will finally disband. For that to happen any time soon, however, will require that taxpayers in the nations that actually pay for the UN demand the end of the IPCC. And while they’re at it, voters would do well to call for an end to all the other costly, unnecessary government boondoggles adopted in the name of global warming, such as expensive and environmentally harmful renewable power mandates.
Toward that end, the public and the press clearly need a reliable source of climate science information, one not controlled by the UN or any government. Fortunately, there is one- the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC). Several days before the IPCC report was released, the NIPCC issued its current report, Climate Change Reconsidered II (CCR-II), a book of more than a thousand pages citing nearly 5,000 peer-reviewed scientific references and written or reviewed by some 50 climate scientists. The scientists firmly conclude nature, not man, controls the climate. It’s available here .
With the release of the CCR-II report, we can only hope that the pounding you’ll soon be hearing are the nails going into the IPCC’s coffin.
Tom Harris is executive director of the Ottawa, Canada-based International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC). Dr. Jay Lehr is science director of the Chicago-based Heartland Institute and an advisor to ICSC.
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.