By Neil Frank, Houston Chronicle
Now that Copenhagen is past history, what is the next step in the man-made global warming controversy? Without question, there should be an immediate and thorough investigation of the scientific debauchery revealed by “Climategate.”
If you have not heard, hackers penetrated the computers of the Climate Research Unit, or CRU, of the United Kingdom’s University of East Anglia, exposing thousands of e-mails and other documents. CRU is one of the top climate research centers in the world. Many of the exchanges were between top mainstream climate scientists in Britain and the U.S. who are closely associated with the authoritative (albeit controversial) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Among the more troubling revelations were data adjustments enhancing the perception that man is causing global warming through the release of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other atmospheric greenhouse gases.
Particularly disturbing was the way the core IPCC scientists (the believers) marginalized the skeptics of the theory that man-made global warming is large and potentially catastrophic. The e-mails document that the attack on the skeptics was twofold. First, the believers gained control of the main climate-profession journals. This allowed them to block publication of papers written by the skeptics and prohibit unfriendly peer review of their own papers. Second, the skeptics were demonized through false labeling and false accusations.
Climate alarmists would like you to believe the science has been settled and all respectable atmospheric scientists support their position. The believers also would like you to believe the skeptics are involved only because of the support of Big Oil and that they are few in number with minimal qualifications.
But who are the skeptics? A few examples reveal that they are numerous and well-qualified. Several years ago two scientists at the University of Oregon became so concerned about the overemphasis on man-made global warming that they put a statement on their Web site and asked for people’s endorsement; 32,000 have signed the petition, including more than 9,000 Ph.Ds. More than 700 scientists have endorsed a 231-page Senate minority report that questions man-made global warming. The Heartland Institute has recently sponsored three international meetings for skeptics. More than 800 scientists heard 80 presentations in March. They endorsed an 881-page document, created by 40 authors with outstanding academic credentials, that challenges the most recent publication by the IPCC. The IPCC panel’s report strongly concludes that man is causing global warming through the release of carbon dioxide.
Last year 60 German scientists sent a letter to Chancellor Angela Merkel urging her to “strongly reconsider” her position supporting man-made global warming. Sixty scientists in Canada took similar action. Recently, when the American Physical Society published its support for man-made global warming, 200 of its members objected and demanded that the membership be polled to determine the APS’ true position.
What do the skeptics believe? First, they concur with the believers that the Earth has been warming since the end of a Little Ice Age around 1850. The cause of this warming is the question. Believers think the warming is man-made, while the skeptics believe the warming is natural and contributions from man are minimal and certainly not potentially catastrophic A la Al Gore.
Second, skeptics argue that CO2 is not a pollutant but vital for plant life. Numerous field experiments have confirmed that higher levels of CO2 are positive for agricultural productivity. Furthermore, carbon dioxide is a very minor greenhouse gas. More than 90 percent of the warming from greenhouse gases is caused by water vapor. If you are going to change the temperature of the globe, it must involve water vapor.
Third, and most important, skeptics believe that climate models are grossly overpredicting future warming from rising concentrations of carbon dioxide. We are being told that numerical models that cannot make accurate 5- to 10-day forecasts can be simplified and run forward for 100 years with results so reliable you can impose an economic disaster on the U.S. and the world.
The revelation of ClimateAgate occurs at a time when the accuracy of the climate models is being seriously questioned. Over the last decade Earth’s temperature has not warmed, yet every model (there are many) predicted a significant increase in global temperatures for that time period. If the climate models cannot get it right for the past 10 years, why should we trust them for the next century?
Climategate reveals how predetermined political agendas shaped science rather than the other way around. It is high time to question the true agenda of the scientists now on the hot seat and to bring skeptics back into the public debate.
Neil Frank, who holds a Ph.D. from Florida State University in meteorology, was director of the National Hurricane Center (1974-87) and chief meteorologist at KHOU (Channel 11) until his retirement in 2008.
By Paul Chesser, American Spectator
If anybody got the idea that Climategate and the Copenhagen failure, and the growing disbelief among the public that global warming catastrophe is around the corner, would accumulate to drive alarmists to repent from their promotion of phony climate data and fraudulent analysis (both economic and scientific), then they don’t know them well enough.
Take for example the Center for Climate Strategies, whose deceptive practices in the states I’ve documented ad nauseum for Spectator and for other publications. CCS is a global warming advocacy group that gets paid millions of dollars by environoiac foundations such as the Rockefeller Brothers Fund to get states’ governors to hire them so they can create their climate change policies. CCS pretends to be an objective, unbiased consultant; they are anything but. CCS produces the same cookie-cutter menu of ideas that increase energy costs and government control for each state, under the guise of a governor-appointed “blue ribbon panel,” which is simply a rubber stamp for the alarmists’ proposals.
Accompanying most recommendations that these panels produce are bogus claims of economic benefit for the given state—if they would only implement all of CCS’s ideas. Green jobs! Cost savings! Economic growth!
Except, as with Climategate, every economic study is crafted by CCS’s chosen researchers and experts, with no independent analysis sought. For example, in North Carolina CCS enlisted the Energy Center at Appalachian State University to promote their rosy scenario, saying their blue-ribbon ideas in the Tar Heel state would generate 32,000 new jobs by 2020 and boost gross state product by $2.2 billion. You know—just like higher taxes, more costs, and increased regulations always do. A peer-review study commissioned by the conservative John Locke Foundation, conducted by the PhD economists at the Beacon Hill Institute, found the following:
Rigorous testing using standard economic analysis yielded far more pessimistic results than those used to support the policies, (BHI President David) Tuerck said in an interview. “There’s an attempt to put a happy face on this...,” he said. “And the attempt is made by trying to show that implementing this legislation would create jobs and would expand economic activity in the state, rather than contract it. And the trouble with that particular representation is that it doesn’t make any sense.”
BHI has done similar truth-telling analyses for other states victimized by CCS’s disinformation. That brings us to today, where Michigan—the state hit the hardest by the current recession (plus union excesses and government mismanagement, but that’s another story)—is CCS’s latest target for fantasy economic research. The Associated Press reports:
The report by the Center for Climate Strategies said a plan devised last year for battling global warming in Michigan would help limit the state’s heat-trapping gas emissions over the next 15 years.
But more than the environment would benefit, the nonprofit group said. It projected gains of 129,000 jobs, a $25 billion uptick in the gross state product and lower prices for home energy sources such as electricity, oil and natural gas.
The [Michigan Climate Action Council] recommended an outside analysis of the potential effect on Michigan’s economy. The [Department of Environmental Quality] secured a $75,000 grant from the Troy-based Kresge Foundation for the study.
Economists with Michigan State University and the University of Southern California teamed with the Center for Climate Strategies, a Washington, D.C.-based organization that has helped more than 20 states develop programs to fight global warming.
The problem is, the economic analysis secured by Michigan’s DEQ was not “outside,” independent, or competent. Instead it was a carefully orchestrated effort to buttress the blue ribbon panel’s recommendations—using CCS’s own people! Two of the three authors are USC’s Dan Wei and Adam Rose, who also happen to be CCS staffers. Rose was part of a similar sham effort to legitimize glowing economic projections in North Carolina. And like CCS/Rose/Wei, Michigan State’s Steven Miller also has a reputation for overlooking costs when conducting economic analyses.
It’s not surprising that the Kresge Foundation would fund the study either, considering that the goal of their climate program is to “cultivate solutions that reduce greenhouse gas emissions, accelerate renewable energy technologies, and support efforts to help society adapt to the impacts of climate change.” Kresge, as well as several other global warming activist foundations, also funded the work of the Climate Action Council in Michigan.
The Center for Climate Strategies has perpetrated their fraudulent work—clothed as a “consultant” and hiding their true origins—in more than half the states now. Like the Climategaters, they forbid discussion and debate about climate science in their proceedings. They are now at work building regional agreements among the states, in case federal action fails.
For CCS to burden Michigan, which has the highest unemployment rate in the nation, with more schemes to kill jobs is especially egregious. These global warming fearmongers have no shame. For that, they get the orchestral version of this relevant rock song.
Read more with links here.
By Garth Paltridge in The Australian
THE Climategate scandal continues to unfold. The thousands of emails leaked to the internet from the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia reveal a tight-knit, influential group of scientists whose attitude to their profession is, to say the least, distorted.
It seems that a religious belief in disastrous climate change has destroyed their common sense and their appreciation of what is the appropriate way to carry out research.
Climategate may at least demonstrate that the concept of a scientific consensus with regard to global warming is nonsense. There may indeed be thousands of scientists contributing to the reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, but on any particular aspect of the overall story all have to rely on the word of the few scientists who are directly involved. And when the particular aspect concerns experimental data on which the whole story rests, the data purporting to show the world is getting warmer, then the consensus argument is indeed on shaky ground.
On the evidence so far, there is not much doubt that the group of scientists linked to the CRU has behaved fairly badly. Any individual email from the Climategate pile may be explained and excused as a stupid mistake of the time, but when all are taken together it seems obvious enough that there have been lots of violations of what might be called the scientific code. The most glaring examples concern efforts to keep basic sets of data out of the hands of people who may not be sympathetic to the official story about the disastrous nature of global warming. This, when the CRU is specifically paid to collate the data gathered by national meteorological services across the world, and to make the data available to outside scientists to check and to use.
In any event, the CRU information is covered by environmental information regulations that specifically require public bodies in Britain to make their data progressively available to the public by electronic means that are easily accessible.
So the ducking and weaving in the face of reasonable requests for CRU data by outside scientists and indeed in the face of Freedom of Information requests by those same outside scientists may not be just bad scientific form. It may be illegal. Which makes the lukewarm reaction to Climategate by the great and powerful of the scientific establishment even more difficult to swallow. The journal Nature, for instance, has this to say: “If there are benefits to the email theft, one [of those benefits] is to highlight yet again the harassment that denialists inflict on some climate-change researchers, often in the form of endless, time-consuming demands for information under the US and UK Freedom of Information Acts.”
Let us ignore the fact that even a prestigious journal such as Nature is happy to label scientific scepticism as the work of “denialists”, which is good evidence that the CRU disease has spread far and wide into the general science community. Prior to Climategate, there were probably fewer than a dozen FOI demands to CRU. There would have been no need even for those if the information had been made available when it was first requested.
I said recently in my book The Climate Caper that most scientists simply cannot believe that their colleagues would deliberately oversell a scientific conclusion for the benefit of a political cause. Dishonesty of that nature would fly in the face of everything that the rather idealistic typical scientist has been taught about his profession.
Perhaps Climategate will provide a medium for introducing typical scientists to the real world and perhaps as well it will re-introduce them to the idea that scepticism is the basis of the profession. See post here.
Garth Paltridge is an atmospheric physicist and former chief research scientist with the CSIRO Division of Atmospheric Research. His book The Climate Caper is published by Connor Court.