By Dr. Gordon Fulks
From near record high to near record low temperatures this November in the Pacific Northwest, from relatively warm ocean conditions and ‘dead zones’ to relatively cold ocean conditions and fabulous salmon runs off our Pacific Coast, from an unusually cold winter to an unusually hot summer in Russia, from near record low Arctic sea ice to near record high Antarctic sea ice, our climate displays wide variability. But an army of psychologists, journalists, and even scientists make sure that the warm swings they deem alarming get the greatest attention. These propagandists know that the selling of Global Warming is all about perception not reality.
If the data will not support their storyline for another UN climate conference in Cancun, Mexico, an army of data manipulators stand ready. They rework averages to show continued warming during the last decade when honest assessments show flat or slightly declining temperatures. Some can be relied upon to say that 2010 was the warmest year “ever,” when honest scientists say that the El Nino this year was very similar to 1998. Also, the recent warm period was not as warm as the previous Medieval Warm Period, something Alarmists deny ever existed.
The simple truth is that there is nothing unusual going on today, let alone anything related to human carbon dioxide emissions. Climate variations are expected on a planet with vast oceans and atmosphere that are never in complete equilibrium. Climate variations are expected with a Sun that varies slightly in total solar irradiance, varies more in x-ray and ultraviolet output, and varies substantially in magnetic irregularities which modulate galactic cosmic rays. Climate variations are also expected in a solar system with large planets like Jupiter that alter the earth’s orbit and produce the huge climate variations called Ice Ages.
But how is someone who never studied science going to figure out who is telling the truth?
Science is not what I say, just because I have a good education and long experience. It is all about honesty, logic, and evidence. The simplest solution is to look out the window. The British Met Office used its new $50 million super computer to predict a mild winter in Britain, 3.4 F warmer than last year. So far, the reality is record breaking cold, heavy snow, and paralyzing ice!
But what if the New York Times (NYT), President Obama, the National Academy of Sciences (NAS), the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (UNIPCC), Yale University, and the Oregonian all say to be worried, very worried?
Perhaps you should question their expertise. Thomas Freidman of the NYT frequently calls for action on climate change, but has no expertise and relies on a notorious propagandist. President Obama relies on scientists whom he funds to give him the answers he wants. The NAS is run to support government programs by an electrical engineer. He discovered that Global Warming is far more lucrative than electrical engineering. The UNIPCC is run by a railroad engineer who writes romance novels. Yale University promoters are really psychologists who want you to believe that they are climate experts when their real expertise is propaganda. The Oregonian relies on all the above. The interlocking relationships are highly incestuous, with vast conflicts of interest and/or little scientific expertise.
Among scientists, belief in Global Warming comes down to cold cash. Those who benefit most from government largesse (about $100 billion to date) are typically true believers, while independent scientists easily spot the scam. This creates a split based on age and experience. Young scientists like Juliane Fry of Reed College, who professed her belief in an Oregonian Op-Ed, are eager for fame, funding, and tenure, all of which are more likely if they support Global Warming. Older scientists like Richard Lindzen of MIT, perhaps the greatest meteorologist alive today, oppose climate hysteria. They built their fame on an approach now considered quaint: the Scientific Method.
Among Global Warming advocates there is occasional candor about their real goals. Christiana Figueres, the new executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, said of the UN climate efforts: “This is the greatest societal and economic transformation that the world has ever seen.”
Global Warming is about politics not legitimate science. Ms. Figueres calls herself a “global climate change analyst.” Her formal education in climate science consists of Al Gore’s training program to promote “An Inconvenient Truth.” That should worry everyone! PDF
Gordon J. Fulks, Ph.D. lives in Corbett and can be reached here. He holds a doctorate in physics from the University of Chicago, Laboratory for Astrophysics and Space Research.
By Duggan Flanakin
The UN seeks to redistribute wealth, while CFACT works to reduce “energy poverty”
As conference delegates shivered in Cancun during its coldest weather in 100 years, power-hungry elitists labored behind the scenes to implement the real goal of this “global warming” summit, this sixteenth Conference of the Parties (COP-16), this clever political con job.
That the Cancun summit was never a climate conference at all has become increasingly obvious. Even before it began, IPCC Working Group III co-chair Ottmar Edenhofer said, COP-16 is actually “one of the largest economic conferences since the Second World War… One has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy.” In fact, it has “almost nothing to do with the environmental policy.” Its real purpose “is redistributing the world’s wealth and natural resources.”
A few days later, IPCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres told conference attendees, “The world is looking for new answers to the political, economic and social challenges which all countries face.” That the “new answers” focused primarily on how much more money and technology developed nations “owe” poor countries further affirmed the proceedings’ true nature.
As Viscount Christopher Monckton has accurately noted, the entire UN IPCC process is a “monstrous transfer of power from once-proud, once-sovereign, once-democratic nations”...to the corrupt, unelected Secretariat of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change.
The grand design - built on the model of the European Union - is to give the Secretariat power to compel once-independent nations to compile and submit vast quantities of information to the UN, pay ever-increasing taxes to unelected internationalists, and do the bureaucrats’ bidding on a host of issues. They are especially keen to compel the replacement of affordable, reliable hydrocarbon energy with “eco-friendly,” “sustainable” wind, solar and biofuel power.
Claims that “the science is settled” and there is “scientific consensus” on manmade climate disasters have already been demolished. The ClimateGate emails, revelations that numerous “peer-reviewed” IPCC “studies” were actually environmentalist press releases and student papers, and admissions by alarmists themselves took care of that. “There has been no statistically significant warming” since 1995, Dr. Phil Jones of East Anglia University’s Climate Research Unit admitted to the BBC in February 2010.
“No kidding,” his fellow Brits would tell him now, amid one of the UK’s coldest winters in a century.
In fact, there is not now and never has been a “consensus” on manmade global warming. A new report by Marc Morano, of the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT) and ClimateDepot.com, lists more than 1,000 scientists who have openly challenged the IPCC and claims that humans, hydrocarbons and carbon dioxide are causing a climate crisis. One of them, Swedish climatologist Dr. Hans Jelbring, accused the alarmist community of relying on inadequate computer models to blame CO2 and innocent citizens for global warming, to generate funding, gain attention and influence public policy.
“If this is what ‘science’ has become,” he added, “I as a scientist am ashamed.”
However, these cold realities have done little to chasten the alarmists or temper their tone. Far too much money, power and prestige are at stake. Confronted in Cancun with Dr. Jones’ admission, a startled IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri pointed to the discredited Fourth Assessment Report (of which Edenhofer was a lead author) as his sole source for “scientific” information - and refused even to say whether he agreed that warming had stopped 15 years ago.
During the widely covered CFACT press conference in Cancun, climatologist Dr. Roy Spencer addressed some of the reasons so many scientists dissent from IPCC orthodoxy. Many of the scary scenarios and predictions of imminent crisis, he explained, are based on computerized climate models that assume carbon dioxide drives climate change, but are deficient or erroneous in reflecting major climate mechanisms. For example, clouds cause negative feedback (cooling effects), and not just the positive feedbacks (heat trapping effects and warming) assumed by nearly all climate models.
Dr. Spencer also challenged a recent paper that continues to insist that clouds only trap heat and warm the planet. This paper defies science and common sense, he noted, and is “one more reason the public is increasingly distrustful of the scientific community, when it comes to research having enormous policy implications” for energy use, jobs, economic growth, and human health and welfare.
In short, debunking alarmist climate science is relatively easy. The much harder job has always been to expose the true intentions of the UN climate cabal. CFACT and others did this in Cancun, by demanding an end to “energy poverty,” condemning phony “climate change” obstacles to affordable energy, and insisting that poor countries be encouraged and helped to achieve the health, prosperity and modern living standards that only hydrocarbons can ensure and sustain.
When billionaires Ted Turner and Richard Branson tried to discuss ways to profit from global warming hype, “renewable” energy and CO2 emissions trading, a team of CFACT college students exposed their hypocrisy and anti-people climate profiteering. Wind, solar and biofuel companies are “producing products people don’t want and can’t afford,” the students pointed out. Even more immorally, they are conspiring to keep poor families impoverished and afflicted by malaria, lung infections, dysentery and other diseases of poverty.
Meanwhile, champions of “climate ethics” and “environmental justice” in dozens of rich countries are all too happy to provide what Lord Monckton called
“bailout bucks for bedwetting big businesses,” to ensure their continued cooperation with the wealth redistribution scheme. He also slammed the notion of giving kleptocratic governments $100 billion a year - which will do little except perhaps keep poor families from starving. If they are to achieve their hopes and dreams, they need abundant, reliable, affordable energy: ie, fossil fuels.
Climate alarmists say poor families will be devastated by global warming, unless we slash carbon dioxide emissions. No. The world’s poor are being devastated right now by climate alarmism. US Congressman Edward Markey (D-MA) and others who say poor countries must live “sustainably” and rely on “renewable” energy are rich, callous hypocrites, Canadian policy analyst Redmond Weissenberger said. They would never live that way themselves, but they want Earth’s poorest people to forego “the energy, wealth, health, clean water, safety and longer lives we enjoy, thanks to fossil fuels.”
A CFACT-organized bus tour drove this fact home. Delegates and journalists visited a village whose residents work at lavish Cancun hotels, but whose own houses are built of cardboard, plywood, rope and sticks - and lack electricity, running water, sanitation, trash pickup or even a functional public school.
“It is wrong to erect obstacles to progress for communities like this,” CFACT President David Rothbard told tour participants. “And yet, global warming campaigners are in Cancun, proposing treaty provisions that would permanently trap these families in energy poverty, while doing nothing to stabilize the Earth’s constantly and naturally changing climate.”
“The UN has always been about the politics of [climate science],” Morano told Fox News’s Neil Cavuto. “They produce the best science that politics can manufacture, and their goal has always been global governance. They openly admit it and are using climate scares to achieve it.”
Decent people everywhere must help ensure this does not happen. The battle will continue through COP-17 in Durban, South Africa and COP-18 in Rio de Janiero, Brazil, during the 20th anniversary of the Rio Earth Summit that launched this power grab. We hope you will join us on the ramparts. PDF
Duggan Flanakin is director of policy research for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org)
By Christopher Booker
By far the biggest story of recent days, of course, has been the astonishing chaos inflicted, to a greater or lesser extent, on all of our lives by the fact that we are not only enjoying what is predicted to be the coldest December since records began in 1659, but also the harshest of three freezing winters in a row. We all know the disaster stories - thousands of motorists trapped for hours on paralysed motorways, days of misery at Heathrow, rail passengers marooned in unheated carriages for up to 17 hours. But central to all this - as the cry goes up: “Why wasn’t Britain better prepared?” - has been the bizarre role of the Met Office.
We might start with the strange affair of the Quarmby Review. Shortly after Philip Hammond became Transport Secretary last May, he commissioned David Quarmby, a former head of the Strategic Rail Authority, to look into how we might avoid a repeat of last winter’s disruption. In July and again in October, Mr Quarmby produced two reports on “The Resilience of England’s Transport System in Winter”; and at the start of this month, after our first major snowfall, Mr Quarmby and two colleagues were asked to produce an “audit” of their earlier findings.
The essence of their message was that they had consulted the Met Office, which advised them that, despite two harsh winters in succession, these were “random events”, the chances of which, after our long previous run of mild winters, were only 20 to one. Similarly, they were told in the summer, the odds against a third such winter were still only 20 to one. So it might not be wise to spend billions of pounds preparing for another “random event”, when its likelihood was so small. Following this logic, if the odds against a hard winter two years ago were only 20 to one, it might have been thought that the odds against a third such “random event” were not 20 to one but 20 x 20 x 20, or 8,000 to one.
What seems completely to have passed Mr Quarmby by, however, is the fact that in these past three years the Met Office’s forecasting record has become a national joke. Ever since it predicted a summer warmer and drier than average in 2007 - followed by some of the worst floods in living memory - its forecasts have been so unerringly wrong that even the chief adviser to our Transport Secretary might have noticed.
The Met Office’s forecasts of warmer-than-average summers and winters have been so consistently at 180 degrees to the truth that, earlier this year, it conceded that it was dropping seasonal forecasting. Hence, last week, the Met Office issued a categorical denial to the Global Warming Policy Foundation that it had made any forecast for this winter. Immediately, however, several blogs, led by Autonomous Mind, produced evidence from the Met Office website that in October it did indeed publish a forecast for December, January and February. This indicated that they would be significantly warmer than last year, and that there was only “a very much smaller chance of average or below-average temperatures”. So the Met Office has not only been caught out yet again getting it horribly wrong (always in the same direction), it was even prepared to deny it had said such a thing at all.
The real question, however, is why has the Met Office become so astonishingly bad at doing the job for which it is paid nearly 200 million pounds a year - in a way which has become so stupendously damaging to our country?
The answer is that in the past 20 years, as can be seen from its website, the Met Office has been hijacked from its proper role to become wholly subservient to its obsession with global warming. (At one time it even changed its name to the Met Office “for Weather and Climate Change”.) This all began when its then-director John Houghton became one of the world’s most influential promoters of the warmist gospel. He, more than anyone else, was responsible for setting up the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and remained at the top of it for 13 years. It was he who, in 1990, launched the Met Office’s Hadley Centre for Climate Change, closely linked to the Climatic Research Unit in East Anglia (CRU), at the centre of last year’s Climategate row, which showed how the little group of scientists at the heart of the IPCC had been prepared to bend their data and to suppress any dissent from warming orthodoxy.
The reason why the Met Office gets its forecasts so hopelessly wrong is that they are based on those same computer models on which the IPCC itself relies to predict the world’s climate in 100 years time. They are programmed on the assumption that, as CO2 rises, so temperatures must inexorably follow. For 17 years this seemed plausible, because the world did appear to be getting warmer. We all became familiar with those warmer winters and earlier springs, which the warmists were quick to exploit to promote their message - as when Dr David Viner of the CRU famously predicted to The Independent in 2000 that “within a few years winter snowfall will be a very rare and exciting event”. (Last week, that article from 10 years ago was the most viewed item on The Independent’s website.)
But in 2007, the computer models got caught out, failing to predict a temporary plunge in global temperatures of 0.7C, more than the net warming of the 20th century. Much of the northern hemisphere suffered what was called in North America “the winter from hell”. Even though temperatures did rise again, in the winter of 2008/9 this happened again, only worse.
The Met Office simply went into denial. Its senior climate change official, Peter Stott, said in March 2009 that the trend towards milder winters was likely to continue. There would not be another winter like 1962/3 “for 1,000 years or more”. Last winter was colder still. And now we have another even more savage “random event”, for which we are even less prepared. (The Taxpayers’ Alliance revealed last week that councils have actually ordered less salt this winter than last.)
The consequences of all this are profound. Those who rule over our lives have been carried off into a cloud-cuckoo-land for which no one was more responsible than the zealots at the Met Office, subordinating all it does to their dotty belief system. Significantly, its chairman, Robert Napier, is not a weatherman but a “climate activist”, previously head of WWF-UK, one of our leading warmist campaigning groups.
At one end of this colossal diversion of national resources, permeating every level of government, we have the hapless Mr Quarmby, who feels obliged to follow the Met Office and advise that the present freeze is a “random event” and calls for no special responses - with the results we see on every side. At the other, fixated by the same belief system, we have our Climate Change Secretary, Chris Huhne, hoping we can somehow keep our lights on and our economy running by spending hundreds of billions of pounds on thousands more windmills.
More than once in the past week, as our power stations have been thrashed way beyond normal peak power demand, the contribution of wind turbines has been so small that it has registered as 0 per cent. (See the website for the New Electricity Trading Arrangements: Google “neta electricity summary page”, and find the table of “source by fuel type”.) At the heart of all this greenie make-believe that has our political class in its thrall has been the hijacking of the Met Office from its proper role. It’s no longer just a national joke: it is turning into a national catastrophe.
Read post and comments here.
Sere also this post on Climate Audit on Hansen and NASA cooking the books and this post on WUWT with comments by many including EM Smith.