Political Climate
Sep 11, 2013
Man Made Climate Change Arguments Don’t Survive Scrutiny

By Art Horn, Meteorologist

Proponents of man made global warming are being challenged more and more by scientists who don’t buy into the climate catastrophe scare. The arguments used to dismiss the challengers range from calling the non-believers names such as president Obama’s “flat earthers” and his use of the term “denier” which is meant to equate non-believers with holocaust deniers, very un-presidential. Al Gore is the champion of the name calling using terms such as racists, homophobes, alcoholics and smokers among others to describe those who dare dispute what he preaches, after all he was Vice-President. That means he’s smart right? Another attempt to marginalize the challengers is to site the various branches of government and scientific organizations that have issued proclamations about their belief in man made global warming. If they’re big and have lots of money they must be right, right?

Large institutions such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) the National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) the National Science Foundation (NSF) the National Academy of Science (NAS) the American Physical Society (APS) the American Meteorological Society (AMS) and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) along with many other government and academic institutions and societies have all issued statements touting their commitment to the man made global warming theory.

All of these organizations have stated that man made global warming is real and is caused by burning fossil fuels. Based on their unanimity we are therefore supposed to believe they are correct. By quoting the statements from these well known organizations we are supposed to believe that because they are large and well funded they are therefore exempt from making mistakes. Of course this is not true. As an example, in 2006 NASA predicted sunspot cycle 24, the current cycle we’re in now, would be the strongest in 300 years. The reality is that it will be the weakest in 100 years. They could not have been more wrong.

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Computer models from the 1990s predicted that global average surface temperature would continue to increase after the year 2000. They were wrong. There has been no measured temperature increase since 1998. Actually I believe that large institutions are more likely to be wrong more often than individuals. Large institutions have giant budgets that must be fed making them vulnerable to political agendas. They have enormous institutional inertia that makes it very hard for them to change direction. Individuals can change direction on a dime if new evidence indicates the old way of thinking was wrong.

The truth is that we really don’t know what the thousands of people who make up large government agencies, organizations and institutions think of global warming. The department heads of government agencies and the boards of directors of academic institutions and societies may claim that their respective organizations support the man made global warming theory. The problem is that they never asked the people who actually make up these various entities what they think. For all I know 85% of all NASA employees may not believe in man made global warming, but nobody knows because nobody asked them. Just as President Obama does not speak for me and at least 57 million other Americans, the department heads and leaders of government agencies and other large institutions don’t necessarily speak for their membership.

The bottom line is that using declarative statements from large organizations, that have a vested interest in maintaining their massive funding from the federal government to study “the problem”, have no real meaning. Until someone actually polls the members of these entities we will never know just what the rank and file members actually believe about man made global warming. It is the thousands of working members of these organizations that define who these entities really are, not the presidents, CEO’s or department heads.

Another argument made by climate change alarmists is that we don’t hear anything in the media from the “deniers”. The reason for this is that news organizations such as NBC, CBS, ABC and CNN have no tolerance for any opinion that is not their own, much like president Obama, whom they overwhelmingly support. I worked in the television news business for twenty five years as a meteorologist, mostly for NBC stations. What I found was that many people who work in TV are utopian liberals. They see government as the supreme repository of good that can, with a few billion dollars here and there, solve our problems.

What I also found was what John Stossel found when working at ABC. If you challenge the network orthodoxy you risk alienation or termination. In Stossel’s new book “No They Can’t” he describes the limited range of thinking that exists in many news organizations across the nation. Once, when Stossel suggested that politicians love of socialism kept India poor, Peter Jennings said his bias was “an embarrassment” to ABC and demanded that he be fired. Because Stossel did not agree with the networks view of the world, Jennings would turn the other way when the two would meet in a hallway. The reason you don’t see climate change challenged on these networks is because they have made up their minds as to what is true and no amount of real truth will change that. I did a couple of interviews on MSNBC in New York a few years ago. One day I was contacted by a producer to see about coming down to New York for another interview. When I mentioned that global temperature had not increased since 1998 I never heard from them again.

I was in Montreal this past summer attending a climate change program at an Eco Park while on vacation. The program consisted of questions about climate change. It was a game show format. The room was divided into two groups. We all had buzzer buttons that we could push if we thought we had the correct answer to each climate change question. The side that got the most “correct” answers got the most points and won. As the game progressed I noticed many of the “correct” answers were wrong. I began to challenge the host, a young lady of about 25 years old. She put up with me saying things like “debate on this is good”. However a man in his 30s on the other side began to challenge me. I had said that global average surface temperature had not increased since 1998, He said temperature is continuing to rise. I said to him that even the United Nations IPCC has admitted that there has been a pause in the warming. He said temperature is rising. I asked for his data source. He had none. He was a firm believer that warming was continuing, probably due to viewing news programs and reading stories in newspapers.

Scrutiny of man made climate change arguments reveal why they are failing. Nature is showing us that carbon dioxide concentrations are not ruling global temperature. Since 1998 twenty eight percent of all carbon dioxide emissions released into the atmosphere since 1850 have occurred yet there has been no warming. World wide hurricanes are not increasing in number or strength. There has been no category 3 or higher hurricane strike in the United States since 2005. This year, in the United States, we are on our way to having the fewest number of tornadoes since modern record keeping began. Sea level is rising at the same rate is has for the last 100 years with no acceleration. Polar Bear populations are at record highs. Computer model temperature predictions are much too warm and the difference between them and measured temperature is increasing each year. Arctic sea ice loss at the end of the summer has leveled off. Man made climate change arguments are failing because they are wrong.

Thank you for supporting Icecap so that we can keep Art out there telling the truth. Art had this story posted in the Energy tribune and SEPP’s TWTW.

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Dr Gordon Fulk’s response to an left coast ivory tower ‘scientist’ trying to suppress skepticism

Dear Professor Alford,

Meteorologist Mark Johnson sent me a copy of your e-mail to him, where you say:  “All the [climate] models reported there clearly demonstrate the same thing; namely, that there is climate change and that it is anthropogenic.”

And you ask him to “please be careful not to misrepresent studies in a way that gives the impression that there is debate in the scientific community about this [Catastrophic Anthropogenic Global Warming]. There isn’t, and the sooner this debate gets put to rest the sooner we as a society can take effective action against climate change.”

Either you are living in an ivory tower completely cutoff from the real world or are willing to bear false witness.  Your statements are naive in the extreme.  Even the US National Academy of Sciences has admitted that the climate models are off by a factor of two.  The attached comparisons of the temperature trends of 73 models versus the best temperature data show that the discrepancy is more like a factor of 3.5 in the tropical mid-troposphere.

If your world is limited to the University of Washington where purity of thought is apparently sooo important that all dissent has been stifled, I suppose that you can maintain “There isn’t” any debate .  That is a pity, because the way that we really make progress in science is to allow, even to celebrate dissent.  One of the greatest living physicists, Freeman Dyson at The Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton University, celebrates those whom he calls ‘heretics’.

Who are/were some of the most famous heretics?

Prior to 1905 there was effectively “no debate in the scientific community about” Classical Physics. Yet a little Jewish man changed all that with his famous papers in 1905.  Then the same year a man by the name of J. Harlen Bretz graduated from Albion College in biology and took up high school teaching in Seattle.  His interest in the geology of Eastern Washington and a presumed ice age Lake Missoula set him on a course to be one of the most famous geologists of all time, defeating the geological consensus of his day.

Then there was the Establishment headed by Sir Harold Jeffries that fought Plate Tectonics and Continental Drift, doing their best to ignore the data. Blackett and Runcorn, et al were the skeptics who eventually defeated the consensus with striking empirical data.  And what about the Nobel Laureates in Medicine in 2005?  Australians Barry Marshall and Robert Warren fought the medical consensus for many years over the cause of peptic ulcers, winning not by a vote of those tied to the establishment but by the ultimate arbiter in science:  logic and evidence.

Would you have missed every single one of these dramatic advances in science, because you were unwilling to think beyond the safety of conventional wisdom?  I hope not.

You are probably unaware yet that several of us who strongly disagree with the prevailing CO2 paradigm have agreed to participate in a seminar at UW this Fall, organized by Professor Cliff Mass.  Cliff is by no means a skeptic.  But he apparently sees the wisdom in scientific discussions.  You might want to attend, so that you come to realize that there is vast and credible opposition to climate hysteria.  And if you have ANY robust data linking man’s burning of fossil fuels to any change in Global Average Surface Temperature (GAST), I am sure everyone in attendance would love to see it.

You might also want to watch the news this Fall as the US Supreme Court is expected to take up the EPA’s Endangerment Finding on carbon dioxide.  Eleven scientists (including me) have already filed arguments proving that the government’s arguments in favor of CAGW (their ‘three lines of evidence’wink are completely false, based on robust empirical evidence not opinion.

But if you cannot wait until then, have a look at the attachment where more than one hundred of us wrote a letter to our Alarmist-in-Chief Obama objecting to his climate hysteria.  Or go here.

Where you will find the great physicist Edward Teller and 31,000 other American scientists objecting to your presumed consensus.

How many scientists have to speak up before you realize that climate science is far from settled?  Remember Albert Einstein’s famous comment: “One man can prove me wrong.” He was obviously not thinking of the University of Washington!

Gordon J. Fulks, PhD (Physics)
Corbett, Oregon USA

P.S. I’m an astrophysicist, just like James Hansen.

* Freeman Dyson’s climate skepticism is well known and was covered in a New York Times article about him.

From: Mark Johnson
Subject: [GWR] Who is Matthew Alford
Date: Wed, 11 Sep 2013 21:17:14 -0400

So I tweeted out a link to this study when Forecast the Facts started its AGW taunting today. Here’s the tweet: ”Study find deep-sea waves that ‘play a crucial role in long-term climate cycles”

A few hours later I get this e-mail from the studies’ author. I was truly stunned by the sentence I highlghted at the end of the email. So, there it is guys, there is total aggreement in the scienitific community on CAGW. Move on.

“Hi Mark,

I saw your tweet wherein you appear to be using my article to attempt to undermine the evidence for climate change. I urge you not to do this. Breaking deep-sea waves such as the ones we observed do affect the specifics of predictions of climate change in the different climate models. In that sense, climate models are sensitive to getting these waves right as we attempt to make them more and more precise. However, the sensitivity is not great enough to affect the basic findings in the IPCC report. All the models reported there clearly demonstrate the same thing; namely, that there is climate change and that it is anthropogenic.

You have the right to your opinion, but please be careful not to misrepresent studies in a way that gives the impression that there is debate in the scientific community about this. There isn’t, and the sooner this debate gets put to rest the sooner we as a society can take effective action against climate change.

Best regards

Matthew Alford
Principal Oceanographer and Associate Professor
Applied Physics Laboratory and School of Oceanography
University of Washington



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