Even as Copenhagen looms, broadcast news ignores e-mails suggesting warming alarmists ‘manipulated’ data, conspired to destroy information and thwarted peer reviews
By Julia Seymour
It’s been nearly two weeks since a scandal shook many people’s faith in the scientists behind global warming alarmism. The scandal forced the University of East Anglia (UK) to divulge that it threw away raw temperature data and prompted the temporary resignation of Phil Jones of the university’s Climate Research Unit.
Despite that resignation and calls by a U.S. senator to investigate the matter, ABC, CBS and NBC morning and evening news programming has remained silent – not mentioning a word about the scandal since it broke on Nov. 20, even as world leaders including President Barack Obama prepare to meet in Copenhagen, Denmark next week to promote a pact to reduce greenhouse gases.
Other news outlets, including The New York Times, Washington Post, CNN and Associated Press have deemed ClimateGate worthy of reporting, but the networks were too busy reporting on celebrity car accidents and the killer whale that ate a great white shark. Instead of airing a broadcast news segment that might inform the public about the science scandal, both ABC and CBS relegated the story to their Web sites. There was one mention of the scandal on ABC’s Sunday talk show: “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”
The ClimateGate scandal, as it is being called, has the hallmarks of a major news story: private emails purporting to show unethical or illegal behavior supplied by a hacker or whistleblower, high profile scientists like James Hansen and Michael Mann, and a potential conspiracy to distort science for political gain. But the networks haven’t bothered with the story.
Patrick J. Michaels, a climatologist and BMI adviser, said Nov. 20 of the leaked e-mails and documents: “This isn’t a smoking gun, it’s a mushroom cloud.”
White House press secretary Robert Gibbs responded to a question about ClimateGate by insisting that “global warming is happening” and that for most people it isn’t really a question anymore. That is the same message viewers get from the network news about climate change.
An examination of morning and evening news programs on ABC, CBS and NBC since Nov. 20 yielded zero mentions of the scandal, even in the Nov. 25 reports about Obama going to Copenhagen to discuss the need for emissions reductions. But during the same time period, the networks reported on pro-golfer Tiger Woods’ “minor” car accident at least 37 times. They also found time to report on an orphaned Moose and the meal selection at the president’s State Dinner.
ClimateGate began after someone (hacker or whistleblower) attacked servers of University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit (CRU) and made thousands of e-mails and documents public. Those e-mails appear to show a conspiracy to falsify temperature data, a willingness to destroy information rather than release it under Freedom of Information (FOI) law and the intimidation of publications willing to publish skeptical articles.
The world cannot trust scientists who abuse their power
By Gordon Crovitz
For anyone who doubts the power of the Internet to shine light on darkness, the news of the month is how digital technology helped uncover a secretive group of scientists who suppressed data, froze others out of the debate, and flouted freedom-of-information laws. Their behavior was brought to light when more than 1,000 emails,and some 3,500 additional files were published online, many of which boasted about how they suppressed hard questions about their data.
The emails, released by an apparent whistle-blower who used the name “FOI,” were written by scientists at the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia in England. Its scientists are high-profile campaigners for the theory of global warming.
The findings from East Anglia have been at the core of policy reports by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC does not do its own research but compiles information relating to climate change. It has declared the evidence that the globe is warming to be “unequivocal,” a claim routinely cited by lawmakers in the U.S. and elsewhere as authoritative.
The IPCC stresses honest science. According to its Web site, its goal is to “assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.”
The panel, which shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, now faces the inconvenient truth that it relied on scientists who violated scientific process. In one email, the Climate Research Unit’s director, Phil Jones, wrote Michael Mann of Pennsylvania State University, promising to spike studies that cast doubt on the relationship between human activity and global warming. “I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report,” he said. He pledged to “keep them out somehow—even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!”
In another email exhange, Mr. Mann wrote to Mr. Jones: “This was the danger of always criticizing the skeptics for not publishing in the ‘peer-reviewed literature.’ Obviously, they found a solution to that—take over a journal! So what do we do about this? I think we have to stop considering ‘Climate Research’ as a legitimate peer-reviewed journal. Perhaps we should encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.”
Other emails include one in which Keith Briffa of the Climate Research Unit told Mr. Mann that “I tried hard to balance the needs of the science and the IPCC, which were not always the same,” and in which Mr. Jones said he had employed Mr. Mann’s “trick” to “hide the decline” in temperatures. A May 2008 email from Mr. Jones with the subject line “IPCC & FOI” asked recipients to “delete any emails you may have had” about data submitted for an IPCC report. The British Freedom of Information Act makes it a crime to delete material subject to an FOI request; such a request had been made earlier that month.
Over the weekend, East Anglia officials disclosed they had disposed years ago of the historic weather data underlying their analysis. This may be one reason they’ve fought information requests. They say they’ll release the data they still have some time next year.
One of the world’s leading promoters of the anthropogenic global warming myth claimed Monday he is convinced the e-mail messages involved in the growing international scandal ClimateGate “are genuine,” and he’s “dismayed and deeply shaken by them.”
So said George Monbiot, a writer and environmental activist many consider to be Great Britain’s Al Gore.
Contrary to what newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post are telling their readers, Monbiot accurately said there’s “no use pretending that this isn’t a major blow. The emails extracted by a hacker from the climatic research unit at the University of East Anglia could scarcely be more damaging” (h/t Andrew Bolt via Marc Morano):
There appears to be evidence here of attempts to prevent scientific data from being released(2,3), and even to destroy material that was subject to a freedom of information request(4).
Worse still, some of the emails suggest efforts to prevent the publication of work by climate sceptics(5,6), or to keep it out of a report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(7). I believe that the head of the unit, Phil Jones, should now resign. Some of the data discussed in the emails should be re-analysed.
In fairness, this has not changed Monbiot’s view of the bogeyman: “The hacked emails are a hard knock, but the science of global warming withstands much more than that.”
That thumping sound you hear is the Los Angeles Times moving the goal posts in the global warming debate.
On November 22, while responding to the growing scandal about alleged proof that global warming is a hoax, the Times brushed it off with a puzzling claim that science should have no bearing on climate legislation.
What a difference a few leaked e-mail messages could make: just over a month ago, the exact same paper had insisted science was behind the push for regulation. Now with the validity of that science in doubt, the Times was quick to find a different angle.
In an article titled “A Climate Change Dust-up,” writers Jim Tankersley and Henry Chu began with reassurance that the scandal was nothing to fear because the hacked e-mail messages would not make a difference either way:
Is it a “Warmist Conspiracy,” or a case of an email being “taken completely out of context”?
Regardless, the latest dust-up over the science of climate change appears unlikely to affect the dynamics of either a pending debate in the Senate or international climate negotiations in Copenhagen next month.
The whole point of the meeting in Copenhagen has been to limit pollution that supposedly destroys the planet based on evidence gathered and purported by researchers specifically involved in the email scandal. If the very premise of global warming has possibly been exposed as a fraud, why would that not be of interest to those who want to legislate global warming?
Because, according to the Times, the fight to stop possibly nonexistent global warming would be about saving the economy:
But advocates of action to curb global warming dismiss those claims, and political leaders and analysts say the Senate bill to limit greenhouse gas emissions will sink or swim based on economics, not science.
“The scientists are going to fight about this for decades,” said Robert Dillon, a spokesman for Sen. Lisa Murkowski of Alaska, one of several Senate Republicans who say they are open to some form of a climate bill. “We should be doing something to curb our emissions that would not harm the economy, and would in fact boost the economy,” he said.
So the Times believed in doing something about emissions whether or not we knew that they were harmful. It was suddenly okay for the science to remain unsettled, and in fact, the Senate was encouraged to limit greenhouse gases even if science was unable to prove a connection between carbon dioxide emissions and temperature.
But if the entire logic of this effort to save the economy was based on the hope that green jobs would put Americans to work, someone should have told the Times that President Obama has already been funding green jobs without a climate bill.
Equally preposterous, nowhere did the article explain exactly how limiting a company’s carbon dioxide output would cause it to expand payrolls.
Not to worry, for according to global warming activists it would all work with or without the data to back it up.
How Freezing Temperatures are Starting to Shatter Climate Change Theory
By Daily Mail Reporter
In the freezing foothills of Montana, a distinctly bitter blast of revolution hangs in the air.
And while the residents of the icy city of Missoula can stave off the -10C chill with thermals and fires, there may be no easy remedy for the wintry snap’s repercussions.
The temperature has shattered a 36-year record. Further into the heartlands of America, the city of Billings registered -12C on Sunday, breaking the 1959 barrier of -5C.
Closer to home, Austria is today seeing its earliest snowfall in history with 30 to 40 centimetres already predicted in the mountains.
Such dramatic falls in temperatures provide superficial evidence for those who doubt that the world is threatened by climate change.
But most pertinent of all, of course, are the growing volume of statistics.
According to the National Climatic Data Centre, Earth’s hottest recorded year was 1998.
If you put the same question to NASA, scientists will say it was 1934, followed by 1998. The next three runner-ups are 1921, 2006 and 1931.
Which all blows a rather large hole in the argument that the earth is hurtling towards an inescapable heat death prompted by man’s abuse of the environment.
Indeed, some experts believe we should forget global warming and turn our attention to an entirely differently phenomenon - global cooling.
The evidence for both remains inconclusive, which is unlikely to help the legions of world leaders meeting in Copenhagen in December to negotiate a new climate change deal.
GCS Editor’s Note: I met Lord Christopher Monckton yesterday, and he mentioned that he’d prodded BBC reporters about when they were going to report on new data that conlusively shows the Earth has been cooling. At that point, the only UK reporting he was aware of was on the BBC website. It seems that word is starting to spread.
Minnesota Majority / GlobalClimateScam.com will be at the Climate Chains / Lord Monckton event at Bethel tonight. Hope to see you all there!
The director of “Not Evil, Just Wrong,” a documentary challenging Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth,” dares to ask a question at the Society of Environmental Journalists annual conference. Apparently Mr. Gore only allows the ‘right kind’ of questions to be asked of him.
Just when you thought it was safe to assume that everyone had pretty much accepted climate change and moved on, here comes rogue NBC 4 chief meteorologist Jym Ganahl to blow your freaking mind.
“Just wait 5 or 10 years, and it will be very obvious. They’ll have egg on their faces,” Ganahl said this week of global warming advocates.
The “global warming hoax” is an obvious fallacy, Ganahl said in a YouTube video posted Jan. 23.
In the video, taped at a meet-up of the Ohio Freedom Alliance, Ganahl chats with Dave, the self-proclaimed No. 1 biker talk show host on radio, and—still odder—Robert Wagner, a former candidate for the 15th congressional district.
Although global warming is clearly “a fallacy,” Ganahl told the dudes, “It is remarkable how many people are being led like sheep in the wrong direction.”
Evoking Orwellian mind-control power of the media, Ganahl said it’s remarkable how easy it is to panic the unwashed masses.
Ganahl continued to evangelize offline this week.
Sunspots—and not carbon emissions—are to blame for the slow warming of the globe, Ganahl said. “It has nothing to do with us.”
“When there are sunspots, like freckles on the sun—dark spots—these are like turning on a furnace and the earth warms. When there are no sunspots, it is like the furnace is in standby and the earth cools.
“I have always thought we should celebrate and be thankful we live in a time when it is warmer, not curse it,” Ganahl said. “It allows us to grow food and feed the population—and the warming is slow and we can adapt to it.”
Cold, on the other hand, is to blame for a whole host of worldly disasters, including death of the Aztecs, the Vikings, and who knew?— the bubonic plague.
“Instead of screaming global warming, we should be preaching global cooling,” he said.
But with a new president who apparently buys into the whole carbon emission demonizing scam, Ganahl said, “It’s very scary,” and admittedly “very difficult,” to fight the mob mentality.
RED HOT LIES: HOW GLOBAL WARMING ALARMISTS USE THREATS, FRAUD AND DECEPTION TO KEEP YOU MISINFORMED
By Larry Thornberry
Christopher C. Horner has deconstructed global-warming alarmism before, but in “Red Hot Lies,” he focuses on how the global-warming industry, with huge money and power on the line, defends itself and perpetuates its beliefs.
The senior fellow at the Competitive Enterprise Institute shows readers scientists, bureaucrats, journal editors and government agency administrators acting more like con men and mob enforcers than objective seekers of truth.
In the current global-warming lobby, Mr. Horner points out that leftists who want ever bigger government with hypertaxation and microregulation of every aspect of our lives find common cause with large companies that stand to make a bundle if alternative energy forms are mandated and/or one of the carbon-fuel-rationing schemes is adopted.
(With billions in government research grants, there’s more money in alarmism than on the skeptical side, worth remembering when a skeptic is accused of being in the pocket of “Big Oil” - no alarmist is ever accused of being in the pocket of Big Research Grants.) These two groups are enabled by a compliant press that relishes sensational scare stories and by politicians ever eager for ways to show their virtue and ways to appear to be saving their constituents.
In his first book, “The Politically Incorrect Guide to Global Warming (and Environmentalism)” (Regnery, 2007) Mr. Horner parsed the fanciful claims of the global warmers. He built the case, infrequently encountered by the public, that the warming our planet has undergone over the past century is almost certainly nothing outside of the normal temperature variations the Earth has been undergoing since there’s been an Earth. Man’s activities may have played a part in this small temperature increase, but almost certainly a trifling part compared to variations in solar activity.
There remain plenty of honest scientists who go to work every day with no other objective than to look for the truth, wherever it leads. But the saddest casualties of the sorry global-warming story are the many scientists who have been corrupted by the oceans of grant money they and their universities are awash in and that will remain available only if the heat is kept up (so to speak) on the global-warming threat to mankind.
Mr. Horner shows how these folks will do just about anything to keep this gravy train going. This includes playing with the data to keep the horrendous story of global catastrophe before the public. It also includes denying jobs, publications and promotions as well as sullying the reputations of “heretics” who dare to question the warming-catastrophe orthodoxy. Alarmists have succeeded in characterizing disagreement with them as either, in Mr. Horner’s words, “daft or venal.”
Hysteria over global warming has opened the door to restrictive energy policies that greatly jeopardize not only average Americans but also low income families in developing countries who are already beset by rising prices, according a new documentary on the modern environmental movement
“Not Evil, Just Wrong” takes a hard look at the potential human costs associated with the demands of environmentalism in areas of the world where carbon-based energy sources are vital. The current scare surrounding man-made global warming theories should be viewed within a larger historical context that reaches back to the early 1960s when Rachel Carson’s book “Silent Spring,” which argued against the use of pesticides like DDT (Dichloro-diphenyl-trichloroethane).
Carson, an American marine biologist, argued that DDT and other pesticides were harmful both to wildlife and to humans. Her book offered up a scenario where birds succumbed to insecticides and stopped singing resulting in a “silent spring.”
But there is considerably scientific dispute today about Carson’s central claims. Some researchers now say the correlation she saw between cancer patterns and DDT is highly questionable. Experiments conducted subsequent to her book also show that any egg shell thinning for birds is most likely causes by other substances not DDT.
Moreover, the beneficial effects attached to the use of DDT in combating malaria, for instance, went unheralded at a critical moment in human history Ann McElinney and Phelim McAleer, the husband and wife film team, responsible for the new film pointed out in an interview.
The World Health Organization (WHO) credits DDT with saving anywhere from 50 million to a 100 million lives by preventing the spread of malaria. There were sharp drops in malaria cases reported in parts of Europe, India, and the U.S. following World War II according to WHO. In fact, malaria was virtually banished in the U.S. thanks to DDT, government studies show.
Unfortunately, DDT was later banned as a result of unfounded hysteria allowing malaria to spread in developing parts of the world where about 50 million children succumbed to the disease, the filmmakers argue.
McElinney and McAleer previously collaborated in directing and producing “Mine Your Own Business” set in Rosia Montana, an impoverished village in Romania where a Canadian mining company sought to set up shop. This previous film contrasted the views of environmentalists opposed to economic development with those of local villagers who favored the installation of a new mine.
“Not Evil, Just Wrong” expands on some of the themes raised in the earlier film and focuses attention on what the policy fallout might be if former Vice-President Al Gore and other environmental advocates prevailed in either freezing or greatly restricting the use of carbon dioxide.
“Carbon is the new DDT, it is the new bogeyman” McElinney said in an interview. “And in another 100 years there will be another false bogeyman. “The timing of this new film is incredible given the debate we are now having on energy use and we hope come to see that this new scare has all the hallmarks of past scares that never materialized.”
A small Indiana town called Vevay is the focal point for much of the action in the new film. It is a picturesque, economically vibrant community replete with restaurants and small businesses. However, the residents make it clear that their town would be difficult to sustain in the absence of cheap energy.
The scientific debate surrounding the question of man-made global warming is mentioned in the film. The infamous “hockey stick” that allegedly showed a sharp uptick in warming connected with human activity is mentioned, for instance. Although, the “hockey stick” was once cited in the United Nation’s (U.N.) International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) it was later shown to be false as the documentary points out.
To the dismay of green-oriented psychologists, seeing and hearing a lone skeptic for as little as 45 seconds in a “balanced” news story on global warming is enough to erode viewers’ confidence in the anthropogenic global warming theory. The solution? No more dissenting views. They are far too powerful, evidently. Hence, the common phrases “global warming deniers,” “the debate is over” and “the science is settled.” These are all attempts to stifle or dismiss even a peep from a questioning voice, because just 45 seconds of questioning can upset the tenuous belief some hold in man-made global warming alarmism.
The American Psychological Association wants Congress to give them tax-dollars to work with other organizations in developing media messages targeting behavior changes. Specifically they want to get people to reduce their “carbon footprint.” Keeping the other side of the debate out of sight looks to be a critical piece of their psychological puzzle.
According to a recent story in USA Today, 16,000 members of the American Psychological Association are just wrapping up a four-day conference in Boston. Hot topics include changing what America eats and how to produce better agitprop to bolster belief in global warming, and foster carbon-targeted behavior changes. One proposed strategy is encouraging students to rebuke fellows they observe engaging in “non-sustainable” behavior, like failing to recycle. Psychologists observe that people are more likely to actively disapprove of such behavior if it is perceived as more harmful. This is an old, time-tested strategy. Researchers at the conference are calling it “increasing sensitivity to the natural world.” It’s more commonly known as demonizing.
By far, the most telling piece of research presented at the conference was put together by Stanford social psychologist, Jon Krosnik. He concludes that news stories presenting a “balanced” view of global warming reduced viewers’ belief that humans are at fault and also reduced the number of people who thought climate change would be bad.
Details on the experiment from the USA Today story: “By editing CNN and PBS news stories so that some saw a skeptic included in the report, others saw a story in which the skeptic was edited out and another group saw no video, Krosnick found that adding 45 seconds of a skeptic to one news story caused 11% of Americans to shift their opinions about the scientific consensus. Rather than 58% believing a perceived scientific agreement, inclusion of the skeptic caused the perceived amount of agreement to drop to 47%.”
Every day, Americans are bombarded with the message of global-warming alarmism. From the TV news casts, car and light bulb commercials, newspaper articles and editorials, radio announcements to sitcoms and films, America is deluged with thousands of hours of anthropogenic global warming propaganda. Going by Krosnik’s research, 45 seconds of skepticism is all it takes to shatter majority status for global warming believers. Truth is indeed a powerful thing.
NASA has played a key role in one of the greatest periods of scientific progress in history. It is uniquely positioned to collect the most comprehensive data on our biosphere.
For example, recently generated NASA data enabled scientists to finally understand the Gulf Stream warming mechanism and its effect on European weather. Such data will allow us to improve our models, resulting in better seasonal forecasts.
NASA’s Aqua satellite is showing that water vapor, the dominant greenhouse gas, works to offset the effect of carbon dioxide (CO2). This information, contrary to the assumption used in all the warming models, is ignored by global warming alarmists.
Climate understanding and critical decision making require comprehensive data about our planet’s land, sea, and atmosphere. Without an adequate satellite system to provide such data, policy efforts and monitoring international environmental agreements are doomed to failure. Our satellite monitoring capability is being crippled by interagency wrangling and federal budget issues. As much as a third of our satellites need replacing in the next couple of years.
NASA should be at the forefront in the collection of scientific evidence and debunking the current hysteria over human-caused, or Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW). Unfortunately, it is becoming just another agency caught up in the politics of global warming, or worse, politicized science. Advocacy is replacing objective evaluation of data, while scientific data is being ignored in favor of emotions and politics.
There are excellent correlations between the regular fluctuations of the Sun and the Earth’s temperature, while scientists cannot find a relationship between industrial activity, energy consumption, and global temperatures. But global warming is an issue no longer being decided in the scientific arena.
Saying the Earth is warming is to state the obvious. Since the end of the ice age, the Earth’s temperature has increased approximately 16 degrees Fahrenheit and sea levels have risen a total of 300 feet. That is certain and measurable evidence of warming, but it is not evidence of AGW—human-caused warming.
We can track the temperature of the Earth back for millennia. Knowing the temperature of the Earth, past or present, is a matter of collecting data, analyzing it, and coming up with the best answer to account for the data. Collecting such data on a global basis is a NASA forte.
I believe in global climate change, but there is no way that humans can influence the temperature of our planet to any measurable degree with the tools currently at their disposal. Any human contribution to global temperature change is lost in the noise of terrestrial and cosmic factors.
Our beautiful home planet has been warming and cooling for the last 4.8 billion years. Most recently, it has been warming—be it ever so slightly—but there is nothing unusual about it! The changes and rates of change in the Earth’s temperature, just since the Industrial Revolution, have occurred many times in our climatic history. While climate scientists generally agree that the Earth’s temperature is always changing, not many of them would say that humans are responsible for those changes.
None of this is to say there are not legitimate reasons to restrict emissions of any number of chemicals into the atmosphere. We should just not fool ourselves into thinking we will change the temperature of the Earth by doing so.
In a December 2007 Senate report, 400 prominent scientists signed a letter pointing out that climate change was a well-known natural phenomenon, and that adapting to it is far more sensible than attempting to prevent it. Their ranks included experts in climatology, geology, oceanography, biology, glaciology, biogeography, meteorology, economics, chemistry, mathematics, environmental sciences, engineering, physics, and paleo-climatology. Their message: When changes are gradual, man has an almost infinite ability to adapt and evolve.
The fearmongers of global warming base their case on the correlation between CO2 and global temperature, even though we cannot be sure which is cause and which is effect. Historically, temperature increases have preceded high CO2 levels, and there have been periods when atmospheric CO2 levels were as much as 16 times what they are now, periods characterized not by warming but by glaciation. You might have to go back half a million years to match our current level of atmospheric CO2, but you only have to go back to the Medieval Warming Period, from the 10th to the 14th Century, to find an intense global warming episode, followed immediately by the drastic cooling of the Little Ice Age. Neither of these events were caused by variations in CO2 levels.
Even though CO2 is a relatively minor constituent of “greenhouse gases,” alarmists have made it the whipping boy for global warming (probably because they know how fruitless it would be to propose controlling other principal constituents, H2O, CH4, and N2O). Since human activity does contribute a tiny portion of atmospheric CO2, they blame us for global warming.
Other inconvenient facts ignored by the activists: Carbon dioxide is a nonpolluting gas, essential for plant photosynthesis. Higher concentrations of CO2 in the atmosphere produce bigger harvests.
In spite of warnings of severe consequences from rising seas, droughts, severe weather, species extinction, and other disasters, the U.S. has not been stampeded into going along with the recommendations of the UN Panel on Climate Change—so far. Even though evidence supports the American position, we have begun to show signs of caving in to the alarmists.
With scientific evidence going out of style, emotional arguments and anecdotal data are ruling the day. The media subjects us to one frightening image of environmental nightmare after another, linking each to global warming. Journalists and activist scientists use hurricanes, wildfires, and starving polar bears to appeal to our emotions, not to our reason. They are far more concerned with anecdotal observations, such as the frozen sea ice inside the Arctic Circle, than they are with understanding why it is happening and how frequently it has occurred in the past.
After warnings that 2007 would be the hottest year on record and a record year for hurricanes, what we experienced was the coolest year since 2001 and, by some measures, the most benign hurricane season in the Northern Hemisphere in three decades.
Even though recent changes in our atmosphere are all within the bounds of the Earth’s natural variability, a growing number of people are willing to throw away trillions of dollars on fruitless solutions. Why do we allow emotional appeals and anecdotal data to shape our conclusions and influence our expenditures with the science and technology we have available at our fingertips?
The situation is complex, but the sad state of scientific literacy in America today is partially to blame for belief in AGW. When a 2006 National Science Foundation survey found 25 percent of Americans not knowing the Earth revolves around the Sun, you know that science education is at a new low and society is vulnerable to the emotional appeal of AGW. And don’t underestimate the role of politics and political correctness.
The public debate should focus on the real cause of global temperature change and whether we can do anything about it. Is global warming a natural inevitability, or is it AGW—human caused?
The conflict over AGW has deteriorated into a religious war; a war between true believers in human-caused global warming and nonbelievers; between those who accept AGW on faith and those who consider themselves more sensible and better informed. “True believers” are beyond being interested in evidence; it is impossible to reason a person out of positions they have not been reasoned into.
It doesn’t help that NASA scientist James Hansen was one of the early alarmists claiming humans caused global warming. Hansen is a political activist who spreads fear even when NASA’s own data contradict him.
Warming in the upper atmosphere should occur before any surface warming effect, but NASA’s own data show that has not been happening. Global temperature readings—accurate to 0.1 degree Celsius—are gathered by orbiting satellites. Interestingly, in the 18 years those satellites have been recording global temperatures, they have actually shown a slight decrease in average temperatures.
Hansen is currently calling for a reduction of atmospheric CO2 by 10 percent and a moratorium on coal-fired power plants, while claiming the Bush administration is censoring him. Other so-called scientists are saying the world must bring carbon emissions to near zero to keep temperatures from rising.
In today’s politically correct environment, many are reluctant to dispute the popular wisdom; when they do, they are frequently ignored. When NASA Administrator Michael Griffin, Hansen’s boss and a distinguished scientist in his own right, attempted to draw a distinction between Hansen’s personal and political views and the science conducted by his agency, he was soon forced to back off.
It is the true believers who, when they have no facts on their side, try to silence their critics. When former NASA mathematician Ferenc Miskolczi pointed out that “greenhouse warming” may be mathematically impossible, NASA would not allow him to publish his work. Miskolczi dared to question the simplifying assumption in the warming model that the atmosphere is infinitely thick. He pointed out that when you use the correct thickness—about 65 miles—the greenhouse effect disappears! Ergo: no AGW. Miskolczi resigned in disgust and published his proof in the peerreviewed Hungarian journal Weather.
For nearly a decade now, there has been no global warming. Even though atmospheric CO2 has continued to accumulate—up about 4 percent in the last 10 years—the global mean temperature has remained flat. That should raise obvious questions about CO2 being the cause of climate change.
Instead, AGW enthusiasts are embracing more regulation, greater government spending, and higher taxes in a futile attempt to control what is beyond our control—the Earth’s temperature. One of their political objectives, unstated of course, is the transfer of wealth from rich nations to poor nations or, as the social engineers put it, from the North to the South, which may be their real agenda.
Last week marked the 20th anniversary of the mass hysteria phenomenon known as global warming. Much of the science has since been discredited. Now it’s time for political scientists, theologians and psychiatrists to weigh in.
What, discredited? Thousands of scientists insist otherwise, none more noisily than NASA’s Jim Hansen, who first banged the gong with his June 23, 1988, congressional testimony (delivered with all the modesty of “99% confidence”).
But mother nature has opinions of her own. NASA now begrudgingly confirms that the hottest year on record in the continental 48 was not 1998, as previously believed, but 1934, and that six of the 10 hottest years since 1880 antedate 1954. Data from 3,000 scientific robots in the world’s oceans show there has been slight cooling in the past five years, never mind that “80% to 90% of global warming involves heating up ocean waters,” according to a report by NPR’s Richard Harris.
The Arctic ice cap may be thinning, but the extent of Antarctic sea ice has been expanding for years. At least as of February, last winter was the Northern Hemisphere’s coldest in decades. In May, German climate modelers reported in the journal Nature that global warming is due for a decade-long vacation. But be not not-afraid, added the modelers: The inexorable march to apocalypse resumes in 2020.
This last item is, of course, a forecast, not an empirical observation. But it raises a useful question: If even slight global cooling remains evidence of global warming, what isn’t evidence of global warming? What we have here is a nonfalsifiable hypothesis, logically indistinguishable from claims for the existence of God. This doesn’t mean God doesn’t exist, or that global warming isn’t happening. It does mean it isn’t science.
So let’s stop fussing about the interpretation of ice core samples from the South Pole and temperature readings in the troposphere. The real place where discussions of global warming belong is in the realm of belief, and particularly the motives for belief. I see three mutually compatible explanations.
The first is as a vehicle of ideological convenience. Socialism may have failed as an economic theory, but global warming alarmism, with its dire warnings about the consequences of industry and consumerism, is equally a rebuke to capitalism. Take just about any other discredited leftist nostrum of yore – population control, higher taxes, a vast new regulatory regime, global economic redistribution, an enhanced role for the United Nations – and global warming provides a justification.
Late last week, the Drudge Report amplified a “shock claim” that “for the first time in human history, ice is on course to disappear entirely from the North Pole this year”. Drudge linked to the claims originally trumpeted by the UK’s fading left-wing rag The Independent.
Just for context, that is a paper that in late 2005 ran a story about me leading a Big Oil-funded global conspiracy against the Kyoto Protocol — not true, but I am willing to listen to offers — based on a cobbling of unrelated offal-smeared papers taken from my trash and given them by the dumpster divers of Greenpeace. But at least they called me first, unlike The Guardian which pulled the same stunt the same day.
This time the Indy writer also claimed “The polar regions are experiencing the most dramatic increase in average temperatures due to global warming and scientists fear that as more sea ice is lost, the darker, open ocean will absorb more heat and raise local temperatures even further.” This is what we call a lie. Overlayed with Homeric prose, it expands to become a scare.
“The polar regions are experiencing the most dramatic increase in average temperatures due to global warming” only in computer models. These taxpayer-funded PlayStations will crank out any result – cooling or warming – that you want. Given that warming is (for now) where the money is, our modern-day Willie Suttons queue up to model warming.
In fact, the Antarctic – South Pole – is gaining ice mass, and cooling.
In truth, the North Pole has warmed, but has more ice now than a year ago. And the researcher supposedly making this claim didn’t actually make it: moreover he rushed to say that his words were being salaciously hyped.
Having once before fallen for a “North Pole is melting!” scam, even the New York Times — on its blog, mind you, no need to tamp down alarmism on its print pages – admitted that the hyperventilated headline and lede “go way beyond what Mark Serreze of the National Snow and Ice Data Center tells the reporter.” Serreze claimed on an alarmist blog that his actual claims “quickly grew out of all reasonable proportion,” admitting that a summer loss of ice at the North Pole “summer would be purely symbolic, but symbolism can be pretty darned powerful” (prompting an alarmist, taxpayer-servant to call on his team to invoke such stunts more often).
This is what we should expect from a press corps fully vested in the global warming industry. It has gotten so bad that in January NBC News showed a moving piece on the plight of the Antarctic, with footage of polar bears. The news would’ve been how in the world those bears got to the other side of the planet from where they really live. Outdoing itself, NBC recently also ran a piece on the Arctic, and showed us penguins. Sigh.
To show how bad things were last week, the less alarmist portrayal came from CNN. Of course, CNN made no effort to inform viewers that the “on record” they were talking about is simply since satellites began sending images in 1972. Nor did they bother with relevant details about the Northwest Passage though it was traversed regularly before the cooling that began about 1940.
Putting things in that perspective, you could say we are simply returning to what we believe was normal before the three-decade cooling that caused so much panic in the ‘70s. Oh, the humanity. Have I mentioned the recent discovery of undersea volcanoes near the northern ice melt? Coincidence.
By Jon Hartzler
Ph.D. and retired science professor, Hutchinson
Global warming is a hot topic. The liberal politicians and news media stir our emotions and try to make us panic. Al Gore won an Emmy for “An Inconvenient Truth.” It’s like a piranha feeding frenzy!
In the June 10 Leader, Glenn Gruenhagen challenged the global warming “theory” but mostly warned us of upcoming legislation that might hurt the U.S. economically. Then John Lofdahl bashed Gruenhagen claiming that science supports global warming. He didn’t address the main issue of Gruenhagen’s argument, the economic impact of the political legislation that the global warming enthusiasts want.
Global warming is a complicated issue. First, is warming really happening? If it is significant, is man causing it? Finally, can man intentionally alter the climate for the good by reducing carbon dioxide?
In science, proof of an effect requires a tight experiment, including large numbers of repetitions and rigid controls. Climate has far too many variables to lend itself to this requirement for proof. We are left with what we call correlations, like increasing carbon dioxide and increasing temperature. This is not proof, only suggestive in science.
Indeed the latest scientific report (Intercontinental Report on Global Climate Change 2007) stated we are 90 percent convinced. So even the much-heralded report contains an admitted element of uncertainty on the part of the scientists who wrote it. As Gruenhagen pointed out, many scientists are skeptical. Some dissenters include world-class names, like Prof. Richard Lintzen, former director of earth and planetary physics at Harvard University and present professor of meteorology at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, arguably the best scientific institution on the planet.
Dr. Lintzen acknowledges that the earth has warmed a fraction of a degree. But he thinks carbon dioxide may or may not be the cause. Further he notes “we don’t understand the natural internal variability of climate change.” Climate has changed dramatically in the history of the earth and the present noted tiny temperature changes may only be natural phenomena. Science cannot prove it either way.
Just how pervasive the bias at most news outlets is in favour of climate alarmism — and how little interest most outlets have in reporting any research that diverges from the alarmist orthodoxy — can be seen in a Washington Post story on the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), announced last week in New York.
The NIPCC is a counter to the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC. The group was unveiled this week in Manhattan at the 2008 International Conference on Climate Change, along with its scientific report claiming that natural factors — the sun, El Ninos and La Ninas, volcanoes, etc, — not human sources are behind global warming.
The Washington Post’s first instincts (not just on its opinion pages, but in its news coverage, too) were cleverly to sew doubt of the group’s credibility by pointing out to readers that many of the participants had ties to conservative politicians, such as former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher, and that the conference sponsor — the Heartland Institute — received money from oil companies and health care corporations.
That’s standard fare, and partly fair, so that’s not what I am talking about.
The insidiousness I am referring to is the unfavourable way the Post compared the NIPCC report to the IPCC’s famous report of last year.
After reminding readers that the IPCC and former U.S. vice-president Al Gore shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 for their work on climate change, the paper then, sneeringly, added: “While the IPCC enlisted several hundred scientists from more than 100 countries to work over five years to produce its series of reports, the NIPCC document is the work of 23 authors from 15 nations, some of them not scientists.”
First of all, the IPCC and Mr. Gore won the Peace Prize, not a science prize, which only proves they are good at politics. They didn’t win the Physics Prize, for instance.
Also, while the former vice-prez may have invented the Internet (by his own admission), he is demonstrably not a scientist. Yet in the same paragraph as the Washington Post lionizes Mr. Gore for his work saving the planet, it backhands non-scientists for meddling in the climate change debate, never once showing any hint it recognized its own hypocrisy.
And the paper displays its utter lack of intellectual curiosity, too.
Hundreds of scientists may have contributed bits and pieces of work to the IPCC’s gargantuan report, but just 62 wrote the chapter said to “prove” that man is behind global warming — not that many more than the 23 from the new NIPCC who the Post so snidely dismiss as inconsequential in number. And just 52 people — many of them the kind of non-scientists the Post would have us believe have no business passing judgment — wrote the IPCC’s “Summary for Policy-makers.” That’s the publication that gets all the ink and drives the climate alarmism because it contains the most provocative statements about the certainty of manmade warming.
The bias is that whatever the IPCC and its defenders claim, the Washington Post and most other outlets report without scrutiny. Meanwhile, the motives and sources of all sceptics are instantly suspected and derided.
To the dismay of green-oriented psychologists, seeing and hearing a lone skeptic for as little as 45 seconds in a “balanced” news story on global warming is enough to erode viewers’ confidence in the anthropogenic global warming theory. The solution? No more dissenting views. They are far too powerful, evidently. Hence, the common phrases “global warming deniers,” “the debate is over” and “the science is settled.” These are all attempts to stifle or dismiss even a peep from a questioning voice, because just 45 seconds of questioning can upset the tenuous belief some hold in man-made global warming alarmism.
by 
By Bret Stephens
by Christopher C. Horner
By Jon Hartzler
Just how pervasive the bias at most news outlets is in favour of climate alarmism — and how little interest most outlets have in reporting any research that diverges from the alarmist orthodoxy — can be seen in a Washington Post story on the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), announced last week in New York.
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