Global Warming Science: www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming
Political Considerations / “The Consensus”
[last update: 2010/06/23]
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Alarmists try to portray the science of global warming as settled by the “consensus”. There may be a media-based political consensus, but there is much non-consensus in the scientific community – but those who disagree do not get coverage, and in some cases get their funding cut off (which is why the most vocal group of critics of the anthropogenic theory is retired atmospheric science professors and researchers).
Nigel Calder, a former editor of New Scientist views CO2 as a symptom of global warming caused by the sun. [http://www.business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article1363818.ece ] He says: “Twenty years ago, climate research became politicised in favour of one particular hypothesis, which redefined the subject as the study of the effect of greenhouse gases. As a result, the rebellious spirits essential for innovative and trustworthy science are greeted with impediments to their research careers”.
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[2010/06/23] IPCC Cross-Examination added
[2010/05/05] Info on WCRP added
[2010/05/04] An examination of the global cooling consensus of the 1970s and the current global warming consensus: http://www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/Consensus.htm
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The IPCC / UN
The politics of global warming now drown out the scientific issues. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was founded in 1988 by the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization, with the purpose of assessing “the scientific, technical and socioeconomic information relevant for the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change.” [i.e. its main goal builds in the assumption of “human-induced climate change”]. The IPCC released climate change reports in 1990, 1996, 2001 and 2007. Even the terminology has conflated the issues: people who question the anthropogenic CO2 causation are referred to as “global warming deniers”.
The IPCC refers to 2,500 scientific expert reviewers – that’s impressive. But when Energy Probe’s Larry Solomon contacted the IPCC to get the list of names so he could interview all of them: “the Secretariat informed me that the names were not public, so I would not be able to survey them, and that the scientists were merely reviewers. The 2,500 had not endorsed the conclusions of the report and, in fact, the IPCC had not claimed that they did. Journalists had jumped to the conclusion that the scientists the IPCC had touted were endorsers and the IPCC never saw fit to correct the record. There is no consensus of 2,500 scientist-endorsers. Moreover, many of those 2,500 reviewers turned thumbs down on the studies that they reviewed -- I know this from my own interviews with them, conducted in the course of writing a book about scientists who dispute the conventional wisdom on climate change.” [http://energy.probeinternational.org/selective-precaution]
This is backed up by a study reported in the Australian: “The IPCC encourages us to believe that about 2500 climate scientists supported the claim of a significant human influence on climate. It fails to clarify that the claim was made in chapter nine of the working group one contribution and that the contributions of working groups two and three were based on the assumption that the claim was correct. ... The entire IPCC thesis therefore stands or falls on the claims of just one chapter. … We are also led to believe that chapter nine was widely supported by hundreds of reviewers, but just 62 IPCC reviewers commented on its penultimate draft. Only five of those reviewers endorsed it but four of the five appear to have vested interests and the other made just one comment for the entire 11-chapter WG1 contribution. … Scientists associated with the development and use of climate models dominate the clique of chapter nine authors and by extension the views expressed in that chapter.”[http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,24315169-7583,00.html]
The National Post (Canada) reported (Jan 25, 2007) about a study done at the Danish National Space Center. [http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/news/story.html?id=d2113c58-030a-4390-a12c-30f45d75dfa5&p=1]: “The sun and the stars could explain most if not all of the warming this century”. The article also states: “The chairman of the United Nations Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change [IPCC], the chief agency investigating global warming, then castigated them in the press, saying, "I find the move from this pair scientifically extremely naive and irresponsible." Others accused them of denouncing the greenhouse theory, something they had not done.”
A University of East Anglia scientist (UEA- where the CRU provides data to the IPCC), Mike Hulme, says: “Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous. That particular consensus judgement, as are many others in the IPCC reports, is reached by only a few dozen experts in the specific field of detection and attribution studies; other IPCC authors are experts in other fields.” [http://mikehulme.org/wp-content/uploads/2010/01/Hulme-Mahony-PiPG.pdf]
John McLean has done a review of IPCC AR4 authorship: “The IPCC's claims of 2500+ reviewers and 1250 authors bears little relationship to the truth … Chapter 9 of Working Group I had 53 authors in total but more than 40 were part of a network of people who worked previously together. In direct contradiction to the IPCC's statements that the team of authors should have a wide range of views and experiences, most were climate modellers and there were many instances where several authors were associated with the same establishment. … The second draft of chapter 9, the last draft available for review by individuals, received comments from 55 people and 7 governments. Of these 62 only 5 reviewers explicitly endorsed the overall chapter … Fifty-three authors and five reviewers are all that can be said to explicitly support the claim of a significant human influence on climate.” [http://mclean.ch/climate/docs/IPCC_numbers_orig.pdf]
The political purpose of the IPCC can be summed up as the former Canadian Environment Minister Christine Stewart put it: "No matter if the science is all phony, there are collateral environmental benefits…. climate change [provides] the greatest chance to bring about justice and equality in the world." [Calgary Herald, December 14, 1998]. Now the tropical developing countries would like payment to preserve the rainforests to reduce deforestation (one of the largest contributing factors to greenhouse gases according to the UN) as part of the CO2 credits program. [http://www.rainforestcoalition.org/eng/initiatives/carbon_emissions.php ]
The IPCC lies about its use of peer reviewed science. IPCC chairman Pachauri said in 2008: “The process is so robust - almost to a fault - that I'm not sure there is too much scope for error. Given that it is all on the basis of peer-reviewed literature.” [http://www.nzherald.co.nz/business/news/article.cfm?c_id=3&objectid=10514468&pnum=0] But in 2010, after many references were shown to be from Greenpeace and other advocacy groups: “the IPCC's chairman said there was a need to use information which was not from peer-reviewed scientific journals, because in some places that was the only research that had been done. … Dr Pachauri said academic work being done by bodies including … charities [i.e. Greenpeace, WWF etc.] "cannot be ignored"” [http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/environment/7725266/Climate-body-chief-defends-use-of-grey-literature.html] See: [http://www.noconsensus.org/ipcc-audit/findings-main-page.php] for more info on the IPCC’s sources.
In December of 2007, the UN held a conference in Bali to try to get the world’s countries to sign on, while denying the ability for dissenters to speak. While Ban Ki Moon said the lack of an agreement would lead to oblivion, the International Climate Science Coalition (ICSC) had their press conference cut off for dissenting with the consensus. A group of more than 100 scientists published an open letter to Ban Ki Moon admonishing him for promoting such scare tactics when the science doesn’t support it (letter at: http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=164002 and list of signatory scientists at http://www.nationalpost.com/news/story.html?id=164004).
Many NGOs were of course in attendance at Bali. In their meetings they are getting more open about the real point of the global warming scare: The Climate Action Network web site provides the following discussion: "A common theme was that the “solutions” to climate change that are being posed by many governments, such as nuclear power, carbon capture and storage (CCS) and biofuels are false and are not rooted in justice. ... a climate change response must have at its heart a redistribution of wealth and resources" [www.climatenetwork.org/bali-blog/ngo-bustle-in-bali]
The World Climate Research Programme (WCRP) is funded by several United Nations based organizations (including the WMO, IOC and UNESCO) as well as the International Council for Science (also partly funded by UN organizations). “WCRP activities match the scientific priorities identified by the IPCC, provide the basis for responding to issues raised in the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), and underpin efforts to meet the research challenges posed in Agenda 21.” [http://wcrp.wmo.int]
WCRP directed the writing of the IPCC AR4, including more than 91% of the coordinating authors:
[http://wcrp.wmo.int/documents/CommunClimResToDecisionMakers_WCRP_AnnualRep_0607.pdf]
Agenda 21 was developed by the UN in 1992 to increase wealth transfer to developing countries and to the UN: “Agenda 21 will require a substantial flow of new and additional financial resources to developing countries, in order to cover the incremental costs for the actions they have to undertake to deal with global environmental problems and to accelerate sustainable development. Financial resources are also required for strengthening the capacity of international institutions [UN] for the implementation of Agenda 21. … It will be carried out … in full respect of all the principles contained in the Rio Declaration on Environment and Development.” [http://www.un.org/esa/dsd/agenda21/res_agenda21_01.shtml]
For more info on Agenda 21 and the Rio conference etc., see: http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/GW_History.htm
May, 2010: A “cross-examination” of the IPCC (referred to as the “climate establishment”) was conducted Jason Johnston of the University of Virginia School of Law [http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1612851##]
“A review of the peer-edited literature reveals a systematic tendency of the climate establishment to engage in a variety of stylized rhetorical techniques that seem to oversell what is actually known about climate change while concealing fundamental uncertainties and open questions regarding many of the key processes involved in climate change. Fundamental open questions include not only the size but the direction of feedback effects that are responsible for the bulk of the temperature increase predicted to result from atmospheric greenhouse gas increases: while climate models all presume that such feedback effects are on balance strongly positive, more and more peer-edited scientific papers seem to suggest that feedback effects may be small or even negative. The cross-examination conducted in this paper reveals many additional areas where the peer-edited literature seems to conflict with the picture painted by establishment climate science, ranging from the magnitude of 20th century surface temperature increases and their relation to past temperatures; the possibility that inherent variability in the earth’s non-linear climate system, and not increases in CO2, may explain observed late 20th century warming; the ability of climate models to actually explain past temperatures; and, finally, substantial doubt about the methodological validity of models used to make highly publicized predictions of global warming impacts such as species loss.”
“when one looks closely at the scientific literature, it turns out that some of the most crucial (and actually testable) predictions or assumptions underlying predictions of dangerous climate change are not in fact being confirmed by observations”
The entire “cross-examination” is worth reading.
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Other Countries
Canada’s Prime Minister, Stephen Harper, refered to the Kyoto accord as: "Kyoto is essentially a socialist scheme to suck money out of wealth-producing nations". [http://www.cbc.ca/canada/story/2007/01/30/harper-kyoto.html]
France’s former President Jaques Chirac had previously (in 2000) called Kyoto "the first component of an authentic global governance." [http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/murray200506210822.asp]
The Government of India published a National Action Plan on Climate Change in July 2008 [http://pmindia.nic.in/Pg01-52.pdf]. Section 1.4 of the Technical Document states: "No firm link between the documented [climate] changes described below and warming due to anthropogenic climate change has yet been established." India is taking a pragmatic approach and has no intention of cutting CO2 emissions if it affects its economic growth. The report Overview states: "India is determined that its per capita greenhouse gas emissions will at no point exceed that of developed countries even as we pursue our development objectives."
Many Russian scientists disagree with the anthopogenic CO2 theory “Russian critics of the Kyoto Protocol, which calls for cuts in CO2 emissions, say that the theory underlying the pact lacks scientific basis. When President Vladimir Putin was weighing his options on the Kyoto Protocol the Russian Academy of Sciences strongly advised him to reject it as having “no scientific foundation.”” Russian scientists state: "There is no proven link between human activity and global warming. This problem is overshadowed by many fallacies and misconceptions that often form the basis for important political decisions" and "The current warming is evidently a natural process and utterly independent of hothouse gases". [http://www.hindu.com/2008/07/10/stories/2008071055521000.htm]
Most of the Japan Geoscience Union members do not believe the IPCC “Dr Maruyama said yesterday there was widespread scepticism among his colleagues about the IPCC's fourth and latest assessment report that most of the observed global temperature increase since the mid-20th century "is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations". When this question was raised at a Japan Geoscience Union symposium last year, he said, "the result showed 90 per cent of the participants do not believe the IPCC report". … Dr Maruyama said many scientists were doubtful about man-made climate-change theory, but did not want to risk their funding from the government or bad publicity from the mass media, which he said was leading society in the wrong direction.” [http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,25197,25182520-2703,00.html]
The President of the Czech Republic, Vaclav Klaus, doesn’t believe the AGW lie: (Global Warming Alarmism is Unacceptable and Should be Confronted) “I know that its propagandists have been using all possible obstructions to avoid exposure to rational arguments and I know that the substance of their arguments is not science. It represents, on the contrary, an abuse of science by a non-liberal, extremely authoritarian, freedom and prosperity endangering ideology of environmentalism. … The new ambitions look more noble, more attractive and more appealing. They are also very shrewdly shifted towards the future and thus practically “immunized” from reality, from existing evidence, from available observations, and from standard testing of scientific hypotheses. … I consider environmentalism to be the most effective and, therefore, the most dangerous vehicle for advocating large scale government intervention and unprecedented suppression of human freedom at this very moment.” [http://www.hawaiireporter.com/story.aspx?ff0796e1-e571-4b15-9d0a-1d53dff2a6bc]
China – the world's largest greenhouse gas emitter – released its plan on climate change in 2007, supporting the rights of developing nations to pursue growth. The Chinese spokesman said "The consequences of inhibiting their development would be far greater than not doing anything to fight climate change … our general stance is that China will not commit to any quantified emissions reduction targets". [www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,2575639,00.html]
As for the Kyoto Protocol, President Bush was right in rejecting it (since it excluded China, Brazil and India) – as of April 2008, the environmentalists now admit it would be a failure. A BBC report about a University of California study of China’s CO2 emissions states: “The research suggests the country's [China’s] greenhouse gas emissions have been underestimated, and probably passed those of the US in 2006-2007. … [China’s] increases in greenhouse gases will be several times larger than the cuts in emissions being made by rich nations under the Kyoto Protocol.” [http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/asia-pacific/7347638.stm]
The Guardian (2010/01/24) “Climate change: Chinese adviser calls for open mind on causes”: “China's most senior negotiator on climate change said today he was keeping an open mind on whether global warming was man-made or the result of natural cycles … more and better scientific research was needed to establish the causes.” [http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/jan/24/china-climate-change-adviser]
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Non-Consensus Scientists
Roy Spencer, Principal Research Scientist at the University of Alabama Earth System Science Center (Ph.D. in meteorology, University of Wisconsin) who was formerly at NASA testified before a US congressional committee in July 2008 [http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Files.View&FileStore_id=e12b56cb-4c7b-4c21-bd4a-7afbc4ee72f3]. He said: “as a NASA employee ... during the Clinton-Gore Administration I was told what I could and could not say during congressional testimony. Since it was well known that I am skeptical of the view that mankind’s greenhouse gas emissions are mostly responsible for global warming, I assumed that this advice was to help protect Vice President Gore’s agenda on the subject. … Despite decades of persistent uncertainty over how sensitive the climate system is to increasing concentrations of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels, we now have new satellite evidence which strongly suggests that the climate system is much less sensitive than is claimed by the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). … If the satellite data indicate an insensitive climate system, why do the climate models suggest just the opposite? I believe the answer is due to a misinterpretation of cloud behavior by climate modelers. … it is time for scientific objectivity and integrity to be restored to the field of global warming research”. The final part of his testimony [http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qzf6z-oHP8U] is: “It seems that the IPCC leadship has a history of ignoring natural climate variability. … In the early days of the IPCC I was visiting the head of the White House’s Office of Science and Technology Policy, the director, Dr. Robert Watson who later became the first chairman of the IPCC. He informed me and a working associate with me that since we now had started to regulate ozone-depleting substances under the 1987 Montreal Protocol, the next goal in his mind was to regulate CO2 emissions from fossil fuel burning. This was nearly 20 years ago. There was no mention of the scientific basis for that goal. So as you can see, from the beginning of the IPCC process, it has been guided by desired policy outcomes, not science. … I am predicting today, that the theory that mankind is mostly responsible for global warming, will slowly fade away in the coming years, as will the warming itself.”
Richard Lindzen (Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT) wrote an article (2006) “Don’t Believe the Hype” [http://www.opinionjournal.com/extra/?id=110008597 ] in which he castigates the media for parroting Al Gore’s view that “the debate in the scientific community is over”. “When Mr. Stephanopoulos confronted Mr. Gore with the fact that the best estimates of rising sea levels are far less dire than he suggests in his movie, Mr. Gore defended his claims by noting that scientists "don't have any models that give them a high level of confidence "one way or the other and went on to claim--in his defense--that scientists "don't know. . . . They just don't know."” He gives further summation of the misrepresentation of IPCC summary reports as well as discussing other studies. “A British social scientist, Benny Peiser, checked her procedure and found that only 913 of the 928 articles had abstracts at all, and that only 13 of the remaining 913 explicitly endorsed the so-called consensus view. Several actually opposed it.”
Lindzen also states: “for over 25 years, we have based not only our worst case scenarios but even our best case scenarios on model exaggeration. As far as I can tell, the main question we ought to be confronting is how long the momentum generated by this issue will prevent us from seeing that it has been an illusion based on model error.” [http://www.ycsg.yale.edu/climate/forms/LindzenYaleMtg.pdf]. He also sums up the global warming issue appropriately: “given that the question of human attribution largely cannot be resolved, its use in promoting visions of disaster constitutes nothing so much as a bait-and-switch scam. That is an inauspicious beginning to what Mr. Gore claims is not a political issue but a "moral" crusade.”
Roger Revelle (Professor of Oceanography at Scripps Institution of Oceanography and founding chairman of the first Committee on Climate Change and the Ocean under the Scientific Committee on Ocean Research and the International Oceanic Commission) was a professor at Harvard with a student named Al Gore. Gore referred to him as "a wonderful, visionary professor" who was "one of the first people in the academic community to sound the alarm on global warming," Gore thought of Dr. Revelle as his mentor and referred to him frequently, relaying his experiences as a student in his book Earth in the Balance, published in 1992. (Gore also pronounced the science as settled in 1992). [http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=58e0c50c-1631-46ca-8719-778c0973526e] Revelle had said in an interview “People are always saying the weather's getting worse. Actually, the CO2 increase is predicted to temper weather extremes.” In 1991, Dr. Revelle co-wrote an article entitled "What to do about greenhouse warming: Look before you leap," the article argued that decades of research could be required for the consequences of increased carbon dioxide to be understood, and laid out the harm that could come of acting recklessly. When the inconsistency between Gore's pronouncements and those of his mentor became national news. Gore responded with a withering attack, leading to claims that Dr. Revelle had become senile before his death, that Dr. Singer had duped Dr. Revelle into co-authoring the article, and that Dr. Singer had listed Dr. Revelle as a co-author over his objections. The sordid accusations ended in a defamation suit and an abject public apology in 1994.”
Dr. David Evans worked at the Australian Greenhouse Office – Carbon Accounting Section (modeling carbon cycling in Australia as part of the Kyoto agreement). He says: [http://nzclimatescience.net/images/PDFs/evans.pdf] “These jobs would not exist if we didn’t blame carbon emissions for global warming… There is now no observational evidence to support the notion that global warming is caused by carbon emissions. None. You would think that in over 20 years of intense investigation, after spending $50 billion of government money on climate change, we would have found something! The only current reasons for blaming carbon emissions are the predictions of climate models. The hypothesis that carbon emissions are to blame is currently falsified by the observational data. If the scientific method was applied, carbon emissions would not be blamed for causing global warming. The current situation is not the way science should be done. It isn’t science, it’s politics.”
In an interview with Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner (head of the Paleogeophysics and Geodynamics department at Stockholm University in Sweden, past president (1999-2003) of the INQUA Commission on Sea Level Changes and Coastal Evolution, and leader of the Maldives Sea Level Project – he has been studying the sea level and its effects on coastal areas for some 35 years) by EIR (Argentine Foundation for a Scientific Ecology) [http://www.mitosyfraudes.org/Calen7/MornerEng.html] he talked about the IPCC misrepresentation of sea level data: “Then, in 2003, the same data set, which in their [IPCC's] publications, in their website, was a straight line—suddenly it changed, and showed a very strong line of uplift, 2.3 mm per year, the same as from the tide gauge. And that didn't look so nice. It looked as though they had recorded something; but they hadn't recorded anything. It was the original one which they had suddenly twisted up, because they entered a “correction factor,” ... I accused them of this at the Academy of Sciences in Moscow —I said you have introduced factors from outside; it's not a measurement. It looks like it is measured from the satellite, but you don't say what really happened. And they answered, that we had to do it, because otherwise we would not have gotten any trend! That is terrible! As a matter of fact, it is a falsification of the data set. ... So all this talk that sea level is rising, this stems from the computer modeling, not from observations. The observations don't find it! I have been the expert reviewer for the IPCC, both in 2000 and last year. The first time I read it, I was exceptionally surprised. First of all, it had 22 authors, but none of them— none—were sea-level specialists. They were given this mission, because they promised to answer the right thing.” And on the sea level project in the Maldives: “I said we cannot leave the Maldives and go home and say the sea level is not rising, it's not respectful to the people. I have to say it to Maldive television. So we made a very nice program for Maldive television, but it was forbidden by the government! Because they thought that they would lose money. They accuse the West for putting out carbon dioxide, and therefore we have to pay for our damage and the flooding. So they wanted the flooding scenario to go on.”
Dr. David Deming (University of Oklahoma, College of Earth and Energy) said in his testimony to congress [http://epw.senate.gov/hearing_statements.cfm?id=266543] “In 1995, I published a short paper in the academic journal Science. In that study, I reviewed how borehole temperature data recorded a warming of about one degree Celsius in North Americ a over the last 100 to 150 years. The week the article appeared, I was contacted by a reporter for National Public Radio. He offered to interview me, but only if I would state that the warming was due to human activity. When I refused to do so, he hung up on me. … I had another interesting experience around the time my paper in Science was published. I received an astonishing email from a major researcher in the area of climate change. He said, "We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.” The existence of the MWP had been recognized in the scientific literature for decades. But now it was a major embarrassment to those maintaining that the 20th century warming was truly anomalous. … There is an overwhelming bias today in the media regarding the issue of global warming. In the past two years, this bias has bloomed into an irrational hysteria. Every natural disaster that occurs is now linked with global warming, no matter how tenuous or impossible the connection. As a result, the public has become vastly misinformed on this and other environmental issues.”
In NPR interview with NASA Administrator Michael Griffin on May 30, 2007, he said: “I am not sure that it is fair to say that it is a problem we must wrestle with. To assume that it is a problem is to assume that the state of earth's climate today is the optimal climate, the best climate that we could have or ever have had and that we need to take steps to make sure that it doesn't change. First of all, I don't think it's within the power of human beings to assure that the climate does not change, as millions of years of history have shown, and second of all, I guess I would ask which human beings - where and when - are to be accorded the privilege of deciding that this particular climate that we have right here today, right now is the best climate for all other human beings. I think that's a rather arrogant position for people to take.” [http://www.spaceref.com/news/viewpr.html?pid=22729]
Physicist Walter Cunningham, a NASA Apollo 7 Astronaut (recipient of the NASA Exceptional Service Medal, who formerly worked on problems of the earth’s magnetosphere at RAND corporation before joining NASA), wote an article published in the August 2008 Launch magazine [http://launchmagonline.com/index.php/Viewpoint/In-Science-Ignorance-is-not-Bliss.html]. He states: “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. … 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. … 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. … 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. … 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. … 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.“ Read more excerpts here.
In a September 2005 Discovery Magazine article, emeritus professor of atmospheric science at Colorado State University Dr. William Gray (a former president of the American Meteorological Association), was asked if the funding problems that he was experiencing were due to his skepticism of man-made global warming. His response: ``I had NOAA money for 30 years, and then when the Clinton administration came in and Gore started directing some of the environmental stuff, I was cut off. I couldn't get any money from NOAA. They turned down 13 straight proposals from me.'' Thus Gray - one of the most prominent hurricane experts in the world - was cut off during the Clinton-Gore administration because he had been skeptical of global warming. [http://rohrabacher.house.gov/News/DocumentSingle.aspx?DocumentID=91424]
Hurricane expert Chris Landsea (NOAA National Hurricane Center, Miami) quit the IPCC AR4 process in 2005 due to concerns about agendas having more importance than science [http://www.lavoisier.com.au/papers/articles/landsea.html ] – he states “It is beyond me why my colleagues would utilize the media to push an unsupported agenda that recent hurricane activity has been due to global warming. Given Dr. Trenberth's role as the IPCC's Lead Author responsible for preparing the text on hurricanes, his public statements so far outside of current scientific understanding led me to concern that it would be very difficult for the IPCC process to proceed objectively with regards to the assessment on hurricane activity. … The IPCC assessments in 1995 and 2001 also concluded that there was no global warming signal found in the hurricane record… I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound.”
Not part of the IPCC “consensus”, Yury Izrael (Director of the Global Climate and Ecology Institute, Russian Academy of Sciences and IPCC Vice President, for RIA Novosti) [http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20050623/40748412.html] disagrees with the IPCC that he is a part of: “There is no proven link between human activity and global warming. This problem is overshadowed by many fallacies and misconceptions that often form the basis for important political decisions”
Russian scientist Oleg Sorokhtin (Merited Scientist of Russia and fellow of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences, staff researcher of the Oceanology Institute) [http://en.rian.ru/analysis/20080103/94768732.html] warns that the warming trend will not continue: “The current warming is evidently a natural process and utterly independent of hothouse gases. … The real reasons for climate changes are uneven solar radiation, terrestrial precession (that is, axis gyration), instability of oceanic currents, regular salinity fluctuations of the Arctic Ocean surface waters, etc. There is another, principal reason—solar activity and luminosity.”
French scientist Claude Allegre, a member of both the French and U.S. Academy of Sciences [http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=PressRoom.PressReleases&ContentRecord_id=E58DFF04-5A65-42A4-9F82-87381DE894CD ] has changed his mind about the issue: “One of the most decorated French geophysicists has converted from a believer in manmade catastrophic global warming to a climate skeptic. This latest defector from the global warming camp caps a year in which numerous scientific studies have bolstered the claims of climate skeptics. Scientific studies that debunk the dire predictions of human-caused global warming have continued to accumulate and many believe the new science is shattering the media-promoted scientific “consensus” on climate alarmism.”
Israeli Astrophysicist Nir Shaviv has changed his mind about climate change causes [http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/story.html?id=156df7e6-d490-41c9-8b1f-106fef8763c6&k=0 ], "Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media… There is no concrete evidence -- only speculation -- that man-made greenhouse gases cause global warming. … Solar activity can explain a large part of the 20th-century global warming," he states, particularly because of the evidence that has been accumulating over the past decade of the strong relationship that cosmic- ray flux has on our atmosphere. So much evidence has by now been amassed, in fact, that "it is unlikely that [the solar climate link] does not exist." He provides further details at http://www.sciencebits.com/CO2orSolar
In April 2006, 60 scientists submitted a letter to the prime minister of Canada requesting proper scientific review of the climate issue (the Canadian government had sent the hockey-stick graph of Figure 1-2 to every household after the IPCC published it in 2001, and Canada signed Kyoto). [http://www.canada.com/nationalpost/financialpost/story.html?id=3711460e-bd5a-475d-a6be-4db87559d605 ] “Observational evidence does not support today's computer climate models, so there is little reason to trust model predictions of the future. Yet this is precisely what the United Nations did in creating and promoting Kyoto and still does in the alarmist forecasts on which Canada's climate policies are based…. Significant [scientific] advances have been made since the [Kyoto] protocol was created, many of which are taking us away from a concern about increasing greenhouse gases. If, back in the mid-1990s, we knew what we know today about climate, Kyoto would almost certainly not exist, because we would have concluded it was not necessary” The references lists the 60 scientists who are non-consenting.
The following three examples of the political nature of the (non)-debate represent what is happening in many states and countries. These examples show how climate science is now done – agree with the “consensus” or suffer for disobedience.
In Oregon, George Taylor, the state climatologist (an Oregon State University job title – not an official state position), doubts the “consensus” view is accurate. He thinks the human cause is relatively minor. "It's not clear that we are seeing unprecedented warming, and it's definitely untrue that any warming trend can be assigned to human activities. Natural variations in climate are much more significant than any human activities." “The “hockey stick” graph which appeared in Nature in 1998 and was quickly adopted by the IPCC has been the subject of three scientific journal articles in the last 12 months, all of which have shown that it contains significant errors.” [http://www.willametteweek.com/story.php?story=6655 , http://www.ocs.orst.edu/page_links/publications/taylor_response.html and http://www.kgw.com/news-local/stories/kgw_020607_news_taylor_title.59f5d04a.html ] As a result of his views, Oregon Governor Ted Kulongoski proposed taking the “state climatologist” title from Taylor. The governor said Taylor's contradictions interfere with the state's stated goals to reduce greenhouse gases, the accepted cause of global warming in the eyes of a vast majority of scientists. He proposes making a state-appointed position of “state climatologist” in order to provide consistency with the official state position.
In Delaware, David Legates, the state climatologist participated in a friend-of-the-court brief against the State of Delaware's legal efforts to regulate greenhouse gas emissions. Legates has argued there is a great deal of uncertainty concerning the extent to which human activities are driving the recent warming cycle.[http://eteam.ncpa.org/commentaries/state-climatologists-attacked-for-global-warming-doubts] As a result Delaware Governor Ruth Ann Minner has asked him to not make any statements as state climatologist http://www.udel.edu/Geography/Legates/Governors%20Letter%20to%20Legates.pdf because “Your views on climate change, as I understand them, are not aligned with those of my administration”.
In Washington State, dissension is occurring at the University of Washington. A Seattle Times article [http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003618979_warming15m.html ] described the argument over Washington snowpack: “The snowpack in the Cascades, it was said, shrank by 50 percent in the last half-century. It's been presented as glaring evidence of the cost exacted by global warming — the drying up of a vital water source. That statistic has been repeated in a government report, on environmental-advocacy Web sites and in media coverage. Seattle Mayor Greg Nickels recently mentioned it in a guest column in The Seattle Times. Here's the problem: The number is dead wrong.” The debate involves UW climatologists who disagree about the decline of the snowpack. The state climatologist is “a member of the Climate Impacts Group who rose to prominence partly due to his work documenting shrinking snowpack” “University of Washington researcher and State Climatologist Philip Mote stripped a colleague of his title as associate state climatologist”. A third associate in the debate said: "In all my years of doing science, I've never seen this sort of gag-order approach to doing science". (For further info on the issue see: http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/CascadesSnowpack.htm).
The American Association of State Climatologists has a “Policy Statement on Climate Variability and Change” [http://www.stateclimate.org/publications/files/aascclimatepolicy.pdf ] which states “Climate prediction is difficult because it involves complex, nonlinear interactions among all components of the earth’s environmental system. These components include the oceans, land, lakes, and continental ice sheets, and involve physical, biological, and chemical processes. The complicated feedbacks and forcings within the climate system are the reasons for the difficulty in accurately predicting the future climate. … Furthermore, climate predictions have not demonstrated skill in projecting future variability and changes in such important climate conditions as growing season, drought, flood-producing rainfall, heat waves, tropical cyclones and winter storms. These are the type of events that have a more significant impact on society than annual average global temperature trends.”
In 2009 the EPA determined that CO2 was an endangerment to human health. “Dr. Alan Carlin, … at the time a scientist within the EPA, had warned that these [IPCC data] sources were not sufficient. He also warned that relying on these reports [IPCC] as the primary sources opened the EPA to legal challenge and also risked making extremely expensive regulatory changes without affecting climate change in any significant fashion. Dr. Carlin’s concerns were suppressed by the EPA. Dr. Al McGartland, head of the EPA’s National Center for Environmental Economics, said, forthrightly, that Dr. Carlin’s view was not to be published because “[the]administrator and administration has decided to move forward on endangerment, and your comments do not help the legal or policy case for this decision.” That is, Dr. McGartland was saying the decision to issue an endangerment finding had been made at the top of the EPA and counterarguments were unwelcome. Dr. Carlin later found out just how unwelcome his comments had been: he was ordered not to speak about the topic, removed from EPA climate policy committees, and eventually demoted.” [http://pajamasmedia.com/blog/sensenbrenner-report-challenges-epa-greenhouse-finding-pjm-exclusive/?singlepage=true]
The Consortium for Science, Policy, and Outcomes (College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at Arizona State University) http://www.cspo.org/ourlibrary/perspectives/allenby_07.htm “a recent report in Science notes the reluctance of some climate scientists to consider geoengineering solutions to global climate change not because they don’t work, but because they don’t require social engineering (314:401-403). As one European climate scientist complains, “You’re papering over the problem [by even considering geoengineering options] so people can keep inflicting damage on the climate system without having to give up fossil fuels.” Whether scientists should arrogate to themselves the responsibility for deciding for everyone that fossil fuels should be given up, as opposed to other alternatives to managing climate change, is apparently not to be subject to dialog.” This is a serious issue. As an example, European countries are imposing new laws and high taxes to reduce travel, while the United Nations has said that the meat industry and deforestation each generate more GHGs than the transportation sector.
Reid A. Bryson -- Emeritus Professor and founding chairman of the University of Wisconsin Department of Meteorology (now the Department of Oceanic and Atmospheric Sciences) (also a member of the United Nations Global 500 Roll of Honor, author of five books and more than 230 other publications and identified by the British Institute of Geographers as the most frequently cited climatologist in the world.) was quoted in an article in which he disagrees with the CO2-based scenario [http://www.wecnmagazine.com/2007issues/may/may07.html ] “Almost 40 years ago, Bryson stood before the American Association for the Advancement of Science and presented a paper saying human activity could alter climate. “I was laughed off the platform for saying that,” In the 1960s, Bryson’s idea was widely considered a radical proposition. But nowadays things have turned almost in the opposite direction. …“All this argument is the temperature going up or not, it’s absurd,” Bryson continues. “Of course it’s going up. It has gone up since the early 1800s, before the Industrial Revolution, because we’re coming out of the Little Ice Age, not because we’re putting more carbon dioxide into the air.” Bryson says the data fed into the computers overemphasizes carbon dioxide and accounts poorly for the effects of clouds—water vapor… Bryson says he looks in the opposite direction, at past climate conditions, for clues to future climate behavior… The ice core data allowed researchers to examine multiple climate changes reaching back over the past 650,000 years. All six studies found atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations tracking closely with temperatures, but with CO2 lagging behind changes in temperature, rather than leading them.”
The Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine hosts the
Petition Project organized by Frederick Seitz
Frederick Seitz, (former president of the National Academy of Sciences) wrote about changes made to the IPCC SAR published in 1996. [http://www.sepp.org/Archive/controv/ipcccont/Item05.htm ] – “A comparison between the report approved by the contributing scientists and the published version reveals that key changes were made after the scientists had met and accepted what they thought was the final peer-reviewed version. The following passages are examples of those included in the approved report but deleted from the supposedly peer-reviewed published version: "None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases." … "No study to date has positively attributed all or part [of the climate change observed to date] to anthropogenic [man-made] causes." … "Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced." The changes were apparently made by Ben Santer who also inserted a statement not in the original: “There is evidence of an emerging pattern of climate response to forcing by greenhouse gases … these results point toward a human influence on global climate.” The connection is not known for sure, but the chairman of the IPCC working group received a letter from the U.S. State Department (Nov. 1995) stating: “It is essential that the chapters not be finalized prior to the completion of discussions… and that chapter authors be prevailed upon to modify their text in an appropriate manner…”. [Follow the money? On June 2, 1998 the New York Times reported Ben Santer was “awarded a MacArthur Foundation "genius" grant of $270,000 for research supporting the finding that human activity contributes to global warming”. http://www.sepp.org/Archive/controv/controversies/santer.html]
The American Physical Society (APS) publishes a Forum on Physics and Society. Whereas Al Gore says the debate is over, the July 2008 Issue of Physics and Society Editor's Comments section says: "There is a considerable presence within the scientific community of people who do not agree with the IPCC conclusion that anthropogenic CO2 emissions are very probably likely to be primarily responsible for the global warming that has occurred". One of the main articles in the issue states the following: "Now that the IPCC has published its estimates of the forcing effects of individual feedbacks for the first time, numerous papers challenging its chosen values have appeared in the peer-reviewed literature. ... the IPCC has failed to allow for two-thirds of the cooling effect of evaporation in its evaluation of the water vapor-feedback ... the cloud-albedo feedback, regarded by the IPCC as second in magnitude only to the water-vapor feedback, should in fact be negative rather than strongly positive." In 2009, the APS Council decided to review its current climate statement via a high-level subcommittee of respected senior scientists. The decision was prompted after a group of 54 prominent physicists petitioned the APS revise its global warming position. The physicists wrote: “Measured or reconstructed temperature records indicate that 20th - 21st century changes are neither exceptional nor persistent, and the historical and geological records show many periods warmer than today.” [http://striky.ece.jhu.edu/~sasha/Public/APS.open.letter.09.pdf]
In 2009 the American Chemical Society members began criticizing their newsletter editor for “alarmist screed” editorials [http://climatedepot.com/a/2213/Climate-Revolt-Worlds-Largest-Science-Group-Startled-By-Outpouring-of-Scientists-Rejecting-ManMade-Climate-Fears-Clamor-for-Editor-to-Be-Removed]
See www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/TheExperts.htm for words from more climate scientists who disagree with the global warming scare.
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Other Political / Religious Considerations
With the 2006 change of control of Congress to the Democrats, the (non)-debate is now over. Nancy Pelosi recently gave a global warming speech in which she implied that global warming was responsible for hurricane Katrina among other exaggerations [http://www.speaker.gov/newsroom/speeches?id=0013 . She says we need “mandatory action to reduce greenhouse gas pollution… We hope to have legislation… by July 4th “The following statement shows her grasp of science in justifying action on greenhouse gas: ”The Bible tells us in the Old Testament, ‘To minister to the needs of God's creation is an act of worship. To ignore those needs is to dishonor the God who made us”.
To Al Gore, world poverty cannot be addressed without addressing global warming: “Earlier this year, Bono and I spoke about the intersection between the extreme poverty in the developing world – especially in Africa – and the climate crisis. It is impossible to solve one of these issues without dealing with the other”. http://blog.algore.com/2008/08/a_set_back.html
Wikipedia has become a major disinformation source in the global warming debate. Lawrence Solomon describes the problem [http://www.nationalpost.com/related/topics/story.html?id=490337&p=2], in that all global warming related articles at Wikipedia are manipulated by one person, William Connolley, who strongly believes in AGW. “Because Wikipedia has become the single biggest reference source in the world, and global warming is one of the most sought-after subjects, the ability to control information on Wikipedia by taking down authoritative scientists is no trifling matter.”
But it may be Britain where the carbon police first appear. An article in Reuters: “Britons fear the carbon cops are coming: survey” states “41 percent of Britons think the country will need its own Carbon Police Force by mid-century. … The UK's perception is that by 2050 we could have the sort of draconian infringements on our civil liberties that have been highlighted in our research.” [http://www.reuters.com/article/environmentNews/idUSL2459239920080624?feedType=RSS&feedName=environmentNews]
See: http://www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/EcoReligion.htm for evidence of AGW as a religion
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More Information:
Climate scientists who disagree with the global warming scare: www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/TheExperts.htm
Political history of the global warming scare, and why the United Nations is promoting it: www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/GW_History.htm
An examination of the global cooling consensus of the 1970s and the current global warming consensus: www.appinsys.com/globalwarming/Consensus.htm
Monetization of carbon and who is profiting from the transactions of CO2 credits: www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/CarbonMonetization.htm
The Climate Industrial Complex: www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/ClimateComplex.htm
Obama’s government (Holdren, Browner, Chu, etc): www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/ObamasGovernment.htm www.appinsys.com/GlobalWarming/WhiteHouseDeception.htm
Richard Lindzen (MIT) on the politicization of climate science:
Larry Solomon has written a good series of articles for Canada’s National Post newspaper documenting the points of view of many “denier” scientists: http://www.nationalpost.com/story.html?id=22003a0d-37cc-4399-8bcc-39cd20bed2f6&k=0
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