By S. Fred Singer • American Thinker
This article is based on a Heartland Panel talk [Dec7, 2015, at Hotel California, Paris].
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has to provide proof for significant human-caused climate change; yet their climate models have never been validated and are rapidly diverging from actual observations. The real threat to humanity comes not from any (trivial) greenhouse warming but from cooling periods creating food shortages and famines.
Burden of proof
Climate change has been going on for millions of years — long before humans existed on this planet. Obviously, the causes were all of natural origin and not anthropogenic. There is no reason to think that these natural causes have suddenly stopped. For example, volcanic eruptions, various types of solar influences, and atmosphere-ocean oscillations all continue today. We cannot model these natural climate-forcings precisely and therefore cannot anticipate what they will be in the future.
But let’s call this the “Null hypothesis.” Logically therefore, the burden of proof falls upon alarmists to demonstrate that this null hypothesis is not adequate to account for empirical climate data. In other words, alarmists must provide convincing observational evidence for anthropogenic climate change (ACC). They must do this by detailed comparison of the data with climate models. This is of course extremely difficult and virtually impossible since one cannot specify these natural influences precisely.
We’re not aware of such detailed comparisons, only of anecdotal evidence — although we must admit that ACC is plausible; after all, CO2 is a greenhouse gas and its level has been rising mainly because of the burning of fossil fuels. Continue reading
by Michael Bastasch • The Daily Caller
In face of intense criticism from alarmist scientists, Dr. John Christy went to great lengths in a Tuesday congressional hearing to detail why satellite-derived temperatures are much more reliable indicators of warming than surface thermometers.
“That’s where the real mass of the climate system exists in terms of the atmosphere,” Christy, a climate scientist at the University of Alabama and Alabama’s state climatologist, said in a Wednesday hearing before the House science committee.
“When a theory contradicts the facts” you need to change the theory, Christy said. “The real world is not going along with rapid warming. The models need to go back to the drawing board.” Continue reading
by Andrew Follett • The Daily Caller
Hundreds of scientists sent a letter to lawmakers Thursday warning National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) scientists may have violated federal laws when they published a 2015 study purporting to eliminate the 15-year “hiatus” in global warming from the temperature record. Continue reading
by Anthony Watts • WUWT
From the “say your prayers, we’re gonna roast” department.
On January 25th, 2006, while at the Sundance film festival, screening “An Inconvenient Truth”, Al Gore said this as chronicled in an article by CBS News:
The former vice president came to town for the premiere of “An Inconvenient Truth,” a documentary chronicling what has become his crusade since losing the 2000 presidential election: Educating the masses that global warming is about to toast our ecology and our way of life.
Gore has been saying it for decades, since a college class in the 1960s convinced him that greenhouse gases from oil, coal and other carbon emissions were trapping the sun’s heat in the atmosphere, resulting in a glacial meltdown that could flood much of the planet.
Americans have been hearing it for decades, wavering between belief and skepticism that it all may just be a natural part of Earth’s cyclical warming and cooling phases. Continue reading
By David Siegel • RealClearPolitics
The earth is warming. But not much, not quickly, and not lately. While it seems as though we are caught on the horns of a dilemma, my goal in this short essay is to make the dilemma disappear, so we can focus on things that need our attention now. Decarbonization will not change the temperature or climate picture for our planet. Decarbonization benefits one group: those whose livelihoods depend on your belief in their story.
It’s not easy to figure these things out. We’re not scientists. Who has time to read all the papers and look at all the data? We rely on others, usually experts, to give us their opinions. If we trust them, we believe them. Often unwittingly, we tend to trust people who are similar to us. So we believe people who look and talk the way we do, and we align ourselves with people who have the same political beliefs we do. Continue reading
At the Paris conference, expect an agreement that is sufficiently vague and noncommittal for all countries to claim victory.
By Matt Ridley and Benny Peiser • Wall Street Journal
In February President Obama said, a little carelessly, that climate change is a greater threat than terrorism. Next week he will be in Paris, a city terrorized yet again by mass murderers, for a summit with other world leaders on climate change, not terrorism. What precisely makes these world leaders so convinced that climate change is a more urgent and massive threat than the incessant rampages of Islamist violence?
It cannot be what is happening to world temperatures, because they have gone up only very slowly, less than half as fast as the scientific consensus predicted in 1990 when the global-warming scare began in earnest. Even with this year’s El Niño-boosted warmth threatening to break records, the world is barely half a degree Celsius (0.9 degrees Fahrenheit) warmer than it was about 35 years ago. Also, it is increasingly clear that the planet was significantly warmer than today several times during the past 10,000 years. Continue reading
Climate alarmists want government to silence skeptics
By Paul Driessen • Washington Times
What irony. The latest attack on fellow scientists was launched by academics from a university named for the patriot who wrote the original Virginia version of our Bill of Rights. Those rights include freedom of speech and assembly, the right to petition our government, and protection from unreasonable search and seizure of our property.
Sadly, it reflects the appalling state of “academic freedom” on too many campuses, which today celebrate every kind of diversity except diversity of opinion.
Jagadish Shukla, four associates at his George Mason University-based Institute of Global Environment and Society, and 15 other climate researchers have signed an outrageous letter, asking President Obama and Attorney General Loretta Lynch to investigate “organizations that have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change.” Continue reading
Scientists find that the huge forested area is teeming with large animals such as red deer, wild boar and wolves
by Steve Connor • Independent
The absence of human activity in the exclusion zone has benefited the wildlife of the region PA
The exclusion zone around the Chernobyl nuclear plant, which was evacuated in 1986 after a devastating explosion and fire, has become a wildlife haven on a par with heavily-protected nature reserves, scientists have found.
A detailed survey of the huge forested area around the stricken plant has revealed that it is teeming with large animals such elk, roe deer, red deer, wild boar and wolves despite being contaminated with radioactive fallout.
The scientists found no evidence to support earlier studies suggesting that wildlife in the region had suffered from the radiation released after the Chernobyl accident of 1986 which sent plumes of radioactive emissions across much of northern Europe, causing radiation “hotspots” within the exclusion zone. Continue reading
By Betsy McCaughey • New York Post
President Obama hiked to Exit Glacier in Alaska last week, with photographers in tow, to send the world a message: The glacier is melting.
Obama blames it on the increasing use of fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas, which he wants to restrict not only in the United States but worldwide. The photo op was designed to build support for an international climate agreement he’s pushing hard to sell, so far with little success.
Trouble is, the president needs to get his facts straight. Exit Glacier has been shrinking for 200 years — since 1815 — long before widespread industrialization and automobiles. As the president ended his trip, he sounded the alarm again: “This state’s climate is changing before our eyes.”
News flash, Mr. President: Alaska has been buffeted by cyclical swings in climate for thousands of years. That’s true for the rest of the world, too. There was a 300-year-long Medieval heat wave, followed by a Little Ice Age that began around 1300, and then the 300-year warming period we’re in now. Continue reading
by Michael Bastasch • Daily Caller
The science on global warming is settled, so settled that 20 climate scientists are asking President Barack Obama to prosecute people who disagree with them on the science behind man-made global warming.
Scientists from several universities and research centers even asked Obama to use the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act (RICO) to prosecute groups that “have knowingly deceived the American people about the risks of climate change, as a means to forestall America’s response to climate change.”
RICO was a law designed to take down organized crime syndicates, but scientists now want it to be used against scientists, activists and organizations that voice their disagreement with the so-called “consensus” on global warming. The scientists repeated claims made by environmentalists that groups, especially those with ties to fossil fuels, have engaged in a misinformation campaign to confuse the public on global warming. Continue reading
As of last year, NOAA didn’t show much, if any August warming for almost 20 years.
That didn’t suit Barack Obama’s agenda, so they simply changed the data to make the hiatus disappear. Continue reading
Climate-change ‘deniers’ are accused of heresy by true believers. That doesn’t sound like science to me.
by John Steele Gordon • Wall Street Journal
Are there any phrases in today’s political lexicon more obnoxious than “the science is settled” and “climate-change deniers”?
The first is an oxymoron. By definition, science is never settled. It is always subject to change in the light of new evidence. The second phrase is nothing but an ad hominem attack, meant to evoke “Holocaust deniers,” those people who maintain that the Nazi Holocaust is a fiction, ignoring the overwhelming, incontestable evidence that it is a historical fact. Hillary Clinton’s speech about climate change on Monday in Des Moines, Iowa, included an attack on “deniers.”
The phrases are in no way applicable to the science of Earth’s climate. The climate is an enormously complex system, with a very large number of inputs and outputs, many of which we don’t fully understand—and some we may well not even know about yet. To note this, and to observe that there is much contradictory evidence for assertions of a coming global-warming catastrophe, isn’t to “deny” anything; it is to state a fact. In other words, the science is unsettled—to say that we have it all wrapped up is itself a form of denial. The essence of scientific inquiry is the assumption that there is always more to learn. Continue reading
by Royce Christyn • YourNewsWire.com
70 Nobel Science Laureates in 2008 stood up to endorse Barack Obama for President – and now Nobel Prize Winner Dr. Ivar Giaever is saying The President is dead wrong about climate change.
According to a recent article in The Daily Caller [1]:
“I would say that basically global warming is a non-problem,” Giaever, who won the Nobel for physics in 1973, told an audience at the Lindau Nobel Laureate meeting earlier this month [2].
Giaever ridiculed Obama for stating that “no challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.” The physicist called it a “ridiculous statement” and that Obama “gets bad advice” when it comes to global warming. Continue reading
By • Town Hall
This year is the 10th anniversary of a book called “The Republican War on Science.” I could just as easily write a book called “The Democratic War on Science.”
The conflict conservatives have with science is mostly caused by religion. Some religious conservatives reject evolution, and some oppose stem cell research.
By contrast, the left’s bad ideas about science do more harm.
Many on the left — including a few of my fellow libertarians — are paranoid about genetically modified organisms. These are crops that have DNA altered to make them grow faster or be more pest-resistant. The left calls that “playing with nature” and worries that eating GMO food will cause infertility, premature aging and a host of other problems.
The fear makes little scientific sense. There is no reason to think that precise changes in a plant’s genes are more dangerous than, say, the cross-breeding of corn done by American Indians centuries ago or a new type of tomato arising in someone’s organic garden. Nature makes wilder and more unpredictable changes in plant DNA all the time.
Yet the left’s fear of GMOs led activists to destroy fields of experimental crops in Europe and, most tragically, bans on GMO foods that might help prevent hunger and malnutrition in African and Asian nations.
Leftists often claim to be defenders of progress, but they sound more like religious conservatives when they oppose “tampering with nature.”
The new movie “Jurassic World,” in which scientists tamper with DNA to create a super-dinosaur that gets out of control, doesn’t just recycle ideas from the original “Jurassic Park.” It recycles the same fears that inspired the novel “Frankenstein” 200 years ago — the idea that if humans alter nature’s perfect design, we’ll pay a terrible price.
But it’s nature that is terrible. We should alter it. “Living with nature” means fighting for food, freezing in the cold and dying young.
The left’s anti-science fears also prevent us from building new nuclear reactors, especially after Fukushima and Chernobyl. But those reactor designs were already considered obsolete. Future reactors could be far safer and would reduce our dependence on carbon-producing fuels.
Humans thrive by improving technology, not abandoning it.
Lately, some people think they’re “erring on the safe side” by avoiding vaccinations. The result is outbreaks of diseases like mumps and measles that we thought were all but eliminated. In Nigeria, conspiracy theories frightened people away from getting polio vaccinations just as we were on the verge of eradicating that crippling disease.
The left also objects to science that contradicts their egalitarian beliefs. A few years ago, I interviewed scientists who had discovered ways in which male and female brains differ from birth. The scientists told me that they wanted to continue such research, but political pressure against it was too intense. Men and women clearly have different aptitudes, but today leftists demand that government punish any company that treats genders differently.
Few scientists today would even study relative IQs of different ethnic groups. They know they’d be de-funded if they discovered the “wrong” facts.
I say, follow the truth wherever science leads. “Science Wars” is the subject of my next TV show.
Last week, I reported how SeaWorld had been smeared by animal rights activists. The activists responded with more smears.
They claimed my producers and I wouldn’t talk to animal trainers seen in the film “Blackfish.” But I tried interviewing them — they refused to talk. The activists also claim we based our report on views of Bridget M. Davis and Mark Simmons, but I don’t even know who they are. Then they claimed we got all our information from SeaWorld, but that, too, is a lie; of course, we consulted independent sources.
As often happens, activists put politics before reality.
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by Jeff Jacoby • The Boston Globe
Unless you’ve spent the last few weeks in solitary meditation on a remote island, you couldn’t miss the wave of media stories breathlessly proclaiming that 2014 was the hottest year in recorded history. As usual, the coverage was laced with alarm about the menace posed by climate change, and with disapproval of skeptics who decline to join in the general panic.
Among those seizing on the news to make a political point was President Obama, who used his State of the Union address to voice disdain for those who don’t share his view. “I’ve heard some folks try to dodge the evidence by saying they’re not scientists,” he scoffed. “Well, I’m not a scientist, either. But. . . I know a lot of really good scientists at NASA, and NOAA, and at our major universities.” Continue reading