By Valerie Richardson • The Washington Times
Al Gore has been accused of hypocrisy for talking the talk on climate change despite burning through fossil fuels at a rapid clip, but it turns out he’s not alone.
A study by Cornell and the University of Michigan researchers found that those “highly concerned” about climate change were less likely to engage in recycling and other eco-friendly behaviors than global-warming skeptics.
Published in the April edition of the Journal of Environmental Psychology, the one-year study broke 600 participants into three groups based on their level of concern about climate change: “highly concerned,” “cautiously worried,” and “skeptical.”
The “highly concerned” cluster was “most supportive of government climate policies, but least likely to report individual-level actions, whereas the ‘Skeptical’ opposed policy solutions but were Continue reading
by Haris Alic • Washington Free Beacon
A civil suit playing out between five American oil companies and the municipalities of Oakland and San Francisco started off poorly for climate change activists.
In preparation for California v. Chevron, the date for which has yet to determined, U.S. District Court Judge William Alsup ordered the litigants converge for a “climate change tutorial” in an effort to ensure all parties understood the scientific foundation that would form the basis of the trial. The city attorneys of San Francisco and Oakland, the suit’s plaintiffs who are championed by climate change activists, were reportedly thrilled by the prospect. Some activists even compared the tutorial to the infamous Scopes Monkey Trial, according to the Wall Street Journal.
The suit accuses the energy companies–BP, Chevron, ExxonMobil, Conoco Phillips, and Shell–of contributing to climate change and conspiring to cover up their knowledge of the associated detrimental effects.
The lead attorney for the plaintiffs, Steven W. Berman, is expected to argue that because of the companies’ contributions to climate change, municipalities are now being forced to commit financial resources to combatting environmental changes.
In defense, the companies’ lawyers don’t seem to be questioning the science behind climate change, but rather their clients’ responsibility. The lawyers are expected to argue that the individuals who burn fossil fuels, rather than companies, are responsible for contributions to climate change. Continue reading
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration may have a boring name, but it has a very important job: It measures U.S. temperatures. Unfortunately, it seems to be a captive of the global warming religion. Its data are fraudulent.
What do we mean by fraudulent? How about this: NOAA has made repeated “adjustments” to its data, for the presumed scientific reason of making the data sets more accurate.
Nothing wrong with that. Except, all their changes point to one thing — lowering previously measured temperatures to show cooler weather in the past, and raising more recent temperatures to show warming in the recent present. Continue reading
by H. Sterling Burnett • American Spectator
So-called “consensus” climate science reaches new lows nearly every day, with many researchers now better resembling dogmatic, fire-and-brimstone preachers — the kind of people who burnt heretics at the stake during the Middle Ages and suppressed scientific discovery — than scientists engaged in the pursuit of knowledge.
I don’t begrudge scientists who either believe their own research shows, or who believe the dominant number of peer-reviewed papers indicate, humans are causing climate change and the changes will be dangerous. But I do disagree with many of the assumptions made by proponents of the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW). Data and evidence show most of their projections concerning temperatures, ice, hurricanes, species extinction, etc. have failed. As a result, I don’t think their projections of the future climate conditions are trustworthy, especially not to make the kind of fundamental, wrenching, costly changes to our economy and systems of government that have been proposed as necessary for fighting climate change. I don’t think climate scientists can foretell the future any better than the average palm reader.
Making matters worse, AGW proponents discount, or ignore entirely, powerful studies that seem to undermine many of their assumptions and refute most of their conclusions. Continue reading
By • Washington Examiner
Spurred on by trial lawyers and environmental activists, whose political support is crucial for any up and coming progressive, state and local elected officials have been trying to prove as a matter of law that the nation’s energy companies lied for years to their stockholders and to the American people about the possible impact of global warming.
They’ve been unsuccessful, largely because the charge is untrue — as several of those who’ve already brought these lawsuits have been forced by the facts to admit. Still, it all continues. Local governments in California, where energy taxes subsidize the out-of-control spending in which Gov. Jerry Brown and the Democrat-controlled state legislature engage with such abandon, recently sued 18 energy companies claiming the threat of rising sea levels in future years present a substantial risk to their communities.
The allegation of near-certain future harm caused by rising sea levels stemming from anthropogenic climate change is an old complaint made many times before. Former Vice President Al Gore famously (and incorrectly) predicted the polar ice caps would have by now all melted for the same reasons.
Environmentalism: A new study published in the prestigious journal Nature finds that all those global warming doomsday scenarios aren’t credible. Not that you would ever know based on how little coverage this study is getting.
The study, published on Thursday, finds that if CO2 in the atmosphere doubled, global temperatures would climb at most by 3.4 degrees Celsius. That’s far below what the UN has been saying for decades, namely that temperatures would rise as much as 4.5 degrees, and possibly up to 6 degrees.
Basically, the scientists involved in the Nature study found that the planet is less sensitive to changes in CO2 levels than had been previously believed. That means projected temperature increases are too high.
Of course this is just one study, but it supports the contention climate skeptics have been making for years — that the computer models used to predict future warming were exaggerating the impact of CO2, evidenced in part by the fact that the planet hasn’t been warming as much as those models say it should. Continue reading
By Robert Tracinski • The Federalist
If we have such an overwhelming scientific “consensus” about the supposed threat of catastrophic man-made global warming—and about the political and economic solutions to it—then why do advocates have to sue scientists to prevent them from questioning it? That’s the question raised by a $10 million lawsuit lawsuit filed by Stanford engineering professor Mark Z. Jacobson accusing other scientists of defamation for critiquing his scientific work in favor of “renewal energy.”
That’s not how science works. That’s not how any of this is supposed to work.
Jacobson made a name for himself and became something of a media celebrity for publishing a study in 2015 that claimed the United States could provide 100 percent of its energy needs from wind, solar, and hydroelectric power by 2050—and at a lower cost than with fossil fuels. Continue reading
By Megan G. Oprea • The Federalist
It’s all over the news: Syria has joined the Paris climate agreement, leaving the United States as the only country in the world that is not a signatory. Many observers and commentators are using this as an opportunity to chastise America for holding out where a roundly abhorred government has given in. But the questions people should really be asking are why Syria joined the Paris agreement and why it chose to do so now, two years after the agreement was first adopted. The answer is simple. Syria is seeking international legitimacy.
No doubt, copy editors across the mainstream media relished the chance to write headlines like, “As Syria Joins Paris Climate Agreement, US Stands Alone” or “As Syria Embraces Paris Climate Deal, It’s the United States Against the World,” emphasizing America’s isolation over climate change and juxtaposing Syria as the “good guy” with the United States as the “bad guy.” After all, if even Syria is signing on, how bad does that make America? Continue reading
By Wendy Wilson • Tennessee Star
On the surface, it would appear that Roy Spencer has a comfortable life.
He is a principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, where he directs climate research projects and has authored books and numerous articles for scientific journals.
Unfortunately for Spencer, he comes down on the wrong side – the politically incorrect side – of global warming and climate change, for which he has taken a lot of heat.
“Nothing we are seeing today is really out of the ordinary,” he said Saturday, sounding exasperated and battle weary as he discussed weather patterns. Continue reading
by Lorrie Goldstein • Toronto Sun
It’s like something out of George Orwell’s 1984.
Canada’s Competition Bureau, an arm’s length agency funded by Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government to the tune of almost $50 million annually, investigated three organizations accused of denying mainstream climate science for over a year, following a complaint from an environmental group.
The bureau discontinued its 14-month probe in June, citing “available evidence, the assessment of the facts in this case, and to ensure the effective allocation of limited resources”, according to Josephine A.L. Palumbo, Deputy Commissioner of Competition, Deceptive Marketing Practices Directorate. Continue reading
Global warming is “settled science,” we hear all the time. Those who reject that idea are “deniers.” But as new evidence trickles out from peer-reviewed science studies, the legs beneath the climate change hypothesis — that the earth was doing just fine until carbon-dioxide spewing human beings came along — is increasingly wobbly.
A new study published in the journal Nature Geoscience purports to support action by global governments to reduce carbon dioxide output in order to lower potential global warming over the next 100 years or so. But what it really does is undercut virtually every modern argument for taking radical action against warming.
Why? The study admits that the 12 major university and government models that have been used to predict climate warming are faulty. Continue reading
By Peter Roff • Washington Times
Ever since Big Tobacco reached a deal with the U.S. government to settle the claims against it the folks who profited most from the deal have been looking for ways to replicate it. They haven’t had much success, but not for lack of trying.
No, the trial lawyers and university scholars and public interest activists and media hogs and politicians who found the tobacco case so helpful to them in so many ways tried to get their hooks into Big Snack, Big Soda, Big Pharma, Big Food and other industries without much success. Their only bright spot thus far is they’ve managed to get Big Oil — or Exxon/Mobil at any rate — into court over allegations the company lied for years to the public about the effects of global warming.
The suit is the brainchild of New York State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman whose case was moving along fine until the judge determined Exxon/Mobil had not lied to anyone about the possible connection between the use of fossil fuels and global warming. In fact, he found, they’d been publicizing the potential linkage for some time. Continue reading
by Oren Cass • City-Journal
Thirty-nine percent of Americans give at least 50-50 odds that “global warming will cause humans to become extinct,” according to a poll released last week by the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication. This extreme view, unsupported by mainstream climate science, is more widely held than the belief that climate change either is “caused mostly by natural changes in the environment” rather than human activity (30 percent), or else “isn’t happening” at all (6 percent). As if on cue, New York published a cover story on Monday entitled, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” with this grim subtitle: “Famine, economic collapse, a sun that cooks us: What climate change could wreak—sooner than you think.” David Wallace-Wells’s 7,000-word article is so disconnected from reality that debunking loses its thrill within a few paragraphs. Even Michael Mann, among the most strident climate scientists, wrote on Facebook that “Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. The article fails to produce it.”
Mann notes that, in his first section alone, Wallace-Wells “exaggerates” the threat of melting permafrost, while his claim about satellite data is “just not true.” The story next intones ominously about “a crack in an ice shelf [that] grew 11 miles in six days, then kept going.” But the Guardian (no climate-change denier), covering the ice-shelf crack last month, explained it differently: “What looks like an enormous loss is just ordinary housekeeping for this part of Antarctica.” Continue reading
by Joshua Caplan • Gateway Pundit
SHFTPLan reports:
According to the report, which has been peer reviewed by administrators, scientists and researchers from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (M.I.T.), and several of America’s leading universities, the data is completely bunk:
In this research report, the most important surface data adjustment issues are identified and past changes in the previously reported historical data are quantified. It was found that each new version of GAST has nearly always exhibited a steeper warming linear trend over its entire history. And, it was nearly always accomplished by systematically removing the previously existing cyclical temperature pattern. This was true for all three entities providing GAST data measurement, NOAA, NASA and Hadley CRU.
As a result, this research sought to validate the current estimates of GAST using the best available relevant data. This included the best documented and understood data sets from the U.S. and elsewhere as well as global data from satellites that provide far more extensive global coverage and are not contaminated by bad siting and urbanization impacts. Satellite data integrity also benefits from having cross checks with Balloon data.
The conclusive findings of this research are that the three GAST data sets are not a valid representation of reality. In fact, the magnitude of their historical data adjustments, that removed their cyclical temperature patterns, are totally inconsistent with published and credible U.S. and other temperature data. Thus, it is impossible to conclude from the three published GAST data sets that recent years have been the warmest ever –despite current claims of record setting warming.
Finally, since GAST data set validity is a necessary condition for EPA’s GHG/CO2 Endangerment Finding, it too is invalidated by these research findings. (Full Abstract Report)