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By Rachelle Peterson
Is it morally permissible to allow "climate deniers" to appear in print and televised media?
Columbia University journalism students wrestled with this question recently at a screening of the new documentary, "Merchants of Doubt." "Merchants," based on the 2010 book by science historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway, endeavors to smear skeptics of anthropogenic global warming as the henchmen of the fossil-fuel industry. The film is light on evidence, as I show here, but heavy on verve. Director Robert Kenner ("Food, Inc.") traces the stories of sly 1950s tobacco reps who hired scientists to cast doubt on a growing consensus that smoking was unhealthy. The film's implication, insinuated rather than demonstrated, is that global warming doubters are likewise mercenary.
If you buy that argument, then it makes some sense to keep "deniers" from deluding the public. In a room full of journalism students in training to ask tough questions and root out the truth, everyone bought it.
Global Warming Opposition Equals Propaganda
"It is a lie to say that global warming poses no danger," New York Times reporter Justin Gillis told the crowd as part of a panel after the screening. He was responding to a question from the editor of the Columbia Journalism Review, who had asked him whether news outlets present a "false balance" when they cite both proponents and skeptics of anthropogenic global warming. Since the science is "settled," and "consensus" has been achieved, why not quote only the proponents? "Journalists care about the truth - that's my only care in life, to find the truth," Gillis added. "To act as if the evidence is half and half is to tell a lie. I refuse to perpetuate that lie."
Wendell Potter from the Huffington Post recommended that newspapers create a new "propaganda beat" with reporters devoted solely to unmasking the "deniers" as frauds.
"Accurate information about climate change is a human right," insisted Emily Southerd, campaign manager for the advocacy group Forecast the Facts. "Accurate information" in this case apparently means "consensus" information. Southerd shared that her organization is petitioning news stations to quit booking "deniers" like Marc Morano of ClimateDepot.com, one of the "merchants" shown in the film.
It's hard to take such caviling seriously when the New York Times is running beguiling hit pieces on respected (but climate-skeptic) astrophysicist Willie Soon and cheering a McCarthyite investigation into seven other professors who expressed skepticism towards the idea that global warming is dangerous and man-made. In the United Kingdom last summer, after global warming-skeptic Lord Nigel Lawson appeared on the BBC, the head of the BBC Complaints Unit announced that "minority opinions and sceptical views should not be treated on an equal footing with the scientific consensus." Lawson has not been on the BBC since.
Skeptics are not exactly popular in the media. Gillis acknowledged a tacit pact among print journalists to stop giving credence to climate skeptics. He called this an "enlightenment" that began ten or 15 years ago. American television, he noted, still lets a few skeptics onto the air; broadcasters have yet to come out of the Dark Ages.
Denying the Deniers
The merits of the term "denier" also got some play among the panelists. Southerd cast a strong vote in favor of the term: "these people need to be labeled what they are: climate change deniers." Gillis explained the need to maintain the appearance of impartiality. "This is much like the abortion wars: what term you use signals what side you are on." His own preference was to describe the "deniers" as "people who oppose climate science." He was adamant, though, that these opponents-of-climate-science should never be called "skeptics"; all scientists are professional skeptics, and it would be inappropriate to honor the climate-doubters with such a term.
Paper trails indicate that federal agencies solicited climate science research that supported their conclusions, cherry-picked peer reviewers known to be sympathetic to the pro-global warming cause, and overlooked conflicts of interest.
One member of the audience thought to ask about the funding for pro-anthropogenic global warming scientists. What if someone investigated the money that supports global warming research, and made a "Merchants of Doubt" sequel about the consensus scientists? An excellent question, especially since in the last 15 years pro-sustainability and global warming research has enjoyed nearly $400 million in funding from the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); $3 billion from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration; $600 million from the National Institutes of Health; $1.7 billion from National Science Foundation; and even $2 million from the National Endowment for the Arts.
No worries about that, Gillis responded: "99.9 percent of climate science is funded by the government." That means, he explained, that each grant is disclosed by number to the public, making every transaction transparent and trustworthy.
But Gillis neglected to explain that studies from two different organizations have uncovered in this federally-funded research cozenage and artifice of exactly the sort "Merchants" espies in climate change doubters. Paper trails indicate that the EPA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, and other federal agencies solicited climate science research that supported their conclusions, cherry-picked peer reviewers known to be sympathetic to the pro-global warming cause, and overlooked conflicts of interest by assigning research papers to be reviewed by members of the same organizations that produced the research in the first place. In response to concerns such as these, the House of Representatives is considering the Secret Science Reform Act and the Science Advisory Board Reform Act to try to bring transparency to the research these federal agencies use as the basis for their environmental regulations.
But none of this was relevant, apparently, in an evening's conversation about threats to the integrity of climate science. Perhaps such obstinate belief in the credibility of global warming research should itself be labeled a kind of doubt-denialism.
Rachelle Peterson is a research associate for the National Association of Scholars.
Joseph D'Aleo, CCM
For populous areas from the south central to the Great Lakes and east coast, it has been a very cold winter season (November 1 through mid March).
The Jack Rabbits in the southern intermountain west have enjoyed a warmer cold season. Yes our friends in the Pacific Northwest and California into the Rockies have gotten off easier thanks to the warm eastern Pacific, the driver for the warm (and dry) west and cold east much like the late 1970s and the 1916-1918 winters.
The late winter will only increase the negative anomalies in the northeast and Mid Atlantic including the eastern Lakes.
February was the most extreme winter month.
The dichotomy peaked in late winter with 6 states in the west under the ridge at or near warmest February while 23 states in the east and central had a top 10 coldest February and 9 states the 2nd coldest. Several cities in the Northeast had their coldest month of any month on record including Buffalo, New York where the monthly average temperature was 10.9F, dipping below the 11.6F observed in February 1934. Several additional cities, including Chicago, Illinois and Cleveland, Ohio observed their coldest February on record.
The western U.S. was warmer than average, where eight states had a top 10 warm February. Arizona, California, Utah, and Washington each had their warmest February on record.
During February, there were 5,448 warm daily temperature records (2,866 daily warm maximum temperature records and 2,582 daily warm minimum temperature records) broken or tied while there were 8,281 cold daily temperature records (4,778 daily cold maximum temperature records and 3,503 daily cold minimum temperature records) broken or tied.
For the winter, thanks to a warmer December (that followed on the heels of a frigid November), the average was in the top 10% percent coldest east and near warmest west.
According to NOAA, the winter contiguous U.S. temperature was 34.3F, 2.1F above the 20th century average, the 19th warmest winter on record.
According to the data that goes into the models 4 times a day, the CONUS anomaly was only 0.2F above the 1981 to 2010 climatology. NOAAs (and NASA's which starts with NOAA data) high rankings have been accomplished by significant cooling of the early century in the adjusted data. This lowers the average and increases the apparent warming.
Even so, the trend for temperatures for the winter for the United States the last 20 years has been down - at a cooling rate of 8.2F/century.
Satellite monthly CONUS temperatures do not show a significant trend since 1979. Outliers included the frigid early 1979 months and the 2012 spring spike.
Plotting the CONUS annual temperatures you can see a pop after the super El Nino of 1997/98 then with the exception of the warm 2012 a drop off.
The volcanic cooling of the early 1980s and 1990s can be seen.
You can explain all the lower troposphere global winter bumps and dips and trends with volcanoes and El Nino and La Nina (also the AMO was positive after the middle 1990s). Satellites tell us it was the 6th warmest ever not the first or second warmest as the surface temperature data sets (contaminated by UHI and land use changes and poor siting) suggest. If we had satellite temperatures going back to the 1895 data start, you would see the recent warming pale in comparison
to the 1930s to 1950s.
How can we know? The only unadjusted surface data set is the record highs and lows for the states. They show 23 of the 50 record highs from the 1930s and 38 before 1960. They show more all time records since the 1940s.
I have seen emails suggesting they would like to modify this inconvenient data set but they have no excuse to do it as the Time of Observation adjustment that does much of the adjustment (cooling early decades and warming later) is said to prevent double counting a high two straight days. For all-time records, this doesn't matter. Homogenization, the other 'blending' trick also makes no sense when looking for record cold or warm records.
After March is done and available we will recap the entire cold season.
See stories like this daily on weatherbell.com.
See also how Gallup reports the public believes Climate Change is the lowest priority.
The Great Lakes ice has been again above normal.
The historical seasonal fell short of last year but was above normal and second highest since 1995/96. Back to back years at this level is unprecedented in the record.
It is having its effect on navigation and cargo shipments again in the eastern lakes which were hardest hit.
Read full story here.
by Dr. Roy Spencer
I was updating a U.S. Corn Belt summer temperature and precipitation dataset from the NCDC website, and all of a sudden the no-warmng-trend-since-1900 turned into a significant warming trend. (Clarification: the new warming trend for 1900-2013 is still not significantly different from zero at the 90% confidence level. H/T, Pat Michaels)
As can be seen in the following chart, the largest adjustments were to earlier years in the dataset, which were made colder. The change in the linear trend goes from 0.2 deg F/century to 0.6 deg. F/century.
I know others have commented on the tendency of thermometer data adjustments by NOAA always leading to greater warming.
As Dick Lindzen has noted, it seems highly improbable that successive revisions to the very same data would lead to ever greater warming trends. Being the co-developer of a climate dataset (UAH satellite temperatures) I understand the need to make adjustments for known errors in the data...when you can quantitatively demonstrate an error exists.
But a variety of errors in data measurement and collection would typically have both positive and negative signs. For example, orbit decay causes a spurious cooling trend in the satellite lower tropospheric temperatures (discovered by RSS), while the instrument body temperature effect causes a spurious warming trend (discovered by us). The two effects approximately cancel out over the long term, but we (and RSS) make corrections for them anyway since they affect different years differently.
Also, the drift in satellite local observation time associated with orbit decay causes spurious cooling in the 1:30 satellites, but spurious warming in the 7:30 satellites. Again this shows that a variety of errors typically have positive and negative signs.
In contrast, the thermometer data apparently need to be adjusted in such a way that almost always leads to greater and greater warming trends.
How odd.
Like Roy, I have been burnt. I downloaded data from NCDC Climate at a Glance a few years ago that showed no warming (actually a small not statistically significant cooling). I ws asked to resprise my presentation this year and despite the cooler weather in recent years, when I downloaded it, the chart showed a significant warming trend that the Portland Press Herald reported on, claiming that Maine was warming faster than any other state. The change involved a dramatic cooling of the past and of the average to make the recent data rank constantly among the warmest and turn no trend into a significant warming one. Each iteration in the USHCN produces more cooling of the past and greated apparent warming. We are now at least at version 3.2.
Cold snaps like the ones that hit the eastern United States in the past winters are not a consequence of climate change. Scientists at ETH Zurich and the California Institute of Technology have shown that global warming actually tends to reduce temperature variability.
Repeated cold snaps led to temperatures far below freezing across the eastern United States in the past two winters. Parts of the Niagara Falls froze, and ice floes formed on Lake Michigan. Such low temperatures had become rare in recent years. Pictures of icy, snow-covered cities made their way around the world, raising the question of whether climate change could be responsible for these extreme events.
It has been argued that the amplified warming of the Arctic relative to lower latitudes in recent decades has weakened the polar jet stream, a strong wind current several kilometres high in the atmosphere driven by temperature differences between the warm tropics and cold polar regions. One hypothesis is that a weaker jet stream may become more wavy, leading to greater fluctuations in temperature in mid-latitudes. Through a wavier jet stream, it has been suggested, amplified Arctic warming may have contributed to the cold snaps that hit the eastern United States.
Temperature range will decrease
Scientists at ETH Zurich and at the California Institute of Technology, led by Tapio Schneider, professor of climate dynamics at ETH Zurich, have come to a different conclusion. They used climate simulations and theoretical arguments to show that in most places, the range of temperature fluctuations will decrease as the climate warms. So not only will cold snaps become rarer simply because the climate is warming. Additionally, their frequency will be reduced because fluctuations about the warming mean temperature also become smaller, the scientists wrote in the latest issue of the Journal of Climate.
The study's point of departure was that higher latitudes are indeed warming faster than lower ones, which means that the temperature difference between the equator and the poles is decreasing. Imagine for a moment that this temperature difference no longer exists. This would mean that air masses would have the same temperature, regardless of whether they flow from the south or north. In theory there would no longer be any temperature variability. Such an extreme scenario will not occur, but it illustrates the scientists' theoretical approach.
Extremes will become rarer
Using a highly simplified climate model, they examined various climate scenarios to verify their theory. It showed that the temperature variability in mid-latitudes indeed decreases as the temperature difference between the poles and the equator diminishes. Climate model simulations by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) showed similar results: as the climate warms, temperature differences in mid-latitudes decrease, and so does temperature variability, especially in winter.
Temperature extremes will therefore become rarer as this variability is reduced. But this does not mean there will be no temperature extremes in the future. "Despite lower temperature variance, there will be more extreme warm periods in the future because the Earth is warming," says Schneider. The researchers limited their work to temperature trends. Other extreme events, such as storms with heavy rain or snowfall, can still become more common as the climate warms, as other studies have shown.
North-south shift makes the difference
And the jet stream? Schneider shrugs off the idea: "The waviness of the jet stream that makes our day-to-day weather does not change much." Changes in the north-south difference in temperatures play a greater role in modifying temperature variability.
Schneider wants to explore the implications these results have in further studies. In particular, he wants to pursue the question of whether heatwaves in Europe may become more common because the frequency of blocking highs may increase. And he wants to find why these high pressure systems become stationary and how they change with the climate.
Read more.
By Joseph D'Aleo
A quick 2.9 inches of snow at the end of a weekend cold rain storm followed by another 1.7 inches at the end of the following week brought Boston to an all-time snow record of 110.3 inches (over 9 feet) beating out the all-time record of 107.6 set in 1995/96. In that year, the snow was spread out over 6 months.
This year it has been mostly concentrated in 40 days centered on the second coldest month in the city's history. Records for snowfall began in 1891, temperatures in 1872 in Boston. The snowy recent years have the 10 year running mean at a new high in the entire record.
Two weeks of wintry weather appears ahead and Boston could challenge 10 feet!!!!
California is seeing the reverse of 2012 when the eastern Pacific was cold and the coastal areas cold and wet. Now the eastern Pacific is warm due to downstream effects after the super La Nina of 2010/11 and the cluster of La Ninas since 2007. This warming in the eastern Pacific is similar to what happened in the 1970s when La Ninas were dominant and some strong in the last cold PDO. In 1976, water warmed off the west coast and a two year devastating drought followed despite, like this year, a weak El Nino. 1977/78 was legendary big snow year in Boston which 2014/15 will surpass or at least rival in the minds of the populace that experienced both years.
See the warm water now.
See the California precipitation plot since 1895. It is obious there is no 'trend' anymore than the dry warm year in 2012 in Texas was anything unusual or the start of a permanent drought.
The warmists decided several years ago to play ambulance chasing games to try and alarm the public into believing every natural event was man made and required eliminating fossil fuel from the energy equation because it emits CO2, a beneficial gas, which by the way we emit 40,000 ppm in every breath we take into air containing near 400 ppm. Record crop yields have occurred as a benefit of the increased CO2, allowing us to feed more of the world's people at a lower cost.
By Joe D'Aleo, CCM
Despite the fact that winters have been cooling in the CONUS (all 9 climate regions) for the last 20 years and snows have been increasing, the Union of Concerned 'Scientists', an advocacy group whose environmentalists have taken over most universities at least here in the northeast have been advising the state goverments that warming was producing less snow and threatening the ski and maple sugar industries. They have been repeating this since at least 2007, ignoring new snow records not only in ski areas but in the big cities. Boston 10 year running mean is at a new high. A lot of bad energy and regulatory policy has been already enacted based on 'failing climate models' on the state and federal level.
While some democrats with full mainstream media support, are trying to silence scientists who don't accept the so called consensus 'warming' position, mother nature is voting 'Nay'.
Last three years had heavy snows and last March was coldest ever in VT. 2nd coldest in NH, ME, 5th in MA. It was the coldest and snowiest December to March ever in Chicago and snowiest ever in Detroit. NOAA and Enviornment Canada had projected at the end of November 2013 a warm winter for the Great lakes and east in 2013/14. NOAA's winter outlook in October for 2014/15 smarting from a busted 2013/14 headlined the politically correct forecast
"Repeat of last year's extremely cold, snowy winter east of Rockies unlikely."
Note that we have high respect for NOAA forecasters at all levels who strive hard to provide accurate forecasts and life saving warnings. However, the last two years were high confidence cold forecasts based on ocean temperature patterns. I was told over dozen years ago, NOAA seasonal forecasters are not permitted to work with any factors not statistically determined by the universities or labs to be valid. Private sector forecasters can play detective and look at all factors- like ocean warm and cold pools outside the tropical Pacific and solar. See how well the ocean pools and other factors' analog pattern (left) fit the actual November to February mean (through February 27) (right).
After a frigid November, in late December, mild weather got the official winter off to a slow start nationwide. January brought cold to the central and east but the thaw mid month central knocked down the anomalies there. Then came this February. The month has been a remarkable one from the Great Lakes to the Northeast and Mid Atlantic.
This February has been 2nd coldest winter month EVER in BOS behind only February 1934. BOS had 8 feet of snows since January 24th and will set the all-time record this week (they are now at 102", record 107.6 inches in 1995/96).
In Boston, where they have had 8 feet of snow since January 24th, it was the 2nd coldest February and month ever. It was the snowiest winter (DJF) on record and will be the snowiest season perhaps by Monday. There is some evidence this may be the snowiest year since the Pilgrims were here in 1717.
It was the coldest month ever in Worcester and Hartford, 2nd coldest in Providence (like Boston trailing 1934).
In Concord it was the 2nd coldest February just 0.1F behind 1934. In Nashua the next town west from me, it was the coldest month ever beating out January 1888! Records go back to 1886. Nashua had 18 days at 0 or below and 25 days below freezing, both records for any month. We are foot away from the all time record.
In Chicago where it was the 3rd snowiest February, it was the coldest since records began in 1872. February 2014 was 8th coldest.
It ranked between 2nd and 5th coldest month in lower Michigan.
In Cleveland it was the coldest February and trailed only 1977 for the coldest month.
The ice cover has increased to 88.8%. Last year this is when the ice made its run for the gold, topping out at 92.5%. They were 85.4% on the same date.
The next 5-10 days, cold temperatures will help challenge the record. As with Antarctica, when the facts are inconvenient, expect the media to dredge up some story that implies the opposite. The last two weeks there were stories that Lake Superior may be warming faster than any other lake in the world. The last two years it has frozen over (rare because it is so deep) and last year ice flows remained into June with lake temperature 7F below normal.
In New York CIty it was the 3rd coldest February and 9th coldest month since records began in 1869.
In Baltimore, it was the 5th coldest month since 1871.
Speaking of icy water, this is from a photographer on Nantucket. It should be looked at from the perspective that some scientists were blaming the snows in Boston on a warm Atlantic pool east of Cape Cod (MMann - as much as 21F above normal). In actual fact specific humidity during the cold period was well below normal and each of the three major snowstorms occurred in Bston with temperatures in the teens.
The waves captured by NBC photographer Jonathan Nimerfroh are so thick with ice that they've drawn comparisons to 'Slurpees' and other frozen beverages, but the texture and shape of the wave also suggest a giant, grey tongue, licking the shores of Nantucket.
Here's what the photographer had to say about his images: "When I pulled up to the beach I could see the horizon just look strange. When I got to the top off the dunes I saw that beginning about 300 yards away from the shoreline the ocean was starting to freeze. The high temp that day was around 19 degrees. The wind was howling from the southwest which would typically make rough or choppy conditions not so good for surfing, but since the surface of the sea was frozen slush the wind did not change the shape. What resulted was perfect, dreamy, slush waves. Most waves were around 2 feet with some larger sets slushing through around 3 foot or waist high. What an experience to be absolutely freezing on the beach watching these roll in while I mind-surfed them! I wonder if a shaper can make me a special designed slurfboard?"
"The next day I drove up to see if they melted but beginning that same 300 yards away from shore the water had frozen solid and there were no waves at all. I've been asking all the fishermen and surfers I know if they have ever seen such a thing and they have all reported that this is a first, a result of it being the coldest winter we've had in 81 years. I guess the people I asked weren't old enough to remember a colder winter than this!"
One last thought, we hear that warming is why we are seeing more snow because warm air holds more water. Meteorologists know that cold weather produces snow. When it is cold, the atmospheric water content is less. See this prior analysis. Indeed most big snow years are cold years, warm years lean on snow.
By Paul Gattis | email@example.com
John Christy, a climate expert at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, said Tuesday that he has not accepted any funding from the fossil fuel industry.
Christy's response in an interview with AL.com resulted from an inquiry from an Arizona congressman who has asked about Christy's funding sources as part of a probe of climate change skeptics.
"My response is that I don't see anything in this letter that challenges the science we produce," he said. "So therefore, it should not matter where support came from to produce that science. (The Obama) administration believes that if you don't agree with them about climate change, you must be being paid to have that opinion.
"In my case, they won't find anything—100 percent of my support is state and federal grants. No one is paying me to have my view. I have my view because I'm a climate scientist and that's what the data shows."
U.S. Rep. Raul Grijalva, D-Arizona, announced last month he was sending letters to seven climate change skeptics in an effort to determine if their positions were defined because they accepted funding from fossil fuel industries. A group of Republican senators, including Alabama's Jeff Sessions, have questioned the worthiness of the inquiry.
Sen. Jeff Sessions uses the Christy chart in a presentation on the Senate floor on Jan. 27, 2015.
Christy, the director of the Earth System Science Center at UAH, said he was meeting with the UAH administration on Wednesday to formally respond to Grijalva's letter. Christy said UAH officials have verified his outside sources of income.
"It's not going to work as intimidation, which is what it's designed to do," Christy said of the letter. "But it does have a backfire aspect to it. It emboldens you when you've gotten under somebody's skin because you know this is what the real world is doing."
Christy said the Obama administration is working to silence those skeptical of dangerous climate change by December in advance of a new global climate agreement. The Grijalva letter is part of that effort, Christy said.
In an interview with Vice News released Monday, Obama put the onus on Republicans when it comes to climate change policy.
"I guarantee that the Republican Party will have to change its approach to climate change because voters will insist upon it," Obama said, according to a report by The Hill.
"I think they think this is their signature issue," Christy said. "And to get that done by December, they've got squelch any opposition they can right now. And to say Republicans have to believe a certain thing, that's a political move, not a scientific move."
Christy referred to a UAH chart that compared 102 climate models produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change with satellite data collected by UAH that reflects that the models are far out of step with the actual data when it comes to climate change. The chart dates from 1975 to 2014.
The chart suggests warming is happening at about eight-tenths of a degree in 2014, according to the IPCC data, while the UAH data indicates warming has been about two-tenths of a degree over the same time period.
The IPCC models, according to the UAH chart, estimated global temperatures to be higher than what the actual data revealed in past years. These models can't even predict what happened in the past," Christy said. "Doesn't that ring alarm bells in your mind about trusting this as a policy tool?"
by Patrick Moore
Editor's Note: Patrick Moore, Ph.D., has been a leader in international environmentalism for more than 40 years. He cofounded Greenpeace and currently serves as chair of Allow Golden Rice. Moore received the 2014 Speaks Truth to Power Award at the Ninth International Conference on Climate Change, July 8, in Las Vegas.
I am skeptical humans are the main cause of climate change and that it will be catastrophic in the near future. There is no scientific proof of this hypothesis, yet we are told "the debate is over" and "the science is settled."
My skepticism begins with the believers' certainty they can predict the global climate with a computer model. The entire basis for the doomsday climate change scenario is the hypothesis increased atmospheric carbon dioxide due to fossil fuel emissions will heat the Earth to unlivable temperatures.
In fact, the Earth has been warming very gradually for 300 years, since the Little Ice Age ended, long before heavy use of fossil fuels. Prior to the Little Ice Age, during the Medieval Warm Period, Vikings colonized Greenland and Newfoundland, when it was warmer there than today. And during Roman times, it was warmer, long before fossil fuels revolutionized civilization.
The idea it would be catastrophic if carbon dioxide were to increase and average global temperature were to rise a few degrees is preposterous.
Recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced for the umpteenth time we are doomed unless we reduce carbon-dioxide emissions to zero. Effectively this means either reducing the population to zero, or going back 10,000 years before humans began clearing forests for agriculture. This proposed cure is far worse than adapting to a warmer world, if it actually comes about.
IPCC Conflict of Interest
By its constitution, the IPCC has a hopeless conflict of interest. Its mandate is to consider only the human causes of global warming, not the many natural causes changing the climate for billions of years. We don't understand the natural causes of climate change any more than we know if humans are part of the cause at present. If the IPCC did not find humans were the cause of warming, or if it found warming would be more positive than negative, there would be no need for the IPCC under its present mandate. To survive, it must find on the side of the apocalypse.
The IPCC should either have its mandate expanded to include all causes of climate change, or it should be dismantled.
Political Powerhouse
Climate change has become a powerful political force for many reasons. First, it is universal; we are told everything on Earth is threatened. Second, it invokes the two most powerful human motivators: fear and guilt. We fear driving our car will kill our grandchildren, and we feel guilty for doing it.
Third, there is a powerful convergence of interests among key elites that support the climate "narrative." Environmentalists spread fear and raise donations; politicians appear to be saving the Earth from doom; the media has a field day with sensation and conflict; science institutions raise billions in grants, create whole new departments, and stoke a feeding frenzy of scary scenarios; business wants to look green, and get huge public subsidies for projects that would otherwise be economic losers, such as wind farms and solar arrays. Fourth, the Left sees climate change as a perfect means to redistribute wealth from industrial countries to the developing world and the UN bureaucracy.
So we are told carbon dioxide is a "toxic" "pollutant" that must be curtailed, when in fact it is a colorless, odorless, tasteless, gas and the most important food for life on earth. Without carbon dioxide above 150 parts per million, all plants would die.
Human Emissions Saved Planet
Over the past 150 million years, carbon dioxide had been drawn down steadily (by plants) from about 3,000 parts per million to about 280 parts per million before the Industrial Revolution. If this trend continued, the carbon dioxide level would have become too low to support life on Earth. Human fossil fuel use and clearing land for crops have boosted carbon dioxide from its lowest level in the history of the Earth back to 400 parts per million today.
At 400 parts per million, all our food crops, forests, and natural ecosystems are still on a starvation diet for carbon dioxide. The optimum level of carbon dioxide for plant growth, given enough water and nutrients, is about 1,500 parts per million, nearly four times higher than today. Greenhouse growers inject carbon-dioxide to increase yields. Farms and forests will produce more if carbon-dioxide keeps rising.
We have no proof increased carbon dioxide is responsible for the earth's slight warming over the past 300 years. There has been no significant warming for 18 years while we have emitted 25 per cent of all the carbon dioxide ever emitted. Carbon dioxide is vital for life on Earth and plants would like more of it. Which should we emphasize to our children?
Celebrate Carbon Dioxide
The IPCC's followers have given us a vision of a world dying because of carbon-dioxide emissions. I say the Earth would be a lot deader with no carbon dioxide, and more of it will be a very positive factor in feeding the world. Let's celebrate carbon dioxide.
Patrick Moore (email@example.com) was a cofounder and leader of Greenpeace for 15 years. He is now chair and spokesman for Allow Golden Rice.
See his powerful talk in 2014 in the 9th IPCC - Confessions of a Greenpeace Dropout.
Letter from Willie Soon
In recent weeks I have been the target of attacks in the press by various radical environmental and politically motivated groups. This effort should be seen for what it is: a shameless attempt to silence my scientific research and writings, and to make an example out of me as a warning to any other researcher who may dare question in the slightest their fervently held orthodoxy of anthropogenic global warming.
I am saddened and appalled by this effort, not only because of the personal hurt it causes me and my family and friends, but also because of the damage it does to the integrity of the scientific process. I am willing to debate the substance of my research and competing views of climate change with anyone, anytime, anywhere. It is a shame that those who disagree with me resolutely decline all public debate and stoop instead to underhanded and unscientific ad hominem tactics.
Let me be clear. I have never been motivated by financial gain to write any scientific paper, nor have I ever hidden grants or any other alleged conflict of interest. I have been a solar and stellar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics for a quarter of a century, during which time I have published numerous peer-reviewed, scholarly articles. The fact that my research has been supported in part by donations to the Smithsonian Institution from many sources, including some energy producers, has long been a matter of public record. In submitting my academic writings I have always complied with what I understood to be disclosure practices in my field generally, consistent with the level of disclosure made by many of my Smithsonian colleagues.
If the standards for disclosure are to change, then let them change evenly. If a journal that has peer-reviewed and published my work concludes that additional disclosures are appropriate, I am happy to comply. I would ask only that other authors - on all sides of the debate - are also required to make similar disclosures. And I call on the media outlets that have so quickly repeated my attackers' accusations to similarly look into the motivations of and disclosures that may or may not have been made by their preferred, IPCC-linked scientists.
I regret deeply that the attacks on me now appear to have spilled over onto other scientists who have dared to question the degree to which human activities might be causing dangerous global warming, a topic that ought rightly be the subject of rigorous open debate, not personal attack. I similarly regret the terrible message this pillorying sends young researchers about the costs of questioning widely accepted "truths."
Finally, I thank all my many colleagues and friends who have bravely objected to this smear campaign on my behalf and I challenge all parties involved to focus on real scientific issues for the betterment of humanity.
See more here.
It matters not how strait the gate,
How charged with punishments the scroll,
I am the master of my fate,
I am the captain of my soul.
from Invictus by William Ernest Henley
Note: Henley�s poems often engage themes of inner strength and perseverance. A trait sadly needed these days when the powerful are working to silence those who disagree with them.
Guest opinion: Dr. Tim Ball
The Washington Examiner headline says, "John Kerry calls climate change deniers members of 'Flat Earth Society'." It typifies all reports about US Secretary of State John Kerry's head-on attack on scientists trying to practice properly skeptical science. I challenge John Kerry to produce a single person who studies climate who denies climate change. Apparently everybody, except John Kerry, knows that climate changes all the time, it always has and it always will.
In statements made to support his political agenda, Kerry manages to perpetuate a series of errors, myths and slurs. One is the claim Al Gore made before the US Senate in 2007 that the "science is settled" and the "debate is over." Kerry said,
"The science is unequivocal, and those who refuse to believe it are simply burying their heads in the sand,"
Kerry displays further ignorance by marginalizing those who question the science.
"We don't have time for a meeting anywhere of the Flat Earth Society."
These are frightening words and a disturbingly narrow position from one of the most powerful statesmen and diplomats, in the world. In the land of "free speech," he believes no venue should be allowed, and thus people denied their free speech rights. Whatever happened to Voltaire's view that I completely disagree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it? Apparently this is too liberal for this liberal. It confirms George Will's trenchant observation that,
"When a politician says, "the debate is over," you can be sure of two things: the debate is raging, and he's losing it."
He clearly doesn't know the history of science that determined centuries ago that science is never settled. As Sir Francis Bacon (1561 - 1626) wrote,
Another error is a conceit that the best has still prevailed and suppressed the rest: so as, if a man should begin the labor of a new search, he were but like to light upon somewhat formerly rejected, and by rejection brought into oblivion; as if the multitude, or the wisest for the multitude's sake, were not ready to give passage rather to that which is popular and superficial, than to that which is substantial and profound: for the truth is, that time seemeth to be of the nature of a river or stream, which carrieth down to us that which is light and blown up, and sinketh and drowneth that which is weighty and solid.
By participating in the denigration of scientists who dare to practice the scientific method Kerry displays more ignorance and a purely political motive. He calls them climate change deniers, with all the holocaust denial connotations of that phrase.
The scientific method requires that all scientists are skeptics, so it was a correct designation. Kerry clearly doesn't understand that, but knew the term achieved the marginalizing of those who opposed him.
Scientists at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and the University of East Anglia hired to create and prove the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis knew they had a problem. Thomas Huxley identified it over a century earlier.
"The great tragedy of science, the slaying of a beautiful hypothesis by an ugly fact."
The ugly fact developed after 1998 when CO2 levels continued to increase as temperature stopped increasing, in contradiction to their major assumption. We learned, from an email leaked from the CRU (IPCC), that it prompted reaction from the Minns/Tyndall Centre on the UEA campus that said,
"In my experience, global warming freezing is already a bit of a public relations problem with the media."
To which Swedish Chief Climate Negotiator Bo Kjellen replied,
"I agree with Nick that climate change might be a better labelling than global warming."
Proper science requires they consider the null hypothesis that something, other than human CO2, is causing warming. Instead, they opted to defend the political objective, and the mantra shifted from global warming to climate change. At the same time, they raised the emotional stakes by saying some scientists moved from questioning to denying.
Thanks to the work of the "flat-earthers" who Kerry scorns, people began to learn that climate change is normal. Increasingly cold winters reinforced their doubts and prompted another shift begun by President Obama's Science Czar, John Holdren. He recommended the switch from climate change to climate disruptions. In 2014, the White House formalized the idea with the 840 pages, "National Climate Assessment".
CBS News explained the transition in an article titled,
"Report Uses Phrase 'Climate Disruption' As Another Way To Say Global Warming."
Climate change's assorted harms "are expected to become increasingly disruptive across the nation throughout this century and beyond," the National Climate Assessment concluded Tuesday. The report emphasizes how warming and its all-too-wild weather are changing daily lives, even using the phrase "climate disruption" as another way of saying global warming.
Kerry is behind the times using climate change and "flat earthers" as epithets. Get with the program John. I suggest you call me a 'climate disruption disrupter' because I still know the science does not support the political agenda?
John Kerry is the third most powerful cabinet member and the most powerful statesman and diplomat in the most powerful country in the world. His words and actions on climate and attacks on some scientists are ignorant and shameful. He uses personal insults because he doesn't understand the science. Worse, he denies scientists free speech, the primary tenet of the US Constitution to which he swore an oath of allegiance.
It is our duty as skeptics/deniers/disrupters to practice T.H Huxley's creed;
"The improver of natural knowledge absolutely refuses to acknowledge authority, as such. For him, skepticism is the highest of duties; blind faith the one unpardonable sin."
Science Lessons for Secretary of State John F. Kerry
Guest post by David Middleton
Secretary of State John F. Kerry's recent remarks on climate change at the Atlantic Council were so scientifically illiterate that I find it difficult to believe that he managed to barely get a D in geology at Yale University. As a US citizen and geoscientist, I feel it is my patriotic and professional duty to provide Secretary Kerry with a few complimentary science lessons.
Read much more here.
Finally the Goracle threatens 'non-believers'
Al Gore: We Need to "Punish Climate Change Deniers"
by Philip Hodges
John Kerry and Al Gore arenot the only global warmists calling for "deniers" to be punished in some way.
There is this professor at the University of Graz in Austria who believes global warming deniers should be executed. And he doesn't even support the death penalty for mass murderers. But he makes an exception for deniers, because they're causing "the deaths of hundreds of millions of future people." He said that more than likely, there would be billions of people's lives at stake, but that hundreds of millions is a "conservative estimate."
So, Al Gore's not that fanatic, but he's getting there. He wants to "punish" those who would dare question the theory of manmade global warming. So tolerant these people are of other viewpoints. Of course, he doesn't really care about people or their opinions. He's trying to get everyone to invest in the green industry and divest from the fossil fuel industry. EcoWatch reported:
For the third time in the last few years, Al Gore, founder and chairman of the Climate Reality Project, spoke at the [South by Southwest] festival on Friday. Naturally, his interactive discussion focused on addressing the climate crisis. The former vice president focused on the need to "punish climate-change deniers, saying politicians should pay a price for rejecting 'accepted science,'" said the Chicago Tribune.
Gore said forward-thinking investors are moving away from companies that invest in fossil fuels and towards companies investing in renewable energy. "We need to put a price on carbon to accelerate these market trends," Gore told the Chicago Tribune, referring to a proposed federal cap-and-trade system that would penalize companies that exceeded their carbon-emission limits. "And in order to do that, we need to put a price on denial in politics."
"Forward-thinking investors," huh? So this is what this whole global warming thing is about. Everyone knows it's not science. It's about money and "market trends."
Read more.
Read more in Judith Curry's post the difference between the two parties on this issue.
Yesterday, a paper was released from Mann and Rahmstorf showing the Atlantic Conveyor Belt slowing cauding the 'pause'.
From the "we told you so yesterday" and the "settled science" department. This study was released in 2010, and they used actual measurements, rather than proxy data and reconstructions like Mann did. Gee, what a concept!
NASA Study Finds Atlantic 'Conveyor Belt' Not Slowing
Illustration depicting the overturning circulation of the global ocean. Throughout the Atlantic Ocean, the circulation carries warm waters (red arrows) northward near the surface and cold deep waters (blue arrows) southward. Image credit: NASA/JPL
PASADENA, Calif. New NASA measurements of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation, part of the global ocean conveyor belt that helps regulate climate around the North Atlantic, show no significant slowing over the past 15 years. The data suggest the circulation may have even sped up slightly in the recent past.
The findings are the result of a new monitoring technique, developed by oceanographer Josh Willis of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., using measurements from ocean-observing satellites and profiling floats. The findings are reported in the March 25 issue of Geophysical Research Letters.
The Atlantic overturning circulation is a system of currents, including the Gulf Stream, that bring warm surface waters from the tropics northward into the North Atlantic. There, in the seas surrounding Greenland, the water cools, sinks to great depths and changes direction. What was once warm surface water heading north turns into cold deep water going south. This overturning is one part of the vast conveyor belt of ocean currents that move heat around the globe.
Without the heat carried by this circulation system, the climate around the North Atlantic - in Europe, North America and North Africa - would likely be much colder. Scientists hypothesize that rapid cooling 12,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age was triggered when freshwater from melting glaciers altered the ocean's salinity and slowed the overturning rate. That reduced the amount of heat carried northward as a result.
Until recently, the only direct measurements of the circulation's strength have been from ship-based surveys and a set of moorings anchored to the ocean floor in the mid-latitudes. Willis' new technique is based on data from NASA satellite altimeters, which measure changes in the height of the sea surface, as well as data from Argo profiling floats. The international Argo array, supported in part by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, includes approximately 3,000 robotic floats that measure temperature, salinity and velocity across the world's ocean.
With this new technique, Willis was able to calculate changes in the northward-flowing part of the circulation at about 41 degrees latitude, roughly between New York and northern Portugal. Combining satellite and float measurements, he found no change in the strength of the circulation overturning from 2002 to 2009. Looking further back with satellite altimeter data alone before the float data were available, Willis found evidence that the circulation had sped up about 20 percent from 1993 to 2009. This is the longest direct record of variability in the Atlantic overturning to date and the only one at high latitudes.
The latest climate models predict the overturning circulation will slow down as greenhouse gases warm the planet and melting ice adds freshwater to the ocean. "Warm, freshwater is lighter and sinks less readily than cold, salty water," Willis explained.
For now, however, there are no signs of a slowdown in the circulation. "The changes we're seeing in overturning strength are probably part of a natural cycle," said Willis. "The slight increase in overturning since 1993 coincides with a decades-long natural pattern of Atlantic heating and cooling."
If or when the overturning circulation slows, the results are unlikely to be dramatic. "No one is predicting another ice age as a result of changes in the Atlantic overturning," said Willis. "Even if the overturning was the Godzilla of climate 12,000 years ago, the climate was much colder then. Models of today's warmer conditions suggest that a slowdown would have a much smaller impact now.
"But the Atlantic overturning circulation is still an important player in today's climate," Willis added. "Some have suggested cyclic changes in the overturning may be warming and cooling the whole North Atlantic over the course of several decades and affecting rainfall patterns across the United States and Africa, and even the number of hurricanes in the Atlantic."
With their ability to observe the Atlantic overturning at high latitudes, Willis said, satellite altimeters and the Argo array are an important complement to the mooring and ship-based measurements currently being used to monitor the overturning at lower latitudes. "Nobody imagined that this large-scale circulation could be captured by these global observing systems," said Willis. "Their amazing precision allows us to detect subtle changes in the ocean that could have big impacts on climate."
Steve McIntyre remarks about the Mann/Rahmstorf's paper:
"The proxy data used to reconstruct AMOC is the same data as Mann et al 2009 - i.e. includes strip bark bristlecones and contaminated Tiljander sediments. in other words, bristlecones not only are a magic thermometer for NH temperature and SH temperature, but now Gulf Stream flow rates. Remarkable."
Pierre Gosselin over at "No Tricks Zone" is reporting that within a day of its publication, the paper from the German Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research has now been debunked and denounced by German climate scholars, some of whom side with the warmer view of climate.
Paul Driessen
Malaria has afflicted mankind for thousands of years. It sickened millions of Americans into the 1930s and was finally eradicated in the United States in 1952, with DDT playing a critical role in reducing mosquitoes that carried the disease from one victim to the next. Malaria was wiped out in Canada, Europe, Russia and many other regions over the next two decades. However, it is still prevalent in Africa, many parts of Asia and even in South America due largely to intense opposition to DDT and other pesticides by radical Big Green environmentalists.
A new documentary film, 3 Billion and Counting, chronicles the devastation and death perpetuated by anti-DDT campaigns that have removed this vital disease prevention weapon from many malaria control arsenals. Dr. Rutledge Taylor's self-financed film also lays out the facts about the chemical's actual safety and environmental record, through his own research and comments by malaria and DDT experts from around the world.
Thank you for posting my article, quoting from it, and forwarding it to your friends and colleagues.
Best regards,
Its anti-DDT war is a lethal "death-rate solution" imposed on Third World countries
Paul Driessen
The terms racism, white supremacy, crimes against humanity are bandied about so often that they have become almost meaningless. But they are absolutely appropriate in an arena where they are too rarely applied: radical environmentalism's campaigns that perpetuate poverty, disease and death, by denying Earth's most impoverished and powerless people access to modern life-saving technologies.
Imagine activist groups preventing you from having your child vaccinated against polio or hepatitis, or from starting her on chemotherapy for leukemia - because they are "concerned" about "possible side-effects" and the "ethics" of permitting such "risky" procedures. Absurd! you say. Outrageous!
Of course it is. But that is what radical environmentalists are doing to Third World countries. By denying people access to abundant, reliable, affordable electricity, modern fertilizers and biotech seeds, and especially DDT to prevent malaria and other insect-borne diseases, they are killing millions every year.
Many of my articles have documented this. Now a new film written, self-financed and produced by Dr. D. Rutledge Taylor, MD graphically presents powerful new evidence of how the Audubon Society, Sierra Club, other predominantly white environmentalist pressure groups and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency conspired to hide and discredit scientific evidence, and wage a campaign of disinformation and outright lies, to ban the most effective weapon yet devised to prevent malaria and other vicious diseases.
3 Billion and Counting: The death toll is mounting shows how DDT was invented on the eve of World War II and became a secret weapon that kept Allied soldiers on the battlefield, instead of in hospitals or graves. After the war, it was sprayed on millions of Europeans to prevent typhus. It then eradicated malaria in Europe, the United States and other developed nations. No one ever got sick from DDT.
Available on demand and through Amazon.com, You Tube, Google Play, iTunes and elsewhere, the film chronicles how Rachel Carson's wildly inaccurate book Silent Spring helped persuade the Audubon Society to launch the Environmental Defense Fund for the sole purpose of demanding a DDT ban.
Why would Audubon do such a thing? Its own research and Department of the Interior studies showed that bird and animal populations were exploding during the two decades when DDT was used most widely. Countless other studies documented that the life-saving chemical was safe for humans and most wildlife, including bald eagles. People actually tried to kill themselves with DDT and repeatedly failed.
An EPA scientific panel conducted six months of hearings, compiled 9,312 pages of studies and testimony, and concluded that DDT was safe and effective, was not carcinogenic, and should not be banned. Nevertheless, without attending a single hour of hearings or reading a single page of the panel's report, EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus banned U.S. production and use of DDT in 1972 - at a time when over 80% of the chemical was being exported for disease control.
Then why the attacks? As EDF scientist Charles Wurster said 1969, "If the environmentalists win on DDT, they will achieve a level of authority they have never had before." When asked later how he justified human deaths from pesticides that replaced DDT, versus the "mere loss of some birds," he said "organophosphates act locally and only kill farm workers, and most of them are Mexicans and Negroes."
Ruckelshaus said he had a political problem, and fixed it. He never considered the plight of malaria victims, and anti-DDT activists still ignore their agony and deaths. Audubon, EDF, Sierra Club, Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund, Pesticide Action Network, Natural Resource Defense Council and other radical groups that oppose DDT just don't give a damn even as they have become filthy, callously rich by opposing the life-saving chemical and other technologies.
Sierra Club executive director David Brower, Population Bomb author Paul Ehrlich and other arch-environmentalists believed the biggest problem facing Planet Earth was "uncontrolled growth" in human populations. Ehrlich argued that the "instant death control" provided by DDT exports was "responsible for the drastic lowering of death rates" in underdeveloped countries. Those countries were not practicing a "birth rate solution" and thus needed to have "death rate solutions" imposed on them, via campaigns against energy, Golden Rice and other biotech crops, and especially DDT.
Almost 3.5 billion people worldwide are at risk of getting this horrific disease, 207 million are actually infected every year, and over 800,000 die year after year from malaria. The vast majority are children and pregnant women, and some 90% of them are in Sub-Saharan Africa. In that region, a child still dies every minute from malaria, and most African children have been brain-damaged to some degree by malaria. Worldwide, nearly 80% of all infectious diseases are spread by insects.
Malaria is certainly a disease of poverty. But poverty is a disease of malaria. It leaves victims too sick to work or care for their families, for weeks on end. Medicines and hospital stays drain families' meager savings. The disease costs tens of millions of lost work hours, billions in lost wages, and tens of billions for medicines and care in antiquated hospitals. It leaves entire nations impoverished.
However, spraying small amounts of DDT on the walls and eaves of cinderblock and mud-and-thatch homes, once or twice a year puts a long-lasting mosquito net over entire households. It keeps 80-90% of mosquitoes from even entering the homes; irritates any that do enter, so they leave without biting; and kills any that land. No other chemical, at any price, can do all this.
In response to these facts, anti-DDT pressure groups rail about risks that are trivial, illusory or fabricated. DDT is associated with low birth-weights, slow reflexes and weakened immune systems in babies, and could cause premature birth and lactation failure in nursing mothers, they claim.
Not one peer-reviewed scientific study supports any of this fear-mongering. Every one of these alleged problems is definitely associated with malaria and other endemic Third World diseases. And compared to the death and devastation that DDT could prevent, the alleged DDT risks are irrelevant.
However, constant deception and harassment by these groups have caused many health agencies and aid organizations to not use or fund DDT, and often other pesticides. Instead, they focus on bed nets, education, "capacity building," and treatment with drugs that are too often unavailable, counterfeit, or ineffective because the malaria parasites have become resistant to them.
Still, the efforts have been somewhat successful. Millions of women and young children now sleep under insecticide-treated nets. Millions now get diagnosed more quickly and receive better care and medicines, often at clinics where two doctors examine up to 400 patients a day. In 2010, the World Health Organization and Roll Back Malaria boasted of an 18% reduction in child mortality, compared with 2000.
But that is not nearly good enough. We would never tolerate 18% as "good enough," if American or European children's lives (or Greenpeace and EDF kids' lives) were at stake and a 90% reduction were possible as it would be, if health workers were also eradicating mosquitoes and spraying DDT.
Instead, they protect Africans and Asians from minimal or illusory risks, by condemning them to agonizing deaths from readily preventable diseases. "They are using us in anti-DDT experiments," says Ugandan human rights activist Fiona Kobusingye. "They are playing with our lives."
They are also playing with American lives. Spraying clothes with DDT once a year would keep infected ticks away and prevent Lyme disease that leaves tens of thousands battling chronic, debilitating pain and illness for years, Dr. Taylor explains. But the same anti-pesticide radicals are dead-set against that.
Dr. Taylor ends his film by drinking 3 grams of DDT...in 2008 - with no ill effects, then or today.
Watch 3 Billion and Counting. Then contact these Big Green pressure groups and their staffs and board members, and the foundations, politicians and bureaucrats who support them. Tell them it's time to end their eco-manslaughter.
Paul Driessen is senior policy analyst for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org), author of Eco-Imperialism: Green power - Black death, and coauthor of Cracking Big Green: Saving the world from the Save-the-Earth money machine. He is a featured expert in 3 Billion and Counting.
By Mike Mogil
A few weeks ago, returning from an AAAS (American Association For The Advancement of Science) Conference in San Jose, CA, I had the pleasure of meeting another conference attendee at a San Jose airport restaurant. The gentleman, a biologist from the University of Wisconsin, recognized me as a conference attendee because I had a "brain hat" with me. One of the exhibitors at Family Science Days, a major public outreach part of the conference, had provided attendees a chance to learn about the brain and then wear their newly made "brain hats" as they roamed the exhibit area. The gentleman asked if he could join me for dinner and I agreed.
Somehow, the conversation turned to "climate change." My guest expressed his concerns about the issue, primarily from a plant growth and population feeding perspective. I listened intently because the information he shared was new to me. Then it was my turn.
I told the gentleman about my credentials - Certified Consulting Meteorologist, science writer, blogger, tutor and more. I then proceeded to explain that I was not sure that humans were THE cause of climate change, although I frankly admitted that we humans, are NOT good planetary stewards. I explained that I had reviewed numerous climate-based articles, attended conference presentations about climate change and even done some independent research on matters that were related to climate change. I noted that I prefer to share both sides of the climate change story and let people decide. I almost concluded by noting that I felt that we could spend far less money (I believe I somewhat jokingly said, "gazillions") on climate change and still make very significant strides in lessening human impact on Planet Earth.
Before I could finish my thoughts, the gentleman slammed me, claiming that I was clearly the type of Republican that Fox News just loved. Further, he chided me for sowing seeds of discontent and doubt and then charged me with doing a disservice to the 99 percent of scientists who had proven that humans caused climate change. How dare I write about non-human caused climate change! I needed to come over to the right side and support the prevailing scientific viewpoint in my writing.
It was then that I was able to sneak in these few words, "I don't name call." In fact, I noted that I preferred to discuss the matter, as scientists should do, to ensure that all sides receive a fair hearing. Maybe no one will change his/her mind, but I was ready to talk with anyone regardless of his/her point of view.
Finally, I was able to note that, "once, the best scientists of the time thought the planets and the Sun orbited the Earth."
Our interaction went on for some 20 minutes and I was name called several more times, as my guest continued to berate me for being a bad journalist and a non-scientist. Never did I name call in retaliation; however, I remained true to my position.
The gentleman finally stood up and announced he was leaving and just walked away.
Still, it is ironic that a brain brought the two of us scientists together and the use of a brain was what separated us.
Some of my fellow scientists have scolded me on various occasions for my position on climate change. Never, however, had I been made to feel so small. I now knew one of the many ways that climate change alarmists have managed to silence the masses of opponents.
Another way of silencing opposition is to control the governmental purse-strings. This is typically evident in medicine, environmentalism and other programs in which the government defines the issue and the desired outcomes (collectively referred to as the, "rules") and then doles out funding primarily to those who support the "rules." Hence, one set of groups and businesses which stand to benefit from the "rules," act to support the, "rules." The opposing camp has no choice but to move toward non-governmental support. In the case of climate change, the only group that can support the opposition involves companies that mine fossil fuels and/or benefit from their use.
Yet, new research is always occurring. Recently, the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee (DGAC) may have become the bright spot in updating information based on new research. The DGAC, whose information is used in setting government dietary guidelines, just reported that, "available evidence shows no appreciable relationship between consumption of dietary cholesterol and serum cholesterol .. Cholesterol is not a nutrient of concern for overconsumption." Hence, cholesterol was found NOT to be as bad as previously thought and it was now okay to consume eggs.
Surely, a large percent of doctors and researchers in this medical arena agreed with the old findings. Now, the rules had changed by 180 degrees and the prevailing wisdom had changed accordingly. The minority was now moving toward becoming the majority! However, the issue is still not "proven" and probably never will. I am sure that additional research is underway to verify and/or refute the new findings. This is how science is supposed to work.
Coming back to climate change, what is to stop scientists from discovering that the climate change findings, and proposed solutions the government and the climate community have been pushing for some 20 years, are wrong? What if carbon dioxide is NOT the cause of the recent warming, but asphalt paving and urbanization are? What if the deforestation of the Amazon and other places has allowed regional and global temperatures to rise? The list of potential contributions toward a warming planet is endless and some or all may be at work, as much as, or even more so, than carbon dioxide.
The Heartland Organization is fully opposed to the current thinking on climate change. Not surprisingly, they just posted an article about Dr. Wei-Hock "Willie" Soon, a distinguished solar astrophysicist. The article describes how the climate change community, the so-called 99%, are uniting to discredit Soon. In past years, the non-believing community tried to discredit some in the climate change community, too. Most of the human-caused climate community use intimidation and personal attacks. For the most part, the opposing side attacks the research process, funding and the media and governmental hype.
In my opinion, it is these tactics and approaches to indoctrination (such as spending on biased government research and publicity, slanting school textbook content, and supporting a biased mass media), which are aimed at silencing scientific discussion and isolating dissenters that are the real problem. The brain, which is supposed to help us humans sort fact from fiction, is, instead, being asked to believe (in a religious way) or else.
I am nowhere the stature of Dr. Soon, but have been subjected to these same tear down, degrading tactics. I have stood up against these and will continue to do so, regardless of any professional or other attacks. By my thinking, the freedom of the press and the freedom to use one's mind to investigate science are far more important than "saving the planet," from a yet unproven threat.
Ross McKitrick
Its ideas would send the West back 100 years and keep poor nations impoverished and wretched
A few years ago, a journalist asked me for my thoughts on the importance of "Earth Hour" which was reprised this past weekend. What I told him applies today, perhaps even more so.
I abhor Earth Hour. Abundant, cheap electricity has been the greatest source of human liberation in the 20th century. Every material social advance in the 20th century depended on the proliferation of inexpensive and reliable electricity.
Giving women the freedom to work outside the home depended on the availability of electrical appliances that free up time from domestic chores. Getting children out of menial labour and into schools depended on the same thing, as well as on the ability to provide safe indoor lighting for reading.
Development and provision of modern health care without electricity is absolutely impossible. The expansion of our food supply, and the promotion of hygiene and nutrition, depended on being able to irrigate fields, cook and refrigerate foods, and have a steady indoor supply of safe hot water.
Many of the world's poor suffer brutal environmental conditions in their own homes because of the necessity of cooking over indoor fires that burn twigs and dung. This causes local deforestation and the proliferation of smoke-and parasite-related lung diseases.
Anyone who wants to see local conditions improve in the Third World should realize the importance of access to cheap electricity from fossil-fuel based power generating stations. After all, that's how the West developed.
The whole mentality around Earth Hour demonizes electricity. I cannot do that. Instead, I celebrate it and all that it has provided for humanity. Earth Hour celebrates ignorance, poverty and backwardness.
By repudiating the greatest engine of liberation, it becomes an hour devoted to anti-humanism. It encourages the sanctimonious gesture of turning off trivial appliances for a trivial amount of time, in deference to some ill-defined abstraction called "the Earth," all the while hypocritically retaining and enjoying the real benefits of continuous, reliable electricity.
People who see virtue in doing without electricity should shut off their fridge, stove, microwave, computer, water heater, lights, TV and all other appliances for a month, not an hour. And pop down to the cardiac unit at the hospital and shut the power off there, too.
I don't want to go back to nature. Travel to a zone hit by earthquakes, floods and hurricanes to see what it's like to go back to nature. For humans, living in "nature" meant a short life span marked by violence, disease and ignorance. People who work for the end of poverty and relief from disease are fighting against nature. I hope they leave their lights on.
Here in Ontario, through the use of pollution control technology and advanced engineering, our air quality has dramatically improved since the 1960s, despite the expansion of industry and the power supply. If, after all this, we are going to take the view that the remaining air emissions outweigh all the benefits of electricity, and that we ought to be shamed into sitting in darkness for an hour, like naughty children who have been caught doing something bad, then we are setting up unspoiled nature as an absolute, transcendent ideal that obliterates all other ethical and humane obligations. No thanks.
I like visiting nature, but I don't want to live there, and I refuse to accept the idea that civilization with all its tradeoffs is something to be ashamed of.
Ross McKitrick is Professor of Economics at the University of Guelph, a Senior Fellow at the Fraser Institute and an adjunct scholar of the Cato Institute.
By Ron Arnold
Harvard historian of science Naomi Oreskes is best known to climate realists for her 2010 screed Merchants of Doubt, but a short, obscure, error-riddled essay she wrote as a chapter in the book How Well Do Facts Travel? The Dissemination of Reliable Knowledge is more significant. In it she examines the 1991 origin of the "skeptics are paid industry shills" narrative found in a legendary set of "leaked Western Fuels memos."
Oreskes' chapter is important because she interprets the memos as industry's plan for a vast national campaign using paid climate scientists to create lasting public doubt about global warming. That's the same interpretation repeated ad nauseam by climate alarmists such as Al Gore, Ross Gelbspan (1997's The Heat Is On), and Canadian attack website DeSmogBlog.
Appallingly, nobody in this parade of critics ever fact-checked the memos, not even historian Oreskes. Critics misinterpreted what they were looking at in the hundred-or-so pages of "Western Fuels memos." They cherry-picked pieces that made skeptics look worst and patched them together into an assumption- laden fairy-tale.
Memos Misnamed, Misunderstood
According to Russell Cook's excellent Heartland Institute Report Merchants of Smear, and numerous interviews with the "memo" sources, all the critics had was a hodgepodge of e-mail exchanges from a loose coalition of 24 large and small electric utilities worried about a carbon tax bill in Congress.
The fairy tale spinners focused only on emails from the utilities' coal suppliers. The coalition explored lobbying to raise public concern about the impact of the tax, along with pointing out the weaknesses in the claims humans were causing climate change, using well-established skeptical scientists as spokesmen to balance the deluge of alarmist publicity.
The "memos" were the everyday work products of coalition members- including the Edison Electric Institute, a large trade group of investor-owned utilities-filed away in no particular order. EEI coordinated the most misinterpreted document, a campaign proposal by opinion survey firm Cambridge Reports of Massachusetts. The other "memos" included letters, meeting notices, reports from a hired Washington public relations firm, sample ads from a North Dakota direct mail firm, and similar items.
Innocuous Trade Association Demonized
Less than one-third of the jumbled "memos" involved Western Fuels Association. It's ironic that they became known as the "Western Fuels memos," because WFA is just the opposite of what the alarmist critics thought. It wasn't a lobbying group but rather a nonprofit, member-owned co-op serving consumer-owned rural electric cooperatives and other public power systems. WFA manages mining and transportation of coal from member-owned mines and buys additional coal in the open market, facts printed on the inside cover of WFA's annual reports.
The coalition's climate skeptics picked the semi-humorous acronym "ICE," and Cambridge Reports suggested several names to fit, including "Informed Citizens for the Environment" and "Information Council for the Environment." Western Fuels used the latter.
The single most misinterpreted page, "Strategy," listed nine goals, topped by "Reposition global warming as theory (not fact)." Critics mischaracterized that as "orders from headquarters" to reposition the public into believing global warming is not a fact. Al Gore even featured it in ominous red letters spread across a frame of his movie An Inconvenient Truth. Actually, it was merely a suggestion offered by Cambridge Reports.
Coalition Dissolves
Even more importantly, Western Fuels Association officials did not even read the Cambridge Reports proposal, because they had already hired Simmons Advertising of Grand Forks, North Dakota. They never saw the "Reposition global warming as theory (not fact)" goal, and they say they wouldn't have used it if they had, because it was too abstract.
The national campaign never happened, a three-city test run flopped, and the coalition dissolved amid disagreements between skeptics and pragmatists. In July 1991, coalition members went their separate ways. Smaller ones, generally skeptics, chose to fight for sound science and against new regulations, whereas big, investor-owned utilities abandoned the science debate and chose to lobby to favorably influence legislation.
Slanted Focus, Coverage
Of the original "Western Fuels memos," only fifty poorly scanned, frustratingly incomplete images on a Greenpeace Investigations site are publicly available today. So, where did Oreskes get the entire set?
She claims she found them "in the archives of the American Meteorological Society (AMS) in Washington, D.C." and advises, "scholars wishing to consult these materials should contact the AMS."
AMS is actually headquartered in Boston, Massachusetts It maintains a small Washington, DC office for government affairs, but it has no archives. The AMS archivist in Boston verified no such documents ever existed in the society's archives.
Oreskes said an "Anthony Socci" brought the documents to her attention. The AMS archivist said Socci-a Senate Commerce Committee staffer from 1991 to 1993 who managed hearings for Sen. Al Gore - had been an AMS employee for a time, and likely had a personal copy he made available to Oreskes.
How did Socci get the documents? The most likely answer comes from a letter on EEI letterhead dated May 6, 1991, showing the group's global warming task force strongly disparaged the skeptic campaign. Within a month, the memos were circulating among environmentalists in Washington. The Sierra Club forwarded a copy to the New York Times, mentioned in a July 8, 1991 article headlined, "Pro Coal Ad Campaign Disputes Warming Idea."
A noted historian, when asked for the simplest definition of history, said, "History is what really happened." That's not what Oreskes wrote.
Ron Arnold (firstname.lastname@example.com) is a free-enterprise activist, author, and commentator.
By Michael Bastasch
Are government climate agencies tampering with climate data to show warming? Some Republicans think so. California Republican Rep. Dana Rohrabacher says to expect congressional hearings on climate data tampering.
@caerbannog666 expect there to be congressional hearings into NASA altering weather station data to falsely indicate warming & sea rise - Dana Rohrabacher (@DanaRohrabacher) February 20, 2015
Rohrabacher serves as the vice chairman of the House Science, Space and Technology Committee, which has jurisdiction over NASA and other agencies that monitor the Earth's climate.
Rohrabacher has long been critical of the theory of man-made global warming. Lately, the California Republican has criticizing NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration for allegedly tampering with temperature data to create an artificial warming trend. Such data is then used to justify regulations aimed at curbing fossil fuel use and other industrial activities.
@grngamine journalist investigation shows records of various weather stations altered by AGW advocates to make it appear to be warming. -Dana Rohrabacher (@DanaRohrabacher) February 19, 2015
@caerbannog666 U seem unaware of latest revelation of data manipulation. NASA reported higher temp than what was record at weather stations - Dana Rohrabacher (@DanaRohrabacher) February 19, 2015
Rohrabacher isn't the only one to call for hearings on the science behind global warming. Oklahoma Republican Sen. Jim Inhofe has also promised to hold hearings on global warming data.
"We're going to have a committee hearing on the science," said Inhofe, who chairs the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee. "People are going to hear the other side of the story."
For years, those skeptical of man-made global warming have argued that government agencies are altering raw temperature data to create a warming trend. Allegations of tampering have increased as satellite temperature readings show much less warming than land and ocean-based weather stations show.
Science blogger Steven Goddard (a pseudonym) has been a major critic of NASA's and NOAA's temperature measurements. Goddard points out that NOAA's National Climatic Data Center makes the present look warmer by artificially cooling past temperatures to show a warming trend.
"NCDC pulls every trick in the book to turn the US cooling trend into warming. The raw data shows cooling since the 1920s," Goddard told The Daily Caller News Foundation in an interview last month.
"NCDC does a hockey stick of adjustments to reverse the trend," Goddard said. "This includes cooling the past for 'time of observation bias' infilling missing rural data with urban temperatures, and doing almost nothing to compensate for urban heat island effects."
NOAA does make temperature adjustments, but it argues such adjustments are necessary to remove "artificial biases" in surface temperature data. The biggest adjustment made by NCDC scientists is cooling past data to take into account the fact that there was a big shift from taking temperature readings in the afternoon to the morning.
"We get a lot of people questioning our data adjustments," Thomas Peterson, NCDC's principal scientist, told TheDCNF. There was an "artificial cool bias in the data," Peterson said.
Switching the time of the day temperatures were taken from the afternoon, when temperatures are warmer, to the morning, when temperatures are cooler, caused a cooling bias in the data. Temperature data from nearby weather stations was used to help create a baseline temperature for different regions.
But there are some drawbacks in surface temperature readings from a few thousand weather stations, boats and buoys spread out across the world. Peterson said the weather station system is "only really good for the U.S."
"The main problem is where there are a few stations in the middle of nowhere." Peterson said, specifically referring to weather station data problems on St. Helena Island.
UK Telegraph writer Christopher Booker joined the fray recently, using work by Goddard and other bloggers to criticize climate agencies for data tampering.
"Of much more serious significance, however, is the way this wholesale manipulation of the official temperature record...has become the real elephant in the room of the greatest and most costly scare the world has known," Booker wrote. "This really does begin to look like one of the greatest scientific scandals of all time."
David H. Douglass, Robert S. Knox
The Sun is the climate pacemaker I. Equatorial Pacific Ocean temperatures
* Central Pacific region temperature dataset SST3.4 from 1990 to 2014 is studied.
* SST3.4 contains a sustained signal at 1.0 cycle/yr implying solar forcing.
* SST3.4 also contains a signal (<1 cycle/yr) showing El Nino/La Nina effects.
* This signal contains segments of period 2 or 3 years, phase locked to the annual.
* A 12-month moving average improves on a "climatology" filter in removing annual effects.
Equatorial Pacific Ocean temperature time series data contain segments showing both a phase-locked annual signal and a phase-locked signal of period two years or three years, both locked to the annual solar cycle. Three such segments are observed between 1990 and 2014. It is asserted that these are caused by a solar forcing at a frequency of 1.0 cycle/yr. These periodic features are also found in global climate data (following paper). The analysis makes use of a twelve-month filter that cleanly separates seasonal effects from data. This is found to be significant for understanding the El Nino/La Nina phenomenon.
The Sun is the climate pacemaker II. Global ocean temperatures
* Global ocean temperatures at depths 0 - 700 m and 0 - 2000 m from 1990 to 2014 are studied.
* The same phase-locked phenomena reported in Paper I are observed.
* El Nino/La Nina effects diffuse to the global oceans with a two month delay.
* Ocean heat content trends during phase-locked time segments are consistent with zero.
In part I, equatorial Pacific Ocean temperature index SST3.4 was found to have segments during 1990-2014 showing a phase-locked annual signal and phase-locked signals of 2 or 3 year periods. Phase locking is to an inferred solar forcing of 1.0 cycle/yr. Here the study extends to the global ocean, from surface to 700 and 2000 m. The same phase-locking phenomena are found. The El Nino/La Nina effect diffuses into the world oceans with a delay of about two months.
Evidence for the Gleissberg solar cycle at the high-latitudes of the Northern Hemisphere
M. Ogurtsov, M. Lindholm, R. Jalkanen, S. Veretenenko
Time evolution of growing season temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere was analyzed using both wavelet and Fourier approaches. A century-scale (60-140 year) cyclicity was found in the summer temperature reconstruction from the Taymir peninsula (∼72N, ∼105E) and other high-latitude (60-70N) regions during the time interval AD 1576-1970. This periodicity is significant and consists of two oscillation modes, 60-70 year and 120-140 year variations. In the summer temperatures from the Yamal peninsula (∼70N, ∼67E) only a shorter-term (60-70 year) variation is present. A comparison of the secular variation in the Northern Hemisphere temperature proxies with the corresponding variations in sunspot numbers and the fluxes of cosmogenic 10Be in Greenland ice shows that a probable cause of this variability is the modulation of temperature by the century-scale solar cycle of Gleissberg. This is consistent with the results obtained previously for Northern Fennoscandia (67-70N, 19-33E). Thus, evidence for a connection between century-long variations in solar activity and climate was obtained for the entire boreal zone of the Northern Hemisphere.
The Great Climate Change Bamboozle Industry
by Dr. E. Calvin Beisner and Douglas Fox
In the "The Great Climate Change Denial Industry," University of Connecticut geology professor Robert Thorson sought to discredit all dissent about climate change by tying it (falsely in most cases) to funding from the fossil fuel industry - niftily adopting the logical fallacy of ad hominem circumstantial while ignoring the fact that advocates of global warming alarmism get hundreds of times as much funding from governments (with their own biases) and alternative-energy corporations, making them subject to the same critique (still fallacious, but sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander).
After sniping at religion (as if only fundamentalists are "climate skeptics"), bemoaning the decline in public fears of global warming but lacking the curiosity to ask whether there might be good reasons, and repeating the myth that polar bears are endangered, Thorson progressed to errors of fact and, well, more fallacious reasoning.
He summed up with five two-word sentences: "It's real. It's us. It's bad. Scientists agree. There's hope." Oh?'
One: It's real. Yes, as throughout earth's history. But Thorson equivocates (fallacy). What he means by "climate change" is historically unprecedented and dangerous global warming driven primarily by human emission of carbon dioxide. Substitute that and "It's real" becomes highly debatable and is highly debated, even among climate scientists,
like former NASA and now Columbia University astrophysicist James Hansen, who affirms it,
like professor and former chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech climatologist Judith Curry, who went from affirming it to strongly questioning it after interacting with climate scientists who reject it,
like University of Alabama climatologists John Christy and Roy Spencer, who manage NASA's satellite remote sensing program and together won NASA's Exceptional Scientific Achievement Medal for their global temperature monitoring work with satellites.
The Medieval Warm Period was warmer than now, and at least two periods since 1850 but before CO2 rose enough to contribute significantly had as rapid and as long upward trends in global average temperature as the warming trend from about 1977 to 2000 that some attribute to higher CO2. So "modern warming" is not unprecedented.
Read more at Townhall here.
The 97% "consensus" study, Cook et al. (2013) has been thoroughly refuted in scholarly peer-reviewed journals, by major news media, public policy organizations and think tanks, highly credentialed scientists and extensively in the climate blogosphere. The shoddy methodology of Cook's study has been shown to be so fatally flawed that well known climate scientists have publicly spoken out against it,
"The '97% consensus' article is poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed. It obscures the complexities of the climate issue and it is a sign of the desperately poor level of public and policy debate in this country [UK] that the energy minister should cite it."
Mike Hulme, Ph.D. Professor of Climate Change, University of East Anglia (UEA)
Only 65 Scientists of 12,000 Make up Alleged 97% on Climate Change and Global Warming Consensus According to Breakdown of Cook et al study, say Friends of Science
In response to multiple inquiries from media and global warming advocates, Friends of Science issue this release to expose the statistical manipulation evident from the break down of the Cook et al paper. Friends of Science decry the linking of this flawed study with alleged danger from man-made carbon dioxide emissions (CO2) as there has been no global warming in 16 years despite a rise in CO2 levels; Friends of Science say the sun and oceanic oscillations are the main drivers of climate change, not CO2.
See faulty methodology of Cook study.
The following is a list of 97 articles that refute Cook's (poorly conceived, poorly designed and poorly executed) 97% "consensus" study. The fact that anyone continues to bring up such soundly debunked nonsense like Cook's study is an embarrassment to science.
See the list here.
See also New paper finds Asian aerosols are not a valid excuse for the 'pause'' in global warming
Warmist Kevin Drum on selling the global warming hoax: "...anecdotal evidence (mild winters, big hurricanes, wildfires, etc.) is probably our best bet. We should milk it for everything it's worth" H/T Tom Nelson.
See also Dr Craig Loehle's analysis on WUWT Climate Change Impacts In The USA is Already [NOT] Happening.
See the Galileo Movement here. Visit Then click on the blue text: "9.2.12 Evidence of Political Fraud - Malcolm Roberts"
See John Coleman's excellent video summary "There is NO Significant Global Warming" on KUSI Coleman's corner. No one communicates better to the public.
See Dr. Doug Hoyt's Greenhouse Scorecard on Warwick Hughes site here.
From Jack Black's Climate Change Dictionary
PEER REVIEW: The act of banding together a group of like-minded academics with a funding conflict of interest, for the purpose of squeezing out any research voices that threaten the multi-million dollar government grant gravy train.
SETTLED SCIENCE: Betrayal of the scientific method for politics or money or both.
DENIER: Anyone who suspects the truth.
CLIMATE CHANGE: What has been happening for billions of years, but should now be flogged to produce 'panic for profit.'
NOBEL PEACE PRIZE: Leftist Nutcase Prize, unrelated to "Peace" in any meaningful way.
DATA, EVIDENCE: Unnecessary details. If anyone asks for this, see "DENIER," above.
CLIMATE SCIENTIST: A person skilled in spouting obscure, scientific-sounding jargon that has the effect of deflecting requests for "DATA" by "DENIERS.' Also skilled at affecting an aura of "Smartest Person in the Room" to buffalo gullible legislators and journalists.
JUNK SCIENCE: The use of invalid scientific evidence resulting in findings of causation which simply cannot be justified or understood from the standpoint of the current state of credible scientific or medical knowledge
Speaking of junk science, see Lubos Motl's excellent point by point counter to the John Cook 104 talking points document attacking the skeptical science here.
See all the talks at the latest ICCC9 Conference in Las Vegas in 2014 here.
Heartland has the presentations and powerpoints posted for the Heartland ICCC IV. If you could not go, there is plenty to see there. Please remember the goldmine of videos and PPTs at the Heartland ICCC proceeding sites for 2008 NYC here, 2009 NYC here and 2009 DC here. Here is a PPT I gave at the Heartland Instutute ICCC Meeting in 2008 and here is the follow up in 2009. Here is an abbreviated PPT in two parts I presented at a UK conference last month: Part 1, Part 2.
See C3 Headlines excellent collection of graphs and charts that show AGW is nonsense here.
See Climate Theater with a collection of the best climate skeptic films and documentaries here. See additional scientific youtubes here.
1350+ Peer-Reviewed Papers Supporting Skepticism of "Man-Made" Global Warming Alarm and here a list of 1000 stories suggesting global cooling has begun.
"The above papers support skepticism of "man-made" global warming or the environmental or economic effects of. Addendums, comments, corrections, erratum, replies, responses and submitted papers are not included in the peer-reviewed paper count. These are included as references in defense of various papers. There are many more listings than just the 900-1000 papers. Ordering of the papers is alphabetical by title except for the Hockey Stick, Cosmic Rays and Solar sections which are chronological. This list will be updated and corrected as necessary."
The less intelligent alarmists have written a paper allegedly connecting the scientists to Exxon Mobil. Here is the detailed response from some of the featured scientists. Note that though this continues to be a knee jerk reaction by some of the followers, there is no funding of skeptic causes by big oil BUT Exxon has funded Stanford warmists to the tune of $100 million and BP UC Berkeley to $500,000,000. Climategate emails showed CRU/Hadley soliciting oil dollars and receiving $23,000,000 in funding.
See still more annotated here.
Many more papers are catalogued at Pete's Place here.
The science and economics of global warming are not too complicated for the average person to consider and make up his or her own mind. We urge you to do that. Go here and view some of the articles linked under "What's New" or "A Primer on Global Warming." Or go here and read about the new report from the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), which comprehensively rebuts the claims of the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Go here for the sources for the factual statements in the ads.
See the ICECAP Amazon Book store. Icecap benefits with small commission for your purchases via this link.
See sister sites:
WeatherBell Analytics here.
Website of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) here. It's latest report (2013) details information from almost 4,000 papers.
John Coleman's Corner here.
Science and Public Policy Institute here.
Intellicast Dr. Dewpoint Library here.
RedNeck Engineer Energy and Innovation here.
The Weather Wiz here. See how they have added THE WIZ SCHOOL (UPPER LEFT) to their website. An excellent educational tool for teachers at all class levels. "Education is the kindling of a flame, not the filling of a vessel" - Socrates (470--399 BC)


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AUS: Little World Beverages chooses brewery site
Australian brewer Little World Beverages has decided not to build a brewery in Jarrahdale, south east of Perth.
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