Other voices on climate change

The Der Spiegel newspaper interviewed German utility executive Fritz Vahrenholt, a supporter of alternative energies, on why he no longer believes in catastrophic, human-caused global warming or the conclusions of the politically based IPCC. Based on solar research, which the IPCC largely ignores, Vehrenholt believes the planet will cool for the next three decades. For the complete interview click here.

Vahrenholt: In my experience as an energy expert, I learned that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is more of a political than a scientific body. As a rapporteur on renewable energy, I witnessed how thin the factual basis is for predictions that are made at the IPCC. In one case, a Greenpeace activist’s absurd claim that 80 percent of the world’s energy supply could soon be coming from renewable sources was assumed without scrutiny. This prompted me to examine the IPCC report more carefully.

SPIEGEL: And what was your conclusion?

Vahrenholt: The long version of the IPCC report does mention natural causes of climate change, like the sun and oscillating ocean currents. But they no longer appear in the summary for politicians. They were simply edited out. To this day, many decision-makers don’t know that new studies have seriously questioned the dominance of CO2. CO2 alone will never cause a warming of more than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) by the end of the century. Only with the help of supposed amplification effects, especially water vapor, do the computers arrive at a drastic temperature increase. I say that global warming will remain below two degrees by the end of the century. This is an eminently political message, but it’s also good news.

Sixteen scientists have published an article in the Wall Street Journal telling politicians that ‘global warming’ is not a crisis, and may even be beneficial. For the full text of the article, click here.

A candidate for public office in any contemporary democracy may have to consider what, if anything, to do about “global warming.” Candidates should understand that the oft-repeated claim that nearly all scientists demand that something dramatic be done to stop global warming is not true. In fact, a large and growing number of distinguished scientists and engineers do not agree that drastic actions on global warming are needed.

In September, Nobel Prize-winning physicist Ivar Giaever, a supporter of President Obama in the last election, publicly resigned from the American Physical Society (APS) with a letter that begins: “I did not renew [my membership] because I cannot live with the [APS policy] statement: ‘The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring. If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth’s physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.’ In the APS it is OK to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible?”

In spite of a multidecade international campaign to enforce the message that increasing amounts of the “pollutant” carbon dioxide will destroy civilization, large numbers of scientists, many very prominent, share the opinions of Dr. Giaever. And the number of scientific “heretics” is growing with each passing year. The reason is a collection of stubborn scientific facts.

Driving home today, I heard about a new report from one of those Canadian “we work for the Government but we’re actually really truly independent, honest we are” kind of organizations. It’s called “PAYING THE PRICE: THE ECONOMIC IMPACTS OF CLIMATE CHANGE FOR CANADA.” It is chock full of the usual nonsense about how, in a country plagued by cold Arctic winds and suffering from a short growing season, a couple degrees of warming will be a multi-billion dollar national tragedy. It featured the usual huge numbers, warming will cost multiple tens of billions of dollars per year. (Curiously, there is no mention of any billions in supposed costs from the 20th century warming.)

I got to wondering about how they estimated these huge costs. I mean, were they based on scientific studies, or from actuarial data, or were they estimated from past damages, or were they just extracting the numbers from their fundamental orifices?…

Around the latitude of Canada, the change in average temperature as one goes north is on the order of 2.5° (where damage = 1) for every couple hundred miles. So if you took a Canadian farm and moved it two hundred miles south, do you seriously think that the farmers would suffer huge problems?

The same thing is true of the forests. They claim there will be huge damage to the forests from a few degrees temperature rise … but for many forests in Canada, the same forest exists two hundred miles to the south of a given point … and two hundred miles to the north of that point. That’s a change of FIVE DEGREES, OMG, THE SOUTHERN TREES MUST BE BURNING UP, THEY ARE FIVE DEGREES WARMER THAN THE NORTHERN TREES, COULD BE EIGHT TIMES THE DAMAGE …

I fear I can’t appropriately express my contempt for this kind of grade-school level of thinking about damage impact. If that’s the best a bunch of “damage analysts” can come up with, I’d fire them on the spot.

To read the rest of this article by Willis Eschenbach, click here.

James Taylor on the oft-quoted survey that 98 per cent of climate scientists believe we are heading for human-caused catastrophe:

During last night’s Republican presidential debate, Jon Huntsman doubled down on Al Gorism, claiming skeptics of “global climate disruption” (that’s the White House’s term) are making “comments that fly in the face of what 98 out of 100 climate scientists have said.” Just as moderator John Harris of Politico asked Rick Perry to name some of the scientists he agrees with, Harris should have asked Huntsman just what the “98 out of 100 climate scientists” believe.

In the “survey” to which Huntsman alluded, scientists were invited to participate in a two-question online survey. Despite what Huntsman said, not even 100 climate scientists chose to participate. The two questions were simple: 1. Have global temperatures risen during the past 200 years? and 2. Are humans a significant contributing factor to this?

Forgetting for the moment that only shameless activists or the most statistically and scientifically ignorant of persons would claim that a survey sample of only 77 scientists volunteering to participate in a survey is indicative of what the entire climate science community believes, the questions and answers themselves tell us nothing.

To illustrate, I will answer the survey:

Q1. “When compared with pre-1800s levels, do you think that mean global temperatures have generally risen, fallen, or remained relatively constant?”

James Taylor Answer: Risen

Q2. “Do you think human activity is a significant contributing factor in changing mean global temperatures?”

James Taylor Answer: Yes

For the rest of this article from Taylor’s Forbes blog, click here.

From No Frakking Consensus:

imagine that city officials knock on my door one day and tell me that an unusual ground fissure has formed at the far end of my street. I’m told the city has a plan for dealing with the situation, but if things don’t work out, there’s a chance the fissure could expand and my house could eventually be swallowed up.

In such an instance I have a range of choices, each with its own pluses and minuses.

The fissure is a scientific fact. But there’s no hand-lettered sign reaching out from its depths with “crystal clear confirmation” about how we should respond to it. Different people on my street will choose to do different things – depending on how much they like their current home, what level of faith they have in city officials, whether or not this is a good time to be selling property, whether their children are having nightmares, and so forth.

In other words, even if it’s true that the modest warming created by human-generated CO2 is going to get amplified by positive feedbacks in the atmosphere (rather than dampened by negative ones), how individuals, communities, and nations should respond to global warming is up for debate.

For the rest of this article, click here.

Friends of Science has produced an excellent video summarizing the criticisms of catastrophic anthropogenic warming, entitled Climate Catastrophe Cancelled. Click here to watch this video.

From Australian geologist Robert Carter:

The essence of the scientific method is the establishment of relevant facts, and the testing of hypotheses against those facts. Any inferred conclusion, or “truth”, is always provisional and must be contestable against further experiment, fact gathering and analysis.

Unfortunately, many of the facts of the climate debate have become subject to political manipulation in favour of shaping “evidence” for human-caused global warming, and climate advisory groups around the world are under increasing pressure to account for the flawed data that they have been providing. …

Over the last 10 years global average temperature has decreased by ~0.05 deg. C, and atmospheric carbon dioxide has increased by ~5%. The hypothesis fails, for not only has the increase in carbon dioxide failed to result in dangerous warming, but no measurable warming has occurred at all.

Carbon dioxide is indubitably a greenhouse gas, so it is important to note that these facts do not tell us that our emissions have no effect on global temperature. Rather, they indicate that the theoretical human-caused warming is so small that it cannot be detected against the background of natural climate forcings, feedbacks and variation. Scarcely dangerous then.

For the rest of this article from Quadrant Online, click here.

From the Hawaii Reporter:

Since the proponents of global warming are being caught without providing supporting evidence, the theory of man-made global warming is being destroyed before our very eyes.  With no hardnosed physical evidence, measurable, observable, replicable evidence, the fiction has been sustained by non-science methods. These include appeals to authority, existence of an elitist scientific consensus, computer models none of which produce physical evidence.

Crippling national energy policies, environmental policies, economic policies are being seriously considered. Such suicidal policies did not originate in the recent fictions of climate change, but from the leaders of the UN and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and their friends within the American leadership.

For the rest of this article by retired nuclear physicist Michael R. Fox, click here.

Will Happer is a physicist at Princeton University. This article appeared in the internet magazine First Things under the title “The Truth About Greenhouse Gases.”

“The object of the Author in the following pages has been to collect the most remarkable instances of those moral epidemics which have been excited, sometimes by one cause and sometimes by another, and to show how easily the masses have been led astray, and how imitative and gregarious men are, even in their infatuations and crimes,” wrote Charles Mackay in the preface to the first edition of his Extraordinary Popular Delusions and the Madness of Crowds. I want to discuss a contemporary moral epidemic: the notion that increasing atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases, notably carbon dioxide, will have disastrous consequences for mankind and for the planet. The “climate crusade” is one characterized by true believers, opportunists, cynics, money-hungry governments, manipulators of various types—even children’s crusades—all based on contested science and dubious claims.

I am a strong supporter of a clean environment. We need to be vigilant to keep our land, air, and waters free of real pollution, particulates, heavy metals, and pathogens, but carbon dioxide (CO2 ) is not one of these pollutants. Carbon is the stuff of life. Our bodies are made of carbon. A normal human exhales around 1 kg of CO2 (the simplest chemically stable molecule of carbon in the earth’s atmosphere) per day. Before the industrial period, the concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere was 270 ppm. At the present time, the concentration is about 390 ppm, 0.039 percent of all atmospheric molecules and less than 1 percent of that in our breath. About fifty million years ago, a brief moment in the long history of life on earth, geological evidence indicates, CO2 levels were several thousand ppm, much higher than now. And life flourished abundantly.

To read the rest of this article, click here.

By Daniel Flynn, in Human Events.com

A July heat wave?  That’s global warming.  A frigid winter?  That’s global warming too.  Hurricanes?  Global warming.  Drought?  Global warming, global warming, global warming.

When evidence against a theory is interpreted as proof of a theory, there is no point in continuing the debate.  All roads lead to Rome, or in this case, all facts prove global warming.  It’s worse than unfalsifiable theories.  It’s worse than circular reasoning.  It’s true believer syndrome.

In his mid-century classic, The True Believer, Eric Hoffer wrote, “The effectiveness of a doctrine does not come from its meaning but from its certitude.  No doctrine however profound and sublime will be effective unless it is presented as the embodiment of the one and only truth.”

Global warming, at least as it is advanced by Gore and company, isn’t a theory to be questioned, but a truth to be accepted.  Thus, condescension substitutes for debate.  Appeals to the number of scientist supporters supplant appeals to reason.  And skeptics become “deniers,” i.e., morally on par with cranks who deny the Holocaust.

For the rest of this article, click here.