Other voices on climate change

 Uncertainty, the Precautionary Principle, and Climate Change 
Kesten C. Green & J. Scott Armstrong
August 9, 2008 

The precautionary principle is a political principle, not a scientific one. The principle is used to urge the
cessation or avoidance of a human activity in situations of uncertainty, just in case that activity might cause harm to human health or the natural environment. There is an interesting discussion of the history of the term in Wikipedia. 
 
In practice, the precautionary principle is invoked when an interest group identifies an issue that can help it to achieve its objectives. If the interest group is successful in its efforts to raise fears about the issue, the application of the scientific method is rejected and a new orthodoxy is imposed. Government dictates follow. People who dissent from the orthodox view are vilified, ostracized, and may have their livelihoods taken away from them.
 
Consider the case of “climate change”. Warnings of dangerous manmade global warming from scientists,  politicians, and celebrities have received much publicity. They admonish us to dramatically reduce emissions of CO2 in order to prevent disaster over the course of the 21st Century. Efforts have been made to stifle a scientific approach to the issue. In an article titled “Veteran climate scientist says ‘lock up the oil men’”, James Hanson, who heads the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, was quoted as suggesting that those who promote the ideas of global warming skeptics should be “put on trial for high crimes against humanity.” The skeptics themselves have been ejected from, for example, State Climatologist positions and prevented from publishing research in mainstream journals, and they and their views are routinely attacked.
 
Much complexity and uncertainty surround climate change. The cumulative empirical evidence on proper forecasting procedures suggests that the most appropriate method in this case is naïve extrapolation. In simple terms, this means to forecast no change. Of course there will be change, but with current knowledge there is no more reason to expect warming than to expect cooling. 

As we describe in our paper, we have been unable to find any forecast derived from evidence-based (scientific) forecasting methods that supports the contention that the world faces dangerous manmade global warming. 
 
Appeals for urgent curtailment of human activity “just in case” are often couched in ways that imply that  industrial societies are inherently sinful, rather than that there might be a problem to be dealt with. Indeed,
interpretation of the precautionary principle is subjective and it is arguable that it is being misapplied to the issue of climate change. 
 
Firstly, even if forecasts of increasing temperatures turned out to be accurate, predicted temperatures and other conditions are within the range of variations that have been experienced in the past. There is no evidence that the natural environment “prefers” relatively cool to relatively warm average temperatures. In fact, life in general prefers warmth. 

Secondly, curtailing human activity would harm people’s health by making them poorer than they would otherwise have been. This is likely to be the case even if curtailing human activity happened to reduce global average temperatures. When the situation is framed in this way, the precautionary principle dictates that it is policies to curtail economically efficient human activity that should themselves be curtailed. 

The outlook for the climate over the 21st Century is highly uncertain. There is a word in the English language to express high uncertainty. That word is “ignorance”. And ignorance is not a basis for responsible government action. We should expect our politicians to have the courage to resist interest groups’ calls for action in the face of ignorance. 
 
The precautionary principle brings to mind the slogan on the Ministry of Truth building in George Orwell’s
1984: “Ignorance is Strength.” Instead of this political principle, we hope that politicians will turn to scientific principles for making public policy. 
 

YESTERDAY, a former chief at NASA, Dr John S. Theon, slammed the computer models used to determine future climate claiming they are not scientific in part because the modellers have “resisted making their
work transparent so that it can be replicated independently by other scientists”.

Today, a founder of the International Journal of Forecasting, Journal of Forecasting, International Institute of
Forecasters, and International Symposium on Forecasting, and the author of Long-range Forecasting (1978, 1985), the Principles of Forecasting Handbook, and over 70 papers on forecasting, Dr J. Scott Armstrong,
tabled a statement declaring that the forecasting process used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) lacks a scientific basis.

What these two authorities, Drs Theon and Armstrong, are independently and explicitly stating is that the computer models underpinning the work of many scientific institutions concerned with global warming, including Australia’s CSIRO, are fundamentally flawed.

In today’s statement, made with economist Kesten Green, Dr Armstrong provides the following eight reasons as to why the current IPCC computer models lack a scientific basis.

To read the eight reasons, click here.

“President-elect Barack Obama recently declared his intention to mitigate global warming by enacting a cap-and-trade policy that would reduce carbon emissions 80 percent by the year 2050. But the last two years of global cooling have nearly erased 30 years of temperature increases. To the extent that global warming ever existed, it is now officially over….

“To the extent global warming was ever valid, it is now officially over. It is time to file this theory in the dustbin of history, next to Aristotelean physics, Neptunism, the geocentric universe, phlogiston, and a plethora of other incorrect scientific theories, all of which had vocal and dogmatic supporters who cited incontrovertible evidence. Weather and climate change are natural processes beyond human control. To argue otherwise is to deny the factual evidence.”

To read the rest of this article from the Washington Times by geophysicist David Deming, click here.

Reducing man-made CO2 emissions will NOT save the planet! The Man-Made Global Warming Theory that the UNIPCC hangs its hat on, states that increasing amounts of man-made carbon dioxide will trap more of the sun’s heat in the atmosphere. This will then increase the water vapor content of the atmosphere.  According to the IPCC, the two greenhouse gases will combine their super powers to increase earth’s surface temperatures to dangerous levels.

But, my friends, carbon dioxide is NOT a pollutant. It is a naturally occurring trace gas essential to life on earth. Simply reducing CO2 levels does nothing to reduce real pollution. It does nothing to clean up our streams and rivers from dangerous mercury contamination. It does nothing to prevent sewage from polluting our drinking supplies. It doesn’t fix holes in the ozone layer, nor does it stop landfill chemicals from leaching into ground water. Even if CO2 levels plummeted in the next 20 years, we’d still have pollution problems.

My “Facebook” buddies are much more esteemed scientists than I. I asked them for their  responses to such a question. Here’s whatGeologist Don Easterbrook,  of Western Washington University told me in a recent e-mail: “CO2 is not a pollutant and reducing emission of it does nothing to abate the real pollutants (sulphur, particulates, metals, etc).” He adds emphatically, “We can’t afford to waste trillions of dollars needlessly chasing the CO2 fantasy.”

For more of this article by meterologist Mark Johnson, click here.

How has the scam that humans are causing global warming worked so effectively?  One answer is exploitation of fear, the technique of which was accurately explained in the late Michael Crichton’s book “State of Fear.”
…

A second way the scam has worked is exploitation of people’s lack of knowledge. … The IPCC and those who support the anthropogenic global warming (AGW) hypothesis use the public’s lack of knowledge to push simplistic and selective science to effectively rule. …

Most people have no idea of the extent of natural climate change. It’s talked about as something new thus implying it is human related. We are told it is occurring at an unprecedented rate that can only be explained by human activities. Neither is correct. Every time such claims are made it is easy to find similar or more dramatic examples in the historic record. The response follows a pattern.  Question the validity of the work, attack the researcher(s) personally, or manufacture something to refute the finding. The “hockey stick” was a classic example of the latter as it tried to deny existence of the Medieval Warm Period (900 - 1200 AD) because it was clearly warmer than today. This exposed their claim that the latter part of the 20th century was the warmest ever.

For the rest of this article from Canadian Free Press, click here.

Is Antarctica warming or cooling? Either way it proves global warming, according to climate modelers.

In the 1990s, predictions of a greenhouse-warmed Antarctic abounded. As time passed, though, problems surfaced. Research paper after paper indicated that, other than the tiny Antarctica peninsula, the continent was in fact cooling — and had been doing so for many decades.

Skeptics pointed to this as a flaw in global warming theory. Not so fast, cried the climate modelers. They quickly spun a number of possible explanations, including ozone holes, ocean currents, and terrain that cut off Antarctica from the world’s warming. As the certainty in the cooling trend grew, so did their statements, until they eventually began stating that they had predicted a cooling trend all along.

As the folks at RealClimate put it, “Doesn’t this contradict [global warming]? Not at all, because a cold Antarctica is just what calculations predict… and have predicted for the past quarter century.”

Cooling was thus cast as proof of global warming, not refutation. The media dutifully shifted their cameras from penguins to polar bears. The world was safe for Kyoto again.

But now a new paper has appeared, saying that Antarctica is warming after all. Written by Eric Steig and Drew Shindell, the paper purports to prove that past evidence of cooling was incorrect. But doesn’t that contradict the models? Not if one can again rewrite history.

For the rest of this article from Heliogenic Climate Change, click here.

Things were looking bad around southeast Greenland a few
years ago. There, the streams of ice flowing from the great ice sheet
into the sea had begun speeding up in the late 1990s. Then, two of the
biggest Greenland outlet glaciers really took off, and losses from the
ice to the sea eventually doubled. Some climatologists speculated that
global warming might have pushed Greenland past a tipping point into a
scary new regime of wildly heightened ice loss and an ever-faster rise
in sea level.

And some non-climatologists speculated disaster from rapidly rising seas as well.

During his An Inconvenient Truth tour, Gore was fond of spinning the following tale:

[E]arlier this year [2006], yet another team of
scientists reported that the previous twelve months saw 32 glacial
earthquakes on Greenland between 4.6 and 5.1 on the Richter scale - a
disturbing sign that a massive destabilization may now be underway deep
within the second largest accumulation of ice on the planet, enough ice
to raise sea level 20 feet worldwide if it broke up and slipped into
the sea. Each passing day brings yet more evidence that we are now
facing a planetary emergency - a climate crisis that demands immediate
action to sharply reduce carbon dioxide emissions worldwide in order to
turn down the earth’s thermostat and avert catastrophe.

Oh how things have changed in the past 2 years….

For the rest of this article from World Climate Report, click here.

THE National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported that October in the US was marked by 63 record snowfalls and 115 lowest-ever temperatures.

Over the past few years, similar signs of colder than usual weather have been recorded all over the world, causing many people to question the still fashionable, but now long outdated, global warming alarmism. Yet individual weather events or spells, whether warmings or coolings, tell us nothing necessarily about true climate change.

Nonetheless, by coincidence, growing recognition of a threat of climatic cooling is correct, because since the turn of the 21st century all real world, long-term climate indicators have turned downwards. Global atmospheric temperature reached a peak in 1998, has not warmed since 1995 and, has been cooling since 2002. Some people, still under the thrall of the Intergovernmental Panel of Climate Change’s disproved
projections of warming, seem surprised by this cooling trend, even to the point of denying it. But why?

To read the rest of this article by geologist Bob Carter from The Australian Online, click here.

“In nominating John Holdren to be director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy - the
position known informally as White House science adviser - President-elect Barack Obama has enlisted an undisputed Big Name among academic environmentalists. Holdren is a physicist, a professor of environmental policy at Harvard, a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, director of the Woods Hole Research Center, and author or coauthor of many papers and books.

“He is also a doom-and-gloomer with a trail of erroneous apocalyptic forecasts dating back nearly 40 years - and a decided lack of tolerance for environmental opinions that conflict with his.

“The position of science adviser requires Senate confirmation. Holdren’s nomination is likely to sail through, but conscientious senators might wish to ask him some questions. Here are eight….”

To read the rest of this article from the Jewish World Review about a climate extremist who might be making U.S. environmental policy, click here.

Looking back over my columns of the past 12 months, one of their major themes was neatly encapsulated by two recent items from The Daily Telegraph. The first, on May 21, headed “Climate change threat to Alpine ski resorts” , reported that the entire Alpine “winter sports industry” could soon “grind to a halt for lack of snow”. The second, on December 19, headed “The Alps have best snow conditions in a generation” , reported that this winter’s Alpine snowfalls “look set to beat all records by New Year’s Day”.

Easily one of the most important stories of 2008 has been all the evidence suggesting that this may be looked back on as the year when there was a turning point in the great worldwide panic over man-made global warming. Just when politicians in Europe and America have been adopting the most costly and damaging measures politicians have ever proposed, to combat this supposed menace, the tide has turned in three significant respects.

First, all over the world, temperatures have been dropping in a way wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare.

Secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a “scientific consensus” in favour of man-made global warming collapsed.

Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades …
panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for “combating climate change” with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable
times.

To read the full article from the Daily Telegraph, click here.