Other voices on climate change

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.

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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.

London Mayor Boris Johnson on why meteorologist Piers Corbyn usually gets his forecasts right, while the UK Meteorological Office gets it wrong. Hint: Corbyn focuses on the sun while the Met Office predicts based on the anthropogenic global warming hypothesis. Johnson writes:

He [Corby] seems to get it right about 85 per cent of the time and serious business people – notably in farming – are starting to invest in his forecasts. In the eyes of many punters, he puts the taxpayer-funded Met Office to shame. How on earth does he do it? He studies the Sun; the Met Office makes guesses based on the anthropogenic global warming theory.

He looks at the flow of particles from the Sun, and how they interact with the upper atmosphere, especially air currents such as the jet stream, and he looks at how the Moon and other factors influence those streaming particles.

He takes a snapshot of what the Sun is doing at any given moment, and then he looks back at the record to see when it last did something similar. Then he checks what the weather was like on Earth at the time – and he makes a prophecy.

I have not a clue whether his methods are sound or not. But when so many of his forecasts seem to come true, and when he seems to be so consistently ahead of the Met Office, I feel I want to know more. Piers Corbyn believes that the last three winters could be the harbinger of a mini ice age that could be upon us by 2035, and that it could start to be colder than at any time in the last 200 years. He goes on to speculate that a genuine ice age might then settle in, since an ice age is now cyclically overdue.

For the rest of this article from The Telegraph, click here.

From a column by Dan Calabrese, April 30, 2007, but still relevant today:

Can a science ignoramus make a compelling case against the supposed scientific super-consensus on global warming?  Watch me.

This supposed super-consensus of scientists tells us that global warming, and man’s complicity therein, are undeniable. And we must act now to stop it.

I don’t really understand science, so I won’t try to take on the scientists on their turf. But they’re coming on mine. I do understand propaganda. And no matter how compelling some of the science may be, it’s the nature of the propaganda – aimed at influencing public policy through politics – that causes me to smell a rat.

For the rest of this article, click here.

David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundations defends the GWPF’s logo showing no warming in the 21st century:

The GWPF’s graph, displayed on the GWPF’s homepage masthead, showing that the global average annual temperature hasn’t changed this century, drawn against a nice blue backdrop, is making a few people see red. Why this is I don’t exactly know as their logic, in contrast to their anger, isn’t entirely clear. Perhaps it is because it neatly summarises the uncertainties in climate science as well as common misconceptions (as was the intention) that some commentators find too uncomfortable to address, instead becoming deniers of basic scientific data. It certainly seems a difficult fact for some, but inconvenience is one thing, facts are another.

Those who complain that the graph is wrong, if they are to be fair and consistent, should now target the Royal Society in their sights as it has admitted this in its recent brochure on the science of climate change that the recent spell of warming ended in 2000.

It is not alone.  The Journal Science has said the pause in global temperatures is real, as do many refereed scientific papers in numerous journals. Also in State of the Climate in 2008, a special supplement to the August Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society, the UK Met Office Hadley Centre, no less, confirmed that in the past ten years the HadCRUT3 temperature data (there are problems with this data set regarding its reliability and how it calculates averages but it is probably the best we’ve got) shows no increase whatsoever.

Their analysis showed that the world warmed by 0.07 +/- 0.07 deg C from 1999 to 2008, not the 0.20 deg C expected by the IPCC. Corrected for the large 1998 El Nino event (that made 1998 the hottest year on record) and its sister La Nina, the last decade’s trend is perfectly flat. There were even comments in the so-called Climategate emails along the lines of the temperature not increasing and “it’s a travesty” that we can’t explain it.

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Physicist Frank J. Tipler writes on the definition of “science” by the great physicist Richard P. Feynman–a definition that, alas, escapes most climate scientists. Feynman’s essay is available online in Google Book’s “preview” of his book The Pleasure of Finding Things Out. “What Is Science” is on page 177; “Cargo Cult Science” is on page 205.

“Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts” is how the great Nobel Prize-winning physicist Richard Feynman defined science in his article “What is Science?” Feynman emphasized this definition by repeating it in a stand-alone sentence in extra large typeface in his article.

Immediately after his definition of science, Feynman wrote: “When someone says, ‘Science teaches such and such,’ he is using the word incorrectly. Science doesn’t teach anything; experience teaches it. If they say to you, ‘Science has shown such and such,’ you should ask, ‘How does science show it? How did the scientists find out? How? What? Where?’ It should not be ‘science has shown.’ And you have as much right as anyone else, upon hearing about the experiments (but be patient and listen to all the evidence) to judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at.”

And I say, Amen. Notice that “you” is the average person. You have the right to hear the evidence, and you have the right to judge whether the evidence supports the conclusion. We now use the phrase “scientific consensus,” or “peer review,” rather than “science has shown.” By whatever name, the idea is balderdash. Feynman was absolutely correct.

When the attorney general of Virginia sued to force Michael Mann of “hockey stick” fame to provide the raw data he used, and the complete computer program used to analyze the data, so that “you” could decide, the Faculty Senate of the University of Virginia (where Mann was a professor at the time he defended the hockey stick) declared this request — Feynman’s request — to be an outrage. You peons, the Faculty Senate decreed, must simply accept the conclusions of any “scientific endeavor that has satisfied peer review standards.” Feynman’s — and the attorney general’s and my own and other scientists’ — request for the raw data, so we can “judge whether a sensible conclusion has been arrived at,” would, according to the Faculty Senate, “send a chilling message to scientists … and indeed scholars in any discipline.”

To read the whole article from Pajamas Media, click here.

Climatologist Judith Curry is interviewed on why she was attacked by alarmist bloggers like Joe Romm (Climate Progress) and RealClimate for suggesting climatologists read Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion:

The level of vitriol in the climate blogs reflects the last gasp of those who thought they could influence national and international energy policy through the power politics of climate science expertise. The politics of expertise is about how scientific information is used in the policy making process, including how diverging viewpoints are interpreted and how science is weighed relative to values and politics in the policy debate.  The problem comes in when the “power” politics of expertise are played.

Signals of the “power” play include: hiding uncertainties and never admitting a mistake; developing a consensus with a high level of confidence; demanding that the consensus receive extreme deference relative to other view points; insisting that that science demands a particular policy; discrediting scientists holding other view points by dismissing them as cranks, trivializing their credentials and say that they are not qualified to hold an opinion; and attacking the motives of anyone that challenges the consensus. Sound familiar?

In the case of climate change, the authoritarianism of “science tells us we should . . . ”  could not withstand the public perception of scientists engaging with pressure groups, lack of transparency that meant people were unable to evaluate the information themselves, and then the climategate affair that raised questions about the integrity of the scientists….

There is an increasing backlash from scientists and engineers from other fields, who think that climate science is lacking credibility because of the politicization of the subject and the high confidence levels in the IPCC report.  While these scientists and engineers are not experts in climate science, they understand the process and required rigor and the many mistakes that need to be made and false paths that get followed.

For the rest of this interview from Collide-a-Scape, click here.

You are probably wondering whether President-elect Obama owes the world an apology for his actions regarding global warming. The answer is, not yet. There is one person, however, who does. You have probably guessed his name: Al Gore. Mr. Gore has stated, regarding climate change, that “the science is in.” Well, he is absolutely right about that, except for one tiny thing. It is the biggest whopper ever sold to the public in the history of humankind.

For the rest of this article by Harold Ambler, click here.

Game show host Pat Sajak offers a solution for those who want to change the world:

Let’s assume that a third of the world’s population really believes mankind has the power to adjust the Earth’s thermostat through lifestyle decisions. The percentage may be higher or lower, but, for the sake of this exercise, let’s put it at one-third. Now it seems to me these people have a special obligation to change their lives dramatically because they truly believe catastrophe lies ahead if they don’t. The other two-thirds are merely ignorant, so they can hardly be blamed for their actions.

Now, if those True Believers would give up their cars and big homes and truly change the way they live, I can’t imagine that there wouldn’t be some measurable impact on the Earth in just a few short years. I’m not talking about recycling Evian bottles, but truly simplifying their lives. Even if you were, say, a former Vice President, you would give up extra homes and jets and limos. I see communes with organic farms and lives freed from polluting technology.

Then, when the rest of us saw the results of their actions—you know, the earth cooling, oceans lowering, polar bears frolicking and glaciers growing—we would see the error of our ways and join the crusade voluntarily and enthusiastically.

How about it? Why wait for governments to change us?

For the rest of this article, click here.

From Clive Crook, a senior editor at The Atlantic and a believer in anthropogenic warming:

I had hoped, not very confidently, that the various Climategate inquiries would be severe. This would have been a first step towards restoring confidence in the scientific consensus. But no, the reports make things worse. At best they are mealy-mouthed apologies; at worst they are patently incompetent and even wilfully wrong. The climate-science establishment, of which these inquiries have chosen to make themselves a part, seems entirely incapable of understanding, let alone repairing, the harm it has done to its own cause….

It’s not the extreme or otherwise ill-advised policy recommendations of the greens that have turned opinion against action of any kind, though I grant you they’re no help. It’s the diminished credibility of the claim that we have a problem in the first place. That is why Climategate mattered. And that is why these absurd “vindications” of the climate scientists involved also matter.

The economic burdens of mitigating climate change will not be shouldered until a sufficient number of voters believe the problem is real, serious, and pressing. Restoring confidence in climate science has to come first. That, in turn, means trusting voters with all of the doubts and unanswered questions — with inconvenient data as well as data that confirm the story — instead of misleading them (unintentionally, of course) into believing that everything is cut and dried. The inquiries could have started that process. They have further delayed it.

For the rest of this article from The Atlantic, click here.