The following article expresses the opinion of two professional geologists on what are truly the causes of global warming. I think it represents the opinion of most geologists, (certainly everyone I know). The truth is being drowned out by the political and social motives of those people who are (sadly) gaining more power than ever. Read the article and let's hear what you think.
Peter
Causes of Global Warming, Are We Certain? (.pdf) November 28, 2007 The Professional Geologist
The November/December, 2007 issue of The Professional Geologist has contains an article titled “Causes of Global Warming, Are We Certain?” by Robert G. Corbett and Gary Dannemiller. Found on pages 12 through 15 it contains a contrarian perspective on the idea that burning fossil fuels makes significant contributions to global warming.
Friday, December 19, 2008
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Carbon Dioxide, Ocean Acidification And Global Warming
Here is another geological, or geochemical explanation of why slightly increasing levels of carbon dioxide are not going to destroy planet Earth. Are mankinds carbon dioxide emissions causing global warming and climate change? Impossible.
Peter
Not Enough CO2 in Fossil Fuels to Make Oceans Acidic: A Note from Professor Plimer
Posted by admin, October 24th, 2008 - under Opinion.Tags: Climate & Climate Change, Coral Reefs
In response to a question concerning the likelihood of our oceans becoming acidic from global warming Ian Plimer, University of Adelaide, has replied:
THE oceans have remained alkaline during the Phanerozoic (last 540 million years) except for a very brief and poorly understood time 55 million years ago.
Rainwater (pH 5.6) reacts with the most common minerals on Earth (feldspars) to produce clays, this is an acid consuming reaction, alkali and alkaline earths are leached into the oceans (which is why we have saline oceans), silica is redeposited as cements in sediments, the reaction consumes acid and is accelerated by temperature (see below).
In the oceans, there is a buffering reaction between the sea floor basalts and sea water (see below). Sea water has a local and regional variation in pH (pH 7.8 to 8.3). It should be noted that pH is a log scale and that if we are to create acid oceans, then there is not enough CO2 in fossil fuels to create oceanic acidity because most of the planet’s CO2 is locked up in rocks.
When we run out of rocks on Earth or plate tectonics ceases, then we will have acid oceans.
In the Precambrian, it is these reactions that rapidly responded to huge changes in climate (-40 deg C to +50 deg C), large sea level changes (+ 600m to -640m) and rapid climate shifts over a few thousand years from ’snowball’ or ’slushball’ Earth to very hot conditions (e.g. Neoproterozoic cap carbonates that formed in water at ~50 deg C lie directly on glacial rocks). During these times, there were rapid changes in oceanic pH and CO2 was removed from the oceans as carbonate. It is from this time onwards (750 Ma) that life started to extract huge amounts of CO2 from the oceans, life has expanded and diversified and this process continues (which is why we have low CO2 today.
The history of CO2 and temperature shows that there is no correlation.
Ask your local warmer:
1. Why was CO2 15 times higher than now in the Ordovician-Silurian glaciation?
2. Why were both methane and CO2 higher than now in the Permian glaciation?
3. Why was CO2 5 times higher than now in the Cretaceous-Jurassic glaciation?
The process of removing CO2 from the atmosphere via the oceans has led to carbonate deposition (i.e. CO2 sequestration).
The atmosphere once had at least 25 times the current CO2 content, we are living at a time when CO2 is the lowest it has been for billions of years, we continue to remove CO2 via carbonate sedimentation from the oceans and the oceans continue to be buffered by water-rock reactions (as shown by Walker et al. 1981).
The literature on this subject is large yet the warmers chose to ignore this literature.
These feldspar and silicate buffering reactions are well understood, there is a huge amount of thermodynamic data on these reactions and they just happened to be omitted from argument by the warmers.
When ocean pH changes, the carbon species responds and in more acid oceans CO2 as a dissolved gas becomes more abundant.
Royer, D. L., Berner, R. A. and Park, J. 2007: Climate sensitivity constrained by CO2 concentrations over the past 420 million years. Nature 446: 530-532.
Bice, K. L., Huber, B. T. and Norris, R. D. 2003: Extreme polar warmth during the Cretaceous greenhouse? Paradox of Turonian ∂18O record at Deep Sea Drilling Project Site 511. Palaeoceanography 18:1-11.
Veizer, J., Godderis, Y. and Francois, L. M. 2000: Evidence for decoupling of atmospheric CO2 and global climate during the Phanerozoic eon. Nature 408: 698-701.
Donnadieu, Y., Pierehumbert, R., Jacob, R. and Fluteau, F. 2006: Cretaceous climate decoupled from CO2 evolution. Earth and Planetary Science Letters 248: 426-437.
Hay, W. W., Wold, C. N., Soeding, E. and Floegel, S. 2001: Evolution of sediment fluxes and ocean salinity. In: Geologic modeling and simulation: sedimentary systems (Eds Merriam, D. F. and Davis, J. C.),
Kluwer, 163-167.Knauth, L. P. 2005: Temperature and salinity history of the Precambrian ocean: implications for the course of microbial evolution. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 219: 53-69.
Rogers, J. J. W. 1996: A history of the continents in the past three billion years. Journal of Geology 104: 91-107.
Velbel, M. A. 1993: Temperature dependence of silicate weathering in nature: How strong a negative feedback on long-term accumulation of atmospheric CO2 and global greenhouse warming? Geology 21:1059-1061
Kump, L. R., Brantley, S. L. and Arthur, M. A. 2000: Chemical weathering, atmospheric CO2 and climate. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 28: 611-667.
Gaillardet, J., Dupré, B., Louvat, P. and Allègre, C. J. 1999: Global silicate weathering and CO2 consumption rates deduced from the chemistry of large rivers. Chemical Geology 159: 3-30.
Berner, R. A., Lasagna, A. C. and Garrels, R. M. 1983: The carbonate-silicate geochemical cycle and its effect on atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past 100 million years. American Journal of Science 283: 641-683.
Raymo, M. E. and Ruddiman, W. F. 1992: Tectonic forcing of late Cenozoic climate. Nature 359: 117-122.Walker, J. C. B., Hays, P. B. and Kasting, J. F. 1981: A negative feedback mechanism for the long term stabilization of the Earth’s surface temperature. Journal of Geophysical Research 86: 9776-9782.
Berner, R. A. 1980: Global CO2 degassing and the carbon cycle: comment on ‘Cretaceous ocean crust at DSDP sites 417 and 418: carbon uptake from weathering vs loss by magmatic activity.” Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 54: 2889.
Schwartzman, D. W. and Volk, T. 1989: Biotic enhancement of weathering and the habitability of Earth. Nature 311: 45-47.
Berner, R. A. 1980: Global CO2 degassing and the carbon cycle: comment on ‘Cretaceous ocean crust at DSDP sites 417 and 418: carbon uptake from weathering vs loss by magmatic activity.” Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 54: 2889. CO2 + H2O = H2CO3 H2CO3 = H+ + HCO3- 2Ca2+ + 2HCO3- + KAl2AlSi3O10(OH)2 + 4H2O = 3Al3+ + K+ + 6SiO2 + 12H2O 2KAlSi3O8 + 2H+ + H2O = Al2Si2O5(OH)4 + 2K+ + 4SiO2 2NaAlSi3O8 + 2H+ + H2O = Al2Si2O5(OH)4 + 2K+ + 4SiO2 CaAl2Si2O8 + 2H+ + H2O = Al2Si2O5(OH)4 + Ca2+ KAl2AlSi3O10(OH)2 + 3Si(OH)4 + 10H+ = 3Al3+ + K+ + 6SiO2 + 12H2O CO2 + CaSiO3 = CaCO3 + SiO2 CO2 + FeSiO3 = FeCO3 + SiO2 CO2 + MgSiO3 = MgCO3 + SiO2
In the oceans, CO2 exists as dissolved gas (1%), HCO3- (93%) and CO32- (8%)
Peter
Not Enough CO2 in Fossil Fuels to Make Oceans Acidic: A Note from Professor Plimer
Posted by admin, October 24th, 2008 - under Opinion.Tags: Climate & Climate Change, Coral Reefs
In response to a question concerning the likelihood of our oceans becoming acidic from global warming Ian Plimer, University of Adelaide, has replied:
THE oceans have remained alkaline during the Phanerozoic (last 540 million years) except for a very brief and poorly understood time 55 million years ago.
Rainwater (pH 5.6) reacts with the most common minerals on Earth (feldspars) to produce clays, this is an acid consuming reaction, alkali and alkaline earths are leached into the oceans (which is why we have saline oceans), silica is redeposited as cements in sediments, the reaction consumes acid and is accelerated by temperature (see below).
In the oceans, there is a buffering reaction between the sea floor basalts and sea water (see below). Sea water has a local and regional variation in pH (pH 7.8 to 8.3). It should be noted that pH is a log scale and that if we are to create acid oceans, then there is not enough CO2 in fossil fuels to create oceanic acidity because most of the planet’s CO2 is locked up in rocks.
When we run out of rocks on Earth or plate tectonics ceases, then we will have acid oceans.
In the Precambrian, it is these reactions that rapidly responded to huge changes in climate (-40 deg C to +50 deg C), large sea level changes (+ 600m to -640m) and rapid climate shifts over a few thousand years from ’snowball’ or ’slushball’ Earth to very hot conditions (e.g. Neoproterozoic cap carbonates that formed in water at ~50 deg C lie directly on glacial rocks). During these times, there were rapid changes in oceanic pH and CO2 was removed from the oceans as carbonate. It is from this time onwards (750 Ma) that life started to extract huge amounts of CO2 from the oceans, life has expanded and diversified and this process continues (which is why we have low CO2 today.
The history of CO2 and temperature shows that there is no correlation.
Ask your local warmer:
1. Why was CO2 15 times higher than now in the Ordovician-Silurian glaciation?
2. Why were both methane and CO2 higher than now in the Permian glaciation?
3. Why was CO2 5 times higher than now in the Cretaceous-Jurassic glaciation?
The process of removing CO2 from the atmosphere via the oceans has led to carbonate deposition (i.e. CO2 sequestration).
The atmosphere once had at least 25 times the current CO2 content, we are living at a time when CO2 is the lowest it has been for billions of years, we continue to remove CO2 via carbonate sedimentation from the oceans and the oceans continue to be buffered by water-rock reactions (as shown by Walker et al. 1981).
The literature on this subject is large yet the warmers chose to ignore this literature.
These feldspar and silicate buffering reactions are well understood, there is a huge amount of thermodynamic data on these reactions and they just happened to be omitted from argument by the warmers.
When ocean pH changes, the carbon species responds and in more acid oceans CO2 as a dissolved gas becomes more abundant.
Royer, D. L., Berner, R. A. and Park, J. 2007: Climate sensitivity constrained by CO2 concentrations over the past 420 million years. Nature 446: 530-532.
Bice, K. L., Huber, B. T. and Norris, R. D. 2003: Extreme polar warmth during the Cretaceous greenhouse? Paradox of Turonian ∂18O record at Deep Sea Drilling Project Site 511. Palaeoceanography 18:1-11.
Veizer, J., Godderis, Y. and Francois, L. M. 2000: Evidence for decoupling of atmospheric CO2 and global climate during the Phanerozoic eon. Nature 408: 698-701.
Donnadieu, Y., Pierehumbert, R., Jacob, R. and Fluteau, F. 2006: Cretaceous climate decoupled from CO2 evolution. Earth and Planetary Science Letters 248: 426-437.
Hay, W. W., Wold, C. N., Soeding, E. and Floegel, S. 2001: Evolution of sediment fluxes and ocean salinity. In: Geologic modeling and simulation: sedimentary systems (Eds Merriam, D. F. and Davis, J. C.),
Kluwer, 163-167.Knauth, L. P. 2005: Temperature and salinity history of the Precambrian ocean: implications for the course of microbial evolution. Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaeoecology 219: 53-69.
Rogers, J. J. W. 1996: A history of the continents in the past three billion years. Journal of Geology 104: 91-107.
Velbel, M. A. 1993: Temperature dependence of silicate weathering in nature: How strong a negative feedback on long-term accumulation of atmospheric CO2 and global greenhouse warming? Geology 21:1059-1061
Kump, L. R., Brantley, S. L. and Arthur, M. A. 2000: Chemical weathering, atmospheric CO2 and climate. Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences 28: 611-667.
Gaillardet, J., Dupré, B., Louvat, P. and Allègre, C. J. 1999: Global silicate weathering and CO2 consumption rates deduced from the chemistry of large rivers. Chemical Geology 159: 3-30.
Berner, R. A., Lasagna, A. C. and Garrels, R. M. 1983: The carbonate-silicate geochemical cycle and its effect on atmospheric carbon dioxide over the past 100 million years. American Journal of Science 283: 641-683.
Raymo, M. E. and Ruddiman, W. F. 1992: Tectonic forcing of late Cenozoic climate. Nature 359: 117-122.Walker, J. C. B., Hays, P. B. and Kasting, J. F. 1981: A negative feedback mechanism for the long term stabilization of the Earth’s surface temperature. Journal of Geophysical Research 86: 9776-9782.
Berner, R. A. 1980: Global CO2 degassing and the carbon cycle: comment on ‘Cretaceous ocean crust at DSDP sites 417 and 418: carbon uptake from weathering vs loss by magmatic activity.” Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 54: 2889.
Schwartzman, D. W. and Volk, T. 1989: Biotic enhancement of weathering and the habitability of Earth. Nature 311: 45-47.
Berner, R. A. 1980: Global CO2 degassing and the carbon cycle: comment on ‘Cretaceous ocean crust at DSDP sites 417 and 418: carbon uptake from weathering vs loss by magmatic activity.” Geochimica et Cosmochimica Acta 54: 2889. CO2 + H2O = H2CO3 H2CO3 = H+ + HCO3- 2Ca2+ + 2HCO3- + KAl2AlSi3O10(OH)2 + 4H2O = 3Al3+ + K+ + 6SiO2 + 12H2O 2KAlSi3O8 + 2H+ + H2O = Al2Si2O5(OH)4 + 2K+ + 4SiO2 2NaAlSi3O8 + 2H+ + H2O = Al2Si2O5(OH)4 + 2K+ + 4SiO2 CaAl2Si2O8 + 2H+ + H2O = Al2Si2O5(OH)4 + Ca2+ KAl2AlSi3O10(OH)2 + 3Si(OH)4 + 10H+ = 3Al3+ + K+ + 6SiO2 + 12H2O CO2 + CaSiO3 = CaCO3 + SiO2 CO2 + FeSiO3 = FeCO3 + SiO2 CO2 + MgSiO3 = MgCO3 + SiO2
In the oceans, CO2 exists as dissolved gas (1%), HCO3- (93%) and CO32- (8%)
Monday, October 13, 2008
Seeking the Truth About Global Warming and Climate Change
This article comes from Britain. It is comforting to read how people from many different walks of life are speaking out against the myth of man-caused global warming. These are experienced and educated people. They are far from being radicals or extremists, and it is absurd for anyone to refer to them as deniers, equating that to those rare eccentrics who deny the holocaust. Read what these global warming skeptics have to say.
Peter
The climate change unbelievers
Global warming is happening and we're to blame, right? That's certainly the view of almost every expert in the field. But a die-hard band of naysayers continues to rail against the consensus. Are they completely mad? Judge for yourself...
By Tim Walker Sunday, 12 October 2008 (source)
The caption calls him the "high priest of deceit and global destruction". The picture has him belching fire like a dragon. And who is the subject of this highly personal attack? None other than Al Gore, who last year won the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for their success in bringing the climate-change crisis to global public attention.
Not everybody likes Gore and his beliefs about the future of our planet – and especially not Hans Schreuder, the 62-year-old former chemist who runs the Gore-baiting website Ilovemycarbondioxide.com (see page 29). Schreuder is one of the climate-change sceptics who continue to make their case despite the mounting evidence of climate change that we, the public, are presented with every day; despite the unanimous endorsement of climate-change theory by every national academy of science in the industrialised world.
Even President Bush, who stalled developments for so long, has conceded that climate change is real, and caused by man-made carbon emissions. And even Bush has tried, however half-heartedly, to do something about it in the last days of his administration. (Though the big challenge remains to persuade the new major emitters – China and India – to sign any agreement on reductions.)
The sceptics declare that the central evidence for carbon-driven climate change in the reports of the IPCC are nonsense. Specifically, the "hockey stick" graph, which correlates the steep rise in world temperatures to the steep rise in carbon emissions, and which Gore demonstrates, with the help of a hydraulic crane, in his film An Inconvenient Truth. Gore's opponents say there's evidence that world temperatures have, in fact, begun to fall since 2000.
In 2005, the House of Lords Economics Committee voiced "concerns" about the objectivity of the IPCC, suggesting some of the agency's emissions projections were "influenced by political considerations". The committee's claims were subsequently rejected by the Government and the Stern Review on the economics of climate change, but the vested-interests argument unites sceptics, and mirrors the accusations often levelled at them in turn, that they are in the pockets of big oil, big gas, or the US Republican Party.
The sceptics come from the worlds of politics, economics, television and, crucially, science. David Bellamy (opposite), a professor of botany who was formerly the televisual face of eco-evangelism, has been compared with a Holocaust denier because he doesn't believe carbon emissions cause climate change. Climatologist Piers Corbyn (page 25) is convinced climate change is caused by solar activity, not CO2. Economist Ruth Lea (page 25) warns of the IPCC's political and business interests. Martin Durkin (page 28), maker of the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, says the green industry is in too deep to afford to acknowledge scientific law. And the former Chancellor, Nigel Lawson (page 27), maintains that though the science of climate change could be broadly correct, its consequences have been exaggerated.
Should we give their opinions the time of day? Whether you agree or not (and chances are you won't), the climate-change sceptics have no intention of shutting up.
The conservationist: David Bellamy
David Bellamy is an environmental campaigner and former television presenter. He was senior lecturer in Botany at Durham University until 1982, where he is now an honorary professor
"Global warming is the biggest scam since the church sold indulgences back in the Middle Ages. If our Government actually believes that all those people are going to die, why did it build Terminal Five?
"I've been doing research on the stability of ecosystems, which is all tied up with human activity, for 22 years. That's why I became a leading greenie in the early days. I have probably stood on more picket lines than anyone to stop forest-clearing, wind farms and the overfishing of the sea. But when the scientific arguments don't add up, one starts to question them: CO2 levels have risen in the atmosphere, but why don't all the other bits of science fall in around that?
"The speed of retreat of glaciers worldwide has not changed. The latest data shows that both the northern and southern ice caps are actually growing. The recent studies of the ice core show that rises in temperature are followed by a release of carbon dioxide, not the other way around. I'll be in New Zealand soon, and two of the major glaciers there are growing like the clappers. And from 1998 there has been no rise at all in the temperature of the earth. Indeed, all the sunspot data tells us we're headed for 15 very cold years.
"Many peer-reviewed papers show that as CO2 goes up, many plants and forests grow up to 40 per cent faster. The New Scientist has reported that 300,000 square kilometres of former desert are now covered with trees. Why don't we have all those good points publicised?
"Global temperature has risen at a natural rate that began 300 years ago. That slope of change has not changed since then, so how can we say that carbon is the driver? The sun has more correlations with temperature change than carbon.
"The whole world is hooked on a fear of carbon, and there really is nothing to fear.
"The scientific consensus is not strong, but every time I turn on the television or read a newspaper, I hear that it is. The BBC constantly tells us the lakes in Africa are drying up because of global warming. The lakes are drying up because of the dams around them, and the fact that we are using that local water to produce cut flowers for the European market. Why aren't we told these things?
"If you go through the peer-reviewed literature on our side of the argument, it's near-unanimous in not predicting climate catastrophe. But it has got to a state of McCarthyism within science. As a university don, I used to try to get every tenth paper of mine into [the weekly science journal] Nature. But Nature will not touch any papers which are anti the global-warming ethic. I have been called a Holocaust denier. If they weren't really frightened they were losing the argument, they wouldn't write those things."
The economist: Ruth Lea
Ruth Lea is economic adviser to the Arbuthnot Banking Group, and formerly held positions including director of the Centre for Policy Studies, head of the Policy Unit at the Institute of Directors, and economics editor of ITN
"The foundation of our climate-change policy is the projections made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). We've signed up to the IPCC, as an agency of the UN, and it's portrayed as an impartial, independent scientific organisation. In fact, it's highly political, most of its members are governmental appointees, and it contains a strong element of evangelical environmentalism. But whatever you think about it politically, you have to look at its projections, as they are core to the whole debate.
"The IPCC makes assumptions on economic growth, assumptions on fuel prices and demographics, then it puts all these assumptions into a model, which produces a forecast for carbon-dioxide emissions. Then it puts those results into a climate model, which predicts temperature change for the next century.
"I wouldn't claim to be qualified to speak about the climate models, but as an economist and statistician, I look at its predictions for economic growth, fuel consumption, demographics and so on, and I ask myself how it can possibly know what these will be by the end of the century.
"I made some economic forecasts about six weeks ago, and then we were hit by a financial crisis, so who knows where fuel costs are going? Yet the IPCC says it knows what'll be happening in 100 years' time.
"Climate-change policy is predicated on the IPCC stuff being taken as gospel. When I started to study the economics, I was shocked. Like many people, I assumed the IPCC findings were rock- solid and unquestionable. But when I looked at how it made its projections, I was horrified. I don't think people realise the vast uncertainties. When you hear people saying the temperature is going to rise by four degrees this century, do you hear anyone explaining that there's only a 0.001 probability that will happen? No.
"I wrote a sceptical letter to the FT in 2006, and there was a very dismissive, patronising, curt response from the Royal Society as if to say, 'How dare you question any of this?' I was amazed at its tone. And the writer and environmentalist George Monbiot has accused me of being financed by the oil companies. If only!
"Anybody who disputes the IPCC's projections is branded a Holocaust denier. I find that offensive. If I had relatives who'd been murdered in the Holocaust, I'd be beside myself with anger.
"When I started to utter my views, I discovered there were quite a few vested interests in green industry, not least in carbon-trading. And boy, they didn't like it. Questioning this stuff rips away the foundations of their business.
"There are probably more economists in a position to speak freely than there are scientists – we can afford to. The problem for scientists is that they have to go along with government policy, which currently states that we're all going to be fried alive in the next 50 years."
The climatologist: Piers Corbyn
Piers Corbyn is the maverick weather forecaster and owner of Weather Action, which makes forecasts up to a year in advance based on Corbyn's theory of the 'Solar Weather Technique'
"There's no evidence that carbon dioxide drives world temperatures or climate change. The 'hockey stick' is fraud, Al Gore's film is fraud, and schemes to remove CO2 from the atmosphere by machines are a scam.
"Temperatures rose since about 1915, but if you look in more detail, estimates show that they've declined since 2002. As it grew, the global-warming empire set about trying to find data to prove its case, but the data it found actually disproves its case. That's why the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment Project doesn't highlight the results that negate the theory.
"The idea that climate change causes extreme weather is preposterous. The average number of landfall storms per decade in the US was higher between 1900 and 1960 than in the past 30 or so years. I've met scientists who've said I'm probably right, but if you're in a university funded to research global warming, you're not going to speak up.
"People say that I oppose climate-change theory because I want my way of forecasting to be proved right. But the reason I think the CO2 theory is wrong is that the CO2 theory is wrong."
The politician: Nigel Lawson
Now Lord Lawson of Blaby, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer this year published 'An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming', in which he was critical of climate-change policy, including the Kyoto Protocol and the Stern Review
"There has been no global warming this century, and that is apparent from figures produced by the Hadley Centre, the branch of the UK Met Office that monitors world temperatures.
"There's also uncertainty over the impact of climate change, even if it does happen. If you take the trouble to read the IPCC reports, there's a mixed bag of potential consequences, some of them beneficial.
"After the hot summer of 2003, the Department of Health looked into what might happen in the UK if the temperature by 2050 matched predictions. It found there would be an increase in deaths from dehydration of 2,000 per year, but a reduction in deaths from hypothermia of 20,000 per year.
"We're told that there has to be a global agreement to deal with global warming, to cut back drastically on carbon-dioxide emissions, but it's simply not going to happen. The Chinese and Indians have made it clear that they're not going to cut back, and with good reason. Their number-one priority is to get their people out of poverty. That means the most rapid possible rate of growth, which means using the cheapest available form of energy, which, now and for the foreseeable future, is carbon-based energy.
"If warming occurs, we should adapt, as mankind has always done. People live in a whole range of climates already. Technology will develop in ways that we can't predict. We can help poor countries to adapt with aid programmes, which will be infinitely cheaper than wrecking our own economies.
"There is a great clash going on between the developing world and the developed world over this, which is politically dangerous. People as diverse as the EU industry commissioner, President Sarkozy of France, and the Democrats in the US Congress, are saying that if China and India won't cut back emissions, then we must impose tariffs on their goods. That kind of retreat into protectionism would be very damaging economically.
"Still, I think you'll find now that both major parties are giving this issue a lot less prominence than they were a year ago, and that is all to the good. The last thing we want is foolish and damaging commitments being made."'
The polemicist: Martin Durkin
Martin Durkin is the documentary-maker behind The Great Global Warming Swindle, which was shown on Channel 4 in 2007 and became the subject of an Ofcom enquiry. He was already known as the 'scourge of the greens' for some of his previous work, including the 1997 series Against Nature, which was critical of the environmental movement
"The premise of The Great Global Warming Swindle was that climate-change science doesn't stack up. We had to ask, if it's true that the science is weak, then why the scare? It had to be about the phenomenon of a scare as much as the science.
"Take BSE; we were told that half the population would die because we'd all eaten dodgy hamburgers. It was backed by the Government's chief scientist, yet it is now acknowledged as nonsense. Anyone with a long memory will remember the 'next ice age' scare in the early-1970s. There is a culture that produces scares.
"My first brush with the environmental movement came about 12 years ago, when Channel 4 asked me to make a series about it. There was a long line of environmental scares – about population, resource depletion, GM food – and I wanted to find out whether they were rational.
"I discovered quickly that a section of society – broadly speaking, the bureaucratic middle-classes – are instinctively anti-industry, anti-supermarkets, anti-cars. Scientists, teachers and university lecturers are part of this section. They fall into a tradition of romantic anti-capitalism, which finds modernity aesthetically distasteful. They used to have a disparate set of prejudices, but global warming linked them all up and gave them the uber-apocalypse they were after.
"If they cause a rumpus, then politicians will say, 'We're putting £20m into research' because they want to be seen to be doing something. Then anyone who's doing a PhD in stoats is advised by their supervisor to do it on stoats in relation to global warming, which releases those funds.
"Objectively, it is staggeringly obvious that climate-change science is complete twaddle. There is no correlation, on any meaningful timescale whatsoever, between CO2 and temperature. Take the politics and the grants out of it, and no one would take it seriously.
"Nearly all the letters we get are positive: if this was a working-class movement, or some rough types believed in it, then I might have been threatened. But they're just a bunch of quiche-eating hippies. What are they going to do – wave their panini at me?
"I think they're trying to inhibit progress, to stifle people's creativity and freedom, and hold back development, particularly in poor countries. It's like Laurens van der Post, the anthropologist who studied African tribes and jolly well didn't want them to change because their culture was so interesting. Well, Van der Post lived in a nice flat in Chelsea while the poor bastards out in Africa were eating mud. I'm in favour of us all leading better lives.
"How conscious were the Nazis of what they were doing? Look at DDT, the insecticide that the greens had banned internationally, thereby causing the deaths of about 50 million people [due to malaria]. We should be made conscious of the consequences of our actions."
The activist: Hans Schreuder
Hans Schreuder is a former analytical chemist from the Netherlands, now living in Suffolk. After retiring, he set up the website www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com to back his hypothesis that carbon dioxide bears no relation to global warming.
"I qualified as an analytical chemist in Holland in 1968 and spent about 15 years in analytical chemistry.
"I set up my site last year to prove that carbon dioxide is irrelevant to climate and climate change. I get about 5,000 or 6,000 hits every month. I wrote my final page in June, but I still publish papers by other people.
"What I want to get across is the fallacy that man can influence the climate by means of a fictitious greenhouse effect. It is just such a laughable idea, yet the western world has bought into it. The problem is, there's way too much money in it to dump it. But in the cold reality of Nature, there is no problem whatsoever with carbon dioxide.
"I'm off to Holland for a publicity stunt. I have a big 'I love my carbon dioxide' banner and a friend of mine wants to jump in the water around the parliament building in The Hague with it.
"I haven't been targeted by activists, which is a shame, as that would have created publicity. I called Al Gore a liar and lots of other things on the site, because I was hoping someone would sue me for defamation. But nobody has bothered."
Peter
The climate change unbelievers
Global warming is happening and we're to blame, right? That's certainly the view of almost every expert in the field. But a die-hard band of naysayers continues to rail against the consensus. Are they completely mad? Judge for yourself...
By Tim Walker Sunday, 12 October 2008 (source)
The caption calls him the "high priest of deceit and global destruction". The picture has him belching fire like a dragon. And who is the subject of this highly personal attack? None other than Al Gore, who last year won the Nobel Peace Prize, along with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), for their success in bringing the climate-change crisis to global public attention.
Not everybody likes Gore and his beliefs about the future of our planet – and especially not Hans Schreuder, the 62-year-old former chemist who runs the Gore-baiting website Ilovemycarbondioxide.com (see page 29). Schreuder is one of the climate-change sceptics who continue to make their case despite the mounting evidence of climate change that we, the public, are presented with every day; despite the unanimous endorsement of climate-change theory by every national academy of science in the industrialised world.
Even President Bush, who stalled developments for so long, has conceded that climate change is real, and caused by man-made carbon emissions. And even Bush has tried, however half-heartedly, to do something about it in the last days of his administration. (Though the big challenge remains to persuade the new major emitters – China and India – to sign any agreement on reductions.)
The sceptics declare that the central evidence for carbon-driven climate change in the reports of the IPCC are nonsense. Specifically, the "hockey stick" graph, which correlates the steep rise in world temperatures to the steep rise in carbon emissions, and which Gore demonstrates, with the help of a hydraulic crane, in his film An Inconvenient Truth. Gore's opponents say there's evidence that world temperatures have, in fact, begun to fall since 2000.
In 2005, the House of Lords Economics Committee voiced "concerns" about the objectivity of the IPCC, suggesting some of the agency's emissions projections were "influenced by political considerations". The committee's claims were subsequently rejected by the Government and the Stern Review on the economics of climate change, but the vested-interests argument unites sceptics, and mirrors the accusations often levelled at them in turn, that they are in the pockets of big oil, big gas, or the US Republican Party.
The sceptics come from the worlds of politics, economics, television and, crucially, science. David Bellamy (opposite), a professor of botany who was formerly the televisual face of eco-evangelism, has been compared with a Holocaust denier because he doesn't believe carbon emissions cause climate change. Climatologist Piers Corbyn (page 25) is convinced climate change is caused by solar activity, not CO2. Economist Ruth Lea (page 25) warns of the IPCC's political and business interests. Martin Durkin (page 28), maker of the documentary The Great Global Warming Swindle, says the green industry is in too deep to afford to acknowledge scientific law. And the former Chancellor, Nigel Lawson (page 27), maintains that though the science of climate change could be broadly correct, its consequences have been exaggerated.
Should we give their opinions the time of day? Whether you agree or not (and chances are you won't), the climate-change sceptics have no intention of shutting up.
The conservationist: David Bellamy
David Bellamy is an environmental campaigner and former television presenter. He was senior lecturer in Botany at Durham University until 1982, where he is now an honorary professor
"Global warming is the biggest scam since the church sold indulgences back in the Middle Ages. If our Government actually believes that all those people are going to die, why did it build Terminal Five?
"I've been doing research on the stability of ecosystems, which is all tied up with human activity, for 22 years. That's why I became a leading greenie in the early days. I have probably stood on more picket lines than anyone to stop forest-clearing, wind farms and the overfishing of the sea. But when the scientific arguments don't add up, one starts to question them: CO2 levels have risen in the atmosphere, but why don't all the other bits of science fall in around that?
"The speed of retreat of glaciers worldwide has not changed. The latest data shows that both the northern and southern ice caps are actually growing. The recent studies of the ice core show that rises in temperature are followed by a release of carbon dioxide, not the other way around. I'll be in New Zealand soon, and two of the major glaciers there are growing like the clappers. And from 1998 there has been no rise at all in the temperature of the earth. Indeed, all the sunspot data tells us we're headed for 15 very cold years.
"Many peer-reviewed papers show that as CO2 goes up, many plants and forests grow up to 40 per cent faster. The New Scientist has reported that 300,000 square kilometres of former desert are now covered with trees. Why don't we have all those good points publicised?
"Global temperature has risen at a natural rate that began 300 years ago. That slope of change has not changed since then, so how can we say that carbon is the driver? The sun has more correlations with temperature change than carbon.
"The whole world is hooked on a fear of carbon, and there really is nothing to fear.
"The scientific consensus is not strong, but every time I turn on the television or read a newspaper, I hear that it is. The BBC constantly tells us the lakes in Africa are drying up because of global warming. The lakes are drying up because of the dams around them, and the fact that we are using that local water to produce cut flowers for the European market. Why aren't we told these things?
"If you go through the peer-reviewed literature on our side of the argument, it's near-unanimous in not predicting climate catastrophe. But it has got to a state of McCarthyism within science. As a university don, I used to try to get every tenth paper of mine into [the weekly science journal] Nature. But Nature will not touch any papers which are anti the global-warming ethic. I have been called a Holocaust denier. If they weren't really frightened they were losing the argument, they wouldn't write those things."
The economist: Ruth Lea
Ruth Lea is economic adviser to the Arbuthnot Banking Group, and formerly held positions including director of the Centre for Policy Studies, head of the Policy Unit at the Institute of Directors, and economics editor of ITN
"The foundation of our climate-change policy is the projections made by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). We've signed up to the IPCC, as an agency of the UN, and it's portrayed as an impartial, independent scientific organisation. In fact, it's highly political, most of its members are governmental appointees, and it contains a strong element of evangelical environmentalism. But whatever you think about it politically, you have to look at its projections, as they are core to the whole debate.
"The IPCC makes assumptions on economic growth, assumptions on fuel prices and demographics, then it puts all these assumptions into a model, which produces a forecast for carbon-dioxide emissions. Then it puts those results into a climate model, which predicts temperature change for the next century.
"I wouldn't claim to be qualified to speak about the climate models, but as an economist and statistician, I look at its predictions for economic growth, fuel consumption, demographics and so on, and I ask myself how it can possibly know what these will be by the end of the century.
"I made some economic forecasts about six weeks ago, and then we were hit by a financial crisis, so who knows where fuel costs are going? Yet the IPCC says it knows what'll be happening in 100 years' time.
"Climate-change policy is predicated on the IPCC stuff being taken as gospel. When I started to study the economics, I was shocked. Like many people, I assumed the IPCC findings were rock- solid and unquestionable. But when I looked at how it made its projections, I was horrified. I don't think people realise the vast uncertainties. When you hear people saying the temperature is going to rise by four degrees this century, do you hear anyone explaining that there's only a 0.001 probability that will happen? No.
"I wrote a sceptical letter to the FT in 2006, and there was a very dismissive, patronising, curt response from the Royal Society as if to say, 'How dare you question any of this?' I was amazed at its tone. And the writer and environmentalist George Monbiot has accused me of being financed by the oil companies. If only!
"Anybody who disputes the IPCC's projections is branded a Holocaust denier. I find that offensive. If I had relatives who'd been murdered in the Holocaust, I'd be beside myself with anger.
"When I started to utter my views, I discovered there were quite a few vested interests in green industry, not least in carbon-trading. And boy, they didn't like it. Questioning this stuff rips away the foundations of their business.
"There are probably more economists in a position to speak freely than there are scientists – we can afford to. The problem for scientists is that they have to go along with government policy, which currently states that we're all going to be fried alive in the next 50 years."
The climatologist: Piers Corbyn
Piers Corbyn is the maverick weather forecaster and owner of Weather Action, which makes forecasts up to a year in advance based on Corbyn's theory of the 'Solar Weather Technique'
"There's no evidence that carbon dioxide drives world temperatures or climate change. The 'hockey stick' is fraud, Al Gore's film is fraud, and schemes to remove CO2 from the atmosphere by machines are a scam.
"Temperatures rose since about 1915, but if you look in more detail, estimates show that they've declined since 2002. As it grew, the global-warming empire set about trying to find data to prove its case, but the data it found actually disproves its case. That's why the Arctic Climate Impact Assessment Project doesn't highlight the results that negate the theory.
"The idea that climate change causes extreme weather is preposterous. The average number of landfall storms per decade in the US was higher between 1900 and 1960 than in the past 30 or so years. I've met scientists who've said I'm probably right, but if you're in a university funded to research global warming, you're not going to speak up.
"People say that I oppose climate-change theory because I want my way of forecasting to be proved right. But the reason I think the CO2 theory is wrong is that the CO2 theory is wrong."
The politician: Nigel Lawson
Now Lord Lawson of Blaby, the former Chancellor of the Exchequer this year published 'An Appeal to Reason: A Cool Look at Global Warming', in which he was critical of climate-change policy, including the Kyoto Protocol and the Stern Review
"There has been no global warming this century, and that is apparent from figures produced by the Hadley Centre, the branch of the UK Met Office that monitors world temperatures.
"There's also uncertainty over the impact of climate change, even if it does happen. If you take the trouble to read the IPCC reports, there's a mixed bag of potential consequences, some of them beneficial.
"After the hot summer of 2003, the Department of Health looked into what might happen in the UK if the temperature by 2050 matched predictions. It found there would be an increase in deaths from dehydration of 2,000 per year, but a reduction in deaths from hypothermia of 20,000 per year.
"We're told that there has to be a global agreement to deal with global warming, to cut back drastically on carbon-dioxide emissions, but it's simply not going to happen. The Chinese and Indians have made it clear that they're not going to cut back, and with good reason. Their number-one priority is to get their people out of poverty. That means the most rapid possible rate of growth, which means using the cheapest available form of energy, which, now and for the foreseeable future, is carbon-based energy.
"If warming occurs, we should adapt, as mankind has always done. People live in a whole range of climates already. Technology will develop in ways that we can't predict. We can help poor countries to adapt with aid programmes, which will be infinitely cheaper than wrecking our own economies.
"There is a great clash going on between the developing world and the developed world over this, which is politically dangerous. People as diverse as the EU industry commissioner, President Sarkozy of France, and the Democrats in the US Congress, are saying that if China and India won't cut back emissions, then we must impose tariffs on their goods. That kind of retreat into protectionism would be very damaging economically.
"Still, I think you'll find now that both major parties are giving this issue a lot less prominence than they were a year ago, and that is all to the good. The last thing we want is foolish and damaging commitments being made."'
The polemicist: Martin Durkin
Martin Durkin is the documentary-maker behind The Great Global Warming Swindle, which was shown on Channel 4 in 2007 and became the subject of an Ofcom enquiry. He was already known as the 'scourge of the greens' for some of his previous work, including the 1997 series Against Nature, which was critical of the environmental movement
"The premise of The Great Global Warming Swindle was that climate-change science doesn't stack up. We had to ask, if it's true that the science is weak, then why the scare? It had to be about the phenomenon of a scare as much as the science.
"Take BSE; we were told that half the population would die because we'd all eaten dodgy hamburgers. It was backed by the Government's chief scientist, yet it is now acknowledged as nonsense. Anyone with a long memory will remember the 'next ice age' scare in the early-1970s. There is a culture that produces scares.
"My first brush with the environmental movement came about 12 years ago, when Channel 4 asked me to make a series about it. There was a long line of environmental scares – about population, resource depletion, GM food – and I wanted to find out whether they were rational.
"I discovered quickly that a section of society – broadly speaking, the bureaucratic middle-classes – are instinctively anti-industry, anti-supermarkets, anti-cars. Scientists, teachers and university lecturers are part of this section. They fall into a tradition of romantic anti-capitalism, which finds modernity aesthetically distasteful. They used to have a disparate set of prejudices, but global warming linked them all up and gave them the uber-apocalypse they were after.
"If they cause a rumpus, then politicians will say, 'We're putting £20m into research' because they want to be seen to be doing something. Then anyone who's doing a PhD in stoats is advised by their supervisor to do it on stoats in relation to global warming, which releases those funds.
"Objectively, it is staggeringly obvious that climate-change science is complete twaddle. There is no correlation, on any meaningful timescale whatsoever, between CO2 and temperature. Take the politics and the grants out of it, and no one would take it seriously.
"Nearly all the letters we get are positive: if this was a working-class movement, or some rough types believed in it, then I might have been threatened. But they're just a bunch of quiche-eating hippies. What are they going to do – wave their panini at me?
"I think they're trying to inhibit progress, to stifle people's creativity and freedom, and hold back development, particularly in poor countries. It's like Laurens van der Post, the anthropologist who studied African tribes and jolly well didn't want them to change because their culture was so interesting. Well, Van der Post lived in a nice flat in Chelsea while the poor bastards out in Africa were eating mud. I'm in favour of us all leading better lives.
"How conscious were the Nazis of what they were doing? Look at DDT, the insecticide that the greens had banned internationally, thereby causing the deaths of about 50 million people [due to malaria]. We should be made conscious of the consequences of our actions."
The activist: Hans Schreuder
Hans Schreuder is a former analytical chemist from the Netherlands, now living in Suffolk. After retiring, he set up the website www.ilovemycarbondioxide.com to back his hypothesis that carbon dioxide bears no relation to global warming.
"I qualified as an analytical chemist in Holland in 1968 and spent about 15 years in analytical chemistry.
"I set up my site last year to prove that carbon dioxide is irrelevant to climate and climate change. I get about 5,000 or 6,000 hits every month. I wrote my final page in June, but I still publish papers by other people.
"What I want to get across is the fallacy that man can influence the climate by means of a fictitious greenhouse effect. It is just such a laughable idea, yet the western world has bought into it. The problem is, there's way too much money in it to dump it. But in the cold reality of Nature, there is no problem whatsoever with carbon dioxide.
"I'm off to Holland for a publicity stunt. I have a big 'I love my carbon dioxide' banner and a friend of mine wants to jump in the water around the parliament building in The Hague with it.
"I haven't been targeted by activists, which is a shame, as that would have created publicity. I called Al Gore a liar and lots of other things on the site, because I was hoping someone would sue me for defamation. But nobody has bothered."
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Global Warming Alarmism A Threat To Freedom and Democracy
To read more by Mr. Vaclav Klaus and to learn more about global warming, climate change, energy issues, and geology, visit my other blog site here: http://petesplace-peter.blogspot.com/
Peter
Global Warming Alarmism Must Be Challenged
The following article sums up why I and too few other scientists oppose the spread of the myth of man-caused global warming. We see the bigger picture, the cost to America's and the world's economies, the great harm this is doing and will do to people all over the world, AND as Mr. Vaclav Klaus says, it is a grave danger to our very freedom.
Peter
Vaclav Klaus is the current President of the Czech Republic. He gave this speech at the Hilton Hotel in Portland, Oregon on September 30, 2008
Global Warming Alarmism is Unacceptable and Should be Confronted
Written by Vaclav Klaus, Hawaii Reporter Wednesday, 01 October 2008
Many thanks for the invitation and for the opportunity to be here with all of you. I have visited the U.S. many times since the fall of communism in November 1989 when – after almost half a century – traveling to the free world became for people like me possible again, but I’ve never been to this beautiful city and to the state of Oregon before. Once again, thank you very much.I am expected to talk here about global warming today (even though I don’t really feel it, especially not in this room) and my address will be devoted mostly to this issue. As you may expect Oregon is – for me – in this respect connected with the well-known Oregon petition which warned and keeps warning against the irrationality and one-sidedness of the global warming campaign. Rational people know that the warming we experience is well within the range of what seems to have been a natural fluctuation over the last ten thousand years. We should keep saying this very loudly.
Before I start talking about this issue, I would like to put the topic of my today’s speech into the broader perspective. During my visits in the U.S. in the last 19 years, I made speeches on a wide range of topics. There has, however, always been a connection between them. They were all about freedom and about threats endangering it. My today’s speech will not be different. I will try to argue and to convince you that even the global warming issue is about freedom. It is not about temperature or CO2. It is, therefore, not necessary to discuss either climatology, or any other related natural science but the implications of the global warming panic upon us, upon our freedom, our prosperity, our institutions and our legislation. It is part of a bigger story.
At the time that followed immediately after the fall of communism, I spoke here about my (and our) experience with the dismantling of this tragic, irrational, repressive and inefficient system, about the experience with the rather complicated transition from one social system to a radically different one and with the intricacies of building a free society and market economy. We had learnt some useful lessons and they should not be forgotten. This is not an issue in my country anymore now, it is all over there, even though it continues to be relevant in other places of the world.
There are other phenomena that should be discussed and warned against now. I very carefully watch and study the situation on the European continent. Applauding the end of communism is not sufficient. I am more and more nervous about the developments that followed. I have always tried to explain to the Americans the meaning and substance of the European integration process and especially the undergoing shift from evolutionary and more or less natural (or genuine) integration, based on opening up, on liberalization, on elimination of various protectionist barriers, towards politically and bureaucratically organized unification. We are close to the formation of a supranational entity called the European Union, resulting in the weakening of democracy and free markets in Europe.
To be correctly understood, I am not against my country’s EU membership (by the way, it was me who handed in the formal application to enter the EU in 1996 when I was prime minister of the Czech Republic), because regretfully there is no other way to go in Europe these days. The recent developments in the EU are, however, very problematic: we see and feel less freedom, less democracy, less sovereignty, more of regulation, and more of extensive government intervention than we had expected when communism collapsed.
As if this wasn’t enough, in the recent years we came to witness yet another major attack on freedom and free markets, an attack based on environmentalism and – in particular – its global warming variant. The explicitly stated intentions of global warming activists are frightening. They want to change us, to change the whole mankind, to change human behavior, to change the structure and functioning of society, to change the whole system of values which has been gradually established during centuries. These intentions are dangerous and their consequences far-reaching. These people want to restrict our freedom. It is our duty to say NO.
As I said at the beginning, the current world-wide panic as regards dramatic, in the past allegedly unknown global climate changes and their supposedly catastrophic consequences for the future of human civilization must not remain without a resolute answer of the more or less silent majority of rationally thinking people.
After having studied this issue for a couple of years, I am convinced that this panic doesn’t have a solid ground and that it demonstrates an apparent disregard for the past experience of mankind. I know that its propagandists have been using all possible obstructions to avoid exposure to rational arguments and I know that the substance of their arguments is not science. It represents, on the contrary, an abuse of science by a non-liberal, extremely authoritarian, freedom and prosperity endangering ideology of environmentalism.
It is important to demonstrate that the global warming story is not an issue belonging to the field of natural sciences only or mostly, even though Al Gore and his fellow-travelers pretend it is the case. It is again, as always in the past, the old, for many of us well-known debate: freedom and free markets vs. dirigism, (Dirigisme (from the French) (in English also "dirigism" although per the OED both spellings are used) is an economic term designating an economy where the government exerts strong directive influence.)political control and expansive and unstoppable government regulation of human behavior. In the past, the market was undermined mostly by means of socialist arguments with slogans like: “stop the immiseration of the masses”.
Now, the attack is led under the slogan: stop the immiseration (or perhaps destruction) of the Planet.This shift seems to me dangerous. The new ambitions look more noble, more attractive and more appealing. They are also very shrewdly shifted towards the future and thus practically “immunized” from reality, from existing evidence, from available observations, and from standard testing of scientific hypotheses. That is the reason why they are loved by the politicians, the media and all their friends among public intellectuals. For the same reason I consider environmentalism to be the most effective and, therefore, the most dangerous vehicle for advocating large scale government intervention and unprecedented suppression of human freedom at this very moment.
Feeling very strongly about this danger and trying to oppose it was the main reason for my writing the book “Blue Planet in Green Shackles” (2) with its hopefully sufficiently understandable subtitle “What is endangered: Climate or Freedom?”. It has also been the driving force behind my active involvement in the current Climate Change Debate and behind my being the only head of state who openly and explicitly challenged the undergoing global warming hysteria at the UN Climate Change Conference in New York City in September 2007. (3)I am frustrated by the fact that many people, including some leading politicians, who privately express similar views, are more or less publicly silent. We keep hearing one-sided propaganda regarding the greenhouse hypothesis, but we are not introduced to serious counter-arguments, both inside climatology, and in the field of social sciences.
We, economists, owe the society a lot. We did not succeed in explaining the practical inexhaustibility of resources, including energy resources (on condition they are rationally used, which means with the help of undistorted prices and well-defined property rights). We did not come up with simple, well-argued and convincing studies about the costs and benefits of the currently proposed “green” measures and policies and about many other things.I feel very strongly about it. I used to live in a world where prices and property rights were made meaningless. It gave me the opportunity to see how irrationally the economy was organized and how damaged the environment was as a result. This experience tells me that we should not let anyone play the market again and dictate what to produce, how to produce it, what inputs to use, what technologies to implement. This would result in another disaster and in the true “immiseration of the masses”, especially in developing countries. We already see some evidence for this now.
We should also speak about the convincing human experience with technological progress and give reasons for our justified belief not only in its continuation but very probable acceleration in the future. It is rational to expect that technological changes will be more important than any potential climate changes. There is no need for technologic skepticism and no reason to expect that we will enter a stationary world – unless the environmentalists win the debate and stop human progress. (4)The economists should also discuss very relevant future shift in the structure of demand which will be based on the so called income or wealth effect. With higher income and wealth, people demand more of environmental protection which is a classic luxury good. It is, therefore, not necessary to radically decrease today’s consumption by coercion, because the much more affluent people in the future will have enough time to make rational consumption and investment decisions without our today’s “quasi-help”. Economic growth and the accumulation of wealth do not lead to deterioration of the environment. The empirical work in the field of the environmental Kuznets curves gives us reassuring arguments about it.
We should also explain to the non-experts the idea of discounting as the only rational basis for intergenerational comparisons, and for our today’s decisions about the future. Everyone who wants to protect future generations should express his or her presumptions about this intergenerational relationship and to clarify how he or she sees the future and what weight and importance he or she attaches to it. The environmentalists assume that no matter how distant the future is, it is of equal importance as the present, which is against human nature and experience. The objectively existing preference of rational human beings of the present over the future is traditionally discussed by means of the term discount rate. To defend this position is neither shortsightedness nor ignorance on our side. The models of the environmentalists produce strange results mainly because they consider the “social discount rate” to be zero or close to zero.Another issue is the rational or irrational risk aversion.
Every rational human being minimizes risks – but not at all costs. The precautionary principle, this dogma of environmentalists, leads to an unjustifiable maximization of risk aversion, which can in the end succeed in blocking and prohibiting almost everything. The environmentalists systematically overestimate the negative impacts of human activities and forget the positive ones. Such approach cannot bring good outcomes. We should offer standard cost-benefit analysis instead.Even more frustrating is the fact that the economists do not pay sufficient attention to the abuse of the words “market” and “price” by the global warming alarmists. They want nothing else than to tax us, but instead speak about market-friendly “emissions trading schemes”. We have to tell them that the emissions licenses are implicit taxes and that playing the market is impossible. The economists convincingly argue that tax changes have very large effects. Recent U.S. study (5) shows that “an exogenous tax increase of GDP lowers real GDP by roughly 2 to 3 per cent.” It works mostly through the strong response of investment to tax changes.
And the environmentalists keep advocating large tax increases under the disguise of the “price of carbon”.The global warming alarmists succeeded also in creating incentives which led to the rise of a very powerful rent-seeking group. These rent-seekers profit- from trading the licenses to emit carbon dioxide;- from constructing unproductive wind, sun and other equipments able to produce only highly subsidized electric energy;- from growing non-food crops which produce non-carbon fuels at the expense of producing food (with well-known side effects);- from doing research, writing and speaking about global warming.
These people represent a strong voice in the global warming debate. They are not interested in CO2, freedom or markets, they are interested in their businesses and their profits – “produced” with the help of politicians.With all my criticism, I hope it is evident that I am not speaking against paying due attention to the environment and to environmental protection, because that’s another story. I would also like to stress that I don’t oppose the claim that the climate-anthropogenic carbon dioxide nexus justifies watching and research, but I am convinced that the existing evidence does not justify the currently proposed expensive, economy and society disrupting and probably useless and ineffective measures.
As I said many times before: the current world-wide dispute is not about environment, it is about freedom. And I would add “about prosperity and living conditions of billions of people.” To avoid a disaster, “we should trust in the rationality of man and in the outcome of spontaneous evolution of human society, not in the virtues of political activism.”
Vaclav Klaus is the current President of the Czech Republic. He gave this speech at the Hilton Hotel in Portland, Oregon on September 20081 - Portland Speech, Cascade Policy Institute luncheon address, Hilton Hotel, September 30, 2008. 2 - Published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C., May 2008 (originally in Czech language under the title Modrá, nikoli zelená planeta by Dokorán, s.r.o., Prague, Czech Republic, 2007). The German, Dutch, English, Russian and Spanish versions were published between December 2007 and July 2008. Polish and Bulgarian translations will be published in coming weeks and others are under preparation.3 - Speech at the Climate Change Conference, United Nations, New York, September 24th, 2007. See www.klaus.cz. 4 - Is Schumpeter’s Vision of the End of Capitalism Relevant?, Speech at the Competitive Enterprise Institute Annual Dinner, 28 May 2008, Washington D.C.; see http://www.klaus.cz/klaus2/asp/clanek.asp?id=OfTuMDaIhOG8 or http://cei.org/cei_files/fm/active/0/90823_CEI-web.pdf5 - Christina Romer, David Romer, “The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks”, NBER Working Paper No 13264, Cambridge, MA, March 2007. Source
Peter
Global Warming Alarmism Must Be Challenged
The following article sums up why I and too few other scientists oppose the spread of the myth of man-caused global warming. We see the bigger picture, the cost to America's and the world's economies, the great harm this is doing and will do to people all over the world, AND as Mr. Vaclav Klaus says, it is a grave danger to our very freedom.
Peter
Vaclav Klaus is the current President of the Czech Republic. He gave this speech at the Hilton Hotel in Portland, Oregon on September 30, 2008
Global Warming Alarmism is Unacceptable and Should be Confronted
Written by Vaclav Klaus, Hawaii Reporter Wednesday, 01 October 2008
Many thanks for the invitation and for the opportunity to be here with all of you. I have visited the U.S. many times since the fall of communism in November 1989 when – after almost half a century – traveling to the free world became for people like me possible again, but I’ve never been to this beautiful city and to the state of Oregon before. Once again, thank you very much.I am expected to talk here about global warming today (even though I don’t really feel it, especially not in this room) and my address will be devoted mostly to this issue. As you may expect Oregon is – for me – in this respect connected with the well-known Oregon petition which warned and keeps warning against the irrationality and one-sidedness of the global warming campaign. Rational people know that the warming we experience is well within the range of what seems to have been a natural fluctuation over the last ten thousand years. We should keep saying this very loudly.
Before I start talking about this issue, I would like to put the topic of my today’s speech into the broader perspective. During my visits in the U.S. in the last 19 years, I made speeches on a wide range of topics. There has, however, always been a connection between them. They were all about freedom and about threats endangering it. My today’s speech will not be different. I will try to argue and to convince you that even the global warming issue is about freedom. It is not about temperature or CO2. It is, therefore, not necessary to discuss either climatology, or any other related natural science but the implications of the global warming panic upon us, upon our freedom, our prosperity, our institutions and our legislation. It is part of a bigger story.
At the time that followed immediately after the fall of communism, I spoke here about my (and our) experience with the dismantling of this tragic, irrational, repressive and inefficient system, about the experience with the rather complicated transition from one social system to a radically different one and with the intricacies of building a free society and market economy. We had learnt some useful lessons and they should not be forgotten. This is not an issue in my country anymore now, it is all over there, even though it continues to be relevant in other places of the world.
There are other phenomena that should be discussed and warned against now. I very carefully watch and study the situation on the European continent. Applauding the end of communism is not sufficient. I am more and more nervous about the developments that followed. I have always tried to explain to the Americans the meaning and substance of the European integration process and especially the undergoing shift from evolutionary and more or less natural (or genuine) integration, based on opening up, on liberalization, on elimination of various protectionist barriers, towards politically and bureaucratically organized unification. We are close to the formation of a supranational entity called the European Union, resulting in the weakening of democracy and free markets in Europe.
To be correctly understood, I am not against my country’s EU membership (by the way, it was me who handed in the formal application to enter the EU in 1996 when I was prime minister of the Czech Republic), because regretfully there is no other way to go in Europe these days. The recent developments in the EU are, however, very problematic: we see and feel less freedom, less democracy, less sovereignty, more of regulation, and more of extensive government intervention than we had expected when communism collapsed.
As if this wasn’t enough, in the recent years we came to witness yet another major attack on freedom and free markets, an attack based on environmentalism and – in particular – its global warming variant. The explicitly stated intentions of global warming activists are frightening. They want to change us, to change the whole mankind, to change human behavior, to change the structure and functioning of society, to change the whole system of values which has been gradually established during centuries. These intentions are dangerous and their consequences far-reaching. These people want to restrict our freedom. It is our duty to say NO.
As I said at the beginning, the current world-wide panic as regards dramatic, in the past allegedly unknown global climate changes and their supposedly catastrophic consequences for the future of human civilization must not remain without a resolute answer of the more or less silent majority of rationally thinking people.
After having studied this issue for a couple of years, I am convinced that this panic doesn’t have a solid ground and that it demonstrates an apparent disregard for the past experience of mankind. I know that its propagandists have been using all possible obstructions to avoid exposure to rational arguments and I know that the substance of their arguments is not science. It represents, on the contrary, an abuse of science by a non-liberal, extremely authoritarian, freedom and prosperity endangering ideology of environmentalism.
It is important to demonstrate that the global warming story is not an issue belonging to the field of natural sciences only or mostly, even though Al Gore and his fellow-travelers pretend it is the case. It is again, as always in the past, the old, for many of us well-known debate: freedom and free markets vs. dirigism, (Dirigisme (from the French) (in English also "dirigism" although per the OED both spellings are used) is an economic term designating an economy where the government exerts strong directive influence.)political control and expansive and unstoppable government regulation of human behavior. In the past, the market was undermined mostly by means of socialist arguments with slogans like: “stop the immiseration of the masses”.
Now, the attack is led under the slogan: stop the immiseration (or perhaps destruction) of the Planet.This shift seems to me dangerous. The new ambitions look more noble, more attractive and more appealing. They are also very shrewdly shifted towards the future and thus practically “immunized” from reality, from existing evidence, from available observations, and from standard testing of scientific hypotheses. That is the reason why they are loved by the politicians, the media and all their friends among public intellectuals. For the same reason I consider environmentalism to be the most effective and, therefore, the most dangerous vehicle for advocating large scale government intervention and unprecedented suppression of human freedom at this very moment.
Feeling very strongly about this danger and trying to oppose it was the main reason for my writing the book “Blue Planet in Green Shackles” (2) with its hopefully sufficiently understandable subtitle “What is endangered: Climate or Freedom?”. It has also been the driving force behind my active involvement in the current Climate Change Debate and behind my being the only head of state who openly and explicitly challenged the undergoing global warming hysteria at the UN Climate Change Conference in New York City in September 2007. (3)I am frustrated by the fact that many people, including some leading politicians, who privately express similar views, are more or less publicly silent. We keep hearing one-sided propaganda regarding the greenhouse hypothesis, but we are not introduced to serious counter-arguments, both inside climatology, and in the field of social sciences.
We, economists, owe the society a lot. We did not succeed in explaining the practical inexhaustibility of resources, including energy resources (on condition they are rationally used, which means with the help of undistorted prices and well-defined property rights). We did not come up with simple, well-argued and convincing studies about the costs and benefits of the currently proposed “green” measures and policies and about many other things.I feel very strongly about it. I used to live in a world where prices and property rights were made meaningless. It gave me the opportunity to see how irrationally the economy was organized and how damaged the environment was as a result. This experience tells me that we should not let anyone play the market again and dictate what to produce, how to produce it, what inputs to use, what technologies to implement. This would result in another disaster and in the true “immiseration of the masses”, especially in developing countries. We already see some evidence for this now.
We should also speak about the convincing human experience with technological progress and give reasons for our justified belief not only in its continuation but very probable acceleration in the future. It is rational to expect that technological changes will be more important than any potential climate changes. There is no need for technologic skepticism and no reason to expect that we will enter a stationary world – unless the environmentalists win the debate and stop human progress. (4)The economists should also discuss very relevant future shift in the structure of demand which will be based on the so called income or wealth effect. With higher income and wealth, people demand more of environmental protection which is a classic luxury good. It is, therefore, not necessary to radically decrease today’s consumption by coercion, because the much more affluent people in the future will have enough time to make rational consumption and investment decisions without our today’s “quasi-help”. Economic growth and the accumulation of wealth do not lead to deterioration of the environment. The empirical work in the field of the environmental Kuznets curves gives us reassuring arguments about it.
We should also explain to the non-experts the idea of discounting as the only rational basis for intergenerational comparisons, and for our today’s decisions about the future. Everyone who wants to protect future generations should express his or her presumptions about this intergenerational relationship and to clarify how he or she sees the future and what weight and importance he or she attaches to it. The environmentalists assume that no matter how distant the future is, it is of equal importance as the present, which is against human nature and experience. The objectively existing preference of rational human beings of the present over the future is traditionally discussed by means of the term discount rate. To defend this position is neither shortsightedness nor ignorance on our side. The models of the environmentalists produce strange results mainly because they consider the “social discount rate” to be zero or close to zero.Another issue is the rational or irrational risk aversion.
Every rational human being minimizes risks – but not at all costs. The precautionary principle, this dogma of environmentalists, leads to an unjustifiable maximization of risk aversion, which can in the end succeed in blocking and prohibiting almost everything. The environmentalists systematically overestimate the negative impacts of human activities and forget the positive ones. Such approach cannot bring good outcomes. We should offer standard cost-benefit analysis instead.Even more frustrating is the fact that the economists do not pay sufficient attention to the abuse of the words “market” and “price” by the global warming alarmists. They want nothing else than to tax us, but instead speak about market-friendly “emissions trading schemes”. We have to tell them that the emissions licenses are implicit taxes and that playing the market is impossible. The economists convincingly argue that tax changes have very large effects. Recent U.S. study (5) shows that “an exogenous tax increase of GDP lowers real GDP by roughly 2 to 3 per cent.” It works mostly through the strong response of investment to tax changes.
And the environmentalists keep advocating large tax increases under the disguise of the “price of carbon”.The global warming alarmists succeeded also in creating incentives which led to the rise of a very powerful rent-seeking group. These rent-seekers profit- from trading the licenses to emit carbon dioxide;- from constructing unproductive wind, sun and other equipments able to produce only highly subsidized electric energy;- from growing non-food crops which produce non-carbon fuels at the expense of producing food (with well-known side effects);- from doing research, writing and speaking about global warming.
These people represent a strong voice in the global warming debate. They are not interested in CO2, freedom or markets, they are interested in their businesses and their profits – “produced” with the help of politicians.With all my criticism, I hope it is evident that I am not speaking against paying due attention to the environment and to environmental protection, because that’s another story. I would also like to stress that I don’t oppose the claim that the climate-anthropogenic carbon dioxide nexus justifies watching and research, but I am convinced that the existing evidence does not justify the currently proposed expensive, economy and society disrupting and probably useless and ineffective measures.
As I said many times before: the current world-wide dispute is not about environment, it is about freedom. And I would add “about prosperity and living conditions of billions of people.” To avoid a disaster, “we should trust in the rationality of man and in the outcome of spontaneous evolution of human society, not in the virtues of political activism.”
Vaclav Klaus is the current President of the Czech Republic. He gave this speech at the Hilton Hotel in Portland, Oregon on September 20081 - Portland Speech, Cascade Policy Institute luncheon address, Hilton Hotel, September 30, 2008. 2 - Published by the Competitive Enterprise Institute, Washington, D.C., May 2008 (originally in Czech language under the title Modrá, nikoli zelená planeta by Dokorán, s.r.o., Prague, Czech Republic, 2007). The German, Dutch, English, Russian and Spanish versions were published between December 2007 and July 2008. Polish and Bulgarian translations will be published in coming weeks and others are under preparation.3 - Speech at the Climate Change Conference, United Nations, New York, September 24th, 2007. See www.klaus.cz. 4 - Is Schumpeter’s Vision of the End of Capitalism Relevant?, Speech at the Competitive Enterprise Institute Annual Dinner, 28 May 2008, Washington D.C.; see http://www.klaus.cz/klaus2/asp/clanek.asp?id=OfTuMDaIhOG8 or http://cei.org/cei_files/fm/active/0/90823_CEI-web.pdf5 - Christina Romer, David Romer, “The Macroeconomic Effects of Tax Changes: Estimates based on a New Measure of Fiscal Shocks”, NBER Working Paper No 13264, Cambridge, MA, March 2007. Source
Wednesday, October 1, 2008
The Corruption Of Climate Science
We have said this before, the science behind the concept of man-caused (anthropogenic) global warming has been corrupted. Here is a partial explanation of how this has happened.
Peter
September 24, 2008
Corrupted science revealed
Jerome J. Schmitt (source)
Outsiders familiar with the proper workings of science have long known that modern Climate Science is dysfunctional. Now a prominent insider, MIT Meteorology Professor Richard S. Lindzen, confirms how Al Gore and his minions used Stalinist tactics to subvert, suborn and corrupt a whole branch of science, citing chapter and verse in his report entitled "Climate Science: Is it currently designed to answer questions?" His answer: A resounding "NO!"
Detailing the corruption, he names a series of names. Until reading this I did not know that
"For example, the primary spokesman for the American Meteorological Society in Washington is Anthony Socci who is neither an elected official of the AMS nor a contributor to climate science. Rather, he is a former staffer for Al Gore." Page 5
Although a bit lengthy, this very important report is highly readable and revealing. While some of the paragraphs are a bit technical, I encourage AT readers to wade through them because their purpose is to provide specific examples of how a radical cabal is forcing scientists to ignore or amend measurements that undermine the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Scientists are literally forced to include sentences in their papers that indicate their support of AGW, even if these sentences are non-sequiturs, or even if they conflict with the overall thrust of the paper. In this way, Al Gore's uneducated political commissars are able to deliver the "consensus" he so craves.
How is this possible you might ask? Prof. Lindzen gives considerable background history.
However, having been an undergraduate and graduate student in the hard sciences, and later a research collaborator with dozens of industrial scientists and university professors, perhaps I can shed some further light. Today's scientists get to the top of their field by extreme dedication to their specialty involving inordinate focus and concentration that cannot tolerate distractions. The best scientists are constantly "at home" at their lab bench, with their instruments, analyzing data, teaching a few promising students and preparing publications. Most scientists interact intensively only with other specialists in allied fields ("geeks").
Many scientists are naturalized citizens from Asia and Eastern Europe, unfamiliar and intimidated by American politics and government, to which they are dependent upon for visas and grant support. Although all stereotypes are unfair to individuals, there is some truth to the one of the shy, retiring, absent-minded professor. His or her absent-mindedness is most likely due to intense cogitation on a difficult scientific problem. Their dealings with one another are only possible by maintaining extreme standards of honesty, integrity and open-mindedness to scholarly debate in search of the truth. The very qualities that make them good scientists and scholars thus leave them ill-equipped to deal with the raucous, underhanded, disrespectful, politically-motivated radicals unleashed upon them by Al Gore and his fifth column for a "hostile takeover" of their scientific institutions.
I naively thought that the National Academy of Sciences could impose some quality-control on an errant discipline. Prof. Lindzen notes that event this august body has been penetrated by eco-activists by exploiting loopholes in its nominating procedures.
Fortunately, in science "truth will out". The long term faith of the American public in science, a trust built up since WWI is at stake. Next it will be important to see whether a prominent scientific journal publishes this revelation.
As an aside, for those who have wondered how leftist cabals were able in the 60's and 70's to take over our universities' humanity departments, the National Endowment of the Arts and the National Endowment of the Humanities, Prof Lindzen's report lays bare the template for radicalization.
Posted at 11:58 AM Email Permalink Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/09/corrupted_science_revealed.html at October 01, 2008 - 05:17:42 PM EDT
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Peter
September 24, 2008
Corrupted science revealed
Jerome J. Schmitt (source)
Outsiders familiar with the proper workings of science have long known that modern Climate Science is dysfunctional. Now a prominent insider, MIT Meteorology Professor Richard S. Lindzen, confirms how Al Gore and his minions used Stalinist tactics to subvert, suborn and corrupt a whole branch of science, citing chapter and verse in his report entitled "Climate Science: Is it currently designed to answer questions?" His answer: A resounding "NO!"
Detailing the corruption, he names a series of names. Until reading this I did not know that
"For example, the primary spokesman for the American Meteorological Society in Washington is Anthony Socci who is neither an elected official of the AMS nor a contributor to climate science. Rather, he is a former staffer for Al Gore." Page 5
Although a bit lengthy, this very important report is highly readable and revealing. While some of the paragraphs are a bit technical, I encourage AT readers to wade through them because their purpose is to provide specific examples of how a radical cabal is forcing scientists to ignore or amend measurements that undermine the theory of Anthropogenic Global Warming. Scientists are literally forced to include sentences in their papers that indicate their support of AGW, even if these sentences are non-sequiturs, or even if they conflict with the overall thrust of the paper. In this way, Al Gore's uneducated political commissars are able to deliver the "consensus" he so craves.
How is this possible you might ask? Prof. Lindzen gives considerable background history.
However, having been an undergraduate and graduate student in the hard sciences, and later a research collaborator with dozens of industrial scientists and university professors, perhaps I can shed some further light. Today's scientists get to the top of their field by extreme dedication to their specialty involving inordinate focus and concentration that cannot tolerate distractions. The best scientists are constantly "at home" at their lab bench, with their instruments, analyzing data, teaching a few promising students and preparing publications. Most scientists interact intensively only with other specialists in allied fields ("geeks").
Many scientists are naturalized citizens from Asia and Eastern Europe, unfamiliar and intimidated by American politics and government, to which they are dependent upon for visas and grant support. Although all stereotypes are unfair to individuals, there is some truth to the one of the shy, retiring, absent-minded professor. His or her absent-mindedness is most likely due to intense cogitation on a difficult scientific problem. Their dealings with one another are only possible by maintaining extreme standards of honesty, integrity and open-mindedness to scholarly debate in search of the truth. The very qualities that make them good scientists and scholars thus leave them ill-equipped to deal with the raucous, underhanded, disrespectful, politically-motivated radicals unleashed upon them by Al Gore and his fifth column for a "hostile takeover" of their scientific institutions.
I naively thought that the National Academy of Sciences could impose some quality-control on an errant discipline. Prof. Lindzen notes that event this august body has been penetrated by eco-activists by exploiting loopholes in its nominating procedures.
Fortunately, in science "truth will out". The long term faith of the American public in science, a trust built up since WWI is at stake. Next it will be important to see whether a prominent scientific journal publishes this revelation.
As an aside, for those who have wondered how leftist cabals were able in the 60's and 70's to take over our universities' humanity departments, the National Endowment of the Arts and the National Endowment of the Humanities, Prof Lindzen's report lays bare the template for radicalization.
Posted at 11:58 AM Email Permalink Page Printed from: http://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2008/09/corrupted_science_revealed.html at October 01, 2008 - 05:17:42 PM EDT
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urchinTracker();
Wednesday, September 24, 2008
Bears Becoming Democrats
from sevenheart.....
It's worse than you thought:
The photo below captures a disturbing trend that is beginning to affect wildlife in the US .
Animals that were formerly self-sufficient are now showing signs of belonging to the Democratic Party... as they have apparently learned to simply sit and wait for the government to provide for their care and sustenance.
Saturday, August 30, 2008
Facing The Facts, The Truth Be Told, Michael Crichton
The following speech is worthy of reprinting and saving. It takes great courage for a person in the public spotlight to tell the truth, just the pure simple, obvious truth, with no concern or need for personal profit. For this, Michael Crichton deserves our support and praise. Consider the following:
Peter
Pulled From The Vault: The Case for Skepticism on Global Warming (source)
Written by Michael Crichton
Moynihan was a Democrat, and I’m a political agnostic. I was also raised in a scientific tradition that regarded politics as inferior: If you weren’t bright enough to do science, you could go into politics. I retain that prejudice today. I also come from an older and tougher tradition that regards science as the business of testing theories with measured data from the outside world. Untestable hypotheses are not science but rather something else.
We are going to talk about the environment, so I should tell you I am the child of a mother who 60 years ago insisted on organic food, recycling, and energy efficiency long before people had terms for those ideas. She drove refrigerator salesmen mad. And over the years, I have recycled my trash, installed solar panels and low flow appliances, driven diesel cars, and used cloth diapers on my child—all approved ideas at the time.
I still believe that environmental awareness is desperately important. The environment is our shared life support system, it is what we pass on to the next generation, and how we act today has consequences—potentially serious consequences—for future generations. But I have also come to believe that our conventional wisdom is wrongheaded, unscientific, badly out of date, and damaging to the environment. Yellowstone National Park has raw sewage seeping out of the ground. We must be doing something wrong.
In my view, our approach to global warming exemplifies everything that is wrong with our approach to the environment. We are basing our decisions on speculation, not evidence. Proponents are pressing their views with more PR than scientific data. Indeed, we have allowed the whole issue to be politicized—red vs blue, Republican vs Democrat. This is in my view absurd. Data aren’t political. Data are data. Politics leads you in the direction of a belief. Data, if you follow them, lead you to truth.
When I was a student in the 1950s, like many kids I noticed that Africa seemed to fit nicely into South America. Were they once connected? I asked my teacher, who said that that this apparent fit was just an accident, and the continents did not move. I had trouble with that, unaware that people had been having trouble with it ever since Francis Bacon noticed the same thing back in 1620. A German named Wegener had made a more modern case for it in 1912. But still, my teacher said no.
By the time I was in college ten years later, it was recognized that continents did indeed move, and had done so for most of Earth’s history. Continental drift and plate tectonics were born. The teacher was wrong.
Now, jump ahead to the 1970s. Gerald Ford is president, Saigon falls, Hoffa disappears, and in climate science, evidence points to catastrophic cooling and a new ice age.Such fears had been building for many years. In the first Earth Day in 1970, UC Davis’s Kenneth Watt said, “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.” International Wildlife warned “a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war” as a threat to mankind. Science Digest said “we must prepare for the next ice age.” The Christian Science Monitor noted that armadillos had moved out of Nebraska because it was too cold, glaciers had begun to advance, and growing seasons had shortened around the world. Newsweek reported “ominous signs” of a “fundamental change in the world’s weather.”
But in fact, every one of these statements was wrong. Fears of an ice age had vanished within five years, to be replaced by fears of global warming. These fears were heightened because population was exploding. By 1995, it was 5.7 billion, up 10% in the last five years.
Back in the 90s, if someone said to you, “This population explosion is overstated. In the next hundred years, population will actually decline.” That would contradict what all the environmental groups were saying, what the UN was saying. You would regard such a statement as outrageous.
More or less as you would regard a statement by someone in 2005 that global warming has been overstated.
But in fact, we now know that the hypothetical person in 1995 was right. And we know that there was strong evidence that this was the case going back for twenty years. We just weren’t told about that contradictory evidence, because the conventional wisdom, awesome in its power, kept it from us.(This is a graph from Wired magazine showing rate of fertility decline over the last 50 years.)
I mention these examples because in my experience, we all tend to put a lot of faith in science. We believe what we’re told. My father suffered a life filled with margarine, before he died of a heart attack anyway. Others of us have stuffed our colons with fiber to ward off cancer, only to learn later that it was all a waste of time, and fiber.
When I wrote Jurassic Park, I worried that people would reject the idea of creating a dinosaur as absurd. Nobody did, not even scientists. It was reported to me that a Harvard geneticist, one of the first to read the book, slammed it shut when he finished and announced, “It can be done!” Which was missing the point. Soon after, a Congressman announced he was introducing legislation to ban research leading to the creation of a dinosaur. I held my breath, but my hopes were dashed. Someone whispered in his ear that it couldn’t be done.
But even so, the belief lingers. Reporters would ask me, “When you were doing research on Jurassic Park, did you visit real biotech labs?” No, I said, why would I? They didn’t know how to make a dinosaur. And they don’t.
So we all tend to give science credence, even when it is not warranted. I will show you many examples of unwarranted credence tonight. But here’s an example to begin. This is the famous Drake equation from the 1960s to estimate the number of advanced civilizations in the galaxy.
Where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fi is the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fc is the fraction that communicates; and fL is the fraction of the planet’s life during which the communicating civilizations live.
The problem with this equation is that none of the terms can be known. As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from “billions and billions” to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. The mathematical appearance is deceptive. In scientific terms—by which I mean testable hypotheses—the Drake equation is really meaninglessness.
And here’s another example. Most people just read it and nod:“How Many Species Exist? The question takes on increasing significance as plants and animals vanish before scientists can even identify them.”
Now, wait a minute…How could you know something vanished before you identified it? If you didn’t know it existed, you wouldn’t have any way to know it was gone. Would you? In fact, the statement is nonsense. If you were never married you’d never know if your wife left you.
Okay. With this as a preparation, let’s turn to the evidence, both graphic and verbal, for global warming. As most of you have heard many times, the consensus of climate scientists believes in global warming. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.
Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
And furthermore, the consensus of scientists has frequently been wrong. As they were wrong when they believed, earlier in my lifetime, that the continents did not move. So we must remember the immortal words of Mark Twain, who said, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
So let’s look at global warming. We start with the summary for policymakers, which is what everybody reads. We will go into more detail in a minute, but for now, we assume the summary has all the important stuff, and turning to page three we find what are arguably the two most important graphs in climate science in 2001.The top graph is taken from the Hadley Center in England, and shows global surface warming. The bottom graph is from an American research team headed by Mann and shows temperature for the last thousand years.
Of these two graphs, one is entirely discredited and the other is seriously disputed. Let’s begin with the top graph.
I have redrawn the graph in Excel, and it looks like this. Now the first thing to say is that there is some uncertainty about how much warming has really occurred. The IPCC says the 20th century temperatures increase is between .4 and .8 degrees. The Goddard Institute says it is between .5 and .75 degrees. That’s a fair degree of uncertainty about how much warming has already occurred.
But let’s take the graph as given. It shows a warming of .4 degrees until 1940, which precedes major industrialization and so may or may not be a largely natural process. Then from 1940 to 1970, temperatures fell. That was the reason for the global cooling scare, and the fears that it was never going to get warm again. Since then, temperatures have gone up, as you see here. They have risen in association with carbon dioxide levels. And the core of the claim of CO2 driven warming is based on this thirty-five year record.
But we must remember that this graph really shows annual variations in the average surface temperature of the earth over time. That total average temperature is ballpark sixteen degrees. So if we graph the entire average fluctuation, it looks like this:So all the interest is in this little fluttering on the surface. Let’s be clear that I am graphing the data in a way that minimizes it. But the earlier graph maximizes it. If you put a ball bearing under a microscope it will look like the surface of the moon. But it is smooth to the touch. Both things are true. Question is which is important.
Since I think the evidence is weak, I urge you to bear this second graph in mind.
Now the question is, is this twentieth-century temperature rise extraordinary? For that we must turn to the second graph by Michael Mann, which is known as the “hockey stick.”This graph shows the results of a study of 112 so-called proxy studies: tree rings, isotopes in ice, and other markers of relative temperature. Obviously there were no thermometers back in the year 1000, so proxies are needed to get some idea of past warmth. Mann’s findings were a centerpiece of the last UN study, and they were the basis for the claim that the twentieth century showed the steepest temperature rise of the last thousand years. That was said in 2001. No one would say it now. Mann’s work has come under attack from several laboratories around the world.
Two Canadian investigators, McKitrick and McIntyre, re-did the study using Mann’s data and methods, and found dozens of errors, including two data series with exactly the same data for a number of years. Not surprisingly, when they corrected all the errors, they came up with sharply differing results.But still this increase is steep and unusual, isn’t it? Well, no, because actually you can’t trust it. It turns out that Mann and his associates used a non-standard formula to analyze his data, and this particular formula will turn anything into a hockey stick---including trendless data generated by computer.Physicist Richard Muller called this result “a shocker…” and he is right. Hans von Storch calls Mann’s study “rubbish.” Both men are staunch advocates of global warming. But Mann’s mistakes are considerable. But he will get tenure soon anyway.
But the disrepute into which his study has fallen leaves us wondering just how much variation in climate is normal. Let’s look at a couple of stations.Here you see that the current temperature rise, while distinctive, is far from unique. Paris was hotter in the 1750s and 1830s than today.Similarly, if you look at Stuttgart from 1950 to present, it looks dramatic. If you look at the whole record, it is put into an entirely different perspective. And again, it was warmer in the 1800s than now.
Now, these are graphs taken from the GISS website at the time I did my research for the book. For those of you think the science is all aboveboard, you might contemplate this. The data have been changed.
I have no comment on why the Goddard Institute changed the data on their website. But it clearly makes the temperature record look more consistently upward-trending and more fearsome than it did a few months ago.
All right. With the second graph demolished, it is time to return to the first. Now we must ask, if surface temperatures have gone up in the twentieth century, what has caused the rise? Most people have been taught that the increase is caused by carbon dioxide, but that is by no means clear.
Page 2 of 3
Two factors that were previously not of concern have recently come to the renewed attention of scientists. The first is the sun. In the past it was imagined that the effect of the sun was fairly constant and therefore any rise in temperature must be caused by some other factor. But it is now clear from work of scientists at the Max Planck institute in Germany that the sun is not constant, and is right now at a 1,000 year maximum. The data comes from sunspots.
According to Solanki and his associates,This shows that solar radiation and surface temperature are correlated until recent times. Solanki says that the sun is insufficient to explain the current temperatures, and therefore another factor is also at work, presumably greenhouse gases. But the question is whether the sun accounts for a significant part of twentieth-century warming. Nobody is sure. But it is likely to be some amount greater than was previously thought.
Now we turn to cities:Another factor that could change the record is heat from cities. This is called the urban heat bias, and as with solar effects, scientists tended to think the effect, while real, was relatively minor. That is why the IPCC allowed only six hundredths of a degree for urban heating. But cities are hot: the correction is likely to be much greater. We now understand that many cities are 7 or 8 degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside. (A temperature chart from a car driving around Berlin. The difference between city and country is 7 degrees.)
Some studies have suggested that the proper adjustment to the record needs to be four or five times greater than the IPCC allowance.
Now what does this mean to our record? Well remember, the total warming in the 20th century is six tenths of a degree.If some of this is from land use and urban heating (and one studies suggests it is .35 C for the century), and some is solar heating (.25 C for century), then the amount attributable to carbon dioxide becomes less. And let me repeat: nobody knows how much is attributable to carbon dioxide right now.
But if carbon dioxide is not the major factor, it may not make a lot of sense to try and limit it. There are many reasons to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, and I support such a reduction. But global warming may not be a good or a primary reason.
So this is very important stuff. The uncertainties are great.
And now, we turn to the most important issue. WHAT WILL HAPPEN IN THE FUTURE?
To answer this, we must turn to the UN body known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC, the gold standard in climate science.
In the last ten years, the IPCC has published book after book. And I believe I may be the only person who has read them. I say that because if any journalist were to read these volumes with any care they would come away with the most extreme unease---and not in the way the texts intend.
The most recent volume is the Third Assessment Report, from 2001. It contains the most up-to-date views of scientists in the field. Let’s see what the text says. I will be reading aloud.
Sorry, but these books are written in academic-ese. They are hard to decipher, but we will do that.
Starting with the first section, The Climate System: An Overview, we turn to the first page of text, and on the third paragraph read:Climate variations and change, caused by external forcings, may be partly predictable, particularly on the larger, continental and global, spatial scales. Because human activities, such as the emission of greenhouse gases or land-use change, do result in external forcing, it is believed that the large-scale aspects of human-induced climate change are also partly predictable. However the ability to actually do so is limited because we cannot accurately predict population change, economic change, technological development, and other relevant characteristics of future human activity. In practice, therefore, one has to rely on carefully constructed scenarios of human behaviour and determine climate projections on the basis of such scenarios.
Take these sentence by sentence, and translate into plain English. Starting with the first sentence. It’s really just saying:
Climate may be partly predictable.
Second sentence means:
We believe human-induced climate change is predictable.
Third sentence means:
But we can’t predict human behavior.
Fourth sentence:
Therefore we rely on “scenarios.”
The logic here is difficult to follow. What does “may be partly predictable” mean? Is it like a little bit pregnant? We see in two sentences we go from may be predictable to is predictable. And then, if we can’t make accurate predictions about population and development and technology… how can you make a carefully-constructed scenario? What does “carefully-constructed” mean if you can’t make accurate predictions about population and economic and other factors that are essential to the scenario?
The flow of illogic is stunning. Am I are making too much of this? Let’s look at another quote:“The state of science at present is such that it is only possible to give illustrative examples of possible outcomes.”
Illustrative examples. The estimates for even partial US compliance with Kyoto---a reduction of 3% below 1990 levels, not the required 7%---has been predicted to cost almost 300 billion dollars a year. Year after year. We can afford it. But if we are going to spend trillions of dollars, I would like to base that decision on something more substantial than “illustrative examples.”
Let’s look at another quote.My concerns deepen when I read “Climate models now have some skill in simulating changes in climate since 1850…” SOME SKILL? This is not skill in predicting the future. This is skill in reproducing the past. It doesn’t sound like these models really perform very well. It would be natural to ask how they are tested.
NEXT QUOTE
While we do not consider that the complexity of a climate model makes it impossible to ever prove such a model “false” in any absolute sense, it does make the task of evaluation extremely difficult and leaves room for a subjective component in any assessment.
Now, the term “subjective” ought to set off alarm bells in every person here. Science, by definition, is not subjective. I will point out to you that this is precisely the kind of issue that has Americans furious about the EPA. We know you can’t let a drug company manufacture a drug and also test it---that’s unreliable, and everybody knows it. So why in this high stakes climate issue do we allow the same person who makes a climate model to test it?
The flaws in this process are well known. James Madison, our fourth President:
No man is allowed to be judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and not improbably, corrupt his integrity.
Madison is right.
Climate science needs some verification by outsiders.
NEXT QUOTE
Again, am I making too much of all this? It turns out I am not. Late in the text, we read:“The long term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
Surely it should lead us to close the book at this point. If the system is non-linear and chaotic—and it is—then it can’t be predicted, and if it can’t be predicted, what are we doing here? Why are we worrying about the year 2100?
All right, you may be saying. Perhaps this is the state of climate science, as the IPCC itself tell us. Nevertheless we read every day about the dire consequences of global warming. What if I am wrong? What if a major temperature rise is really going to happen? Shouldn’t we act now and be safe? Don’t we have a responsibility to unborn generations to do so?
NEXT CHART – Act Now or Later?Here is again the IPCC chart of predictions for 2100. As you see, they range from a low of 1.5 degrees to a high of 6 degrees. That is a 400% variation. It’s fine in academic research. Now let’s transfer this to the real world.
In the real world, a 400% uncertainty is so great that nobody acts on it. Ever.If you planned to build a house and the builder said, it will cost somewhere between a million and a half and six million dollars, would you proceed? Of course not, you’d get a new builder. If you told your boss you were going on vacation and would be gone somewhere between 15 and 60 days, would he accept that? No, he’d say tell me exactly what day you will be back. Real world estimation has to be much, much better than 400%.
When all is said and done, Kyoto is a giant global construction project. In the real world nobody builds with that much uncertainty.
Next, we must face facts about the present. If warming is a problem, we have no good technological solutions at this point. Everybody talks wind farms, but people hate them. They’re ugly and noisy and change the weather and chop birds and bats to pieces, and they are fought everywhere they are proposed. Here is the wind farm at Cape Cod, which has aroused everyone who lives there, including lots of environmentalists who are embarrassed but still…they don’t want them. Who can blame them? A very large anti-wind faction has grown up in England, partly because the government are trying to put farms in the Lake District and other scenic areas.
But whether we like the technology or not, do we really have the capability to meet the Kyoto Protocols? Reporting in Science magazine, a blue-ribbon group of scientists concluded that we do not: So, if we don’t have good technology perhaps we should wait. And there are other reasons to wait. If in fact we are facing a really expensive construction job, we can afford it better later on. We will be richer. This is a 400 year trend.Finally, I think it is important to recognize that we can adapt to the temperature changes that are being discussed. We are told that catastrophe will befall if we increase global temperature 2 degrees. But that is the difference in average temperature between New York and Washington DC. I don’t think most New Yorkers think a move to Washington is balmy. Similarly, a move to San Diego is an increase of 9 degrees.
Of course this is not a fair comparison, because a local change is not the same as a global change. But it ought at least to alert you to the possibility that perhaps things are not as dire as we are being told. And were told thirty years ago, about the ice age.
Last, I want you to think about what it means to say that we are going to act now to address something 100 years from now. People say this with confidence; we hear that the people of the future will condemn us if we don’t act. But is that true?
Page 3 of 3
We’re at the start of the 21st century, looking ahead. We’re just like someone in 1900, thinking about the year 2000. Could someone in 1900 have helped us?
Here is Teddy Roosevelt, a major environmental figure from 1900. These are some of the words that he does not know the meaning of:
airport
antibiotic
antibody
antenna
computer
continental drift
tectonic plates
zipper
nylon
radio
television
robot
video
virus
gene
proton
neutron
atomic structure
quark
atomic bomb
nuclear energy
ecosystem
jumpsuits
fingerprints
step aerobics
12-step
jet stream
shell shock
shock wave
radio wave
microwave
tidal wave
tsunami
IUD
DVD
MP3
MRI
HIV
SUV
VHS
VAT
whiplash
wind tunnel
carpal tunnel
fiber optics
direct dialing
dish antennas
gorilla
corneal transplant
liver transplant
heart transplant
liposuction
transduction
maser
taser
laser
acrylic
penicillin
Internet
interferon
nylon
rayon
leisure suit
leotard
lap dancing
laparoscopy
arthroscopy
gene therapy
bipolar
moonwalk
spot welding
heat-seeking
Prozac
sunscreen
urban legends
rollover minutes
Given all those changes, is there anything Teddy could have done in 1900 to help us? And aren’t we in his position right now, with regard to 2100?
Think how incredibly the world has changed in 100 years. It will change vastly more in the next century. A hundred years ago there were no airplanes and almost no cars. Do you really believe that 100 years from now we will still be burning fossil fuels and driving around in cars and airplanes? The idea of spending trillions on the future is only sensible if you totally lack any historical sense, and any imagination about the future.
If we should not spend our money on Kyoto, what should we do instead? I will argue three points.
First, we need to establish 21st century policy mechanisms. I want to return to those pages from the IPCC. The fact is if we required the same standard of information from climate scientists that we do from drug companies, the whole debate on global warming would be long over. We wouldn’t be talking about it. We need mechanisms to insure a much, much higher standard of reliability in information in the future.
Second, we need to deal correctly with complexity of non-linear systems. The environment is a complex system, a term that has a specific meaning in science. Beyond being complicated, it means that interacting parts that modify each other have the capacity to change the output of the system in unexpected ways. This fact has several ramifications. The first is that the old notion of the balance of nature is thoroughly discredited. There is no balance of nature. To think so is to share an agreeable fantasy with the ancient Greeks. But it is also a shocking change for us, and we resist it. Some now talk of “balance in nature,” as a way to keep the old idea alive. Some claim there are multiple equilibrium states, but this is just a way of pretending that the balance can attained in different ways. It is a misstatement of the truth. The natural system of inherently chaotic, major disruption is the rule not the exception, and if we are to manage the system we are going to have to be actively involved.
This represents a revision of the role of mankind in nature, and a revision of the perception of nature as something untouched. We now know that nature has never been untouched. The first white visitors to the New World didn’t understand what they were looking at. In California, Indians burned old growth forest with such regularity that there is more old growth today than there was in 1850. Yellowstone was a beauty spot precisely because the Indians hunted the elk and moose to the edge of extinction. When they were prevented from hunting in their traditional grounds, Yellowstone began its complex decline.
We now have research to help us formulate strategies for management of complex systems. But I am not sure we have organizations capable of making these changes. I would also remind you that to properly manage what we call wilderness is going to be stupefyingly expensive. Good wilderness is expensive!
Finally, and most important—we can’t predict the future, but we can know the present. In the time we have been talking, 2,000 people have died in the third world. A child is orphaned by AIDS every 7 seconds. Fifty people die of waterborne disease every minute. This does not have to happen. We allow it.What is wrong with us that we ignore this human misery and focus on events a hundred years from now? What must we do to awaken this phenomenally rich, spoiled and self-centered society to the issues of the wider world? The global crisis is not 100 years from now—it is right now. We should be addressing it. But we are not. Instead, we cling to the reactionary and antihuman doctrines of outdated environmentalism and turn our backs to the cries of the dying and the starving and the diseased of our shared world.
And if we are going to remain too self-involved to care about the third world, can we at least care about our own? We live in a country where 40% of high school graduates are functionally illiterate. Where schoolchildren pass through metal detectors on the way to class. Where one child in four says they have seen a murdered person. Where millions of our fellow citizens have no health care, no decent education, no prospects for the future. If we really have trillions of dollars to spend, let us spend it on our fellow human beings. And let us spend it now. And not on our impossible fantasies of what may happen one hundred years from now.
Thank you very much.
Source About the author:
Michael Crichton is the best-selling author of State of Fear, which takes the reader from the glaciers of Iceland to the volcanoes of Antarctica, from the Arizona desert to the deadly jungles of the Solomon Islands, from the streets of Paris to the beaches of LosAngeles. The novel races forward on a roller-coaster thrill ride, all the while keeping the brain in high gear. Gripping and thought provoking, State of Fear is Michael Crichton at his very best.
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Pulled From The Vault: The Case for Skepticism on Global Warming (source)
Written by Michael Crichton
Page 1 of 3To be in Washington tonight reminds me that the only person to ever offer me a job in Washington was Daniel Patrick Moynihan. That was thirty years ago, and he was working for Nixon at the time. Moynihan was a hero of mine, the exemplar of an intellectual engaged in public policy. What I admired was that he confronted every issue according to the data and not a belief system. Moynihan could work for both Democratic and Republican presidents. He took a lot of flack for his analyses but he was more often right than wrong.
CCF note: Occasionally we like to highlight an item from our
vault that provides exceptional insight into a particular issue. In this
speech by Mr. Crichton, given on January 25, 2005, to the National Press Club,
he "criticizes global warming scenarios. Using published UN data, he
reviews why claims for catastrophic warming arouse doubt; why reducing CO2 is
vastly more difficult than we are being told; and why we are morally unjustified
to spend vast sums on this speculative issue when around the world people are
dying of starvation and disease."
* * * * *
Moynihan was a Democrat, and I’m a political agnostic. I was also raised in a scientific tradition that regarded politics as inferior: If you weren’t bright enough to do science, you could go into politics. I retain that prejudice today. I also come from an older and tougher tradition that regards science as the business of testing theories with measured data from the outside world. Untestable hypotheses are not science but rather something else.
We are going to talk about the environment, so I should tell you I am the child of a mother who 60 years ago insisted on organic food, recycling, and energy efficiency long before people had terms for those ideas. She drove refrigerator salesmen mad. And over the years, I have recycled my trash, installed solar panels and low flow appliances, driven diesel cars, and used cloth diapers on my child—all approved ideas at the time.
I still believe that environmental awareness is desperately important. The environment is our shared life support system, it is what we pass on to the next generation, and how we act today has consequences—potentially serious consequences—for future generations. But I have also come to believe that our conventional wisdom is wrongheaded, unscientific, badly out of date, and damaging to the environment. Yellowstone National Park has raw sewage seeping out of the ground. We must be doing something wrong.
In my view, our approach to global warming exemplifies everything that is wrong with our approach to the environment. We are basing our decisions on speculation, not evidence. Proponents are pressing their views with more PR than scientific data. Indeed, we have allowed the whole issue to be politicized—red vs blue, Republican vs Democrat. This is in my view absurd. Data aren’t political. Data are data. Politics leads you in the direction of a belief. Data, if you follow them, lead you to truth.
When I was a student in the 1950s, like many kids I noticed that Africa seemed to fit nicely into South America. Were they once connected? I asked my teacher, who said that that this apparent fit was just an accident, and the continents did not move. I had trouble with that, unaware that people had been having trouble with it ever since Francis Bacon noticed the same thing back in 1620. A German named Wegener had made a more modern case for it in 1912. But still, my teacher said no.
By the time I was in college ten years later, it was recognized that continents did indeed move, and had done so for most of Earth’s history. Continental drift and plate tectonics were born. The teacher was wrong.
Now, jump ahead to the 1970s. Gerald Ford is president, Saigon falls, Hoffa disappears, and in climate science, evidence points to catastrophic cooling and a new ice age.Such fears had been building for many years. In the first Earth Day in 1970, UC Davis’s Kenneth Watt said, “If present trends continue, the world will be about four degrees colder in 1990, but eleven degrees colder by the year 2000. This is about twice what it would take to put us in an ice age.” International Wildlife warned “a new ice age must now stand alongside nuclear war” as a threat to mankind. Science Digest said “we must prepare for the next ice age.” The Christian Science Monitor noted that armadillos had moved out of Nebraska because it was too cold, glaciers had begun to advance, and growing seasons had shortened around the world. Newsweek reported “ominous signs” of a “fundamental change in the world’s weather.”
But in fact, every one of these statements was wrong. Fears of an ice age had vanished within five years, to be replaced by fears of global warming. These fears were heightened because population was exploding. By 1995, it was 5.7 billion, up 10% in the last five years.
Back in the 90s, if someone said to you, “This population explosion is overstated. In the next hundred years, population will actually decline.” That would contradict what all the environmental groups were saying, what the UN was saying. You would regard such a statement as outrageous.
More or less as you would regard a statement by someone in 2005 that global warming has been overstated.
But in fact, we now know that the hypothetical person in 1995 was right. And we know that there was strong evidence that this was the case going back for twenty years. We just weren’t told about that contradictory evidence, because the conventional wisdom, awesome in its power, kept it from us.(This is a graph from Wired magazine showing rate of fertility decline over the last 50 years.)
I mention these examples because in my experience, we all tend to put a lot of faith in science. We believe what we’re told. My father suffered a life filled with margarine, before he died of a heart attack anyway. Others of us have stuffed our colons with fiber to ward off cancer, only to learn later that it was all a waste of time, and fiber.
When I wrote Jurassic Park, I worried that people would reject the idea of creating a dinosaur as absurd. Nobody did, not even scientists. It was reported to me that a Harvard geneticist, one of the first to read the book, slammed it shut when he finished and announced, “It can be done!” Which was missing the point. Soon after, a Congressman announced he was introducing legislation to ban research leading to the creation of a dinosaur. I held my breath, but my hopes were dashed. Someone whispered in his ear that it couldn’t be done.
But even so, the belief lingers. Reporters would ask me, “When you were doing research on Jurassic Park, did you visit real biotech labs?” No, I said, why would I? They didn’t know how to make a dinosaur. And they don’t.
So we all tend to give science credence, even when it is not warranted. I will show you many examples of unwarranted credence tonight. But here’s an example to begin. This is the famous Drake equation from the 1960s to estimate the number of advanced civilizations in the galaxy.
Where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fi is the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fc is the fraction that communicates; and fL is the fraction of the planet’s life during which the communicating civilizations live.
The problem with this equation is that none of the terms can be known. As a result, the Drake equation can have any value from “billions and billions” to zero. An expression that can mean anything means nothing. The mathematical appearance is deceptive. In scientific terms—by which I mean testable hypotheses—the Drake equation is really meaninglessness.
And here’s another example. Most people just read it and nod:“How Many Species Exist? The question takes on increasing significance as plants and animals vanish before scientists can even identify them.”
Now, wait a minute…How could you know something vanished before you identified it? If you didn’t know it existed, you wouldn’t have any way to know it was gone. Would you? In fact, the statement is nonsense. If you were never married you’d never know if your wife left you.
Okay. With this as a preparation, let’s turn to the evidence, both graphic and verbal, for global warming. As most of you have heard many times, the consensus of climate scientists believes in global warming. Historically, the claim of consensus has been the first refuge of scoundrels; it is a way to avoid debate by claiming that the matter is already settled. Whenever you hear the consensus of scientists agrees on something or other, reach for your wallet, because you’re being had.
Let’s be clear: the work of science has nothing whatever to do with consensus. Consensus is the business of politics. Science, on the contrary, requires only one investigator who happens to be right, which means that he or she has results that are verifiable by reference to the real world. In science, consensus is irrelevant. What is relevant is reproducible results. The greatest scientists in history are great precisely because they broke with the consensus.
And furthermore, the consensus of scientists has frequently been wrong. As they were wrong when they believed, earlier in my lifetime, that the continents did not move. So we must remember the immortal words of Mark Twain, who said, “Whenever you find yourself on the side of the majority, it is time to pause and reflect.”
So let’s look at global warming. We start with the summary for policymakers, which is what everybody reads. We will go into more detail in a minute, but for now, we assume the summary has all the important stuff, and turning to page three we find what are arguably the two most important graphs in climate science in 2001.The top graph is taken from the Hadley Center in England, and shows global surface warming. The bottom graph is from an American research team headed by Mann and shows temperature for the last thousand years.
Of these two graphs, one is entirely discredited and the other is seriously disputed. Let’s begin with the top graph.
I have redrawn the graph in Excel, and it looks like this. Now the first thing to say is that there is some uncertainty about how much warming has really occurred. The IPCC says the 20th century temperatures increase is between .4 and .8 degrees. The Goddard Institute says it is between .5 and .75 degrees. That’s a fair degree of uncertainty about how much warming has already occurred.
But let’s take the graph as given. It shows a warming of .4 degrees until 1940, which precedes major industrialization and so may or may not be a largely natural process. Then from 1940 to 1970, temperatures fell. That was the reason for the global cooling scare, and the fears that it was never going to get warm again. Since then, temperatures have gone up, as you see here. They have risen in association with carbon dioxide levels. And the core of the claim of CO2 driven warming is based on this thirty-five year record.
But we must remember that this graph really shows annual variations in the average surface temperature of the earth over time. That total average temperature is ballpark sixteen degrees. So if we graph the entire average fluctuation, it looks like this:So all the interest is in this little fluttering on the surface. Let’s be clear that I am graphing the data in a way that minimizes it. But the earlier graph maximizes it. If you put a ball bearing under a microscope it will look like the surface of the moon. But it is smooth to the touch. Both things are true. Question is which is important.
Since I think the evidence is weak, I urge you to bear this second graph in mind.
Now the question is, is this twentieth-century temperature rise extraordinary? For that we must turn to the second graph by Michael Mann, which is known as the “hockey stick.”This graph shows the results of a study of 112 so-called proxy studies: tree rings, isotopes in ice, and other markers of relative temperature. Obviously there were no thermometers back in the year 1000, so proxies are needed to get some idea of past warmth. Mann’s findings were a centerpiece of the last UN study, and they were the basis for the claim that the twentieth century showed the steepest temperature rise of the last thousand years. That was said in 2001. No one would say it now. Mann’s work has come under attack from several laboratories around the world.
Two Canadian investigators, McKitrick and McIntyre, re-did the study using Mann’s data and methods, and found dozens of errors, including two data series with exactly the same data for a number of years. Not surprisingly, when they corrected all the errors, they came up with sharply differing results.But still this increase is steep and unusual, isn’t it? Well, no, because actually you can’t trust it. It turns out that Mann and his associates used a non-standard formula to analyze his data, and this particular formula will turn anything into a hockey stick---including trendless data generated by computer.Physicist Richard Muller called this result “a shocker…” and he is right. Hans von Storch calls Mann’s study “rubbish.” Both men are staunch advocates of global warming. But Mann’s mistakes are considerable. But he will get tenure soon anyway.
But the disrepute into which his study has fallen leaves us wondering just how much variation in climate is normal. Let’s look at a couple of stations.Here you see that the current temperature rise, while distinctive, is far from unique. Paris was hotter in the 1750s and 1830s than today.Similarly, if you look at Stuttgart from 1950 to present, it looks dramatic. If you look at the whole record, it is put into an entirely different perspective. And again, it was warmer in the 1800s than now.
Now, these are graphs taken from the GISS website at the time I did my research for the book. For those of you think the science is all aboveboard, you might contemplate this. The data have been changed.
I have no comment on why the Goddard Institute changed the data on their website. But it clearly makes the temperature record look more consistently upward-trending and more fearsome than it did a few months ago.
All right. With the second graph demolished, it is time to return to the first. Now we must ask, if surface temperatures have gone up in the twentieth century, what has caused the rise? Most people have been taught that the increase is caused by carbon dioxide, but that is by no means clear.
Page 2 of 3
Two factors that were previously not of concern have recently come to the renewed attention of scientists. The first is the sun. In the past it was imagined that the effect of the sun was fairly constant and therefore any rise in temperature must be caused by some other factor. But it is now clear from work of scientists at the Max Planck institute in Germany that the sun is not constant, and is right now at a 1,000 year maximum. The data comes from sunspots.
According to Solanki and his associates,This shows that solar radiation and surface temperature are correlated until recent times. Solanki says that the sun is insufficient to explain the current temperatures, and therefore another factor is also at work, presumably greenhouse gases. But the question is whether the sun accounts for a significant part of twentieth-century warming. Nobody is sure. But it is likely to be some amount greater than was previously thought.
Now we turn to cities:Another factor that could change the record is heat from cities. This is called the urban heat bias, and as with solar effects, scientists tended to think the effect, while real, was relatively minor. That is why the IPCC allowed only six hundredths of a degree for urban heating. But cities are hot: the correction is likely to be much greater. We now understand that many cities are 7 or 8 degrees warmer than the surrounding countryside. (A temperature chart from a car driving around Berlin. The difference between city and country is 7 degrees.)
Some studies have suggested that the proper adjustment to the record needs to be four or five times greater than the IPCC allowance.
Now what does this mean to our record? Well remember, the total warming in the 20th century is six tenths of a degree.If some of this is from land use and urban heating (and one studies suggests it is .35 C for the century), and some is solar heating (.25 C for century), then the amount attributable to carbon dioxide becomes less. And let me repeat: nobody knows how much is attributable to carbon dioxide right now.
But if carbon dioxide is not the major factor, it may not make a lot of sense to try and limit it. There are many reasons to reduce our dependence on fossil fuels, and I support such a reduction. But global warming may not be a good or a primary reason.
So this is very important stuff. The uncertainties are great.
And now, we turn to the most important issue. WHAT WILL HAPPEN IN THE FUTURE?
To answer this, we must turn to the UN body known as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC, the gold standard in climate science.
In the last ten years, the IPCC has published book after book. And I believe I may be the only person who has read them. I say that because if any journalist were to read these volumes with any care they would come away with the most extreme unease---and not in the way the texts intend.
The most recent volume is the Third Assessment Report, from 2001. It contains the most up-to-date views of scientists in the field. Let’s see what the text says. I will be reading aloud.
Sorry, but these books are written in academic-ese. They are hard to decipher, but we will do that.
Starting with the first section, The Climate System: An Overview, we turn to the first page of text, and on the third paragraph read:Climate variations and change, caused by external forcings, may be partly predictable, particularly on the larger, continental and global, spatial scales. Because human activities, such as the emission of greenhouse gases or land-use change, do result in external forcing, it is believed that the large-scale aspects of human-induced climate change are also partly predictable. However the ability to actually do so is limited because we cannot accurately predict population change, economic change, technological development, and other relevant characteristics of future human activity. In practice, therefore, one has to rely on carefully constructed scenarios of human behaviour and determine climate projections on the basis of such scenarios.
Take these sentence by sentence, and translate into plain English. Starting with the first sentence. It’s really just saying:
Climate may be partly predictable.
Second sentence means:
We believe human-induced climate change is predictable.
Third sentence means:
But we can’t predict human behavior.
Fourth sentence:
Therefore we rely on “scenarios.”
The logic here is difficult to follow. What does “may be partly predictable” mean? Is it like a little bit pregnant? We see in two sentences we go from may be predictable to is predictable. And then, if we can’t make accurate predictions about population and development and technology… how can you make a carefully-constructed scenario? What does “carefully-constructed” mean if you can’t make accurate predictions about population and economic and other factors that are essential to the scenario?
The flow of illogic is stunning. Am I are making too much of this? Let’s look at another quote:“The state of science at present is such that it is only possible to give illustrative examples of possible outcomes.”
Illustrative examples. The estimates for even partial US compliance with Kyoto---a reduction of 3% below 1990 levels, not the required 7%---has been predicted to cost almost 300 billion dollars a year. Year after year. We can afford it. But if we are going to spend trillions of dollars, I would like to base that decision on something more substantial than “illustrative examples.”
Let’s look at another quote.My concerns deepen when I read “Climate models now have some skill in simulating changes in climate since 1850…” SOME SKILL? This is not skill in predicting the future. This is skill in reproducing the past. It doesn’t sound like these models really perform very well. It would be natural to ask how they are tested.
NEXT QUOTE
While we do not consider that the complexity of a climate model makes it impossible to ever prove such a model “false” in any absolute sense, it does make the task of evaluation extremely difficult and leaves room for a subjective component in any assessment.
Now, the term “subjective” ought to set off alarm bells in every person here. Science, by definition, is not subjective. I will point out to you that this is precisely the kind of issue that has Americans furious about the EPA. We know you can’t let a drug company manufacture a drug and also test it---that’s unreliable, and everybody knows it. So why in this high stakes climate issue do we allow the same person who makes a climate model to test it?
The flaws in this process are well known. James Madison, our fourth President:
No man is allowed to be judge in his own cause, because his interest would certainly bias his judgment, and not improbably, corrupt his integrity.
Madison is right.
Climate science needs some verification by outsiders.
NEXT QUOTE
Again, am I making too much of all this? It turns out I am not. Late in the text, we read:“The long term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
Surely it should lead us to close the book at this point. If the system is non-linear and chaotic—and it is—then it can’t be predicted, and if it can’t be predicted, what are we doing here? Why are we worrying about the year 2100?
All right, you may be saying. Perhaps this is the state of climate science, as the IPCC itself tell us. Nevertheless we read every day about the dire consequences of global warming. What if I am wrong? What if a major temperature rise is really going to happen? Shouldn’t we act now and be safe? Don’t we have a responsibility to unborn generations to do so?
NEXT CHART – Act Now or Later?Here is again the IPCC chart of predictions for 2100. As you see, they range from a low of 1.5 degrees to a high of 6 degrees. That is a 400% variation. It’s fine in academic research. Now let’s transfer this to the real world.
In the real world, a 400% uncertainty is so great that nobody acts on it. Ever.If you planned to build a house and the builder said, it will cost somewhere between a million and a half and six million dollars, would you proceed? Of course not, you’d get a new builder. If you told your boss you were going on vacation and would be gone somewhere between 15 and 60 days, would he accept that? No, he’d say tell me exactly what day you will be back. Real world estimation has to be much, much better than 400%.
When all is said and done, Kyoto is a giant global construction project. In the real world nobody builds with that much uncertainty.
Next, we must face facts about the present. If warming is a problem, we have no good technological solutions at this point. Everybody talks wind farms, but people hate them. They’re ugly and noisy and change the weather and chop birds and bats to pieces, and they are fought everywhere they are proposed. Here is the wind farm at Cape Cod, which has aroused everyone who lives there, including lots of environmentalists who are embarrassed but still…they don’t want them. Who can blame them? A very large anti-wind faction has grown up in England, partly because the government are trying to put farms in the Lake District and other scenic areas.
But whether we like the technology or not, do we really have the capability to meet the Kyoto Protocols? Reporting in Science magazine, a blue-ribbon group of scientists concluded that we do not: So, if we don’t have good technology perhaps we should wait. And there are other reasons to wait. If in fact we are facing a really expensive construction job, we can afford it better later on. We will be richer. This is a 400 year trend.Finally, I think it is important to recognize that we can adapt to the temperature changes that are being discussed. We are told that catastrophe will befall if we increase global temperature 2 degrees. But that is the difference in average temperature between New York and Washington DC. I don’t think most New Yorkers think a move to Washington is balmy. Similarly, a move to San Diego is an increase of 9 degrees.
Of course this is not a fair comparison, because a local change is not the same as a global change. But it ought at least to alert you to the possibility that perhaps things are not as dire as we are being told. And were told thirty years ago, about the ice age.
Last, I want you to think about what it means to say that we are going to act now to address something 100 years from now. People say this with confidence; we hear that the people of the future will condemn us if we don’t act. But is that true?
Page 3 of 3
We’re at the start of the 21st century, looking ahead. We’re just like someone in 1900, thinking about the year 2000. Could someone in 1900 have helped us?
Here is Teddy Roosevelt, a major environmental figure from 1900. These are some of the words that he does not know the meaning of:
airport
antibiotic
antibody
antenna
computer
continental drift
tectonic plates
zipper
nylon
radio
television
robot
video
virus
gene
proton
neutron
atomic structure
quark
atomic bomb
nuclear energy
ecosystem
jumpsuits
fingerprints
step aerobics
12-step
jet stream
shell shock
shock wave
radio wave
microwave
tidal wave
tsunami
IUD
DVD
MP3
MRI
HIV
SUV
VHS
VAT
whiplash
wind tunnel
carpal tunnel
fiber optics
direct dialing
dish antennas
gorilla
corneal transplant
liver transplant
heart transplant
liposuction
transduction
maser
taser
laser
acrylic
penicillin
Internet
interferon
nylon
rayon
leisure suit
leotard
lap dancing
laparoscopy
arthroscopy
gene therapy
bipolar
moonwalk
spot welding
heat-seeking
Prozac
sunscreen
urban legends
rollover minutes
Given all those changes, is there anything Teddy could have done in 1900 to help us? And aren’t we in his position right now, with regard to 2100?
Think how incredibly the world has changed in 100 years. It will change vastly more in the next century. A hundred years ago there were no airplanes and almost no cars. Do you really believe that 100 years from now we will still be burning fossil fuels and driving around in cars and airplanes? The idea of spending trillions on the future is only sensible if you totally lack any historical sense, and any imagination about the future.
If we should not spend our money on Kyoto, what should we do instead? I will argue three points.
First, we need to establish 21st century policy mechanisms. I want to return to those pages from the IPCC. The fact is if we required the same standard of information from climate scientists that we do from drug companies, the whole debate on global warming would be long over. We wouldn’t be talking about it. We need mechanisms to insure a much, much higher standard of reliability in information in the future.
Second, we need to deal correctly with complexity of non-linear systems. The environment is a complex system, a term that has a specific meaning in science. Beyond being complicated, it means that interacting parts that modify each other have the capacity to change the output of the system in unexpected ways. This fact has several ramifications. The first is that the old notion of the balance of nature is thoroughly discredited. There is no balance of nature. To think so is to share an agreeable fantasy with the ancient Greeks. But it is also a shocking change for us, and we resist it. Some now talk of “balance in nature,” as a way to keep the old idea alive. Some claim there are multiple equilibrium states, but this is just a way of pretending that the balance can attained in different ways. It is a misstatement of the truth. The natural system of inherently chaotic, major disruption is the rule not the exception, and if we are to manage the system we are going to have to be actively involved.
This represents a revision of the role of mankind in nature, and a revision of the perception of nature as something untouched. We now know that nature has never been untouched. The first white visitors to the New World didn’t understand what they were looking at. In California, Indians burned old growth forest with such regularity that there is more old growth today than there was in 1850. Yellowstone was a beauty spot precisely because the Indians hunted the elk and moose to the edge of extinction. When they were prevented from hunting in their traditional grounds, Yellowstone began its complex decline.
We now have research to help us formulate strategies for management of complex systems. But I am not sure we have organizations capable of making these changes. I would also remind you that to properly manage what we call wilderness is going to be stupefyingly expensive. Good wilderness is expensive!
Finally, and most important—we can’t predict the future, but we can know the present. In the time we have been talking, 2,000 people have died in the third world. A child is orphaned by AIDS every 7 seconds. Fifty people die of waterborne disease every minute. This does not have to happen. We allow it.What is wrong with us that we ignore this human misery and focus on events a hundred years from now? What must we do to awaken this phenomenally rich, spoiled and self-centered society to the issues of the wider world? The global crisis is not 100 years from now—it is right now. We should be addressing it. But we are not. Instead, we cling to the reactionary and antihuman doctrines of outdated environmentalism and turn our backs to the cries of the dying and the starving and the diseased of our shared world.
And if we are going to remain too self-involved to care about the third world, can we at least care about our own? We live in a country where 40% of high school graduates are functionally illiterate. Where schoolchildren pass through metal detectors on the way to class. Where one child in four says they have seen a murdered person. Where millions of our fellow citizens have no health care, no decent education, no prospects for the future. If we really have trillions of dollars to spend, let us spend it on our fellow human beings. And let us spend it now. And not on our impossible fantasies of what may happen one hundred years from now.
Thank you very much.
Source About the author:
Michael Crichton is the best-selling author of State of Fear, which takes the reader from the glaciers of Iceland to the volcanoes of Antarctica, from the Arizona desert to the deadly jungles of the Solomon Islands, from the streets of Paris to the beaches of LosAngeles. The novel races forward on a roller-coaster thrill ride, all the while keeping the brain in high gear. Gripping and thought provoking, State of Fear is Michael Crichton at his very best.
Order "State of Fear"
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Friday, August 22, 2008
Book Review: "The Deniers"
This book should open a few eyes about the MYTH of man-caused global warming. It should be very sobering, if not frightening for people to realize how badly the general public has been misled about the realities of global warming and climate change. This is serious; billions, if not trillions of dollars are at stake, as well as the health and well-being of everyone on Earth. For more information on global warming, climate change, and related issues, go here. Note that you can also do a search to quickly find what interests you.
Peter
BOOK REVIEW OF "The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud" By Lawrence Solomon
Review by Jay Lehr, Ph.D
Lawrence Solomon, a longtime environmental activist, began wondering a few years ago how it could be that some scientists were questioning the apparently solid consensus that humans are causing a global warming crisis. He began seeking them out, and interviewing them on the topic. Before long, Solomon came to realize a substantial number of the world's leading scientists are making a very strong case that humans are not causing any sort of global warming crisis.In 2006 he began publishing his interviews with these leading scientists in Canada's National Post newspaper.
In his outstanding new book, The Deniers, Solomon presents the best of these interviews, while sharing additional insights for which his newspaper columns did not have room. Solomon's book breaks new ground in the global warming discussion, presenting the most important scientific evidence in the words of the scientists themselves.The Deniers is not just a series of interviews and vignettes, however. Solomon carefully divides the information gleaned from his prestigious dissenters into chapters asking the very questions most of us have on our minds, and he allows the scientists' own words to answer the questions collectively.
All of the "dissenters" profiled in the book are recognized leaders in their fields, with many even active in the official body that oversees most of the world's climate change research, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Thus the book provides absorbing insight into both the scientific issues and the ferocious political and media battles being waged about global warming. Solomon shows how noble scientists have suffered for their integrity and how attack dogs have mounted an all-out campaign against these scientists, portraying them as hacks bought by profit-mad oil companies or as non-credentialed cranks and lunatics.
The book offers well-written brief biographies of each of their illustrious careers. Here is a sample of the dozens of scientists the author interviewed, with a very condensed indication of who they are and what they believe:
Claude Allegre, Ph.D.: A member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and French Academy of Science, Allegre was among the first scientists to sound the alarm on potential dangers from global warming. His view now: "The cause of this climate change is unknown."
Richard Lindzen, Ph.D.: A professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the National Research Council Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, Lindzen says global warming alarmists "are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right."
Habibullo Abdussamatov, Ph.D.: Head of the space research laboratory of the Russian Academy of Science's Pulkova Observatory and head of the International Space Station's Astrometria Project, Abdussamatov reports, "the common view that man's industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from misinterpretation of cause and effect relations."
Richard Toi, Ph.D.: Principal researcher at the Institute for Environmental Studies at Vrije Universiteit and adjunct professor at the Carnegie Mellon University Center for Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change, Toi calls the IPCC reports "preposterous ... alarmist and incompetent."
Sami Solanki, Ph.D.: Director and scientific member at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, Solanki argues changes in the sun's state, not human activity, may be the principal cause of global warming. Says Solanki, "The sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures."
Freeman Dyson, Ph.D.: A professor at Princeton University and one of the most eminent physicists in the world, Dyson reports the models used to justify global warming are "full of fudge factors" and "do not begin to describe the real world."
Eigil Friis-Christensen, Ph.D.: Director of the Danish National Space Center and vice president of the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy, Friis-Christensen argues changes in the sun's behavior could very well account for most of the warming during the past century.
Necessary Second Opinion
Global warming has become a critical question for citizens who must decide whether the cures being bandied about are not in fact worse than the disease. In matters of health, most intelligent citizens seek a second opinion before undergoing a serious medical procedure, but in the case of global warming, a second opinion is exactly what global warming activists do not want you to seek, for fear it will reduce the effectiveness of their fear-mongering. Therefore, we are treated to a continuous drumbeat of the words, "the science is settled."All the scientists Solomon interviews in his book are prominent in climate science and are not just nitpicking over the interpretation of some small piece of data. Throughout the book Solomon artistically includes boxes of highlighted quotes from his subjects, taken from their own publications.
Here is one from Lindzen:
"How can a barely discernible, one-degree increase in the recorded global temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather catastrophes? And how can it translate into unlikely claims about future catastrophes? The answer has much to do with misunderstanding the science of climate, plus a willingness to debase climate science into a triangle of alarmism. "Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus raising the political stakes for policymakers who provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to increase the political stakes."
In his interview, Dyson points out from long experience that models packed with numerous "fudge factors" are worthless. As a mathematician and physicist, Dyson is known for the unification of three versions of quantum electrodynamics, as well as for contributions to space flight and the development of a safe nuclear reactor used today by hospitals and universities around the world. But today he is known more widely as a scientific heretic for disagreeing with claims of a central human role in global warming.
In his 2005 winter commencement address at the University of Michigan, Dyson said the mathematical computer models on which the alarmist claims are based "do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry, and the biology of fields, farms, and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in."
In Solomon's interview with Friis-Christensen, the scientist states he was originally optimistic about the work IPCC would do in studying the sun's influence on climate change. To his surprise, however, IPCC refused to consider the sun's effect on the Earth's climate as a topic worthy of investigation. IPCC conceived its task only as investigating potential human causes of climate change.That is a huge omission, Abdussamatov points out. He notes there has been global warming on other planets and moons in the solar system, and this demonstrates other forces may be at work regarding the Earth's moderate recent warming. "Mars has global warming, but without a greenhouse and without the participation of Martians," he observes.
Abdussamatov, at the pinnacle of Russia's scientific establishment, is one of the world's most eminent critics of the notion carbon dioxide is driving global warming. He argues these "parallel global-warmings observed simultaneously on Mars and on Earth--can only be a straight line consequence of the effect of the one same factor: a long-time change in solar irradiance."Abdussamatov believes the recent global warming will be short-lived and that we are actually on the brink of a global cooling, and likely a severe one. He argues Earth has hit its temperature ceiling, demonstrated by cooling currently occurring in the upper layers of the world's oceans. In addition, Abddussamatov notes, solar irradiance has begun to fall, likely ushering in a protracted cooling period beginning in 2012-2015.
The lowest depth of the solar irradiance reaching Earth will occur around 2041 (plus or minus 11 years), Abdussamatov estimates, and will inevitably lead to a deep freeze around 2055-60. The freeze will last into the twenty-second century before temperatures rise again. For now, he says, "we continue to bask in the remains of heat that the planet accumulated over the twentieth century."
This is an excellent book. It is written for non-scientists, and I guarantee you will understand every word. It will inspire you as you witness the courage of the deniers to take a stand and endure the wrath of global warming activists for having the audacity to report sound science.
Source
Peter
BOOK REVIEW OF "The Deniers: The World Renowned Scientists Who Stood Up Against Global Warming Hysteria, Political Persecution, and Fraud" By Lawrence Solomon
Review by Jay Lehr, Ph.D
Lawrence Solomon, a longtime environmental activist, began wondering a few years ago how it could be that some scientists were questioning the apparently solid consensus that humans are causing a global warming crisis. He began seeking them out, and interviewing them on the topic. Before long, Solomon came to realize a substantial number of the world's leading scientists are making a very strong case that humans are not causing any sort of global warming crisis.In 2006 he began publishing his interviews with these leading scientists in Canada's National Post newspaper.
In his outstanding new book, The Deniers, Solomon presents the best of these interviews, while sharing additional insights for which his newspaper columns did not have room. Solomon's book breaks new ground in the global warming discussion, presenting the most important scientific evidence in the words of the scientists themselves.The Deniers is not just a series of interviews and vignettes, however. Solomon carefully divides the information gleaned from his prestigious dissenters into chapters asking the very questions most of us have on our minds, and he allows the scientists' own words to answer the questions collectively.
All of the "dissenters" profiled in the book are recognized leaders in their fields, with many even active in the official body that oversees most of the world's climate change research, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Thus the book provides absorbing insight into both the scientific issues and the ferocious political and media battles being waged about global warming. Solomon shows how noble scientists have suffered for their integrity and how attack dogs have mounted an all-out campaign against these scientists, portraying them as hacks bought by profit-mad oil companies or as non-credentialed cranks and lunatics.
The book offers well-written brief biographies of each of their illustrious careers. Here is a sample of the dozens of scientists the author interviewed, with a very condensed indication of who they are and what they believe:
Claude Allegre, Ph.D.: A member of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences and French Academy of Science, Allegre was among the first scientists to sound the alarm on potential dangers from global warming. His view now: "The cause of this climate change is unknown."
Richard Lindzen, Ph.D.: A professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a member of the National Research Council Board on Atmospheric Sciences and Climate, Lindzen says global warming alarmists "are trumpeting catastrophes that couldn't happen even if the models were right."
Habibullo Abdussamatov, Ph.D.: Head of the space research laboratory of the Russian Academy of Science's Pulkova Observatory and head of the International Space Station's Astrometria Project, Abdussamatov reports, "the common view that man's industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from misinterpretation of cause and effect relations."
Richard Toi, Ph.D.: Principal researcher at the Institute for Environmental Studies at Vrije Universiteit and adjunct professor at the Carnegie Mellon University Center for Integrated Study of the Human Dimensions of Global Change, Toi calls the IPCC reports "preposterous ... alarmist and incompetent."
Sami Solanki, Ph.D.: Director and scientific member at the Max Planck Institute for Solar System Research in Germany, Solanki argues changes in the sun's state, not human activity, may be the principal cause of global warming. Says Solanki, "The sun has been at its strongest over the past 60 years and may now be affecting global temperatures."
Freeman Dyson, Ph.D.: A professor at Princeton University and one of the most eminent physicists in the world, Dyson reports the models used to justify global warming are "full of fudge factors" and "do not begin to describe the real world."
Eigil Friis-Christensen, Ph.D.: Director of the Danish National Space Center and vice president of the International Association of Geomagnetism and Aeronomy, Friis-Christensen argues changes in the sun's behavior could very well account for most of the warming during the past century.
Necessary Second Opinion
Global warming has become a critical question for citizens who must decide whether the cures being bandied about are not in fact worse than the disease. In matters of health, most intelligent citizens seek a second opinion before undergoing a serious medical procedure, but in the case of global warming, a second opinion is exactly what global warming activists do not want you to seek, for fear it will reduce the effectiveness of their fear-mongering. Therefore, we are treated to a continuous drumbeat of the words, "the science is settled."All the scientists Solomon interviews in his book are prominent in climate science and are not just nitpicking over the interpretation of some small piece of data. Throughout the book Solomon artistically includes boxes of highlighted quotes from his subjects, taken from their own publications.
Here is one from Lindzen:
"How can a barely discernible, one-degree increase in the recorded global temperature since the late 19th century possibly gain public acceptance as the source of recent weather catastrophes? And how can it translate into unlikely claims about future catastrophes? The answer has much to do with misunderstanding the science of climate, plus a willingness to debase climate science into a triangle of alarmism. "Ambiguous scientific statements about climate are hyped by those with a vested interest in alarm, thus raising the political stakes for policymakers who provide funds for more science research to feed more alarm to increase the political stakes."
In his interview, Dyson points out from long experience that models packed with numerous "fudge factors" are worthless. As a mathematician and physicist, Dyson is known for the unification of three versions of quantum electrodynamics, as well as for contributions to space flight and the development of a safe nuclear reactor used today by hospitals and universities around the world. But today he is known more widely as a scientific heretic for disagreeing with claims of a central human role in global warming.
In his 2005 winter commencement address at the University of Michigan, Dyson said the mathematical computer models on which the alarmist claims are based "do a very poor job of describing the clouds, the dust, the chemistry, and the biology of fields, farms, and forests. They do not begin to describe the real world that we live in."
In Solomon's interview with Friis-Christensen, the scientist states he was originally optimistic about the work IPCC would do in studying the sun's influence on climate change. To his surprise, however, IPCC refused to consider the sun's effect on the Earth's climate as a topic worthy of investigation. IPCC conceived its task only as investigating potential human causes of climate change.That is a huge omission, Abdussamatov points out. He notes there has been global warming on other planets and moons in the solar system, and this demonstrates other forces may be at work regarding the Earth's moderate recent warming. "Mars has global warming, but without a greenhouse and without the participation of Martians," he observes.
Abdussamatov, at the pinnacle of Russia's scientific establishment, is one of the world's most eminent critics of the notion carbon dioxide is driving global warming. He argues these "parallel global-warmings observed simultaneously on Mars and on Earth--can only be a straight line consequence of the effect of the one same factor: a long-time change in solar irradiance."Abdussamatov believes the recent global warming will be short-lived and that we are actually on the brink of a global cooling, and likely a severe one. He argues Earth has hit its temperature ceiling, demonstrated by cooling currently occurring in the upper layers of the world's oceans. In addition, Abddussamatov notes, solar irradiance has begun to fall, likely ushering in a protracted cooling period beginning in 2012-2015.
The lowest depth of the solar irradiance reaching Earth will occur around 2041 (plus or minus 11 years), Abdussamatov estimates, and will inevitably lead to a deep freeze around 2055-60. The freeze will last into the twenty-second century before temperatures rise again. For now, he says, "we continue to bask in the remains of heat that the planet accumulated over the twentieth century."
This is an excellent book. It is written for non-scientists, and I guarantee you will understand every word. It will inspire you as you witness the courage of the deniers to take a stand and endure the wrath of global warming activists for having the audacity to report sound science.
Source
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