Thursday, March 26, 2015

March, 2015, Part 2, I Am A Global Warming Doubter and A Believer In Science: Attacking Those Scientists That Dare To Disagree

For the past few years we have run a semi-regular series under the theme, “I am a global warming doubter and a believer in science.” The underlying drivers of this theme were twofold. First, I had gotten tired of people like Al Gore ranting at the top of their lungs that if someone did not believe what they believed then you were an idiotic, a denier, a racists, a homophobe, and a non-believer in science. Second, I wanted to take a look at ALL of the global warming science out in the world, suspecting that Gore et al were using only science and research that supported their apparently skewed view of the world.

What have found over the years in dozens of posts and dozens of scientific research, studies, facts, and realities is that if anything, there are more evidence to dispute the Al Gore point of view than there is supporting it. To view those past discussions and findings, just enter “global warming doubter” or believer in science” in the search box above. The fact that people like Al Gore had to rebrand the whole “global warming” theme to “man made climate change” tells you that their original thinking is starting to collapse and they needed to jump to another point of view.

Yesterday and today we will prove again that it is possible to be a global warming doubter AND a believer in science.

1)Al Gore likes to talk about how just about every scientist in the world supports the man made global warming theory originally and the rebranded effort, climate change. We have shown many times that lots and lots of reputable scientists do not hold those views. One of those in opposition is a gentleman named Patrick Moore, Ph.D.

Moore was an early and important member of the ecological activist group Greenpeace. Greenpeace co-founder Bob Hunter wrote of Moore, as reported by Wikipedia: “Moore was quickly accepted into the inner circle on the basis of his scientific background, his reputation [as an environmental activist], and his ability to inject practical, no-nonsense insights into the discussions.” 

Moore has been active in environmentalism for more than four decades, he currently serves as chair of Allow Golden Rice, and he received the 2014 Speaks Truth to Power Award at the Ninth International Conference on Climate Change, July 8, in Las Vegas.

Listen to what Dr. Moore, a scientist, has to say about global warming and the forces that need it to continue:

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I am skeptical humans are the main cause of climate change and that it will be catastrophic in the near future. There is no scientific proof of this hypothesis, yet we are told “the debate is over” and “the science is settled.”

My skepticism begins with the believers’ certainty they can predict the global climate with a computer model. The entire basis for the doomsday climate change scenario is the hypothesis increased atmospheric carbon dioxide due to fossil fuel emissions will heat the Earth to unlivable temperatures.

In fact, the Earth has been warming very gradually for 300 years, since the Little Ice Age ended, long before heavy use of fossil fuels. Prior to the Little Ice Age, during the Medieval Warm Period, Vikings colonized Greenland and Newfoundland, when it was warmer there than today. And during Roman times, it was warmer, long before fossil fuels revolutionized civilization.

The idea it would be catastrophic if carbon dioxide were to increase and average global temperature were to rise a few degrees is preposterous.

Recently, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) announced for the umpteenth time we are doomed unless we reduce carbon-dioxide emissions to zero. Effectively this means either reducing the population to zero, or going back 10,000 years before humans began clearing forests for agriculture. This proposed cure is far worse than adapting to a warmer world, if it actually comes about.

IPCC Conflict of Interest

By its constitution, the IPCC has a hopeless conflict of interest. Its mandate is to consider only the human causes of global warming, not the many natural causes changing the climate for billions of years. We don’t understand the natural causes of climate change any more than we know if humans are part of the cause at present. If the IPCC did not find humans were the cause of warming, or if it found warming would be more positive than negative, there would be no need for the IPCC under its present mandate. To survive, it must find on the side of the apocalypse. [my emphasis]

The IPCC should either have its mandate expanded to include all causes of climate change, or it should be dismantled.

Political Powerhouse

Climate change has become a powerful political force for many reasons. First, it is universal; we are told everything on Earth is threatened. Second, it invokes the two most powerful human motivators: fear and guilt. We fear driving our car will kill our grandchildren, and we feel guilty for doing it.

Third, there is a powerful convergence of interests among key elites that support the climate “narrative.” Environmentalists spread fear and raise donations; politicians appear to be saving the Earth from doom; the media has a field day with sensation and conflict; science institutions raise billions in grants, create whole new departments, and stoke a feeding frenzy of scary scenarios; business wants to look green, and get huge public subsidies for projects that would otherwise be economic losers, such as wind farms and solar arrays. Fourth, the Left sees climate change as a perfect means to redistribute wealth from industrial countries to the developing world and the UN bureaucracy.

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Now, who should we believe? Ex-politician and lawyer Al Gore or Ph.D. holder Patrick Moore who is a trained scientist who has actively support environmental efforts for over forty years? Looks like at least one famous scientist is a global warming doubter also.

2) But to be a scientist and a global warming doubter like Mr. Moore can have some serious career implications. Consider the plight and long fight back for UCLA professor James Enstrom. Dr. Enstrom’s research exposed climate change fraud, got his research funding cut, was eventually fired, sued the school, and eventually won an out of court legal settlement.

Details of his battle include the following facts:

  • He had worked at the university for 34 years so he was obviously not a fly by night, weak researcher and professor.
  • After he analyzed data and findings of a shoddy piece of work used to support California diesel regulations, exposing the weak credentials of the person who did the analysis, the professor was fired.
  • He was fired even though he exposed fraudulent behavior in the analyses on which the board relied, including that of the lead author of a 2008 report. 
  • His actions also led Hien Tran, primary analyst and author of the research, to admit he purchased a magna cum laude Ph.D. for $1,000 from a “diploma mill associated with a fugitive pedophile,” according to CalWatchdog.
  • After a two and a half year battle, the school relented and settled the case, reinstating the professor, paying him $140,000, giving him full access to UCLA resources again, and rescinding his termination.

Good for him, he had the guts and fortitude to battle for science based on reality even though it was contrary to what global warming and climate change types want to believe. But that is the tactic that people like Al Gore like to take: dare to disagree with them and they attack and make it personal rather than sitting down, having an adult conversation, and discussing science and the facts, preferring the hysteria and mud slinging approach.

3) Let’s stay at the university level and consider the case of a Harvard University physicist who dared to show that computer forecast models used by the United Nations almost always overstate the impacts of global warming and why that was happening.

Details include:
  • The Harvard professor is named Dr. Wei-Hock “Willie” Soon who is a solar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics.
  • He was the co-author of a peer reviewed and approved research paper which explains the “widening discrepancy between prediction and observation” in climate change and global warming forecasting models.
  • This is not a newly known fact since we have shown many times the discrepancy between what global warming forecasters predicted and the failure of those models to predict the eventual reality:















  • Dr. Soon found that: "The impact of anthropogenic global warming over the next century... may be no more than one-third to one-half of IPCC's current projections."
  • Lord Christoher Monckton, a co-author of the paper also concluded: “The billion-dollar climate models that have so profitably predicted Thermageddon are hopelessly wrong. We said the models were wrong because they were using a rogue equation borrowed from electronic circuitry and bolted on to the climate, where it does not fit. That equation, and that alone, leads the modelers erroneously to triple the small and harmless 1 CÂș global warming we should expect from a doubling of CO2 in the air. Our irreducibly simple climate model does not replace more complex models, but it does expose major errors and exaggeration in those models, such as the over-emphasis on positive or amplifying temperature feedbacks. Take away the erroneous assumption that strongly net-positive feedback triples the rate of man made global warming and the imagined climate crisis vanishes.”




(Science Bulletin)
Sounds like good solid research by solid scientists that come down on the right side of reality as time has shown: original global warming forecast models were grossly wrong, which we know from the eventual real data, and this study provides a reasoned and plausible explanation of why they were wrong. But now the hysteria gets started. Apparently, one of the financial contributors to the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory is ExxonMobil a company that obviously has a stake in any global warming/climate change government sanctions. Thus, rather than discuss the finding of the research based on its scientific merits, the Al Gore types are getting all revved up to discredit the research simply because an oil company made a general donation to the organization with no strings attached. They are getting crazy even though Smithsonian advance and external affairs officer Amanda Preston, signed an affidavit on April 2, 2009 stating that no “goods and/or services [were] provided to ExxonMobil in return for this contribution.”

So let's review:
















- The research disputes the view of Al Gore types and global warming with what appears to be solid research by multiple scientists working together.
   - The funding organization, the Smithsonian, has avowed that no benefit was given or corners cut to benefit ExxonMobil.
   - Rather than discussing the research and its merits and whether it is right or wrong, global warming advocates immediately go into attack mode to attack the person, not the findings.
    - Thus, those doing the attacking are doing the exact same thing they accuse global warming deniers of doing, ignoring scientific research and findings, so hypocritical. When in doubt attack credibility not credentials and merit, so pitiful. 

A few further points to be made:A) In 2014, Dr. Soon won the Courage of Defense of Science Award at the Tenth International Conference on Climate Change for challenging “computer modelers and advocates who consistently underestimate solar influences on cloud formation, ocean currents, and wind that cause climate to change.”B) Dr. Soon defended the integrity of his work as follows: “[the attacks on him are] a shameless attempt to silence my scientific research and writings, and to make an example out of me as a warning to any other researcher who may dare question in the slightest their fervently held orthodoxy of anthropogenic global warming….Let me be clear. I have never been motivated by financial gain to write any scientific paper, nor have I ever hidden grants or any other alleged conflict of interest. I have been a solar and stellar physicist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics for a quarter of a century, during which time I have published numerous peer-reviewed, scholarly articles.The fact that my research has been supported in part by donations to the Smithsonian Institution from many sources, including some energy producers, has long been a matter of public record. In submitting my academic writings, I have always complied with what I understood to be disclosure practices in my field generally, consistent with the level of disclosure made by many of my Smithsonian colleagues.If the standards for disclosure are to change, then let them change evenly. If a journal that has peer-reviewed and published my work concludes that additional disclosures are appropriate, I am happy to comply. I would ask only that other authors - on all sides of the debate - are also required to make similar disclosures.And I call on the media outlets that have so quickly repeated my attackers’ accusations to similarly look into the motivations of and disclosures that may or may not have been made by their preferred, IPCC-linked scientists.”If a global warming scientist had been similarly attacked for receiving money from Greenpeace, the Sierra Club, or Al Gore himself, those doing the attacking would be branded as scientifically ignorant. When the shoe is on the other foot, the personal attacks are viewed as justified for a potential, unproven connection to the oil industry without looking at the merits of the research.That will do it for this update of being a global warming doubter and a believer in science. It is sad that scientists like the ones we discussed today are criticized and attacked professionally and verbally for doing what they do best: science. The fact that their findings and results do not line up with someone's political agenda should scare all of us who believe in science since no political stunts or agenda should overrule the quest for scientific knowledge and reality.






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