New American reports:
Desperate Dash of Global Warming
Written by William F. Jasper
Regarding the supposed “crisis” of global warming, we have both good news and bad news to report. Leading off the good news is the fact that, contrary to the non-stop bombardment of headlines and broadcasts about catastrophic warming, the evidence shows that there has been no global warming for the past 17 to 18 years. (More details on this in a moment.) Moreover, even many of the leading individuals and institutions that have been promoting climate-change alarmism admit that, in defiance of their predictions, there has been more than a decade-and-a-half “pause” in the previous warming trend. In addition, the global-warming propagandists have been exposed again and again for engaging in unethical behavior and outright fraud, as well as wild exaggeration. As a result, public susceptibility to global-warming hysteria has subsided and political support for draconian climate-related policies has declined dramatically. All of this is cause for rejoicing.
The bad news is that the Obama administration, the establishment media, and the political powers that be that have been pushing the global-warming frenzy for the past couple decades are not backing off from their destructive agenda. In fact, they are doubling down and accelerating their drive, realizing full well that they are in danger of losing a huge chunk of their plan for global regulation. They are pushing hard to lock us into a new climate-change treaty at the United Nations climate summit in Paris in 2015. And they have a huge network of highly motivated lobbyists on their side from government agencies, universities, scientific institutions, and businesses that are riding the billion-dollar-a-day, taxpayer-funded global-warming gravy train. In addition, they have a potent auxiliary lobbying force comprised of millions of children, adolescents, and young adults who have been thoroughly saturated in climate-change indoctrination. Finally, some of the leading climate alarmists admit that they are employing “post-normal” science perversion in order to promote their sacred cause. So, the race is on, and the battle, over the coming months, is going to be very intense.
The Great Pause
As we have mentioned above, the global temperature data show, contrary to all of the frantic predictions of the past two decades, that there has been no increase in global surface temperatures over at least the past 17 to 18 years! Lord Christopher Monckton, science advisor to British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, points out that the Hadley Centre/Climatic Research Unit records show no warming for 19 or 20 years, and the Remote Sensing System (RSS) satellite dataset shows no warming for 24 years.
What’s more, many of the most prominent individual and institutional promoters of anthropogenic (man-made) global warming (AGW) alarmism have acknowledged that there has been no measurable global warming for the past 17 or 18 years. This includes the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC); the Met Office (the U.K.’s national weather service); the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC); NASA; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA); and Professor Phil Jones, the former director of the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia, who was among the scientists exposed by the CRU’s infamous e-mail scandal known as “Climategate.”
Many of these same alarmists have been inventing new theories in attempts to explain why the actual global temperatures refuse to conform to the projections of their computer models, their most commonly cited excuse being that the oceans “ate” the warming. Nevertheless, their admissions regarding the “pause” are monumental, considering the decades of hyperventilating headlines their AGW “research” has provoked.
More interesting still, in June of this year NOAA released data from its U.S. Climate Reference Network (USCRN) showing that average, maximum, and minimum surface temperatures for the United States have declined slightly over the past decade (January 2005 to April 2014). This is no small thing, considering that NOAA is home to some of the most ardent climate alarmists, and that the NOAA/USCRN data showing a decadal cooling trend flies in the face of all the apocalyptic pronouncements of the alleged oracles of climate science.
What we have just reported may come as something of a shocking news flash to the millions of Americans who are not regular readers of The New American or the many excellent climate “skeptic” blogs and websites that have been publicizing these game-changing developments, but it’s both true and verifiable, nonetheless. To state it plainly, the theory that Planet Earth is headed toward a death spiral caused by anthropogenic global warming, or AGW, has no empirical basis to back it up.
If it is true that there has been no global warming for at least 17 years, then the very touchstone of AGW theory has been shattered. The alarmists and their sacred computer models, which all predicted continuous, unbroken temperature increases, have been completely, monumentally discredited.
Not only has the global warming “paused” (if ever it was even above what is considered natural variability), but in recent years a great many studies, including in peer-reviewed science journals, have shaken the false “consensus” that CO2 is a major driver of climate. A problem that the AGW alarmists could never solve or explain is how CO2 could be causing global warming when the historical record shows that rises in atmospheric CO2 follow temperature rises, not the other way around. “It’s hard for us to say that CO2 drives temperature. It’s easier to say temperature drives CO2,” says Dr. Robert Giegengack, chairman of the Department of Earth and Environmental Science at the University of Pennsylvania, one of many experts who claim the CO2 basis of the climate scare is ludicrous. The reader may recall from Logic 101 or Scientific Method 202 that the cause precedes the effect. It is plainly evident that the AGW activists cannot explain either the pause or the cause. Scientific teams writing papers positing that temperature rises have preceded CO2 rises include Eric Monnin, et al. (Science, 2001); Nicolas Caillon, et al. (Science, 2003); and Lowell Stott, et al. (Science Express, 2007). Dr. Lowell Stott, professor of earth sciences at the University of Southern California, said that his team’s study of ice-core data showed that the heating of the oceans caused a release of CO2, with the rising temperatures preceding rising CO2 levels by about 1,000 years.
An additional smack-down to the CO2 haters is that not only is CO2 very dubious as a significant driver of climate (as opposed to the sun, water vapor, clouds, and oceans), but man-made CO2 comprises only a tiny fraction — about three percent — of the Earth’s total atmospheric CO2. And the IPCC’s AGW alarmists know this. In fact, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA), an agency of the federal Department of Energy, cites the IPCC’s Climate Change 2001 report as the source for its three-percent figure for a table on the EIA website entitled, “Global Natural and Anthropogenic Sources and Absorption of Greenhouse Gases in the 1990s.” What’s more, only a few years ago AGW proponents, such as Bill McKibben, launched a noisy campaign warning that if CO2 levels reached 350 parts per million (ppm) we would have heated the planet past the point of no return. Well, we are now at 400 ppm, and, as we have noted, the predicted catastrophic warming has not materialized. In fact, many of the top scientists in CO2 research point out that our planet is in CO2 “starvation mode” compared to past periods, when levels were 1,000 ppm or more — and plant and animal life flourished.
And there’s more — much, much more. For those who find talk about conflicting temperature datasets, CO2 ppms, “climate sensitivity,” squabbling experts, etc. too arcane, let us switch to — the polar bear, Ursus maritimus, that cute mascot that has been the cash cow and icon for the AGW disaster lobby. Everyone knows that these creatures are starving, drowning, dying in great numbers due to nasty human SUV drivers and other irresponsible energy consumers. Right? Al Gore told us so in An Inconvenient Truth, and tugged our heartstrings with his florid narrative and images of the disappearing bears. The polar bear, we have been told repeatedly, is “the canary in the coal mine” that is telling us we are headed dangerously in the wrong direction.
Well, not according to National Public Radio. The NPR folks are about as hardcore AGW alarmist as it gets, which made it nothing less than amazing when NPR last year produced a program entitled “The Inconvenient Truth About Polar Bears,” a story about environmental activist Zac Unger, who moved with his wife and three kids to Manitoba to study, write about, and help “save” polar bears. To his surprise, he learned that there “are far more polar bears alive today than there were 40 years ago,” and they are literally overrunning many areas, surpassing their habitat’s carrying capacity. This, of course, is what on-the-ground polar bear experts, such as Dr. Mitchell Taylor, have been saying (and documenting) for decades. Ditto for Dr. Susan J. Crockford, adjunct professor at the University of Victoria, British Columbia, who runs the very informative polarbearscience.com website. According to a posting by Dr. Crockford on July 1, 2013, the polar bear global population is booming and “has increased by 2,165-5,700 since 2001.” However, Dr. Crockford also warned in July of this year that the Polar Bear Specialist Group of the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which is fully on board with the global-warming diatribe, is preparing a report for release in 2015 to list the bears as “vulnerable” (IUCN-equivalent to “threatened” in the United States). This is obviously planned to help key up support for the UN’s climate treaty conference in Paris.
Crashing “Consensus”
As the companion article to this one points out, virtually every major prediction of catastrophe that global-warming alarmists have made about the coming state of the environment over the past several decades — from melting sea ice and flooded nations to loss of snowfalls and increased climate refugees — has proven utterly incorrect. That’s in addition to the Climategate e-mail scandal and dozens of additional scandals that have exposed the “climate science” establishment’s use of fraudulent methods, statistical manipulation, censorship, intimidation, and many other unethical and criminal practices
But perhaps the biggest fraudulent claim promoted by the AGW alarmists is that “the science is settled” on global warming because some mythical “consensus” of scientists has said so. However, not only is there no “consensus” — and consensus wouldn’t matter anyway because science has always been about provable scientific fact undoing commonly held beliefs, not the other way around — scientists by the drove have been abandoning global-warming theory, including many who previously were in the alarmist camp and who served on the UN’s IPCC.
Prominent AGW “defectors” include Dr. Judith Curry, professor of climatology and chair of the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences; Dr. Patrick Moore, chemist/ecologist/activist co-founder of Greenpeace and former director of Greenpeace International; Dr. Fritz Vahrenholt, a leader in the European environmental movement and “green” energy; Dr. Richard S. J. Tol, IPCC author and professor at the Vrije Universiteit in Amsterdam, Netherlands; and Dr. James Lovelock, inventor/scientist/ecologist and formulator of the “Gaia hypothesis.”
For the past couple of decades, a superbly organized and well-funded “climate mafia” of activist scientists, political activists, and their media allies have managed to keep the “scientific consensus” ruse afloat through deception and intimidation. But, fortunately, a large body of noted scientists now is aggressively challenging both the fraudulent science and the deceitful consensus claims of the AGW lobby. Due to the prominent stature and rapidly growing numbers of these “skeptic” experts (or “realist,” if you prefer), it is becoming increasingly difficult for the alarmists to sustain their claims. Among the renowned scientists in the AGW skeptic camp are:
• Richard Lindzen, Ph.D., MIT climate physicist and Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology, Dept. of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences;
• John Christy, Ph.D., climatologist of the University of Alabama in Huntsville and NASA;
• Lee C. Gerhard, Ph.D., past director and state geologist with the Kansas Geological Society and a senior scientist emeritus of the University of Kansas;
• Patrick J. Michaels, Ph.D., former Virginia State climatologist, UN IPCC reviewer, and University of Virginia professor of environmental sciences;
• William Happer, Ph.D., Cyrus Fogg Bracket professor of physics, Princeton University;
• Leonard Weinstein, Ph.D., 35 years at the NASA Langley Research Center and presently a senior research fellow at the National Institute of Aerospace;
• Robert B. Laughlin, Ph.D., Nobel Prize-winning Stanford University physicist and former research scientist at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory;
• Anatoly Levitin, Ph.D., head of the geomagnetic variations laboratory at the Institute of Terrestrial Magnetism, Ionosphere and Radiowave Propagation of the Russian Academy of Sciences;
• Hans Jelbring, Ph.D., climatologist of the Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics Unit at Stockholm University, Sweden;
• Burt Rutan, renowned engineer, inventor, and aviation/space pioneer;
• Willie Soon, Ph.D., Harvard-Smithsonian Center astrophysicist;
• Vincent Gray, Ph.D., New Zealand chemist and climate researcher;
• Tom V. Segalstad, Ph.D., geologist/geochemist, head of the Geological Museum in Norway;
• Lennart Bengtsson, Ph.D., Swedish meteorologist/climatologist, recipient of numerous awards, former director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology in Hamburg, Germany; and
• John T. Everett, Ph.D., a former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration senior manager and project manager for the UN Atlas of the Oceans.
These, obviously, are not the cranky outliers and hillbilly flat-earthers that Obama et al. insultingly imply all skeptics are. And those we mention above are but a small sampling of thousands, literally, that could be cited. ClimateDepot.com has released a 321-page report featuring the statements (and impressive vitae) of more than 1,000 renowned scientists worldwide who challenge the IPCC’s man-made global-warming claims. In July, the Heartland Institute held its 9th International Conference on Climate Change, which brought together hundreds of prominent climate realists to discuss, analyze, and publicize the latest developments in climate research. The presentations and panel discussions of these stellar scientists can be viewed at the Heartland Institute’s website (www.heartland.org).
Truth vs. “Post-normal Science”
However, many “scientists” have no ethical qualms about fudging data (lying) because they are practitioners of a higher, “spiritual,” “post-normal science” that has become the new religion of environmental scientists. Mike Hulme, one of the high priests of post-normal science, has explained this new religion in his book Why We Disagree About Climate Change and in various articles he has written and interviews he has given. Dr. Hulme, professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia — the university of Climategate infamy — is the founding director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of the U.K.’s most prominent climate scientists.
“Climate change seems to fall in this category” of post-normal science, he writes. “Disputes in post-normal science focus [as much] … on the process of science — who gets funded, who evaluates quality, who has the ear of policy — as on the facts of science.”
Truth is not the objective of the post-normal advocates. In fact, the old-fashioned scientific pursuit of truth is counterproductive to the post-normal crowd. “The danger of a ‘normal’ reading of science is that it assumes science can first find truth, then speak truth to power, and that truth-based policy will then follow,” Hulme says.
Within “normal” science, Hulme says, “exchanges often reduce to ones about scientific truth rather than about values, perspectives and political preferences.” And he sees that as a problem. He writes:
Self-evidently dangerous climate change will not emerge from a normal scientific process of truth seeking, although science will gain some insights into the question if it recognises the socially contingent dimensions of a post-normal science. But to proffer such insights, scientists — and politicians — must trade (normal) truth for influence. If scientists want to remain listened to, to bear influence on policy, they must recognise the social limits of their truth seeking and reveal fully the values and beliefs they bring to their scientific activity.
“The function of climate change … really is not about stopping climate chaos,” Hulme concedes. “Instead, we need to see how we can use the idea of climate change — the matrix of ecological functions, power relationships, cultural discourses and materials flows that climate change reveals — to rethink how we take forward our political, social, economic and personal projects over the decades to come.”
“Within a capitalist world order, climate change is actually a convenient phenomenon to come along,” says Hulme, revealing, perhaps, the underlying socialist, proto-Marxian impetus for many of the AGW fanatics.
According to this leading post-normal climate oracle:
The idea of climate change should be seen as an intellectual resource around which our collective and personal identities and projects can form and take shape. We need to ask not what we can do for climate change, but to ask what climate change can do for us…. Because the idea of climate change is so plastic, it can be deployed across many of our human projects and can serve many of our psychological, ethical, and spiritual needs.
The promoters of climate alarmism are well aware that the plasticity of “climate change” offers them untold opportunities to reshape and transform the political, economic, social, psychological, ethical, and spiritual makeup of all society. That is what they are aiming at now with the Obama administration’s current EPA climate plan and with other world-spanning climate agendas.
Far from acknowledging their errors and backing off from their authoritarian agenda, the global-warming alarmists have doubled down and cranked up both the volume of their doomsday predictions and the audacity of their demands. The Obama administration and its allies realize full well that they do not have public support for a carbon tax, a carbon cap-and-trade bill, or any of the many other economy-destroying, job-destroying schemes. They cannot get them through Congress. Thus, President Obama is resorting to dictatorial executive orders and administrative rulings to force his unconstitutional “environmental” program on an unwilling populace. His primary instrument for doing so is the Environmental Protection Agency, but he is also tasking every Cabinet department and agency with assisting in the project. The new EPA regulations unleashed on June 2, 2014, for example, demand an impossibly high 30-percent reduction in CO2 for coal-fired electrical plants. It is clearly aimed at effecting Obama’s pledge to shut down coal.
Professor Judith Curry, whom we mentioned earlier, is but one of many reputable climatologists who have expressed amazement at the audacity and unfounded assertions of the administration’s AGW agenda. “I am mystified as to why President Obama and John Kerry are making such strong (and indefensible) statements about climate change,” Dr. Curry said. “Particularly with regards to extreme weather events, their case is very weak. Especially at this time, given that much of the rest of the world is pulling back against commitments to reduce emissions and combat climate change.” Professor Curry, who chairs the Georgia Institute of Technology’s School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences, was herself once counted as a leading light in the AGW alarmist camp. Indeed, she was even referred to as “the high priestess of global warming.” However, she now counts herself a “heretic,” along with a large and growing body of scientists who challenge the false “consensus” dogma.
Professor Curry may be at a loss to explain the president’s motives, but to knowledgeable outsiders looking in, the reason behind the desperate words and measures is obvious. The president, like his globalist cadres at the UN, is working feverishly to use climate change to remake the political order of the globe — before the wheels come completely off the global-warming bandwagon — so that countries and their peoples kowtow to a new international socialist regime based out of the UN, a regime that literally tells individuals what they can and cannot do. (Already, only a few months ago, in September 2013, a fierce revolt by Australian voters against the newly imposed “carbon tax” and other stifling “climate” policies swept Prime Minister Kevin Rudd and his Labor Party from office. The crushing defeat for Rudd and his militantly Green agenda sent political tremors worldwide.)
The present climate alarmism has a very specific, immediate purpose: One of the alarmists’ most coveted prizes is adoption next year in Paris, France, of a new proposed United Nations convention to replace the (largely) expired 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The UN is calling for the 2015 Paris treaty to be universally binding, with concrete commitments by developed nations to reduce their “carbon footprints,” as well as all other greenhouse gas emissions — which translates, of course, into shutting down much of our energy consumption (coal, oil, diesel, and natural gas); much higher costs for heating, transportation, manufacturing, and food (in short, everything that requires energy, which means, of course, virtually everything); increased poverty and economic hardship; and vastly increased regulation of everything, under a perennially evolving international regimen overseen by the UN.
With that prize comes the ability to effect “a complete transformation of the economic structure of the world.” Those are the words of Christiana Figueres, executive director of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), spoken at the UNFCCC summit in Doha, Qatar, in 2012. Figueres’ damning admission (which she ebulliently posited as a boast) is worth closer examination. “It must be understood that what is occurring here, not just in Doha, but in the whole climate change process is a complete transformation of the economic structure of the world,” Figueres enthused.
Figueres expanded on this “transformative” UN agenda in an interview with the British left-wing daily The Guardian. “The Industrial Revolution was also a transformation,” she noted, “but it wasn’t a guided transformation from a centralized policy perspective. This is a centralized transformation that is taking place because governments have decided that they need to listen to science. So it’s a very, very different transformation and one that is going to make the life of everyone on the planet very different.” (Emphasis added.)
Figueres is in charge of the process that is producing the new climate treaty for the Paris summit next year. It will aim to impose acomplete, centralized, guided transformation that will affect “the life of everyone on the planet” and make it “very different.” Very different, indeed. If Figueres and her UN cohorts have their way, a “carbon budget” will be foisted upon the entire planet, with draconian CO2 rationing to control all human activity.
Based on the claims of the discredited and widely ridiculed IPCC Fifth Assessment Report, the carbon budget proposal is a naked scam to seize power and money. For starters, the UNFCCC is engaged in “resource mobilization” to obtain national commitments for its newly established Green Climate Fund. They are asking for $100 billion — for starters. And that is chump change next to thetrillions of dollars for “climate finance” and “climate justice” demanded by UN officials and Third World dictators. UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon, for instance, told the audience of business and financial elites at this year’s World Economic Forum (WEF): “We need trillions of dollars of investment to move from the brown to the green economy.” He stressed the need for a “public-private framework that supports low-carbon investment.” Secretary-General Ban was pushing on an open door, of course, since many, if not most, of the WEF elites he was addressing are already big players in the “public-private framework” that rewards politically connected private companies with grants and subsidies extracted from taxpayers to support unsustainable “green” technology and alternative energy projects. According to a report of the Climate Policy Initiative last year entitled “Global Landscape of Climate Finance 2013,” already “global climate finance flows” are at $359 billion annually, or around $1 billion per day. Al Gore, of course, serves as a prime example of how the public-private-partnership scheme works; he cashed in big and is well on his way toward becoming one of the first “carbon billionaires.”
Collapsing Paradigm
As support for global-warming alarm among both scientists and the general public crumbles rapidly, globalists must act forcefully now or risk losing all the gains they have made over the past two decades.
Ban Ki-moon and Obama are frantically wielding both the carrot and the stick, attempting to lure business and financial support with visions of even more massive wealth transfers from the middle classes to the corporate ruling classes, while at the same time appealing to the socialist-minded enviro-activists with promises of harsh regulations to stamp out fossil fuels, along with many of the “evil” capitalist industries that depend on them. They are in a desperate rush to build support for a Paris treaty that will lock into place “global governance” and “complete transformation of the economic structure of the world.”
This is huge, a sprint to the finish line between a complete meltdown of global-warming theory and the institution of the biggest effort ever to regiment all humanity! Let’s not only root for the meltdown, but help speed it to the finish line by increasing all our efforts to expose the bogus science and tyrannical agenda behind the colossal global-warming fraud.
Photo of UN IPCC Chairman Rajendra K. Pachauri: AP Images
