January 4, 2009
Right Side News Reports finds that global warming set some records in the disappointment catagory for those that believe the planet will fry itself due to mans Co2 emissions. Michael R. Fox expounds on this in some detail.
By Michael R. Fox Ph.D.
The year 2008 marked the tenth consecutive year of no global warming. This is not widely reported or known. In fact the Earth has been cooling for the last 6 years.
Richard Lindzen
A profound analysis of the global warming issues including huge political issues was written and presented in August this year by Dr. Richard Lindzen, climatologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). (http://tinyurl.com/6lcelj). He asks two very important questions:
- 1. Has the global warming alarm become the goal itself, instead of the result of scientific research?
- 2. Is climate science really designed to answer questions or promote political goals?
Too often we witness climate alarmism being promoted while solid science is ignored, misrepresented, or downplayed. This makes great fodder for scary movies, scary news articles, and scary documentaries, but it is still bad science.
We also note that the nearly $5 billion/year being spent on global warming research is buying a lot of name-calling, ad hominem attacks, and all around nastiness by many of the indentured recipients of that money.
Such behavior certainly is not scientific. In fact it inhibits the progress of science, and the intelligent formulations of science and energy policies. If half the participants are ignored by the science journals, insulted with ad hominem attacks by the promoters, and ignored and dismissed by the media, then the simple and rational scientific processes are stopped.
Lindzen describes the origins of global warming alarm, the political agenda of the alarmists, their intimidation tactics, and the reasons for their success. Also, in painstaking detail, he debunks their key scientific claims and counterclaims. This Lindzen paper, although quite lengthy, is must reading for all decision makers, energy policy makers, and their staffs. Of course it would also help if the entire US population and the media read it as well, to help them understand the unscientific political processes taking place right before their eyes.
Les Kinsolving
Writer Kinsolving reports more of the bad news (http://tinyurl.com/8xnox9). As Dr. David Gee at the University of Uppsala Sweden asks “For how many years must the planet cool before we begin to understand that the planet is not warming? For how many years must cooling go on?”—Geologist Dr. David Gee, chairman of the science committee of the 2008 International Geological Congress, has authored 130-plus peer-reviewed papers, and currently is at Uppsala University of Sweden. As if this weren’t bad enough, the list of credentialed skeptics is growing by leaps and bounds.
Kinsolving provides a number of other important quotations from the scientists who don’t accept the dogma of man-made global warming:
- 1. “I am a skeptic. … Global warming has become a new religion.” – Nobel Prize winner for physics Ivar Giaever.
- 2. “Anyone who claims that the debate is over and the conclusions are firm has a fundamentally unscientific approach to one of the most momentous issues of our time.” – Solar physicist Dr. Pal Brekke, senior adviser to the Norwegian Space Centre in Ohio.
- 3. “It is a blatant lie put forth in the media that makes it seem there is only a fringe of scientists who don’t buy into anthropogenic global warming.” – U.S. government atmospheric scientist Stanley B. Goldenberg of the Hurricane Research Division of NOAA.
- 4. “After reading (U.N. IPCC Chairman) Pachauri’s asinine comment (comparing skeptics to) Flat Earthers, it’s hard to remain quiet.” – Climate statistician Dr. William M. Briggs.
- 5. “All those urging action to curb global warming need to take off the blinkers and give some thought to what we should do if we are facing global cooling instead.” – Geophysicist Dr. Phil Chapman, an astronautical engineer and former NASA astronaut, serving as staff physicist at Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
- 6. “The (global warming) scaremongering has its justification in the fact that it is something that generates funds.” – Award-winning paleontologist Dr. Eduardo Tonni, of the Committee for Scientific Research in Buenos Aires and head of the Paleontology Department at the University of La Plata.
- 7. “Earth has cooled since 1998 in defiance of the predictions by the U.N.-IPCC. … The global temperature for 2007 was the coldest in a decade and the coldest of the millennium … which is why ‘global warming’ is now called ‘climate change.'” – Climatologist Dr. Richard Keen of the Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences at the University of Colorado.
The Petition Project
There are many more scientists and engineers who do not accept the fuzzy “science” of global warming. More than 31,000 of them are now listed on the Petition Project, including more than 9000 Ph.D.s (http://tinyurl.com/5o5dxl). These 31,000 scientists, engineers, and medical professionals sign a simple statement which says:
“We urge the United States government to reject the global warming agreement that was written in Kyoto, Japan, in December, 1997, and any other similar proposals. The proposed limits on greenhouse gases would harm the environment, hinder the advance of science and technology, and damage the health and welfare of mankind. There is no convincing scientific evidence that the human release of carbon dioxide, methane, or other greenhouse gases is causing, or will in the foreseeable future, cause catastrophic heating of the Earth’s atmosphere and disruption of the Earth’s climate. Moreover, there is substantial scientific evidence that increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide produce many beneficial effects upon the natural plant and animal environments of the Earth.”
This is not an unreasonable appeal by very well educated people asking our government not to fall for the steady stream of a continuing hoax. Solid evidence is needed. If we don’t get the science right, we won’t get the policy right.
Christopher Booker
The irrepressible Christopher Booker has noted the large changes in the global warming events during 2008 (http://tinyurl.com/8p7d83).
These include:
- 1. Global temperatures continue to decline. Booker says “The decline in global temperatures was wholly unpredicted by all those computer models which have been used as the main drivers of the scare. Last winter, as temperatures plummeted, many parts of the world had snowfalls on a scale not seen for decades. This winter, with the whole of Canada and half the US under snow, looks likely to be even worse. After several years flatlining, global temperatures have dropped sharply enough to cancel out much of their net rise in the 20th century.”
- 2. Booker continues “secondly, 2008 was the year when any pretence that there was a “scientific consensus” in favour of man-made global warming collapsed. At long last, as in the Manhattan Declaration last March, hundreds of proper scientists, including many of the world’s most eminent climate experts, have been rallying to pour scorn on that “consensus” which was only a politically engineered artifact, based on ever more blatantly manipulated data and computer models programmed to produce no more than convenient fictions”.
- 3. “Thirdly, as banks collapsed and the global economy plunged into its worst recession for decades, harsh reality at last began to break in on those self-deluding dreams which have for so long possessed almost every politician in the western world. As we saw in this month’s Poznan conference, when 10,000 politicians, officials and “environmentalists” gathered to plan next year’s “son of Kyoto” treaty in Copenhagen, panicking politicians are waking up to the fact that the world can no longer afford all those quixotic schemes for “combating climate change” with which they were so happy to indulge themselves in more comfortable times”.
Summary
A nation which abolishes its fossil energy sources (coal. oil, and natural gas), nuclear energy, hydro energy, as these political forces are pushing, will lose all of the energy needed for our industries, homes, and infrastructure such as hospitals, office buildings, schools, and hotels. A powerful nation such as ours cannot sustain its energy needs on sunbeams and gentle breezes, as many of the warmers propose. That pathway to the future is dangerous and instead is a pathway to economic suicide
Michael R. Fox, Ph.D., a science and energy reporter for Hawaii Reporter and a science analyist for the Grassroot Institute of Hawaii, is retired and now lives in Eastern Washington. He has nearly 40 years experience in the energy field. He has also taught chemistry and energy at the University level. His interest in the communications of science has led to several communications awards, hundreds of speeches, and many appearances on television and talk shows. He can be reached via email at mailto:mike@foxreport.org
Reach Hawaii Reporter editor Malia Zimmerman at mailto:Malia@HawaiiReporter.com