Search Results for “consensus”

‘Alternative Facts’: Ted Nordhaus explains how extreme events came to represent climate change contrary to an overwhelming scientific consensus

March 8, 2024

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/alternative-facts BY ROGER PIELKE JR. Excerpt: …[A]n excellent new essay by Ted Nordhaus of The Breakthrough Institute2 published today by The New Atlantis, titled — Did Exxon Make it Rain Today?. Nordhaus does a nice job explaining that disasters occur at the confluence of an extreme event and an exposed and vulnerable society, but most attention these days is paid to extreme events, and climate change in particular: What determines whether hurricanes, floods, heat waves, and wildfires amount to natural disasters or minor nuisances, though, is mostly not the relative intensity or frequency of the natural hazard but rather how many people are in harm’s way and how well protected they are against the climate’s extremes. Infrastructure, institutions, and technology mediate the relationship between extreme climate and weather phenomena, and the costs that human societies bear as a result of them. . . The implications of this point will be counterintuitive for many. Yes, there are many types of disasters, like hurricanes and floods, that are causing greater economic costs in many places than they used to. But this is almost entirely because the places that are most exposed to weather disasters have far more people and far more wealth in harm’s way than they used to. Even if there were no global warming, in other words, these areas would be much more at risk simply because they have much more to lose. However, what I find really interesting about Nordhaus’ essay is his discussion of how we got to a point where leading journalists and scientists are seeking to deny these rather obvious conditions and instead, to focus obsessively on human-caused climate change, and specifically on the fossil fuel industry as bearing responsibility for increasing disaster costs, contrary to an overwhelming scientific consensus. Nordhaus explains that climate advocates have a long history of trying to tie disasters to climate change, dating back decades: Those efforts intensified after Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, with Al Gore using it as a centerpiece in An Inconvenient Truth.3 A few years later, in 2012, the Union of Concerned Scientists convened a gathering of environmental advocates, litigators, climate scientists, and opinion researchers in La Jolla, California. Their explicit purpose was to develop a public narrative connecting extreme weather events that were already happening, and the damages they were causing, with climate change and the fossil fuel industry. The proceedings from that gathering, which were subsequently published in a report titled “Establishing Accountability for Climate Change Damages: Lessons from Tobacco Control,” are revealing. The IPCC, over decades of reports, has not concluded with high confidence that a signal of human caused climate change can be detected for most types of extreme weather, and especially those that result in the greatest impacts. That remains the case today. For those wanting to promote climate action using contemporary disasters as a reason to act, the IPCC’s consistent conclusions — no matter how deeply buried in its reports — present a problem. In a 2018 survey of environmental journalists … Seventy-one percent reported that they never or rarely included opposing viewpoints in their coverage of climate change. So alternative facts needed to be created. Nordhaus explains: Myles Allen, the climate scientist who is credited with creating the field of “extreme event attribution,” is described in the report as lamenting that “the scientific community has frequently been guilty of talking about the climate of the twenty-second century rather than what’s happening now.” Yet, he and other scientists at the gathering also acknowledged how difficult it is to identify the contributions of climate change to current extreme weather events. “If you want to have statistically significant results about what has already happened,” another scientist, Claudia Tebaldi, noted, “we are far from being able to say anything definitive because the signal is so often overwhelmed by noise.” While much of the convening was ostensibly focused on litigation strategies, modeled on campaigns against the tobacco industry, the subtext of the entire conversation was how to raise the public salience of a risk that is diffuse, perceived to be far off in time and space, and associated with activities — the combustion of fossil fuels — that bring significant social benefits. Nordhaus explains that a three-pronged strategy emerged from the 2012 meeting — lowering scientific standards (from those of the IPCC) to enable stronger claims, redefining the attribution of causality differently than the IPCC, and emphasizing the villainous nature of fossil fuel companies to give people an enemy: During the meeting, Naomi Oreskes, the Harvard historian of science who popularized the connection between climate and tobacco, argued that scientists should use a different standard of proof for the relationship between climate change and extreme weather events. “When we take these things to the public,” she argued, “we take a standard of evidence applied internally to science and use it externally.” But, she continued, the 95-percent confidence standard that scientists use “is not the Eleventh Commandment. There is nothing in nature that taught us that 95 percent is needed. That is a social convention.” Others suggested that reframing the attribution of extreme weather to climate change could allow for stronger claims: rather than looking at whether there was any long-term detectable trend in extreme weather, scientists might instead focus on the degree to which climate change increased the likelihood of a given extreme event. And others believed that focusing legal strategies on a villain — fossil fuel companies conspiring to mislead the public about the danger of their product — would result in greater public acceptance of the claims that climate change was the cause of extreme weather. As it happened, environmental advocates would pursue all of these strategies. Nordhaus further explains that broader changes in the media occurred at a perfect time to boost these strategies aimed at creating a new narrative: Not so long ago, news coverage needed to be credible to multiple audiences whose politics and values spanned a relatively broad spectrum of worldviews and values. But the proliferation of media outlets and platforms in recent decades, first with the rise of cable news and then the Internet, has increasingly fragmented media audiences. Today, media outlets large and small compete in a far more crowded marketplace to reach much narrower segments of the population. This incentivizes them to tailor their content to the social and political values of their audiences and serve up spectacles that comport with the ideological preferences of the audiences they are trying to reach. For the audiences that elite legacy outlets such as the New York Times now almost exclusively cater to, that means producing a continual stream of catastrophic climate news. I suspect that the only place that most of you reading this will encounter Nordhaus’ essay is right here at THB.4 Reporters on the “climate beat” know very well that acknowledging the existence of Nordhaus’ essay or the arguments he makes might offend the politics of their employers, readers, and colleagues. Nordhaus explains that a large majority of environmental journalists refuse to engage narrative-challenging viewpoints (emphasis added): Reporters and editors at these outlets are also well-aligned ideologically with their audiences. A national survey of political journalists and editors working for newspapers at the state and national level conducted in 2022 found that those identifying as Democrats outnumbered those identifying as Republicans by 10 to 1. A 2018 survey of environmental journalists by George Mason University’s Center for Climate Change Communication, meanwhile, found that 70 percent reported trusting information from environmental advocacy organizations versus fewer than 10 percent from business groups. Seventy-one percent reported that they never or rarely included opposing viewpoints in their coverage of climate change. …

Europe’s Consensus On Climate Is Crumbling

February 29, 2024

Europe’s Consensus On Climate Is Crumbling BY WOLFGANG MÜNCHAU At stake in the European elections in June this year will be everything that defines the modern EU: a large volume of net zero legislation, a values-based foreign policy, and ever-more intrusive business regulation. Polls suggest the centrist majority that has supported these policies is growing slimmer. [emphasis, links added] Ursula von der Leyen [pictured above] has been the quintessential representative of that majority. Born in Brussels, German by nationality, proposed by France, she was the perfect candidate for European Commission president in late 2019. Now she is seeking a second term. Whether she will succeed will depend to a large extent on whether the centrist four-party coalition that supported her in 2019 will hold. All over Europe, we are now seeing a backlash against the kind of policies the Von der Leyen Commission represents. The far right is part of that response, but the main political shift has been inside Von der Leyen’s own political group, the European People’s Party (EPP), of which the German CDU/CSU is the largest member. This backlash follows one of the most hectic political phases in recent EU history. When Covid struck in early 2020, Von der Leyen was instrumental in setting up the EU’s recovery fund to help countries deal with the economic consequences of the pandemic. Then came the Green Deal, a hefty tranche of legislation on renewable energy, land use, forestry, energy efficiency, emission standards for cars and trucks, and a directive on energy taxes. There was also a tightening of standards on pesticides, air quality, water pollution, and wastewater. Farmers are resisting this program because it affects their livelihoods. Industrialists, too, are unhappy. A big part of the Green Deal was its industrial policy; the flagship legislation was the Net Zero Industry Act. The industry used to be the EU’s strongest supporter. But with the new laws came new bureaucracy: now, all EU-funded investment must include a green component of at least 30 percent, while a carbon border adjustment mechanism, to take effect in 2026, will penalize imports that do not meet EU carbon-emission standards. Together, EU legislation in the last few years amounts to a near-total corporate regime change. Compliance with some regulations is virtually impossible for companies without dedicated legal teams. It is going to get worse. Under discussion right now is a supply-chain law that would make European companies responsible for human rights abuses in their supply chain – including the suppliers of their suppliers. I expect that the hyperactive phase of this green agenda will end with the elections in June. Some of it might even go into reverse. I am even starting to doubt whether the EU will ever enforce the 2035 target for phasing out fossil-fuel-driven cars. This is an industrial-policy disaster in the making because Europe’s carmakers are having trouble selling their electric cars. It is instructive to look at what happened to Green politics in Germany. The coalition of the center-left SPD, the Greens, and the liberal FDP started with great enthusiasm in 2021 but is now hopelessly divided. After a string of unpopular laws, Germany’s anti-Green surge has been in full force for some time. Both the far-right AfD and Sahra Wagenknecht’s new left-populist party have identified the Greens as their main opponent. They depict them as members of metropolitan elites forcing their urban values on rural communities. The language suggests parallels with Brexit. As the EU is associated with partisan policies of the center-left, opposition to those policies and opposition to the EU are starting to merge. It was the sudden abolition of a diesel subsidy for agricultural vehicles that led farmers to protest in Germany. But their discontent goes deeper. What is happening all over Europe is the first organized revolt against the green agenda. The center-right has discovered that there are votes to be had by opposing green policies. Farmers and rural communities are starting to fight back. A consequence of this is that the centrist coalition is no longer viable. This is a healthy development. When centrist parties always form coalitions with one another, we should not be surprised to see parties emerge on the fringes. The centrists’ reaction to the rise of the far right has been to erect firewalls – by simply refusing to engage with such parties. This might work to begin with. But when the far right exceeds certain thresholds in support, as it has in Germany, such firewalls cannot withstand the electoral arithmetic. In Brussels, the firewall is cracking. The EPP has already opened up to the European Conservatives and Reformists group, whose most influential member is Giorgia Meloni, the hard-right Italian prime minister, who has said she will support Von der Leyen. Meloni’s big issue is immigration: I would not rule out the idea of Von der Leyen once again assembling a majority; what I struggle to imagine is a coalition that encompasses both the left and Meloni. It is not clear whether Renew Europe, the liberal grouping in the European Parliament, will still support Von der Leyen. Support for liberal parties is weakening everywhere, including in France. Mark Rutte’s Party for Freedom and Democracy lost last year’s election in the Netherlands. The German FDP is fighting for its political survival within the coalition in Berlin. Von der Leyen’s hyperactive green industrial agenda is the antithesis of what conservative-liberal parties such as the FDP are standing for. And herein lies the ultimate irony. If Ursula von der Leyen were to win a second term, she would spend most of it undoing what she did in her first. Read more at New Statesman

Pielke Jr.: The Weaponization of ‘Scientific Consensus’ – Only science offers a path to truth, not surveys of expert opinion

February 6, 2024

https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-weaponization-of-scientific-consensus By ROGER PIELKE JR. Excerpt: In September, 2022 California Governor Gavin Newsome signed into law a bill that prohibited medical professionals from sharing “misinformation” with patients. Specifically, the law stated that it would be [U]nprofessional conduct for a physician and surgeon to disseminate misinformation or disinformation related to COVID-19. The law defined “misinformation”: “Misinformation” means false information that is contradicted by contemporary scientific consensus contrary to the standard of care. The law reflected a common perspective: A scientific consensus represents truth and views outside that consensus are misinformation. Thus, to identify those who are spreading misinformation we simply need to identify the relevant scientific consensus. Those out of step with the consensus, the argument continues, can then be called out or sanctioned for spreading misinformation — and public discourse can proceed based on accepted facts, not falsehoods. The notion of consensus-as-truth has been operationalized in various forms: journalistic “fact checkers,” academic “misinformation” researchers, and content moderation on social media platforms. The practical effect is the creation of self-appointed arbiters of truth — journalists, academics, social media platforms, and even governments — who render judgments on acceptable and unacceptable speech according to conformance with an acceptable view. There are many problems with the notion of consensus-as-truth and the (self)appointment of misinformation police to regulate discourse, whether of the public or, as in the case of the California law, of experts themselves. A scientific consensus is not a single view, but a distribution of views. Almost 20 years ago I participated in an exchange in Science with Naomi Oreskes on this point. Professor Oreskes shot to fame by publishing a commentary that argued that the consensus on climate change was universal, based on a review of 928 papers. Oreskes argument quickly moved from characterizing science to a call for political action, based on the asserted universal consensus. I responded by arguing that a consensus is not a single thing, but a distribution, and policy should be robust to that distribution: The actions that we take on climate change should be robust to (i) the diversity of scientific perspectives, and thus also to (ii) the diversity of perspectives of the nature of the consensus. A consensus is a measure of a central tendency and, as such, it necessarily has a distribution of perspectives around that central measure. On climate change, almost all of this distribution is well within the bounds of legitimate scientific debate and reflected within the full text of the IPCC reports. Our policies should not be optimized to reflect a single measure of the central tendency or, worse yet, caricatures of that measure, but instead they should be robust enough to accommodate the distribution of perspectives around that central measure, thus providing a buffer against the possibility that we might learn more in the future. A further complication is that the notion of a “consensus on climate change” is incoherent. In a 2011 study of how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) represented uncertainty in its Fourth Assessment Report, Rachael Jonasson and I identified 2,744 “findings” across the AR4 report — each finding was a specific scientific claim. There was a degree of consensus associated with each of those claims — the distribution of views may have been narrow (e.g., climate change is real), bimodal or wide (e.g., future hurricane incidence), and with the advantage of hindsight, utterly wrong (e.g., a high emissions scenario is business-as-usual). … Full report: https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com/p/the-weaponization-of-scientific-consensus

Mark Lynas ‘99% Consensus’ on Climate Change – Busted in Peer Review.

November 8, 2023

Mark Lynas ‘99% Consensus’ on Climate Change – Busted in Peer Review. By Anthony Watts From email: My name is Yonatan Dubi, I am a professor of chemistry and physics at Ben Gurion University, Israel. I am also one of Israel’s leading advocates for rational environmentalism and climate realism. Together with a few colleagues we have conducted a very nice research, detailing and quantifying the flaws in the famous consensus study by Lynas et al, which (falsely) claimed the ridiculous 99% consensus. After a year long journey, our paper was finally published in the peer reviewed journal Climate, the link is https://www.mdpi.com/2225-1154/11/11/215. The conclusion does not follow from the data”: Israeli study trashes extreme global warming consensus claim. Ninety-Nine Percent? Re-Examining the Consensus on the Anthropogenic Contribution to Climate Change David Dentelski , Ran Damari , Yanir Marmor , Avner Niv , Mor Roses and Yonatan Dubi Climate 2023, 11(11), 215; https://doi.org/10.3390/cli11110215 Received: 16 September 2023 / Revised: 24 October 2023 / Accepted: 26 October 2023 / Published: 30 October 2023 (This article belongs to the Section Policy, Governance, and Social Equity) Abstract Anthropogenic activity is considered a central driver of current climate change. A recent paper, studying the consensus regarding the hypothesis that the recent increase in global temperature is predominantly human-made via the emission of greenhouse gasses (see text for reference), argued that the scientific consensus in the peer-reviewed scientific literature pertaining to this hypothesis exceeds 99%. This conclusion was reached after the authors scanned the abstracts and titles of some 3000 papers and mapped them according to their (abstract) statements regarding the above hypothesis. Here, we point out some major flaws in the methodology, analysis, and conclusions of the study. Using the data provided in the study, we show that the 99% consensus, as defined by the authors, is actually an upper limit evaluation because of the large number of “neutral” papers which were counted as pro-consensus in the paper and probably does not reflect the true situation. We further analyze these results by evaluating how so-called “skeptic” papers fit the consensus and find that biases in the literature, which were not accounted for in the aforementioned study, may place the consensus on the low side. Finally, we show that the rating method used in the study suffers from a subjective bias which is reflected in large variations between ratings of the same paper by different raters. All these lead to the conclusion that the conclusions of the study does not follow from the data. The original study, to which the above is a response; Greater than 99% consensus on human caused climate change in the peer-reviewed scientific literature Mark Lynas, Benjamin Z Houlton and Simon Perry Published 19 October 2021 • © 2021 The Author(s). Published by IOP Publishing Ltd Environmental Research Letters, Volume 16, Number 11Citation Mark Lynas et al 2021 Environ. Res. Lett. 16 114005DOI 10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966 Abstract While controls over the Earth’s climate system have undergone rigorous hypothesis-testing since the 1800s, questions over the scientific consensus of the role of human activities in modern climate change continue to arise in public settings. We update previous efforts to quantify the scientific consensus on climate change by searching the recent literature for papers sceptical of anthropogenic-caused global warming. From a dataset of 88125 climate-related papers published since 2012, when this question was last addressed comprehensively, we examine a randomized subset of 3000 such publications. We also use a second sample-weighted approach that was specifically biased with keywords to help identify any sceptical peer-reviewed papers in the whole dataset. We identify four sceptical papers out of the sub-set of 3000, as evidenced by abstracts that were rated as implicitly or explicitly sceptical of human-caused global warming. In our sample utilizing pre-identified sceptical keywords we found 28 papers that were implicitly or explicitly sceptical. We conclude with high statistical confidence that the scientific consensus on human-caused contemporary climate change—expressed as a proportion of the total publications—exceeds 99% in the peer reviewed scientific literature. … Read more: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1748-9326/ac2966 What a surprise – a study which claims over 99% consensus appears to be unsupported by the evidence, because neutral papers were misclassified, and skeptic papers were ignored. Lynas, et. al., is probably the worst case of confirmation bias ever published. Of course, we all knew that when we first saw it. The Lynas paper was all about grabbing headlines, not science. Now watch the fun as Lynas et. al. tries to defend their paper, with even greater levels of nonsense.

Award-winning journalist Alex Newman: ‘Three new peer-reviewed papers, published in major prestigious scientific journals… completely undermine the alleged scientific consensus on man-made global warming’

October 19, 2023

"I think the dam is finally cracking." Award-winning journalist, Alex Newman (@ALEXNEWMAN_JOU), explains why the "human-induced climate emergency" narrative is finally crumbling. "Three new peer-reviewed papers, published in major prestigious scientific journals… completely… pic.twitter.com/fLIdiKY7Hw — Wide Awake Media (@wideawake_media) October 19, 2023 New Papers ‘Completely Undermine’ the So-Called Settled Science on Manmade Global Warming: Alex Newman

Scientist admits the ‘overwhelming consensus’ on the climate change crisis is ‘manufactured’

August 10, 2023

The UN created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “The IPCC wasn’t supposed to focus on any benefits of warming. The IPCC’s mandate was to look for dangerous human-caused climate change,”climatologist Dr. Judith Curry said. “Then the national funding agencies directed all the funding . . . assuming there are dangerous impacts. The researchers quickly figured out that the way to get funded was to make alarmist claims about ‚”man-made climate change” This is how “manufactured consensus” happens.

WSJ: Can the Climate Heal Itself? Dissenters from the catastrophe consensus on warming are worth listening to

June 12, 2023

https://www.wsj.com/articles/can-the-climate-heal-itself-cumulus-cirrus-clouds-negative-feedback-un-30bbbef0?mod=opinion_featst_pos3 Can the Climate Heal Itself? – Dissenters from the catastrophe consensus on warming are worth listening to. By Andy Kessler Excerpt: But what if the entire premise is wrong? What if the Earth is self-healing? Before you hurl the “climate denier” invective at me, let’s think this through. Earth has been around for 4.5 billion years—living organisms for 3.7 billion. Surely, an enlightened engineer might think, the planet’s creator built in a mechanism to regulate heat, or we wouldn’t still be here to worry about it. … Richard Lindzen, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and lead author of an early Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, told me, “Temperatures in the tropics remain relatively constant compared with changes in the tropics-to-pole temperatures. The tropics-polar difference is about 40 degrees Celsius today but was 20 degrees during the warm Eocene Epoch and 60 degrees during Ice Ages.” This difference has more to do with changes in the Earth’s rotation, like wobbling, than anything else. According to Mr. Lindzen, this effect is some 70 times as great as human-made greenhouse gases. OK, back to clouds. Cumulus clouds, the puffy ones often called thunderclouds, are an important convection element, carrying heat from the Earth’s surface to the upper atmosphere. Above them are high-altitude cirrus clouds, which can reflect heat back toward the surface. A 2001 Lindzen paper, however, suggests that high-level cirrus clouds in the tropics dissipate as temperatures rise. These thinning cirrus clouds allow more heat to escape. It’s called the Iris Effect, like a temperature-controlled vent opener for an actual greenhouse so you don’t (existentially) fry your plants. Yes, Earth has a safety valve. Mr. Lindzen says, “This more than offsets the effect of greenhouse gases.” As you can imagine, theories debunking the climate consensus are met with rebuttals and more papers. Often, Mr. Lindzen points out, critics, “to maintain the warming narrative, adjust their models, especially coverage and reflection or albedo of clouds in the tropics.” More tuning. A 2021 paper co-authored by Mr. Lindzen shows strong support for an Iris Effect. Maybe Earth really was built by an engineer. Proof? None other than astronomer Carl Sagan described the Faint Young Sun Paradox that, 2.5 billion years ago, the sun’s energy was 30% less, but Earth’s climate was basically the same as today. Cirrus clouds likely formed to trap heat—a closed Iris and a negative feedback loop at work.

Watch: RFK Jr. reaches out to skeptics: ‘In my campaign, I’m not going to be talking a lot about climate’ – ‘I’m not going argue with you if you don’t believe in it’ – ‘We’re not going to get a consensus on climate’

May 26, 2023

Robert F. Kennedy Jr.: (Automated transcript) I believe that climate is an existential threat, but I don’t insist other people believe that. And one of the problems with the climate crisis — and let me tell you because on the areas of vaccines and public health and a lot of environmental issues — I have made myself an expert the way that attorneys always do when they’re arguing a case. I understand the science. I can read the science critically. I cannot do that with climate science, so I’m left kind of taking other people’s word and I think most people are in the same situation. We’re all basically saying ‘Okay, 99% of scientists are saying and the public science, are saying the climate crisis is existential and it is being created by anthropogenic carbon production.’ I can’t independently verify that, but the reason I believe it is because and I also know particularly in the past three years people you know we’ve seen how science particularly federally funded science can’t be corrupted and this is what the critics of you know the sort of the Republican right is saying we don’t believe anything that Federal science anymore. I can’t go to them like again with vaccines or Pharmaceuticals or other environmental issues and say you’re wrong and I can explain to you exactly why you’re wrong I can’t do that but I have seen in the 19 you know these documents in the 1970s were exons own signs Exxon had scientists working for them that pride in themselves on knowing more about the fate of the carbon molecule in the environment than anybody else and during that time in the 70s they were saying to their bosses in the Exxon management we if we continue to burn carbon the way that we are we are going to warm the globe and that actually is going to be a bad thing for Humanity but it’s going to be a great thing for our company because we’re going to melt the Arctic and there’s a tremendous amount of oil under the Arctic and we’re going to be able to exploit it so you had people who were on the industry side back in the 70s who were saying this is real now In my campaign I’m not going to be talking about climate. Why is that? Because climate has become a crisis like COVID that the Davos group, other totalitarian elements in our society, have util have used as a pretext for clamping down totalitarian controls. Host: But isn’t that even more of a justification if you if you think that is not even more of a justification for you to argue in favor of an approach that doesn’t result in the totalitarianism that you’re fearful of? Exactly. RFK Jr.: So, and I’ve always said, I’ve always been cautious about leaning on scientific evidence for climate because the reason is it’s not persuasive to people who don’t want to believe it. I worked for commercial fishermen on the Hudson River for most of my career and all across the country. They love the environment. Republicans, most Republicans love the environment. If you tell them you know you’re gonna protect this place this sacred place your backyard, the water for your children, you’re gonna protect against toxicity. They’re all in it should not be a divisive issue. The environment should not be divisive. But it’s hard to persuade people that lines on a graph that say that sometime in the future, you’re gonna suffer. Take my word for it, and I want you to give up these things in your life. It just all it’s gonna do is polarize people more or what argument I’ve always made, is that all of the things that we need to do, whether you believe in climate change or not, you don’t have to, and I’m not gonna argue with you if you don’t believe in it. But all the things we need to do to avert climate change, we ought to be doing anyway to avert war. You know, the oil words that have cost us $8 trillion since since 2002. The the poisoning of every fish in America the toxicity to our children. The asthma attack, the ozone and particulates, the snow, the sterilizing of the legs on the Appalachian. These are all things that everybody’s concerned about. And those are the things I think we can get a consensus on, rather than and we’re not going to get a consensus on climate and climate using a you know the the approach that we’ve been using up until now has stalled. And if you you know, the solutions which are to get everybody to sign treaties and have unenforceable milestones, nobody can enforce that everybody can lie about and that that become an excuse. Or clamping down totalitarian controls on people are things that are going to get a lot of pushback. You know, if you talk to people about pollution, and let’s switch to something more efficient, that’s going to provide jobs that’s going to give us a new industry and economic growth. That’s something that I think, you know, we can unite people on rather than divide our Bobby Kennedy JR: "Climate has become a crisis like COVID that the Davos group and other totalitarian elements in our society have used as a pretext for clamping down totalitarian controls." pic.twitter.com/mfGsfVXPg7 — Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) May 17, 2023 RFK Jr.: Green hero turned anti-vaccine activist takes on Biden – As climate skeptics welcome him – Morano: ‘We need to realign coalitions to oppose Covid & climate coercion’ E&E News: Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was once a hero of the environment in New York…That Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is gone. … Kennedy once told Marc Morano, a conservative activist who runs a prominent climate denial blog, that those who reject climate science should be held criminally liable and that polluters should be thrown in jail. Now, Morano says, all is forgiven because Kennedy is “undergoing a genuine transformation over his views on the climate agenda.” Morano considers the new Kennedy an ally in his fight to sow doubt and distrust around climate science, vaccine research and Covid-19 public health measures. “I have received some flak from my fellow climate skeptics for being so welcoming and forgiving to RFK Jr., given his hostile history to anyone opposing the climate ‘consensus,’ but I truly believe we are at a pivotal point in U.S. history where we need to realign coalitions to oppose Covid and climate coercion,” Morano said. RFK Jr. red-pilled on climate agenda?! RFK Jr. declares climate ‘being exploited by the WEF & Bill Gates’ in ‘the same way that COVID was exploited’ – ‘Top-down totalitarian controls on society’ Robert F. Kennedy Jr. on The Kim Iversen Show – Broadcast April 25, 2023 RFK Jr.: “The climate issues and pollution issues are being exploited by the World Economic Forum and Bill Gates and all of these big Mega billionaires the same way that COVID was exploited. To use it as an excuse to clamp down — top-down totalitarian controls on society and to then to give us engineering solutions. And if you look closely as it turns out, the guys who are promoting those engineering solutions are the people who own the IPs, the patents for those solutions. It’s being used. They’ve given climate chaos a bad name because people now see that it’s just another crisis that’s being used to strip mine the wealth of the poor and to enrich billionaires. I, for 40 years, have had the same policy on climate and engineering. You can go check my speeches from the 1980s, and I’ve said the most important solution for environmental issues is not top-down controls, it’s free market capitalism and what we have in this country now is not free market capitalism; it’s corporate crony capitalism. It’s capitalism, cushy, kind of socialism for the rich, and a brutal, barbaric merciless capitalism for the poor.” Listen: Morano discusses Great Reset, climate lockdowns & why Naomi Wolf & RFK Jr. are his new political heroes on the Richie Allen Show Morano’s interview begins at 1:05:30 into into broadcast

Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry: ‘The UN IPCC Reports have become ‘bumper sticker’ climate science’ – Report lobbies for ‘politically manufactured consensus’

March 29, 2023

https://judithcurry.com/2023/03/28/uns-climate-panic-is-more-politics-than-science/ by Judith Curry I have a new op-ed published in The Australian, here is the complete text. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has issued a new Synthesis Report, with fanfare from the UN Secretary General Antonio Guterres: “The climate time-bomb is ticking but the latest IPCC report shows that we have the knowledge & resources to tackle the climate crisis. We need to act now to ensure a livable planet in the future.” The new IPCC Report is a synthesis of the three reports that constitute the Sixth Assessment Report, plus three special reports. This Sythesis Report does not introduce any new information or findings. While the IPCC Reports include some good material, the Summary for Policy Makers for the Synthesis Report emphasizes weakly justified findings on climate impacts driven by extreme emission scenarios, and politicized policy recommendations on emissions reductions. The most important finding of the past 5 years is that the extreme emissions scenarios RCP8.5 and SSP5-8.5, commonly referred to as “business-as-usual” scenarios, are now widely recognized as implausible. These extreme scenarios have been dropped by UN Conference of the Parties to the UN Climate Agreement. However, the new Synthesis Report continues to emphasize these extreme scenarios, while this important finding is buried in a footnote: “Very high emission scenarios have become less likely but cannot be ruled out.” The extreme emissions scenarios are associated with alarming projections of 4-5oC of warming by 2100. The most recent Conference of the Parties (COP27) is working from a baseline temperature projection based on a medium emissions scenario of 2.5oC by 2100. Since 1.2oC of warming has already occurred from the baseline period in the late 19th century, the amount of warming projected for the remainder of the 21st century under the medium emissions scenario is only about one third of the warming projections under the extreme emissions scenario. The Synthesis Report emphasizes “loss and damage” as a central reason why action is needed. It is therefore difficult to overstate the importance of the shift in expectations for future extreme weather events and sea level rise, that is associated with rejection of the extreme emissions scenarios. Rejecting these extreme scenarios has rendered obsolete much of the climate impacts literature and assessments of the past decade, that have focused on these scenarios. In particular, the extreme emissions scenario dominates the impacts that are featured prominently in the new Synthesis Report. Clearly, the climate “crisis” isn’t what it used to be. Rather than acknowledging this fact as good news, the IPCC and UN officials are doubling down on the “alarm” regarding the urgency of reducing emissions by eliminating fossil fuels. You might think that if warming is less than we thought, then the priorities would shift away from emissions reductions and towards reducing our vulnerability to weather and climate extremes. However, that hasn’t been the case. The IPCC has been characterized as a “knowledge monopoly,” with its dominant authority in the UN climate deliberations. The IPCC claims that it is “policy-neutral” and “never policy-prescriptive.” However, the IPCC has strayed far from its chartered role of assessing the scientific literature in support of policy making. The entire framing of the IPCC Reports is now around the mitigation of climate change through emissions reductions. Not only has the IPCC increasingly taken on a stance of explicit political advocacy, but it is misleading policy makers by its continued emphasis on extreme climate outcomes driven by the implausible extreme emissions scenarios. With its explicit political advocacy, combined with misleading information, the IPCC risks losing its privileged position in international policy debates. The impact of these alarming IPCC reports and rhetoric by UN officials is this. Climate change has become a grand narrative in which human-caused climate change has become a dominant cause of societal problems. Everything that goes wrong reinforces the conviction that there is only one thing we can do to prevent societal problems—stop burning fossil fuels. This grand narrative leads us to think that if we solve the problem of burning fossil fuels, then these other problems would also be solved. This belief leads us away from a deeper investigation of the true causes of these other problems. The end result is a narrowing of the viewpoints and policy options that we are willing to consider in dealing with complex issues such as energy systems, water resources, public health, weather disasters, and national security. The IPCC Reports have become “bumper sticker” climate science – making a political statement while using the overall reputation of science to give authority to a politically manufactured consensus.

NY Post: After the experts’ Covid fiasco it’s time to take for another look at the ‘settled science’ pseudo-consensus of climate doom-saying

March 6, 2023

https://nypost.com/2023/03/04/with-the-expert-covid-view-blown-up-green-terror-must-be-next/ With the ‘expert’ COVID view blown up, green terror must be next By Post Editorial Board With the demolition of the “expert” views on COVID — mask mandates are useless; vaccines fail to stop transmission; the virus most likely came from that Wuhan lab — it’s time to take a very hard look at another major “settled science” pseudo-consensus: climate doom-saying. Climate change is real, with human activity contributing to it. But the exact mechanics aren’t remotely as well understood as received wisdom has it — and the terror-campaign hysteria about how to address it, from Greta Thunberg and Al Gore all the way to Joe Biden, Kathy Hochul and most of the media, is utterly anti-science. Carbon fuels and the technologies that depend up them are essential to modern society: Pretending that governments can simply mandate them away, ordering replacements into existence, is out-and-out magical thinking — and policy based on unicorns and magic crystals can only bring disaster and suffering. … Green fanatics, the numbers show, are just as much in the dark about the climate situation as Anthony Fauci et al were about COVID. Their “solutions” — ban gas stoves! mandate Teslas! eat mealworms! — are equally nonsensical, catering to the imaginations and emotions of rich progressives rather than aiming rationally to mitigate the (very real) risks climate change actually presents. It’s time we stopped listening to them, for good.

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