Fox News Sunday anchor Chris Wallace uncritically cited “guesswork” by UN scientists as some sort of hard science during an interview with EPA chief Scott Pruitt on April 2. Wallace also hyped discredited “hottest year” claims and referred to carbon dioxide, a trace essential gas humans exhale as “carbon pollution.” Wallace also praised China’s emission efforts and implied that EPA regulations and UN agreements would impact climate change. (Full transcript & video here)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=51&v=pfxWF1R8EaU
Wallace asked Pruitt about his recent statement noting that carbon dioxide was not the control knob of the climate. See: EPA chief says CO2 not primary contributor to âglobal warmingâ â Calls UN Climate Treaty âa bad dealâ (Note: Pruitt’s statement was scientifically sound and climatologists defended his comments. See:  Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry on EPA chief Pruittâs CO2 comments: âI think these two statements made by Pruitt are absolutely correctâ – Curry: ‘I do not find anything to disagree with in what Pruitt said’)
Wallace claimed: âMr. Pruitt, there are all kinds of studies that contradict you.â He then cited the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) 2013 claim that there it a “95% likely” that âhuman influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century.â
Wallace even featured this onscreen graphic to make his question look official:
Apparently absent in Wallace’s show preparation was the fact that the UN IPCC’s “95%” claim is nothing more than guesswork and has no statistical basis whatsoever.
Even Reuters news service recognized this in a 2013 article. Â Reuters explained that the UN IPCCâs 95% confidence of human causation of global warming was “based on a discussion among the authors,” not a scientifically sound statistic.Â
Reuters essentially exposed that the fact that UN scientists (who are hand-picked by governments to support the IPCC’s political mandate that it seeks to further the human climate change narrative) talked their way to the 95% claim!
“Scientists use a mixture of data and ‘expert judgment’ to decide how likely it is that climate change is man-made and rule out other factors, such as changes in the sunâs output,” Reuters wrote. [Note: Many UN scientists have turned against the organization. See UN Scientists Who Have Turned on the UN IPCC & Man-Made Climate Fears â A Climate Depot Flashback Report]
‘No more scientific a process than a show of hands’
Lord Christopher Monckton, a former science adviser to Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and a IPCC reviewer called the 95% claim “no more scientific a process than a show of hands.”
“The IPCCâs pretense that it is 95% confident that most of the warming since 1950 was man-made is transparently rent-seeking guesswork, to which no intelligent journalist should lend the slightest credence,” Monckton wrote in 2013.
“The IPCCâs attempt to assign a quantified statistical confidence interval to a non-statistical process was inappropriate and, mathematically speaking, contemptible,” Monckton wrote.
“The sheer dumbness of the IPCCâs approach should at least be questioned by journalists, not merely paraded as though it were some sort of Gospel truth,” he added.
“Surely it would be better to start asking real questions than merely to parrot uncritically the innumerate absurdities of a politicized clique of profiteers of doom in the scientific establishment,” he added.
Monckton warned journalists who cite the UN IPCC claim uncritically that it was “Time to raise your game.”
IPCC’s claim ‘does not seem logically consistent’
Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry has also ripped this UN IPCC claim.
“The attribution statement itself is at best imprecise and at worst ambiguous: what does âmostâ mean â 51% or 99%? Whether it is 51% or 99% would seem to make a rather big difference regarding the policy response,” Curry wrote in 2014.
“The IPCCâs attribution statement does not seem logically consistent with the uncertainty in climate sensitivity,” Curry added.
Curry continued: “The reasoning process used by the IPCC in assessing confidence in its attribution statement is described by this statement from the AR4: ‘The approaches used in detection and attribution research described above cannot fully account for all uncertainties, and thus ultimately expert judgement is required to give a calibrated assessment of whether a specific cause is responsible for a given climate change.’
“I am arguing that climate models are not fit for the purpose of detection and attribution of climate change on decadal to multidecadal timescales,” she concluded.
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Hottest Year
Wallace also cited uncritically the absurd claims by NOAA that the world has recently experienced the “hottest years” ever, despite the multitude of data and scientists who point out such claims are baseless.
Former Obama Official Mocks âHottest Year on Recordâ â Temps Within Margin of Error
Dr. Lindzen also ridiculed previous âhottest yearâ claims. âThe uncertainty here is tenths of a degree. When someone points to this and says this is the warmest temperature on record, what are they talking about? Itâs just nonsense. This is a very tiny change period,â Lindzen said. âIf you can adjust temperatures to 2/10ths of a degree, it means it wasnât certain to 2/10ths of a degree.â
Dr. David Whitehouse noted the ‘temperature pause never went away‘: ‘According to NOAA 2016 was 0.07°F warmer than 2015, which is 0.04°C. Considering the error in the annual temperature is +/- 0.1°C this makes 2016 statistically indistinguishable from 2015, making any claim of a record using NOAA data specious.’
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‘What if you are wrong’
Wallace also asked a version of the infamous “what if you are wrong” question directed frequently to climate skeptics:
Wallace to Pruitt: âWhat if, in fact, the earth is warming, what if it is causing dramatic climate change and we as humans through carbon emissions are contributing to it? Simple question, what if you are wrong?â Left unsaid by Wallace, was the simple fact that EPA climate regulations will not possibly be able to impact the Earthâs climate.
Climate Depot offers this simple answer to Wallace’s question about essentially having an insurance policy in case skeptics are wrong.
Would anyone purchase fire insurance on their home that had a huge up front premium for virtually no payout if you home burned down? If you answered YES to such an âinsuranceâ policy, then Congress, the EPA and the UN have a deal for you with their “climate” regulations. If we actually did face a man-made climate crisis and we had to rely on the U.S. Congress or the United Nations to save us, we would all be DOOMED.
These so-called solutions to “global warming” would have no detectable climate impact. Former President Obama, is on record as claiming the failed cap and trade bill would somehow make our planet 4 or 5 degrees cooler for our grandchildren. His then EPA director went to the US senate and testified that not only would the cap and trade bill not impact global temperature, it would not even impact global co2 levels. What is being proposed to “solve” climate change is pure symbolism. It is medieval witchcraft. They are claiming we can alter the climate through acts of Congress, the EPA and United Nations.
President Obamaâs own EPA Chief Gina McCarthy admitted that the EPA regulations are symbolic and will have no measurable climate impact â even if you believe in the climate activist version of science. âThe value of this rule is not measured in that way [temperature impact],â McCarthy said in 2015. âI am not disagreeing that this action in and of itself will not make all the difference we need to address climate action, but what I’m saying is that if we don’t take action domestically we will never get started,â she added.
Obamaâs former EPA Administrator Lisa Jackson had previously noted that âU.S. action alone will not impact world CO2 levels.â
Climatologist Dr. Patrick Michaelsâ analysis says any potential impact on climate from EPA regulations would be âso small as to be undetectable, less than two one-hundredths of a degree C.â âWeâre not even sure how to put such a small number into practical terms, because, basically, the number is so small as to be undetectable.â
Even NASAâs former lead global warming scientist James Hansen has called Obamaâs EPA climate regulations âpractically worthless,â and added, âYou’ve got to be kidding me.â Yet, despite the fact that EPA regulations would have no impact on global CO2 levels, Obama advisor John Podesta claimed in 2014 that the EPA CO2 regulations are needed to combat extreme weather: âThe risk on the downside youâre seeing every day in the weather.â
Wallace’s view of “climate change” is similar to the other mainstream media outlets who set up a narrative that implies politicians âcan do something aboutâ droughts, floods, sea levels, hurricanes, and tornadoes.
Pruitt at EPA is a refreshing change. He knows that laws, treaties, and regulations â whether from the United Nations, the U.S. Congress, or the Environmental Protection Agency â cannot control the weather. CO2 does not control global temperatures, and current global temperatures are well within natural variability, as demonstrated by surface and satellite data and extensive historic records. Scientific studies and data also show that droughts, floods, wildfires, and other extreme weather are not unusual, unprecedented, or related to CO2 emissions or climate change. See:Â Skeptics Deliver Consensus Busting 2016 âState of the Climate Reportâ to UN Summit
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‘Carbon Pollution’
Wallace also called carbon dioxide “carbon pollution” and fretted clean air would be impacted if Obama climate regulations are overturned.
CO2 is not âpollution.â The term âcarbon pollutionâ is unscientific and misleading. As James Agresti wrote: âThe phrase conflates carbon dioxide with noxious chemicals like carbon monoxide and black carbon.â âThe phrase âcarbon pollutionâ is scientifically inaccurate because there are more than ten million different carbon compounds, and the word âcarbonâ could refer to any of them. Some of the more notorious of these compounds are highly poisonous, such as carbon monoxide (a deadly gas) and black carbon (the primary ingredient of cancerous and mutagenic soot). Using a phrase that does not distinguish between such drastically different substances is a sure way to misinform people.â Carbon Dioxide â CO2 â is a harmless trace essential gas in the atmosphere that humans exhale from their mouth (after inhaling oxygen). Princeton Physicist Dr. Will Happer has said: âTo call carbon dioxide a pollutant is really Orwellian. You are calling something a pollutant that we all produce. Where does that lead us eventually
McKitrick on Air Pollution: The models get âmore deaths from air pollution than you were death from all causesâ â âParticulates and soot are at such low levels in the U.S. â levels well below what they were in the 1970s. The health claims at this point are groundless coming from this administration.I noticed these numbers coming up for Ontario for how many deaths were caused by air pollution. What struck me â was knowing that air pollution levels were very low in Ontario â but they were extremely high in 1960s. So I took the same model and fed in the 1960s air pollution levels into it: How many deaths would you get? I did the calculations and you quickly get more deaths from air pollution than you were death from all causes.In other words, the streets would have been littered with bodies from air pollution if it was actually that lethal. The problem with all of these models is they are not based on an actual examination of death certificates or looking at what people actually died of â these are just statistical models where people have a spreadsheet and they take in an air pollution level and it pops out a number of deaths. But there are no actual bodies there, it is all just extrapolation.â#
JunkScience.com also rebutted pollution claims:Â FACT SHEET: Particulate Matter in Indoor/Outdoor Air Does NOT Cause Death
Greenpeace Shocked China Is Putting Another $150 Billion Into Coal Power – China will build 1,171 new coal power plants.
Lomborg Blasts UN Paris Treatyâs $100 Trillion Price Tag For No Temp Impact: âYou wonât be able to measure it in 100 yearsâ – Bjorn Lomborg: The debate about the UN Paris Agreement is âabout identity politics. Itâs about feeling good⊠but the climate doesnât care about how you feel.”
Related Links:Â
Letâs talk percentages! Reuters explains UN IPCCâs 95% confidence of human causation of global warming: âItâs based on a discussion among the authorsâ â UN Scientists talk their way to 95%! âScientists use a mixture of data and âexpert judgmentâ to decide how likely it is that climate change is man-made and rule out other factors, such as changes in the sunâs output. The IPCC draft halves the likelihood that natural factors are to blame to 5 per cent from 10, the flip side of raising the probability that climate change is man-made to 95 per cent. âItâs based on a discussion among the authorsâŠThere must be multiple lines of evidence,â said Eystein Jansen, of the Bjerknes Centre for Climate Research in Norway and one of the authors of the Stockholm draft.â
The IPCCâs AR5 attribution statement: ‘It is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together. The best estimate of the human induced contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over this period.’
The reasoning process used by the IPCC in assessing confidence in its attribution statement is described by this statement from the AR4: âThe approaches used in detection and attribution research described above cannot fully account for all uncertainties, and thus ultimately expert judgement is required to give a calibrated assessment of whether a specific cause is responsible for a given climate change.’
Curry: ‘The attribution statement itself is at best imprecise and at worst ambiguous: what does âmostâ mean â 51% or 99%? Whether it is 51% or 99% would seem to make a rather big difference regarding the policy response.’
‘The IPCCâs attribution statement does not seem logically consistent with the uncertainty in climate sensitivity.’
‘I am arguing that climate models are not fit for the purpose of detection and attribution of climate change on decadal to multidecadal timescales.’
Monckton rips APâs Seth Borenstein for touting UN IPCCâs meaningless 95% confidence in man-made global warming: Monckton: It is âno more scientific a process than a show of handsâ â Monckton to Borenstein: âThe IPCCâs pretence that it is 95% confident that most of the warming since 1950 was manmade is transparently rent-seeking guesswork, to which no intelligent journalist should lend the slightest credenceâŠThe IPCCâs attempt to assign a quantified statistical confidence interval to a non-statistical process was inappropriate and, mathematically speaking, contemptibleâ â The sheer dumbness of the IPCCâs approach should at least be questioned by journalists, not merely paraded as though it were some sort of Gospel truthâŠSurely it would be better to start asking real questions than merely to parrot uncritically the innumerate absurdities of a politicized clique of profiteers of doom in the scientific establishment. Time to raise your game.â APâs Borenstein wrote glowingly about the UN IPCCâs 95% confidence in man-made global warming, but failed to tell his readers that the number was made up out of thin air.  ââItâs based on a discussion among the authorsâ  See: Letâs talk percentages! Reuters explains UN IPCCâs 95% confidence of human causation of global warming: âItâs based on a discussion among the authorsâ
EPA chief Scott Pruitt: “I think that measuring with precision human activity on the climate is something very challenging to do and there’s tremendous disagreement about the degree of impact, so no, I would not agree that it’s a primary contributor to the global warming that we see ,” he told CNBC’s “Squawk Box.”
Pruitt also called the Paris Agreement, an international accord aimed at mitigating the impacts of climate change, “a bad deal.” He said it puts the United States on a different playing field than developing countries like China and India.