By Caleb S. Rossiter, Ph.D.
The Washington Post, the long-time leader of the Climate Religion media, seems to never pass up an opportunity to slip allegations of undefined “climate change” into every section of the paper – News, Metro, Sports, Travel …
Of course the Post bars any contrary analysis, either in these stories or in letters and opinion responses.
But the Post reached a new low by throwing its climate narrative into its obituary for physicist Freeman Dyson:
Here’s how the Post slurred this towering figure in American, indeed global, science:
“His technophilia may explain his apostasy on global warming…(H)e thought the environmental movement had overstated the threats to the planet: ‘I just don’t see any evidence that global warming is particularly dangerous.’ That view is not shared by the overwhelming majority of scientists.”
This last sentence is simply not true. The data generated to date by the world’s scientists do not show any statistically significant increases in rates of extreme weather or sea-level rise as global average temperature increased by one degree over the past 120 years. And the UN IPCC, a political, not a scientific body, admits that the temperature increase was largely natural anyway, with only a quarter of a degree attributable to industrial emissions of the non-pollutant CO2.
The danger behind the controversial 2009 “endangerment” finding by President Obama’s EPA has not occurred. It only lives on in the ever-extended projections of computer models of the climate.
Freeman Dyson knew John von Neumann, the father of climate models. Von Neumann wanted to use modeling as a Cold War military tool, to figure out how to create drought in the Soviet Union. The effort failed due to the complexity of the actual climate system, and Dyson often recounted von Neumann saying, “With four (free) parameters I can fit an elephant. With five I can make him wiggle his trunk.”
Well, it’s actually been done now, and you can read about it, and see the wiggling trunk, on the CO2 Coalition’s website: https://co2coalition.org/?s=four+parameters+elephant
By now, of course, climate computer models have thousands of free parameters, which are estimates that modelers enter to create a “backfit” where the model runs close to the actual historical temperature record. Dyson called these “fudge factors,” much to the displeasure of the modelers. But the modelers are embarrassed whenever they run the models forward into the future, and watch them, as always, run far too hot.
Mother nature still isn’t cooperating with the narrative of “dangerous warming” from CO2 emissions. Dyson was right, and the Post is still stubbornly wrong.