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Geologist’s skeptical global warming book is driving Norwegian climate alarmists nuts

  https://www.lifesitenews.com/opinion/an-antiglobal-warming-hysteria-book-is-driving-norwegian-climate-alarmists-nuts By Gordon Tomb April 13, 2021 (American Thinker) – Other than by misspelling “fjord,” how would an American geologist draw the ire of a pair of Norwegian politicians?  Answer: Write a book that counters the notion that human activity is causing the globe to warm with catastrophic consequences. Gregory Wrightstone’s 2017 book, Inconvenient Facts: The Science that Al Gore Doesn’t Want You to Know, was published in Norway and is being promoted by the Climate Realists, a Norwegian organization, which shares the author’s view that modern warming is neither unusual nor unprecedented. Backed with 90 illustrations and 15 pages of references, the book presents 60 footnoted facts inconvenient to the Western elite’s absurd narrative about global warming.  Among them: Most of the last 10,000 years have been warmer than today, including the Medieval Warm Period, when Vikings raised barley on Greenland, and the Roman Warm Period, when citrus grew in northern England. After the Climate Realists announced plans to distribute the book to all 356 of Norway’s mayors, two members of Norway’s unicameral Stortinget — Tom-Christer Nilsen and Lene Westgaard-Halle — wrote the mayors a letter discouraging them from accepting a book that is popular “because lies are more entertaining” than the truth. Mr. Wrightstone, recently named executive director of the Arlington, Virginia–based CO2 Coalition, responded with a letter of his own, noting that he has been accepted as an expert reviewer by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “The two politicians claim to be ‘supporters of an open exchange of words.’  However, that is apparently only true if they agree with you,” says Mr. Wrightstone, whose book has been banned from his home library north of Pittsburgh and whose smartphone app was removed briefly from the Apple Store. “The book is brilliant, very easily read,” says Morten Jødal, Climate Realists chairman of the board.  Mr. Wrightstone’s rebuttal has been published in Norwegian newspapers, and distribution of the book to mayors will proceed in a few weeks, reports Mr. Jødal, a biologist and author of Environmental Myths, another book that critiques the global warming fraud. Formerly head of the University of Oslo’s Center for Environment and Development, Mr. Jødal says, “Slowly, slowly I realized that the environmental movement is not competent.  I started waking up to the fact that many environmental crises being described do not exist.” Why would global warming be of interest to a country split by the Arctic Circle and 90 percent reliant on hydropower, an electricity source whose operations emit virtually no carbon dioxide — the bogeyman of global warmists? “Politicians today talk about saving the world, beyond their own country,” says Mr. Jødal, who once worked at the Research Council of Norway.  “They are convinced that the globe is threatened.” Some climate alarmists say global warming will shut down the Gulf Stream and destroy its moderating effect on Norway’s climate, ensuring doom for everybody, Mr. Jødal scoffs. A government proposal to eliminate the country’s 50 million tons of annual carbon dioxide emissions, without acknowledging its huge costs and lack of any benefit, is “totally ridiculous,” he says. Norway’s vast forests and algae-rich coastal waters, he adds, probably absorb more carbon dioxide than the country’s 5.4 million people emit. Mr. Wrightstone predicts that the controversy will allow his fact- and science-based views on climate change to be presented to a much wider audience.

Analysis: Climate activist Naomi Oreskes’ shady history of ‘crooked skeptics’ claims

http://gelbspanfiles.com/?p=11478 Did Naomi Oreskes formulate her ‘climate scientists corrupted by tobacco/fossil fuel industries’ idea before she was ‘told’ about those scientists’ existence? by Russell Cook Global warming issue. 3 talking points. It’s just this simple: the science is settled the fossil fuel industry pays ‘skeptic climate scientist shills’ to lie that it isn’t settled ignore those skeptics because of the two above points Regardless of which angles of the ‘crooked skeptics’ accusation that objective investigators choose to examine, the moment they start pulling on loose threads in those angles, that’s when the bigger fabric starts coming apart, to the point where it looks like it will never be stitched back together neatly. One really big loose thread is “Merchants of Doubt” book author / documentary movie star Naomi Oreskes’ alleged happenstance foray into the global warming issue which supposedly led to her ‘discovery odyssey’ concerning the ‘corruption of skeptic scientists,’ and she supplies many more loose threads to pull in her apparently faulty narratives about her role in the issue. This post details one more problem to throw onto Oreskes’ latter threadbare pile. Whether it’s Oreskes narrative featuring Dr Ben Santer (where her “Merchants of Doubt” co-author Erik Conway is relegated to little more than incidental status), or if it’s the one prominently featuring time-traveler Conway (with no mention of Santer at all), the overall story is that she was a science historian who was curious about the extent of the ‘scientific consensus’ concerning man-caused global warming in relation to the history of oceanography. She undertook her own study of the ‘consensus’ and presented her results in a single slide within her February 2004 “Consensus in Science: How Do We Know We’re Not Wrong?” presentation, and the enormous response from the audience on that single slide further prompted her to turn it into a paper she submitted to Science magazine, which published it in December 2004. Immediately afterward – according to her narratives – she was viciously, personally ‘attacked’ for her “truth” of finding no papers that countered the idea of man-caused global warming, while having no idea who her ‘attackers’ were or what their motivations were. Soon afterward, she was also alerted – depending on which of her inconsistent narratives are read – by either Conway or Santer about who the ‘attackers’ of her Science paper were and how these ‘attackers’ — Surprise! — seemed to operate out of the tobacco industry’s old playbook on using disinformation tactics to deceive the public into believing global warming science was still unsettled. In short, without the alerts from either Conway or Santer – depending on which of her inconsistent narratives are read – Oreskes would have been clueless to the notion that scientists might be skewed by industry influence into spreading disinformation. Bam – consensus paper, bam – attackers attack the paper, bam – she learns her attackers, Dr S Fred Singer for example, (*ahem* Fred Singer) have conflicts of interest which clearly undermines the integrity of their global warming viewpoints — a straight line process directly resulting in her “Merchants of Doubt” book. Except, there’s apparently a problem with that timeline. It’s found right inside her own Harvard 2020 curriculum vitae, page 9 under the “Scholarly Products: Journal Articles” heading: “Science and public policy: What’s proof got to do with it?” It’s a paper that predates her December 2004 Science paper. Her paper was one of several in the October 2004 Volume 7 journal issue of Environmental Science & Policy which addressed the ‘uproar’ in the pro-global warming community over Bjørn Lomborg’s 2001 book, “The Skeptical Environmentalist.” Editor Roger Pielke Jr additionally noted in his introduction how her contribution to the collection of articles arose out of her and others’ participation in a 2002 symposium over the Lomborg ‘controversy.’ Oreskes’ Harvard CV places the date of her participation at February 2003 which is corroborated by a January ’03 newsletter announcement of the event. Set aside all the discussion about Lomborg, though. The problem with Oreskes’ bam-bam-bam timeline about when she formulated her ideas about skeptic climate scientists having conflicts of interest are seen in key statements within her October 2004 ES&P paper. First, we have the following on PDF / print pg pg 372: If there is no consensus of experts—as was the case among earth scientists about moving continents before the late 1960s—then we have a case for more research. If there is a consensus of experts—as there is today over the reality of anthropogenic climate change (Oreskes, 2004)—then we have a case for moving forward with relevant action. PDF pg 383: Oreskes, N., 2004. Consensus in Science: How Do We Know We’re Not Wrong? AAAS George Sarton Memorial Lecture. Seattle, Washington, February. Oreskes, a person with exactly zero specific education in climate science and no demonstrable expertise in the field of climate science declares outright that there is a scientific consensus for man-caused global warming, and her source for that is her own survey of climate science papers that is seen, not within a recognized science journal paper that, but is instead in just her own single slide which underwent no peer review. The acute irony is how she criticized Bjørn Lomborg’s book several years later as having many sources that weren’t seen in “refereed scientific literature.” That doesn’t look good. The following on PDF pgs 380-381 in her October 2004 ES&P paper looks worse – the boldface / red color highlighting is my addition: Expertise can of course be compromised and even bought outright, so we also need to ask: what are the non-epistemic interests of the experts? How might they be affecting the scientific results? … The recent growth of corporate sponsorship of scientific research on university campuses has raised the question of how financial interests are currently shaping not merely the subject of scientific research, but also the outcomes. An obvious and well-studied area is tobacco research … the tobacco industry has tried to generate uncertainty over the issue of second-hand smoke by directly sponsoring scientific studies whose purpose is to destabilize the existing consensus. These studies are far more likely to find no evidence of ill effect than studies not funded by the tobacco industry. … To which Oreskes emphasizes just a sentence later …. The critical point here is not that the fact the research was funded by industry, because all science is funded by some institution,group, or individual, and it’s not clear that industrial patronage is intrinsically more problematic than support from a prince, a foundation, an armed service, or a government agency. Rather, the issue is that the research is supported by a sponsor who wants a particular result—a particular epistemic outcome—and the researchers know in advance what that outcome is, producing an explicit conflict of interest, which undermines the integrity of the research performed. See what just happened there? Everybody knows cigarette smoking is harmful, and she just told you there’s a scientific consensus on the harm of man-caused global warming, therefore any so-called expert displaying any kind of fossil fuel industry conflict of interest association is someone you …. well, obviously don’t have to listen to. the science is settled the fossil fuel industry pays ‘skeptic climate scientist shills’ to lie that it isn’t settled ignore those skeptics because of the two above points Look again, though, at the first bit I excerpted from her ES&P paper — she doesn’t speak about cigarette smoking in general, but instead about secondhand smoke specifically. Back in 2003-’04, who was the most famous person questioning the EPA over its designating secondhand smoke as a Class A carcinogen when science conclusions didn’t justify that label? Dr S Fred Singer. The August 2004 Wikipedia page for him noted his alleged “conflict of interest” along with a jab about how his viewpoints weren’t in scientific literature. Where does the External Link near the bottom of that Wikipedia page for “Disinfopedia” take readers? To an Internet Archive page for the “Disinfopedia” website, which first tries to portray Dr Singer as a shill for the tobacco industry, and then falsely portrays him as being on the payroll of the oil industry. (I dissected the fatal faults about the ‘oil industry consulting’ accusation here; the tobacco industry accusation here; meanwhile, click on “http://www.disinfopedia.org/wiki.phtml?title=S._Fred_Singer” and where does that old link automatically default to now? Sheldon Rampton’s SourceWatch pages, which I detailed as being only one degree separated from Ross Gelbspan in several posts here, including one detailing how Rampton worked at Wikipedia as an editor) Naomi Oreskes is a professor of history, where one of the basic requirements should be that a person holding that title is very adept at deep, thorough research. Is it plausible that even after being tapped for a lengthy focuses discussion at an annual Meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science regarding a prominent global warming book and subsequently writing a 12½ page paper on that topic, that she would still have never heard of the name Fred Singer, enough so that it was a surprise to her via alerts to her by Erik Conway or Ben Santer – depending on which of her inconsistent narratives are read – that Dr Singer was one of the main critics of her Dec ’04 Science paper on “consensus”? One more question arises out of all of that. Dr Singer once famously said, ironically back in September 2004, consensus is not science and science is not about consensus…science is not a show of hands. ….. and Lord Christopher Monckton has more recently characterized the worthlessness of a “consensus” as: … “argumentum ad populum” … is rightly regarded as unacceptable because the consensus view — and whatever “science” the consensus opinion is founded upon — may or may not be correct, and the mere fact that there is a consensus tells us nothing about the correctness of the consensus opinion or of the rationale behind that opinion. … science is not done by consensus.“ It appears that her initial claim to fame is fundamentally based a total lack of understanding about the way the Scientific Method works; her dismissal of scientists based on outright guilt-by-association – while never even making the effort to examine their science-based viewpoints or even having the climate science expertise to do – so seems to indicate a serious level of anti-intellectual thinking on her part. That leads, of course, to an overarching question, one that congressional investigators should explore, or that defendant lawyers in the current 20+ global warming lawsuits should examine: Was her entry into, and role in, the global warming issue just a series of pure random luck events, or are none of those actually narratives true?

Federal scientists publish skeptical reports on climate change — media freaks out

https://www.eenews.net/climatewire/2021/01/12/stories/1063722283?utm_campaign=edition&utm_medium=email&utm_source=eenews%3Aclimatewire WHITE HOUSE Racing to build wall of climate denial before Trump exits Scott Waldman, E&E News reporter Published: Tuesday, January 12, 2021 David Legates, a political appointee at NOAA, attends a Heartland Institute conference in 2019. Legates is promoting researchers who reject climate science. Heartland Institute/YouTube A climate denier working under the purview of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy is attempting to publish cherry-picked and inaccurate research so that it can be permanently archived as a government record. David Legates, who serves in a senior role at NOAA and is heading the U.S. Global Change Research Program, was brought to the Trump administration recently to challenge consensus climate science. A geologist from the University of Delaware and an affiliate of the Heartland Institute, he has said climate scientists make false claims for money and that humans need to burn more fossil fuels. Legates was recruited by the White House personnel office in September to challenge the National Climate Assessment and to attack climate science elsewhere in the government, E&E New has previously reported (Climatewire, Sept. 28, 2020). He is also working to select authors who question climate science, including some of those who authored the briefs, to staff the next version of the climate assessment. Those contracts would be carried over into the Biden administration. Now, in addition to that work, Legates is also giving false climate views a different imprimatur: the seal of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He has reached out to the small group of researchers who question humanity’s role in driving global warming, according to John Christy, an atmospheric science professor at the University of Alabama, Huntsville. “I was asked to write a paper on something very clean and kind of opinionated that just demonstrated what data actually show about climate change, and in my case it was that the records are not increasing at all in the United States,” Christy said. He added, “It would get a lot of attention if it were on the White House website.” … The goal, Spencer said, is to have the briefs published on the official White House website before Trump leaves office next week. That would mean the denial documents would be officially recorded and archived on the White House website, and therefore available to be cited in the future as official government documents, even if they are immediately removed by the Biden administration. “Several of us were asked by David Legates (White House Office of Science and Technology Policy) to write short, easily understandable brochures that supported the general view that there is no climate crisis or climate emergency, and pointing out the widespread misinformation being promoted by alarmists through the media,” Spencer wrote. In a brief introduction, Legates wrote that the office published the briefs by “distinguished scholars” as an “evaluation of climate change as an ’emergency’ and how much of anthropogenic effects of climate change must be taken as a matter of faith.” There are nine briefs, including one authored by Will Happer, the emeritus Princeton University professor who served on Trump’s National Security Council and unsuccessfully tried to force a hostile review of climate science. … Yesterday, it was unclear if Office of Science and Technology Policy Director Kelvin Droegemeier will block the effort. A spokeswoman said that Legates’ actions were not approved by the OSTP. “These papers were not created at the direction of The White House Office of Science and Technology Policy nor were they cleared or approved by OSTP leadership,” spokeswoman Kristina Baum tweeted last night. Spencer maintains that natural variability could be just as responsible as humanity for observed climatic changes. Another author is Willie Soon, a scientist at the Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, who quietly accepted more than $1 million from the fossil fuel industry for years as he claimed that the sun was driving global warming. There’s also Pat Michaels, a climate scientist who has long worked for groups that fight against climate regulations, who said that all four of the previous congressionally mandated National Climate Assessments were the “most egregious distortions of science in service of policy that have ever been published.” In fact, the volumes were authored by hundreds of the top scientists in their fields and relied on thousands of peer-reviewed studies. A brief on hurricanes and climate change, which accurately reflects the latest scientific consensus, was authored by Ryan Maue, a former employee of the Cato Institute, who was installed by the Trump White House as NOAA’s chief scientist a few months ago. The effort is likely an attempt to create a government record of climate denial research so that it can become an official record, said Andrew Rosenberg, director of the Center for Science and Democracy at the Union of Concerned Scientists. That means, he said, Legates and others can later argue that the research must be included in the crafting of the next National Climate Assessment. He said the briefs appear to also be part of a strategy to create a record of climate denial that can be cited in future lawsuits over regulations or climate policy.  

Claim: Climate skeptics ‘have lost the argument’ – Media has ‘gaslighted the world into believing that there was never an argument in the first place’

https://www.breitbart.com/europe/2020/12/12/delingpole-no-lying-bbc-britains-weather-isnt-getting-wilder/ By James Delinpole “Britain’s weather is getting wilder,” claimed the BBC on a Panorama documentary this week. This is actually untrue — as we’ll see below — but the BBC knows it can get away with blatant lies about climate change these days. Partly, this is because the sensible people who might object stopped watching the BBC long ago. And partly because there is no one left in the mainstream media left to criticize it. As the Telegraph‘s economics commentator Jeremy Warner wrote this week: “Whatever the merits of their case, climate change skeptics have lost the argument.” James Delingpole: I deplore the triumphalism of his tone but cannot dispute the premise. The only thing I’d add is that it isn’t shortage of facts or evidence which has caused climate change skeptics to lose the argument. It’s quite simply that the mainstream media — led by the BBC — has become such an uncritical propaganda mouthpiece for the Climate Industrial Complex that it has effectively gaslighted the world into believing that there was never an argument in the first place. That is, the skeptical case against “man-made climate change”, though overwhelming, is aired almost nowhere these days outside the fringes of the internet. The MSM has shut down the story by refusing to give it any coverage. … A decade ago I can think of at least four conservative newspapers and one conservative magazine which would have had a field day exposing this nonsense — perhaps with a plea at the end for the BBC’s special, licence-fee-funded monopoly status to be revoked. Not one of those publications would do so today. They’ve all been bought and paid for by the green blob. It’s why we’re in the mess we’re in. Our media is no longer holding the enemies of truth and freedom to account. Instead, it’s acting as their mouthpiece.

RIP: Climate Skeptic sea level expert Swedish paleo-geophysicist Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner – Debunked rising sea fears as ‘scaremongering’

2017 Study: Tide gages find no global ‘acceleration in sea level’ – But satellite data ‘manipulated’ to show acceleration – Published in International Journal of Engineering Science Invention – August 2017 – “Sea Level Manipulation” – By Dr. Nils-Axel Mörner – Paleogeophysics & Geodynamics, Stockholm, Sweden Study concludes: “Up to the present, there has been no convincing recording of any acceleration in sea level, rather the opposite: a total lack of any sign of an accelerating trend.” Study also finds satellite sea level rise data “manipulated” to show acceleration: “Satellite altimetry is a new elegant tool to view the changes in sea level over the globe…The temporal changes, on the other hand, has always remained very questionable as they seem to over-estimate observed sea level changes by 100-400% [9-16]. It seems quite weird to claim that it would be the satellite altimetry that is right and that the true observations in the field are wrong (still this is what the people around the IPCC and the Paris agreement at COP21 continue to claim).” “The satellite altimetry values provided by NOAA [17] and University of Colorado [18] do not agree with tide gage data…  It is the satellite altimetry data, which have been “corrected” to give a rise in the order of 3.0 mm/yr. This “correction” [19-21] may, of course, be classified as a “manipulation” of facts, like the manipulation temperature measurements recently revealed.” Skeptical scientists crash UN climate summit, praise Trump for ‘bringing science back again’ Skeptical scientists at UN climate summit hope Trump will Make Science Great Again Norwegian Astrophysicist Prof. Jan-Erik Solheim of the University of Tromso: ‘Trump’s victory is very promising. We can get real science back in the field.’ Prominent Swedish Geologist Dr. Nils Axel Morner of Stockholm University: ‘We have a benefit from Trump’s victory: We scientists may see a liberation from this unscientific closing of journals. Agro-Biologist Dr. Albrecht Glatzle of Paraguay:  ‘I have very much hope that Trump’s election will be the initialization of a turnaround in science relating to climate change.’ “Go straight ahead Mr. Trump with your plans to this end the politicized climate agenda and bring the science back again to its place.” UK Astrophysicist & Meteorologist Piers Corbyn also declared Trump’s views on climate change are ‘excellent’. Update: Hegnar, One of the most influential papers in Norway – read by at least 100,000 picks up on Climate Depot’s report: Skeptical scientists crashed climate meeting in Marrakech Morner presented at the “World Climate Change Conference” in Rome in 2015. Here is an interview about the conference with Roger Tattersall. In 2015, Nils-Axel Morner spoke at the “Paris Climate Challenge”. Morner presented a study on sea-level rise. View video of the speech below: Watch Morner here: In 2000, Professor Mörner led a team of INQUA sea-level specialists to investigate claims of rising levels at the Maldive Islands in the Indian Ocean. “What we found was that sea levels were relatively stable between 1790 and 1970, but that around 1970 there was a fall in sea levels of 20 to 30 cm, and since then the levels have remained stable.” ‘Scaremongers’: Sea Level Rise expert Dr. Morner rips claims that ‘sea-level rise could displace 13 million Americans by 2100’ – Swedish paleogeophysicist Nils-Axel Mörner rips latest media scare stories on the sea-level rise as “scaremongering in operation” Nils-Axel Mörner: ‘These Researchers Have A Political Agenda’ New Paper By Renowned Sea Level Expert Nils-Axel Mörner, Calls AGW A “New Religion” Built On “False Premises.” Renowned Swedish paleogeophysicist Nils-Axel Mörner & Two German Climate Scientists Declare: ‘CO2 Malarkey Coming To An End’ — ‘Its Days Are Doomed’ The latest paper from Swedish sea-level expert, Dr. Nils Axel Morner: ‘For the last 40-50 years strong observational facts indicate virtually stable sea level conditions’ – ‘Best estimates for future sea level changes up to the year 2100 are in the range of +5 cm ±15 cm’ New paper finds global sea levels will rise only about 5 inches by 2100 — A new peer-reviewed paper by sea level expert Dr. Nils-Axel Morner Study ‘concludes that Australian government claims of a 1 meter sea level rise by 2100 are greatly exaggerated, finding instead that sea levels are rising around Australia and globally at a rate of only 1.5 mm/year. This would imply a sea level change of only 0.13 meters or 5 inches by 2100. Dr. Morner also finds no evidence of any acceleration in sea level rise around Australia or globally’ New Study sea level expert Prof. Morner: ‘At most, global average sea level is rising at a rate equivalent to 2-3 inches per century. It is probably not rising at all’ Sea level is not rising at all in the Maldives, the Laccadives, Tuvalu, India, Bangladesh, French Guyana, Venice, Cuxhaven, Korsør, Saint Paul Island, Qatar, etc.– ‘Modelling is not a suitable method of determining global sea-level changes, since a proper evaluation depends upon detailed research in multiple locations with widely-differing characteristics. The true facts are to be found in nature itself’ Are sea-levels rising? Nils Axel-Morner documents a decided lack of rising seas – Sea level scares are, ‘as it turns out, one interpretation of some highly adjusted, carefully selected data, all possibly ‘corrected’ by one outlying tide gauge in Hong Kong. Nils Axel-Morner is here to point out that the raw satellite data shows barely any rise, and furthermore, the observations from places all over, like the Maldives, Suriname, Tuvalu, India, Bangladesh, Venice, and Germany show not much either. It’s close enough to zero to call it ‘nothing’ # Videos of Dr. Morner:  

RIP: Sea Level Expert Professor Nils-Axel Mörner, 1938-2020 – Climate Skeptic

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/10/19/professor-nils-axel-morner-1938-2020/ By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley Professor Nils-Axel Mörner, who died on Friday October 16 aged 83 after a short illness, knew more about sea level than did Poseidon himself. He wrote more than 650 papers on the subject in his long and distinguished career. He became even more well-known after his retirement than before it, because he decided to take the risk of publicly opposing the false notion, profitably peddled by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change et hoc genus omne, that global warming would cause many meters of sea-level rise. Silent upon a peak in Darien I first came across Niklas Mörner when he and I met at St. Andrews University in Scotland, where we had been invited to debate the climate question with true-believers at the University Union, one of the oldest debating societies in the world. At the beginning of the evening, the President asked us whether we minded taking part in a debate in which 97% of the students were against our viewpoint. Niklas replied cheerfully that he had faced worse odds than that. During the debate, Professor Mörner’s speech won us the day. Within seconds, he had the undergraduates eating out of his hand. His manner was calculatedly eccentric, and yet all through his speech one could see how passionate he was about seeking scientific truth objectively by measurement, observation and the application of previous theory to the results so as to confirm and develop or to overthrow that theory. Either way, said Niklas, science advances by little and little towards the truth, and nothing but the truth matters. The scientific method applied to sea-level change: a slide by Niklas Mörner The undergraduates were visibly fascinated. After 40 years of lecturing, he knew that keeping them entertained was the best way to hold their attention, and that making visible his personal dedication to the hunt for objective truth in scientific enquiry would lead the students to emulate him. He was rapturously received throughout his speech, and was accorded a thunderous round of applause at the end. When the vote was taken, the skeptics had won by a margin of 3 votes. It was the first time that any student audience in Britain had voted to oppose the climate-Communist Party line. Thereafter, Niklas and I kept in regular touch until just a couple of months ago, when he wrote asking me to contribute two papers to a new scientific journal that he was setting up. He wanted one paper on What is science and what is not? and another on our team’s demonstration that concern about global warming sprang from an elementary but significant error of physics. Mörner’s fork At the Copenhagen climate conference in 2009, Niklas gave a speech on sea-level rise to a press briefing organized by the Committee for a Constructive Tomorrow. The meeting was well attended, and Niklas – who needed a pointer for his slides but could not find one – seized a passing wooden salad fork and used that instead, to the delight of the journalists. He also established the influential International Committee on Geoethics, with the aim of removing partisan politics and reintroducing open debate on scientific questions at universities. The Committee held its inaugural conference in Prague, where the presentations were given in the Spanish Ballroom of the Hradcany Palace at the invitation of then-President Vaclav Klaus, who also spoke. Geoethics in style: the Spanish Ballroom at the Hradcany Palace, Prague Professor Mörner was a hands-on scientist. He did not enjoy squatting in his ivory tower. He liked to travel the world investigating sea level by the novel method of actually going to the coastline and having a look.

‘You are a murderer!’ – ‘You are an evil fat man!’ Listen: Nasty voicemails greet NOAA’s new skeptical climate scientist Dr. David Legates

https://wmbriggs.com/post/32598/ BY BRIGGS Dear Men of the Right, you might complain that you have not got all you wanted from President Trump. But you will not be able to deny he has the unparalleled ability to send his enemies into shivering bat-guano fits of drooling insanity. It is a beautiful thing to see. The entertainment value alone of his presidency makes his re-election imperative. Trump has done his signal service for us again by hiring a friend of ours, David Legates, for a top science position at NOAA.Long-time readers will remember Legates. He allowed me to tag along on a few papers on the climate (example). The most infamous of which caused—I’m guessing—at least seven TIAs, three full strokes, seventeen angina attacks, and four fatal myocardial infarctions. This was “Why Models Run Hot: Results From An Irreducibly Simple Climate Model“, with lead author Christopher Monckton.This peer-reviewed sensation made a simple claim: man, like all creatures, influences the climate; he is influencing this one, likely to the tune of a 1 degree C or so global temperature increase with a doubling of pre-industrial atmospheric carbon dioxide.Now, with all the worry, angst, consternation, fretting, wailing, lamentations, and just plain unhappiness about global-warming-of-doom, you’d think a paper like ours would be greeted with cheers and sighs of relief! Here was hope! We thought we were all going to die of heat death, but here was evidence saying maybe it will be okay. Isn’t that wonderful! Alas, no. Word is that that MSNBC reporter lady’s hair caught on fire when reading our story. Environmentalist activists lit torches. Members of Congress—and here I do not jest—launched investigations. Willie Soon, one of the other authors, was hounded, harassed, and hectored. Monkton was disparaged in many foreign languages. My old site was hacked. All of us were called names that I hadn’t even learned in the military. It was strange. It was almost as if the left did not want good news about the climate! It was as if the left hated the idea that their services to cure this non-problem were not necessary. But how could this be? They loved Science! Yet when science said “Calm yourselves”, that love evaporated. It’s true. The left became science deniers. A sad thing to see. Well, five years have passed and we have all grown in maturity and sobriety. We have come to appreciate the massive and unseen uncertainties that lurk in scientific models. We’ve seen how many forecasts have failed, we’ve seen that our fears were exaggerated. Our well-funded scientists, now abashed, have switched from temerity to timidity. Strange, then, that NPR said “Longtime Climate Science Denier Hired At NOAA“. They said Legates, “a University of Delaware professor of climatology who has spent much of his career questioning basic tenets of climate science”. Younger readers won’t recall that it used be the job of scientists to question basic, and even not-so-basic, tenets of science. That was how, in the old days, mistakes were recognized and progress made. All that has, of course, changed for the better. Tenets are now supplied by political agencies and are, as is proper, unquestionable. One has to admit that this change makes doing science much easier. Used to take years, even decades, of gruesome and mostly vain toil to ferret out flubs in theories, and even longer to discover fixes. Now all we have to do is check with the press and we know all the right answers. This is where the term denier originates. Anybody who questions the official line is called one. Anybody who can prove the parts of the official line are false are not only called deniers, but names I’m not allowed to print (my mother reads this blog). Truth and accuracy are not wanted. Compliance is all that counts. CNN sent plaintive emails to people asking for dirt on Legates. That MSNBC’s lady’s hair caught fire again. Science magazine, an international journal of politics, not realizing the pun, called Legates’s hiring an “escalation”. The most devastating critique of all came from the ex-head of the American Society of Interior Designers, Randy Fiser. He said Legates’s use of throw pillows and afghan carpet combination was sure to spell disaster for the country. Kidding! No, Fiser was hired by The American Geophysical Union, which is evidently an organization devoted to settle the scientific debate of wood floors versus tile. Fiser demanded Legates’s position be revoked. It’s not clear, but Fiser may be holding his breath until he turns blue to show earnest he is. Then came the hate calls. I have permission for you to delight in this mad woman’s ravings. She apparently believes “climate change”, and not admitted and caught arsonists, are responsible the wildfires out west (how many times have we been reminded that propaganda works?). I have removed all identifying information, so there are a few quiet spots. #Related Links:  Cheers! NPR: ‘Scientist Who Denies Climate Change Hired At NOAA By Trump Administration’ – Great news for science! Climatologist Dr. David Legates to join NOAA Update: REAL CLIMATE SCIENCE FROM DAVID LEGATES SEEMS TO SCARE THE MEDIA, WILL IT SCARE NOAA? # Steve Milloy, a Heartland board member and part of Trump’s Environmental Protection Agency transition team, says he welcomes the Legates appointment. “David Legates is a true climate scientist and will bring a great deal of much-needed science to NOAA,” Milloy writes in an email to NPR. # Marc Morano comments: “This is a victory for science! Having Dr. Legates at NOAA will be a much-needed counter to the usual scientific crap coming from federal science reports. Science has not been served with the likes of Union of Concerned Scientists’ activists Katherine Hayhoe or Don Wuebbles. Kudos to the Trump administration.” Legates can help clean up scientific messes like this”:Scientists rip new federal climate report as ‘tripe’ – ’embarrassing’ – ‘systematically flawed’ – Key claim based on study funded by Steyer & Bloomberg [Update: Fed climate con job: Obama’s UN Paris negotiator & green activists helped prepare dire federal climate report White House recruited climate critics for NOAA – ‘White House has been quietly working in recent weeks to reshape the leadership of NOAA with a goal of criticizing climate science’ Climate Depot response: “The big question is, why did the Trump administration wait until late in year four of his first term to start doing the right thing!?” Critic of dire climate predictions Meteorologist Dr. Ryan Maue may become NOAA chief scientist A Fact-Based Rebuttal To NPR’s Attack Of Climatologist David Legates # Read: Bonus chapter: Intimidating the ‘Deniers’ to Enforce the ‘Consensus’ – Climate ‘deniers’ threatened with being ‘thrown in jail’ – ‘The Politically Incorrect Guide to Climate Change’ A sampling of Hate Mail send to Morano of Climate Depot:  ‘F*CK YOU! DROP DEAD MOTHERF*CKER!!’ Morano receives threat after Congressional testimony – ‘May you die by [your children’s] hand!’ – WARNING GRAPHIC LANGUAGE May 23, 2019 threat to Morano: Tim Remple < [email protected]>: Excerpt: “Whereas you appeared on public at the recent House Natural Resources Committee, and Whereas you said things that indicate your guilty of Crimes Against Humanity and Ecocide,You are hereby official and irrevocably CURSED:  May you live long enough that your children and grandchildren likewise see the end of ALL LIFE on Planet Earth, May they, when they understand what they YOU have done, Ask you, “How the FUCK could you have done this to us??!!?? And may they then kill you! May you die by their hand! Looking them in the eye as THEY end your miserable life!!!!!” Watch: Dr. Will Happer shares his hatemail: ‘You are a f@cking uneducated Nazi. I hope you hang by the neck until you are dead’ Related: Trump meets with Princeton scientist who called ‘global warming’ fears ‘pure belief disguised as science’ Climate Depot’s Morano receives threatening email: ‘You and your children should be burned in public’ Recent hate mail to Morano: ‘Let’s meet man to man and I’ll rip that stupid smile off your face’ Other Hate Mail sample to Morano: ‘If you have children, I hope beyond hopes that you must bury them, and that your grief will know no end.’ UK Daily Mail reporter David Rose faces threats and intimidation after writing articles challenging the global warming narrative Comments ‘liken the work of David Rose – who is Jewish – to Adolf Hitler’s anti-Semitic rant Mein Kampf’ ‘Top climate scientists receive death threats’: ‘Have also been subjected to intimidating e-mails along with threats against their families’ ‘It is now an undeniable fact though that not only is our climate changing, but that it has been responsible for many recent world-wide disasters’ Flashback 2009: Warmest Eli Rabett (AKA Joshua Halpern of Howard U.) revels in thought of a dead Morano: ‘If Marc Morano were dead he’d be whirling in his grave’ Hate Mail Sent to Climate Depot’s Morano: ‘I will have a nice long drive up to DC and have a very short and unpleasant conversation with your ass if you dont stop harrassing scientists’ Climate Depot’s Response: ‘I wonder if Australian media would be interested in hate/threatening mail i received today. ABC News?’ Will Media Report this?! Hate mail goes both ways: Here’s an example that ClimateDepot.com received: ‘I hope they hang you and the rest of the stooges for the fossil fuel industry’ Hate Mail Sent to Climate Depot’s Morano: ‘Hi I just wanted to let you know what a god**** stupid lying idiot you are. I really hope you are someday put on trial before a world tribunal on charges of ‘crimes against humanity’…You are an evil little f*** and you have your head so far up your a**, you can tickle your tonsils when you wiggle your ears. F*** you, ‘moron-o’  

New Book Argues For More Science Skeptics — Except In Climatology

https://climatechangedispatch.com/new-book-argues-more-science-skeptics-except-climatology/ New Book Argues For More Science Skeptics, Except In Climatology Climate Change Dispatch / by Donna Laframboise / Psychologist Stuart Ritchie is the author of a new book, Science Fictions: How Fraud, Bias, Negligence, and Hype Undermine the Search for Truth. In the words of his publisher, it demonstrates that “failures in peer review and mistakes in statistics have rendered a shocking number of scientific studies useless.” Ritchie declares the scientific publication process “badly broken.” He argues persuasively that enormous resources are being wasted, and that our heads “are being filled with ‘facts’ that are either incorrect, exaggerated, or drastically misleading.” These arguments overlap many found in my 2016 report, Peer Review: Why Skepticism is Essential. But new scandals and controversies have emerged since then, and Ritchie does a great job of explaining why all of this matters. But there’s a catch. Here we have an author lamenting delusion and self-deception. Here we have an author championing skepticism and hard-headed empiricism. Yet he, himself, utterly refuses to confront what all of the above implies about climate science. If significant numbers of peer-reviewed papers in psychology, economics, evolutionary biology, organic chemistry, geoscience, and medicine can’t be reproduced/replicated when third parties attempt to do so, if many published studies really are useless, on what basis shall we go on imagining that climate research is a separate case? How can that field possibly be exempt from problems that are widespread elsewhere? Environmental research has, after all, been highly politicized for at least two decades. Cambridge University Press was urged by scientists to withdraw Bjorn Lomborg’s The Skeptical Environmentalist from publication – to essentially burn his book back in 2002. A reasonable observer might therefore suspect that climate research is saturated with tribalism and bias, rather than the opposite. Ergo: many of the studies on which politicians now base their climate decisions must be unreliable. How ironic that Ritchie is incapable of following his own arguments to their logical conclusion. Nevertheless, it’s difficult not to feel sympathy for this young academic. His book was no doubt completed late last year. He had no way of anticipating that a deadly new coronavirus was about to spread across the globe and that John Ioannidis, one of the people he cites extensively in his book, would respond to the pandemic in unexpected ways. Two weeks before Science Fictions was released in mid-July, Ritchie published an essay titled There should never be heroes in science. It begins by telling us about the late Hans Eysenck, once the most-cited psychologist in Britain. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, this eminent personality (who died in 1997), devoted much of his energy to keeping his own profession honest. As Ritchie tells it, Eysenck authored “blistering critiques of psychoanalysis and psychotherapy, noting the unscientific nature of Freudian theories and digging into the evidence base for therapy’s effects on mental health.” Last year, more than a dozen of Eysenck’s papers were retracted. Dozens more are now officially considered questionable. An investigation by Kings College London concurred with critics who’ve long been concerned about the quality of Eysenck’s data and “the implausibility of the results presented.” In other words, this “strong advocate of rigor in science” was better at identifying the flaws in other people’s reasoning, than in producing bulletproof research of his own. Ritchie then turns his attention to Ioannidis: It’s fair to say that Stanford University’s John Ioannidis is a hero of mine. He’s the medical researcher who made waves in 2005 with a paper carrying the firecracker title “Why Most Published Research Findings are False”, and who has published an eye-watering number of papers outlining problems in clinical trials, economics, psychology, statistics, nutrition research and more. …Ioannidis’s contribution to science has been to make it far more open, honest, and self-reflective about its flaws. How odd it is, then, to see his failure to follow his own advice. Ritchie points to a March 2020 article in which Ioannidis legitimately observed that politicians were making decisions about how to respond to the coronavirus “without reliable data.” Five months on, that’s still true. Many of the numbers currently available to us are compromised in one way or another. But whether Ioannidis’ own hunches are correct is a different matter altogether. Writes Ritchie: The most memorable part of the article was his prediction – on the basis of his analysis of the cursed cruise ship Diamond Princess – that around 10,000 people in the US would die from COVID-19…As US deaths have just hit 125,000, I don’t need to emphasise how wrong that prediction was. Yesterday, American deaths from COVID-19 exceeded 187,000. Even if that count is wrong by 20% in either direction, we’re definitely talking a different ballpark. Ritchie tells us Ioannidis has since authored more than one piece of COVID-related research marred by serious design flaws. Even the best minds amongst us, therefore, succumb to bias. Even professional skeptics can exhibit, as Ritchie says, a “strong aversion to having their cherished theories proved wrong.” Here’s the last paragraph in Ritchie’s essay: Above, I should really have said that John Ioannidis was a hero of mine. Because this whole episode has reminded me that those self-critical, self-correcting principles of science simply don’t allow for hero-worship. Even the strongest critics of science need themselves to be criticised; those who raise the biggest questions about the way we do research need themselves to be questioned. Healthy science needs a whole community of sceptics, all constantly arguing with one another…Who watches the watchmen in science? The answer is, or at least should be: all of us. [bold added; italics in the original] I invite you to re-read that sentence in bold font. So says a man whose book dismisses climate skeptics in peremptory fashion. In fact, Ritchie ends his final chapter by referencing a famous cartoon that implies climate policies will automatically create a “better world” even if the climate crisis turns out to be overblown. This is unfortunate. Ritchie’s argument is that improving the way research is conducted makes sense even if we reject his contention that “something has gone very wrong with science.” But that famous climate cartoon naively presupposes that good intentions are enough, that climate programs have no negative consequences, that government policies are never counterproductive, ill-conceived, or designed to financially benefit political donors. I critiqued that climate cartoon last year. Read more at Big Pic News The post New Book Argues For More Science Skeptics, Except In Climatology first appeared on Climate Change Dispatch. SHAREVISIT WEBSITE

Why Progressive Activists Want to Silence the Truth About Climate Change – Interview with skeptical climate statistician Dr. Caleb Rossiter

https://www.dailysignal.com/2020/08/05/why-progressive-activists-want-to-silence-the-truth-about-climate-change/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=why-progressive-activists-want-to-silence-the-truth-about-climate-change Why Progressive Activists Want to Silence the Truth About Climate Change The Daily Signal / by Virginia Allen / Climate activists continue to sound the alarm over carbon dioxide emissions and climate change. Caleb Rossiter, the executive director of CO2 Coalition, an organization of climate scientists and experts who research and report the facts of climate change, joins the show to explain just how worried we really should or should not be about the planet’s warming. Rossiter also explains “a long campaign to … cancel climate voices in the mainstream media,” including his own. Virginia Allen: I am joined by Caleb Rossiter, the executive director of CO2 Coalition. Caleb, thanks so much for being on the show. Rossiter: Virginia, it’s a real pleasure to be talking to you from lovely upstate New York where I’m on a bit of a vacation. Allen: Oh, that’s good. Good for you. Well, I’m sorry to make you work on your vacation, but I’m glad that you’re allowing us to pull you in and speak with you today. I want to start by just hearing a little bit about your organization. You all have come under some fire recently from the left and we’re going to get into that in just a moment. But first, can you just tell us a little bit about what CO2 Coalition does? Rossiter: Sure. The CO2 Coalition was founded in 2015 by Dr. Will Happer of Princeton University, a physicist, a very noteworthy American physicist who recently served as President [Donald] Trump’s science adviser on the National Security Council, which explains how I ended up being the director for a couple of years. There are 55 climate scientists and energy economists, experts in their field who over the years noticed with alarm that climate science and energy economics had become very politicized. And there were claims that it was all settled and because of the terrible changes in atmospheric warmth leading to hurricanes and sea level rise and glaciers melting, we had to get rid of the fossil fuels that power over 80% of the world economy. These climate scientists and energy economists felt that was incorrect based on the data and their understanding of physics and economics and came together. So, they’ve been a prominent source in Congress of sort of scientific and economic expertise. We publish reports, we comment on other people’s reports, and we do a lot of public speaking and congressional education. Allen: We hear so much about climate change and, like you say, it has become so politicized. How did we get to that point? Where, for one, it seems like often the facts are overlooked for the sake of just kind of pushing an agenda. And then to what extent is climate change something that we actually need to be concerned about? Rossiter: One of the first things we always ask people, particularly members of Congress who say, “Is climate change real?” And we ask them to tell us, “What do you mean by climate change?” As academics, we want to know what it is we’re supposed to be looking at. The climate of the world, meaning the temperature and the weather that it experiences, changes dramatically over the course of fairly regular course. Let’s just take a short-term period in sort of geological history. Every 100,000 years, there’s a terribly powerful cycle that drives temperature up and down about 8 degrees Celsius, about 15 degrees Fahrenheit over the entire world on average. That’s when you get, for example, where I’m sitting right today in Ithaca, New York, 18,000 years ago or so it was under a mile of ice. That’s the last glacial maximum. Those occur every 100,000 years in some very powerful cycle going up and going down those 15 degrees based on, you might call it the geometry of the Earth’s movement around the sun. The ellipse we travel in changes its shape slightly and regularly and that brings more sunlight to bear. So there are these powerful climate changes over long periods. In short periods, temperature goes up and down a degree or two all the time. So at the moment, because of that powerful elliptical 100,000-year cycle, we happen to be at this stage of humanity at the top of the temperature range. And that temperature wobbles up there a bit every few 100 years in some chaotic, some regular ways. And it’s about to, I’m sorry to say, go down for the next glacial maximum. But don’t worry, it’ll take 80,000 years to get us cool. So, in that period that we are in now, there has been a slight natural warming since about the year 1800 as the world came out of something called the Little Ice Age. Now, none of this is controversial or outside any sort of scientific consensus. It’s just the way that the temperatures work when they wobble around a little bit. At about 1950—when about half of the warming from 1900 till today of about 1 degree average around the world—in 1950, there was enough carbon dioxide pumped out by industrialization after World War II to finally make a difference to temperature. Because carbon dioxide is a warming gas and the U.N. claims that at least half of that, which is a reasonable estimate, has come because of the addition of carbon dioxide, a very minor trace warming gas to the big warming gases like water vapor that is naturally causing about 97% of our greenhouse effect. So the worry is that either this 1 degree rise that’s at least a quarter natural in the last 100 years or 50% natural if all the warming since 1950 is natural is going to cause rapid increases in the rate of sea level rise, the melting of glaciers, and droughts, hurricanes, floods, things that harm people. That is climate change. Now, the data to date that the U.N. has put out and analyzed do not support that. The rates of all those variables per decade, the rate of sea level rise that was always coming up from the Little Ice Age is the same as it was 1920 to 1950, droughts, floods, and all that. So the climate change debate has strangely morphed into a debate over my topic. I used to teach mathematical modeling and climate statistics at American University. The debate today really is driven by, do you believe the computer models, mathematical models that project, if we keep producing carbon dioxide, temperature will rise dramatically and will cause increased floods, storms, and hurricanes? That’s where this whole debate that you and I are talking about comes in because our coalition has experts in these matters who write on these matters and Facebook has started to censor them on these matters. Allen: Let’s touch on that a little bit. You mentioned Facebook, what role is Facebook playing in actually censoring information about CO2 emissions and climate change, and specifically your organization? Rossiter: Because the mainstream media—from about USA Today and Washington Post to CNN on over to the left—have been sort of cancel cultured over the last 15 years with tremendous pressure from advertisers and groups to eliminate critical voices about the wildest climate change claims from their airwaves and from their newspapers, we have relied not only on direct publication and meeting with members of Congress and holding briefings, but also social media. It’s our samizdat, as dissidence in the Soviet Union called their underground method of transmitting information during the communist era where people can pass information. Social media is fantastic. We use Facebook and Twitter to broadcast and publicize and advertise to reach people directly with our arguments and our studies that we can’t get written about in anything to the left of Fox News and The Washington Times. Allen: I want to touch on this letter that was written. You all recently came under some attack from the left and a couple of weeks ago, a group of 19 left-wing leaders and climate activists, including Stacey Abrams, sent a letter to Fox asking that they remove the CO2 Coalition Facebook page. And I quote from their letter, “Facebook is allowing the spread of climate misinformation to flourish unchecked across the globe. Instead of heeding the advice of independent scientists and approved fact-checkers from climate Facebook, Facebook sided with fossil fuel lobbyists, by allowing the CO2 Coalition to take advantage of a giant loophole for opinion content.” Were you surprised by this letter? Rossiter: Well, there’s virtually not one word in that sentence that’s accurate, but I’m not going to have time to explain that, but I’ll tell you what happened. There’s a long campaign to, as I said, cancel climate voices in the mainstream media. A leader of that campaign was named Eric Michelman. He’s a tech millionaire, billionaire, whatever, he would be who helped invent the mouse. And he has been on this tear for at least 15 years of funding organizations that try to silence dissent on climate. And Mr. Michelman founded something in 2015 or 16 called Climate Feedback, which Facebook accepted as an independent fact-checker through a sort of left-leaning international fact-checking network run by the group that runs PolitiFact and somehow put them in charge of deciding what was false and misleading on this issue. Last September, the former president of the American Association of State Climatologists, Patrick Michaels, and I, a climate math statistician, wrote an article in the Washington Examiner just describing what climate models are and how they work. And they’re really just tools, not oracles, as we know from the COVID modeling escapades. And people have elevated climate models of far over what mathematicians would tell you is worth listening to in terms of policy. So, we make those points. We were censored on Facebook by the Science Feedback group that Facebook had given the power to, labeled false, which means you can’t repost it, send it around, advertise it, and boost it, all the ways that we reach our audiences. Dr. Michaels and I immediately responded with a detailed scientific letter citing all sorts of peer-reviewed research to indicate that the models were running hot and were quite poor guides for policy and Facebook removed it. I think they were a little scared of Sen. [Ted] Cruz who had been jumping on them the day before because Climate Feedback … is part of a passel called Science Feedback that includes Health Feedback, and they’ve been going after abortion activists on Facebook for making claims about the medical aspects of abortion and Sen. Cruz had intervened. So, we fortunately were left alone for a while. And then Dr. Michaels had a very successful video appearance on “Life, Liberty & Levin” maybe three years ago that had 3 million views. Well, about a month ago, Climate Feedback went back and unearthed that and decided to censor that. So, again, we complained, we cited the science, and it’s been written about. And I think because we’re successful in … challenging the underpinnings of climate alarm, which are the models that are quite weak, Climate Feedback came after us. And so did this group led by Stacey Abrams and Tom Steyer and all the environmental groups, frankly, who have always refused to debate us and just spread alarm on their webpage. It’s like the Union of Concerned Scientists or the Sierra Club. These are huge organizations and they’re picking on us and we’re very proud of that. But I would add one thing. Recently, Michael Shellenberger, a noted environmentalist, and Roger Pielke Jr., a very prominent climate statistician, who are not part of our coalition at all, have published articles that have been equally critical of the climate consensus of alarm. And Michael Moore’s new film, although he believes in climate catastrophe, he said, “The new renewables aren’t ready for prime time and will not make any difference in carbon emissions.” All of these have been censored on Facebook by Climate Feedback. So maybe we were the warm-up act for them to learn how to do it. And they come after anything that is popular and makes people say, “Huh, maybe we don’t have such a climate emergency going on that would justify getting rid of our affordable, reliable energy.” Allen: To me, this just so underscores truly how political this issue is that at CO2 Coalition, you have all of these well, well-educated experts in this field. And then you have this Facebook group that is essentially saying, “No, we know better than these experts.” This is your world. This is where you study. You know the facts, you know the science. I would like to say it’s shocking, I guess, unfortunately though, we’ve seen this trend so frequently that maybe now it really isn’t that surprising. Rossiter: Well, it is politicized. You have to remember, I mean, I’m a Democrat. I was a Democratic candidate for Congress, a Democratic staffer for many years on Capitol Hill. I come to this completely from the mathematics and the statistics of having been a professor in this area and learned by my work I had to do to teach it that, of course, it’s a very complex area. And the so-called science is not settled in these thousands of areas that relate to climate, let alone is the economic settled. You have a longtime effort to suppress that point of view. Many of our members—professor Dick Lindzen, for example; Roy Spencer, the atmospheric physicist who keeps the satellite record for the United States government—these folks were on the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change], the U.N. body, and around 2001 they’d been appointed by the United States, began to see that it was being politically exaggerated from its very fine, peer-reviewed studies up through its report language, up to its press release. By the time the secretary-general talks about something that says, “We see the same rate of sea level rise since before the carbon era,” it’s become climate change caused by carbon dioxide is wiping out our cities. So, there’s just been systematic exaggeration of the science. We point that out and that is very threatening to people who are trying to create the consensus to pass the Green New Deal, which, as someone who’s worked in African Energy, I can tell you is the “Green New Death” because Africa needs cheap, reliable energy to raise its life expectancy. And that’s not going to get there with wind farms and solar panels. Allen: I want to circle back and ask you, one of the issues that we are hearing a lot of policy debate around is a carbon tax. And you kind of hear both sides of the debate on this in the news. Essentially, this would be a tax on companies that produce high levels of greenhouse gases. Can you explain what a carbon tax would accomplish and whether or not it actually makes sense? Rossiter: The purpose of a carbon tax is to raise the price of using their resources for your heating in your house, from a natural gas-powered electrical generating plant or in your automobile with gasoline. Raise it so high that you will be willing to pay a higher price and buy the renewable so-called energy coming out of a solar-powered electrical plant or a wind-powered grid that you can plug your vehicle into. The reason is those so-called renewables, which are not at all. They have to be mined in Africa, transformed, shipped, set up, and then recycled when they fall apart every 10 years—the wind turbines and the solar panels and all of that uses fossil fuel, of course. They’re very expensive because they’re intermittent. You can’t really get rid of your fossil fuel plant if you have wind-powered electricity because when the wind dies down or the sun goes down for solar, you got to have the fossil fuel grid there to keep it going. It’s very expensive. It doesn’t work yet. They don’t have the batteries to save the energy for when the power is intermittent, which would be wonderful. So you have to raise the price of carbon dioxide-fueled and since fossil-fueled power very high to get people to change their behavior and instead buy the renewable. That’s essentially what the purpose of the tax is, is to make it as expensive as the renewable so you stop using it. Allen: And right now, for you all at CO2 Coalition, where are you all really focused and zeroed in on right now as it relates to within the climate change debate and research and discussion around this issue? Rossiter: Sure. We focus on two things. Our climate scientists write about the reasons to revisit the 2009 endangerment finding that found that the greenhouse gases were endangering our society’s health by creating storms, floods, droughts, things of that nature. Nothing could be further than the truth. The carbon dioxide by chance happens to be a strong plant food that is boosted in the carbon dioxide era of fossil fuels, plant productivity about 30% around the world and with more to come. And we’d like to see that that finding—which is the basis of all these federal laws to consider carbon dioxide dangerous and raise prices on energy fourfold—we’d like to see that reversed scientifically, meaning have the [Environmental Protection Agency] look at it again. On the economic side, we write about the cost of renewable energy. We published something last year called “The Social Cost of Carbon” that shows that it’s four times as expensive to use so-called renewables when you have the true cost with the mandates that all cities and states buy a certain amount of this expensive energy. And we’re about to publish something on the so-called fossil fuel subsidies, which proponents of renewable say are so big that it reduces the price of fossil fuel unfairly. And it turns out, of course, with all the taxes we put on fossil fuels, there’s a net negative subsidy to fossil fuels. For renewables, who are having trouble for prime time, it’s not because fossil fuels are unfairly subsidized. Natural gas, because of horizontal fracturing starting about 2010, is pouring out of the ground essentially free to utilities that want to provide electricity and heat from it. It’s saving up to 11,000 lives a year, according to the National Institutes of Health, by keeping the price of heating down in places like Ohio and Wisconsin and New England. The natural gas fracking miracle for our economy is having tremendously positive health effects and yet it’s considered an endangering gas as if it were sulfur dioxide out of a coal plant and carbon monoxide out of your pipe, all of which are being treated in modern science with catalytic converters that virtually eliminate the pollution. So, as real pollution has gone down, Virginia, ironically, concern about so-called carbon pollution, which is not a pollutant—it doesn’t hurt you to breathe in and out carbon dioxide—concern about carbon pollution, which is a propaganda term, has gone up. Allen: So interesting. Where can our listeners find these pieces as they come out and follow your work? Rossiter: We have a website called co2coalition.org. And on it, you will see articles of the day, interesting, sort of scientifically-based, but readable articles we find. And right below them, you’ll see all our publications. So all the publications I mentioned both short and long will be listed there. They can always contact me at the CO2 Coalition. I love to talk. I miss being a professor. I love to talk with people about the complex and interesting science and economics of what I’d call the great carbon dioxide experiment, which is the massive increase in use of fossil fuels since about 1950. It’s increased the percentage of carbon dioxide in our atmosphere from three one-hundredths of 1% to four one-hundredths of 1%. And it’s having effects on the oceans, the land, and the air. And we were happy to provide the latest research and talk about it in a manner that the average citizen can understand. Allen: That’s wonderful. Well, and of course, we also encourage everyone to follow you on Facebook. The Facebook is still there. Rossiter: Now that is for sure. I think Facebook’s in a very tough spot. It’s a private company that can do whatever it wants, but … it turns this censoring function over that was supposed to be used just to stop hate speech and incitement of violence and horrible things like that, which I support. Now, it’s being used as a tool to go after climate scientists and energy economists who publish studies and have comments on other people’s studies. It’s really a mania to cancel a debate on what is probably the most important public policy issue of the coming election. Are you in favor of raising energy prices or reducing them because of your fears or lack of fears about carbon dioxide? Allen: Absolutely. Well, we will be sure to put those links both for the website and the Facebook page, so we can continue to support you and show that support in today’s show notes. So Caleb, thank you so much for your time. We really appreciate it. Rossiter: Thank you so much, but you could have saved time by going over and interviewing Kevin Dayaratna of your wonderful organization. He too has labored in these fields, particularly the carbon tax and economic issues, and I’ve found him open and brilliant, and you ought to interview him next time. Allen: Yeah. No, we are very, very grateful and very thankful to have him at [The Heritage Foundation], but also very much so appreciate your perspective. Rossiter: OK. Thank you. The post Why Progressive Activists Want to Silence the Truth About Climate Changeappeared first on The Daily Signal. SHAREVISIT WEBSITE

BBC Climate Documentary: ‘How they (skeptics) Made Us Doubt Everything’

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/07/28/bbc-climate-documentary-how-they-made-us-doubt-everything/ By Eric Worrall Guest essay by Eric Worrall I’ve just listened to the entire BBC radio series “How They Made Us Doubt Everything”, which compares climate skepticism to rejecting the link between tobacco and cancer. Episodes 1-5, all I heard was details of how the tobacco industry sowed doubt about lung cancer – interesting but largely irrelevant to the climate debate. Episode 6 starts with a few details of Ben Santer’s custody battle for his son, then segues straight into saying how his life is also tough because he is a climate scientist. The episode then dives into Myron Ebell’s battle against the Kyoto Protocol, claiming Ebell’s plan to oppose Kyoto was just like the “white coat” campaign against tobacco regulation. It is worth pausing for a moment to reflect on some of the reasons why Ben Santer has encountered a few frustrations in his career. Ben Santer became a Climategate star because of his email fantasy of perpetrating violent assault against Pat Michaels, but this is not all that Santer did. Ben Santer also seems to have spent a fair bit of time thinking up excuses to fend off requests for data referenced by his published papers, while writing angry emails to colleagues about the persecution he was enduring. “Can any competitor simply request such datasets via the US FOIA before we have completed full scientific analysis of those datasets?” (Climategate Email 1231257056.txt). Stephen McKintyre describes Santer refusing a polite request for data on the Climate Audit website. Of course none of this was mentioned by the BBC. Episode 7 contains a quote from science communicator Susan Hassol, who seems to think ordinary people don’t understand the word “uncertainty”. Episode 8 talks about Jerry Taylor. Jerry used to be a climate skeptic, but changed his mind after talking to Joe Romm in the changing room after a live debate about James Hansen’s work. Jerry discussed what Joe Romm said with Pat Michaels, about Hansen producing more than one scenario, but was unsatisfied with Pat’s response; Jerry left with the impression he had been “duped” by climate skeptics. I’m not sure why Jerry feels he was misled; according to our Willis, Hansen’s Scenario A underestimated CO2 emissions by 25%, but predicted double the observed global warming. The other Hansen scenarios were a better fit for the observed temperature trend, but drastically underestimated CO2 emissions. Hansen got it wrong. Episode 8 also mentions the BBC advising their journalists “we do not need a denier to balance the debate“. Episode 9 focuses on smearing Dr. Willie Soon. In my opinion the BBC attempted to make funding for Soon’s research look like Dr. Soon received a million dollar bribe from the fossil fuel industry. The part the BBC leaves out of this grossly misleading attack is the grant was paid over a period of ten years. Lord Monckton estimates Willie Soon received less than $60,000 / year after the Smithsonian took their cut – not exactly life changing money. WUWT published Willie Soon’s excellent response to the BBC’s biased questions, which Soon received from BBC producer Phoebe Keane a few weeks ago. Episode 10, “Leaving the Tribe”, discusses former Republican representative Bob Inglis being dumped by his district after he embraced climate alarmism, though looking at other sources it is unclear whether climate alarmism was the primary reason Inglis was dumped – Inglis did plenty of other things which likely upset his supporters. Producer Phoebe Keane then complains in episode 10 that when Willie Soon responded to her biased questions, she also received angry emails from other people Dr. Soon copied into his response. Keane then wastes listeners time discussing her disdain for the people who wrote to her, but doesn’t actually present what Dr. Soon said in his response. What can I say – this is not the BBC I grew up listening to and watching. In my opinion “how they made us doubt everything” is an innuendo heavy smear, rather than a genuine attempt to enlighten BBC listeners. The BBC “How they made us doubt everything” series spent two episodes of their 10 episode series vilifying Dr. Willie Soon, then failed to present Dr. Soon’s response to their attacks. Regardless of whether you think Dr. Soon is right or wrong, Dr. Willie Soon deserves better than this one sided gutter press assault on his reputation from the BBC. Even dictators and murderers are often given an opportunity to argue their case on the BBC. But this is a courtesy the BBC “How they made us doubt everything” series has so far failed to extend to a mild mannered law abiding climate scientist, who was unfortunate enough to be a prime target of their latest ugly smear campaign. Update (EW): h/t Dr. Soon – Corrected the spelling of Susan Hassol’s name. Naomi Oreskes has expressed her support for the BBC series.

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