The Federal Climate Science Report Is Bunk; Trump Must Fire All the Charlatans Responsible

Climate protest — ADRIAN DENNIS/AFP/Getty

A bunch of alarmist holdovers from the Obama era released a report insisting that climate change is still just about the worst thing ever.

The Federal Climate Science Special Report from the U.S. Global Change Research Program – to give it its full grandiose title – was seized on by the liberal media as proof that President Trump is wrong on climate and that the “science” still supports all those greens, Democrats, RINOs and other pondlife demanding more action be taken to combat global warming.

Needless to say the report is bull from start to finish.

In a moment I shall thoroughly debunk it. (If you’re impatient, you can cut to the chase and skip straight to the paragraph below beginning “Here is why it cannot be trusted…”)

But first, if you don’t mind, I want to have a bit of fun at the expense of all those prize pillocks who for the last few days have been making hay with this alarmist propaganda.

Here is how the liberal media reported it. You can almost hear the trickle of their drool as they salivate over just how wrong and anti-science President Trump is.

The New York Times:

Directly contradicting much of the Trump administration’s position on climate change, 13 federal agencies unveiled an exhaustive scientific report on Friday that says humans are the dominant cause of the global temperature rise that has created the warmest period in the history of civilization.

Read the rest at Breitbart.

Children Just Aren’t Going to Know What Sun Is

Enjoy it while it lasts

There’s a great piece by David Rose in the Mail On Sunday nicely summing up what a lot of us here knew already: that the thing we really need to fear right now is not global warming but global cooling. And that, on current evidence, it’s global cooling we’re going to get.

The supposed ‘consensus’ on man-made global warming is facing an inconvenient challenge after the release of new temperature data showing the planet has not warmed for the past 15 years.

The figures suggest that we could even be heading for a mini ice age to rival the 70-year temperature drop that saw frost fairs held on the Thames in the 17th Century.

Based on readings from more than 30,000 measuring stations, the data was issued last week without fanfare by the Met Office and the University of East Anglia Climatic Research Unit. It confirms that the rising trend in world temperatures ended in 1997.

Rose’s piece comes hot on the heels of an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal signed by 16 distinguished scientists (proper ones: not “climate” “scientists”) noting the continuing absence of ManBearPig:

Perhaps the most inconvenient fact is the lack of global warming for well over 10 years now. This is known to the warming establishment, as one can see from the 2009 “Climategate” email of climate scientist Kevin Trenberth: “The fact is that we can’t account for the lack of warming at the moment and it is a travesty that we can’t.” But the warming is only missing if one believes computer models where so-called feedbacks involving water vapor and clouds greatly amplify the small effect of CO2.

The lack of warming for more than a decade—indeed, the smaller-than-predicted warming over the 22 years since the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) began issuing projections—suggests that computer models have greatly exaggerated how much warming additional CO2 can cause. Faced with this embarrassment, those promoting alarm have shifted their drumbeat from warming to weather extremes, to enable anything unusual that happens in our chaotic climate to be ascribed to CO2.

The fact is that CO2 is not a pollutant. CO2 is a colorless and odorless gas, exhaled at high concentrations by each of us, and a key component of the biosphere’s life cycle. Plants do so much better with more CO2 that greenhouse operators often increase the CO2 concentrations by factors of three or four to get better growth. This is no surprise since plants and animals evolved when CO2 concentrations were about 10 times larger than they are today. Better plant varieties, chemical fertilizers and agricultural management contributed to the great increase in agricultural yields of the past century, but part of the increase almost certainly came from additional CO2 in the atmosphere.

All true, of course. All very, very true. Which does rather invite the question: when’s the scam going to end? When are all those “climate” “scientists” at institutions like the University of Easy Access finally going to eat crow?

Actually this question is entirely rhetorical since I already know the answer: when hell freezes over.

Consider, for example, the fate of Dr David Viner – the University of Easy Access climatologist responsible for the most-read-ever story in the Independent when, in 2000, he famously deployed his meteorological expertise to tell us:

“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is.”

And where did “Nostradamus” Viner go?

Well, for a time he was in charge of disseminating climate change propaganda at taxpayers’ expense for the British Council.

More than £3.5 million has gone on recruiting a worldwide network of young “climate activists” in over 70 countries to engage in climate change propaganda – what Marxists used to call agitprop – and to pressure their politicians to join the worldwide struggle. Under a programme called Challenge Europe, £1.1 million has been paid out to fund young “climate advocates” in 17 countries across Europe, including Britain itself. But £2.5 million has been spent on a more ambitious project to recruit a global network of 100,000 activists in 60 countries across the world, led by 1,300 young “International Climate Champions”, to participate in “international peer networks, both in person and online, to share ideas, projects and experiences”.

Of this sum, £303,093.24 went to China; £71,262.91 to Brazil; £53,006.25 to Japan; £70,132.88 to India (including £11,000 to Dr Pachauri’s Teri institute); £77,507.89 to oil-rich Qatar; and £50,000 to the US. There was £120,000 for a dozen different countries in Africa, including £14,000 to fund climate champions in starving Zimbabwe.

So, to recap: a scientist from arguably Britain’s most discredited university department – the Climatic Research Unit at the UEA – made a fool of himself and his employer by feeding to a newspaper wrongheaded disaster scenarios based on woefully inaccurate computer projections, thus lending spurious credibility to a massive media scaremongering campaign which has led to the squandering of billions of pounds on an entirely unnecessary scheme to “decarbonise” the UK economy. His reward for this was to be granted a taxpayer-funded salary to go round the world spreading more abject nonsense about a mostly non-existent threat called “climate change.”

Viner is not the exception: he is the rule. We have a right, I think, to start getting very angry indeed.

One thought on “Children just aren’t going to know what sun is”

nigelbryancook says:15th February 2012 at 10:44 pmThe “consensus of experts” approach to defining what “science methodology” is pure academia. In history journals, peer review works because it is constructive: “peer” reviewers are honest and objective as far as possible. In science “peer” review, you always have corruption. This goes back to the so-called “profession” of science, circa 1850, when amateur free thinkers and experimentalists like bookbinder’s apprentice and Davy bottle-washer Michael Faraday (discoverer of electromagnetic induction, the thing that merely generates all electricity, drives all transformers and turns all electric motors) started to be replaced by Oxbridge educated dons. Here is the mathematician Oliver Heaviside describing censorship by dollar-grabbing professionals in 1893 (who left school at 14 to become a Morse code telegrapher, becoming obsessed by electromagnetic theory and correctly developing transmission line theory as well as predicting the ionosphere, the “Heaviside layer”).Heaviside, Electromagnetic Theory, vol 1, 1893, p337: “Internal obstruction and superficial construction … If you have got anything new, in substance or in method, and want to propagate it rapidly, you need not expect anything but hindrance from the old practitioner – even though he sat at the feet of Faraday. Beetles could do that. Besides, the old practitioner [any so-called “professional” scientist in general as well] is apt to measure the value of science by the number of dollars he thinks it is likely to bring into his pocket, and if he does not see the dollars, he is very disinclined to disturb his ancient prejudices. But only give him plenty of rope, and when the new views have become fashionably current, he may find it worth his while to adopt them, though, perhaps, in a somewhat sneaky manner [plagiarism], not unmixed with bluster, and make believe he knew about it when he was a little boy! He sees a prospect of dollars in the distance, that is the reason. The perfect obstructor [“peer”-review bias] having failed, try the perfect conductor. … Prof. Tait [the famed quaternionic expert] says he cannot understand my vectors, though he can understand much harder things. But men who have no quaterionic prejudices can understand them, and do.” – http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=juMqHkD7YHMC&pg=PA337&lpg=PA337&ganpub=k186085&ganclk=GOOG_GB_1469676051#v=onepage&q&f=true

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Climategate 2.0: junk science 101 with Michael Mann

At last, I’ve arrived.

Michael Mann: isn’t he pretty?

Michael Mann, inventor of the Hockey Stick, has written to the Wall Street Journal branding me a “denier” and a “contrarian” and “silly.” These are badges of honour I shall wear with pride.

The letter is interesting for lots of reasons, not least its grotesque hypocrisy. “In recent years”, he writes, “attacks on climate science have become personal” – as if somehow the real victims of all this are not the innocent taxpayers being screwed to pay for the great green boondoggle, but ordinary decent climate scientists like Mann and his Hockey Team just trying to get on and do their job.

Every snowflake is unique, but attacks on climate science all seem the same. I should know. I’ve been one of the climate contrarians’ preferred targets for years.

Has Mann actually read any of the Climategate and Climategate 2.0 emails, I wonder? A lot of them have his name on them, so he must have done at one time or another. But perhaps with all that data-fudging and decline-hiding his brain has been overtaxed of late. So let us gently jog his memory with some examples.

Here’s one from New Zealand. (H/T WUWT) It’s 2003 and a Kiwi scientist called Chris de Freitas has published in a journal called Climate Research a meta-analysis by some Harvard astronomers Soon & Baliunas of all the papers that have been written on the Medieval Warming Period (MWP). The conclusion of Soon & Baliunas? That the vast majority of published, peer-reviewed papers on the MWP conclude that it was both geographically widespread (not, as Warmists and their amen corner in Wikipedia like to pretend, a little local anomaly confined to Northern Europe) and significantly warmer than now.

This irritates Michael Mann and his Hockey Team no end, for it contradicts their view that late 20th century warming is both unprecedented and catastrophic. So how do they respond? Do they counter it with new, learned papers demonstrating in closely illustrated detail just where Soon & Baliunas have got it wrong?

Of course they don’t!

Instead, what they do is gang up to shoot the messenger. They conspire to have Climate Research closed down; to have Chris de Freitas sacked; then, they write to the head of his university in Auckland to see if they can’t get de Freitas deprived of his living too. Nice!

Dr Pat Michaels has another good example of this delightful behaviour by members of Mann’s “Team.”

In Forbes magazine, he writes an open letter to the director of the National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, describing how one of his “most prestigious employees” Dr Tom Wigley sought to have Michaels deprived of his PhD.

Dr Wigley’s evidence for this potentially libellous claim, widely circulated to a large number of his fellow climate “scientists”? None whatsoever.

But hey, as Mann has taught us many times over the years, who needs evidence or facts when you can go straight in for good old character assassination instead.

This, though, is wearisomely familiar stuff to anyone who has been following the Climategate story. What’s perhaps more interesting about Mann’s WSJ letter is his citation of the lead-in-petrol example from a few years back to try to bolster the credibility of his own brand of climate junk science. As we’ll see, he may have cause to regret this.

Here’s what he says in the letter:

Climate scientists can also find kinship with Dr. Herbert Needleman, who identified a link between lead contamination and impaired childhood brain development in the 1970s. The lead industry accused him of misconduct. Later, the National Institutes of Health exonerated him.

Hmm. The Needleman affair is covered very thoroughly in Christopher Booker’s and Richard North’s Scared To Death (Continuum). It does not reflect at all well on the junk science scare industry.

Dr Herbert Needleman was a US child psychologist who generated headlines in 1979 with his research paper showing that lead poisoning was dramatically affecting children’s IQs. This “evidence” became a vital plank in the case of the Environmental Protection Agency’s regulations from 1986 onwards to have almost all lead removed from petrol. Just one problem: Needleman’s study was about as reliable as Michael Mann’s Hockey Stick.

In the Needleman affair, the McIntyre/McKitrick role was played by another academic child psychologist Dr Claire Ernhart, who worked in the same field as Needleman. She noted that Needleman’s research was based on serious methodological flaws. In particular, she claimed that he had not sufficiently allowed for “confounding variables” that might have explained the difference in IQ scores such as poor schools or parental neglect.

When an expert panel from the EPA tried looking into this, however, Needleman proved as reluctant to reveal the basis of his research as Mann did with raw data underpinning his Hockey Stick.

According to Booker/North:

“When in 1983 the panel visited Needleman’s laboratory to look at his data, he handed over six books of computer printouts, but said that only two panel members could examine them, and only for two hours.”

“Even during this cursory study, the panel found enough evidence to arouse profound doubts about Needleman’s research. Although starting with 3,329 children, he had winnowed out so many, often for apparently arbitrary reasons, that he had ended up basing his conclusions first on 270 subjects, then on just 158. ‘Exclusion of large numbers of eligible participants’ the panel concluded, ‘could have resulted in systematic bias’. In other words, it looked to the panel as though he might have selected his evidence to give the results he wanted.”

Lone bristlecone pines, anyone?

The expert panel concluded that Needleman’s studies “neither support nor refute the hypothesis that low or moderate levels of Pb (lead) exposure lead to cognitive or other behavioural impairments in children.” In other words, that his researches were valueless.

But hey, guess what happened then. Pressure was applied. The expert panel – for reasons which were never satisfactorily explained – completely reversed its decision. And the head of the EPA William Ruckelshaus (the same man responsible for the DDT ban which effectively condemned millions in the third world to die of malaria) was able to use Needleman’s study as the basis for doing what the EPA and environmental campaigners had been wanting to do anyway: ban lead from petrol.

Unsurprisingly, the EU soon eagerly followed suit. As even the Eu Commission admitted, the new rules would cost consumers an additional £4.8 billion a year, raise the average cost of a car by up to £600 a year and force oil companies into £70 billion-worth of new investment. Oh, and also, EU studies estimated, the switch to unleaded (it being less efficient than leaded) would also result in the creation of 15-17 million tonnes a year more greenhouse gas emissions.

But hey, as Michael Mann and his Team could surely tell us, when you’re trying to save the world from non-existent threat no price is too great to pay.

Tag: Wall Street Journal