Part two of a two-part series summarizing climate change. Part One is here.
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Climategate in 2009 proved scientists were “quite capable of deliberately selecting data in order to overstate the case for dangerous climate change.”64 The leading scientists spoke openly about gatekeeping research journals “to deny publication of any material that goes against the orthodox dogma.” These are the actions of a person or group that is committing fraud. Not a group that is following the scientific method.
In the Climategate emails we see a desperation to escape from data. The scientists saw the failure of climate models falsified their theory of dangerous man-made global warming.
“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,” said Dr. Kevin Trenberth, Distinguished Senior Scientist in the Climate Analysis Section at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, a major author in the history of the UN reports on climate, who has published 532 scientific articles or papers, including 62 books or book chapters, and over 247 refereed journal articles.64
The travesty is maintaining public advocacy for a theory which, in private, you know has been disproved. Dr. Trenberth embodies the travesty of alarmism.
The pause in warming, beginning at the turn of the century, if it remains steady, or if temperatures fall, then the massive global warming industry will die. The reputation of the leaders will be ruined. More and more evidence is showing that they deserve the fall.
“The tyranny of the experts is now crumbling,” said Andrew Bolt, columnist for the Herald Sun and Daily Telegraph.66
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Big Media calls skeptics deniers. Big Media makes opponents of a scientific hypothesis equal to the people who say Hitler did not kill Jews. It is hard to imagine a crueler form of name calling. This is not a principled argument. It is totalitarian denunciation.
Academics who want to speak up don’t speak up because “dissent can be career-threatening.”67 Skeptics are “cast into outer darkness and dismissed as ‘anti-science’ or a ‘denier.’”68
Something is driving the warming proponents which is overruling the scientific method. A billion-dollars-a-day of work is part of it. The power and the glory is part of it. The totalitarian nature of progressivism is part of it.
My opinion is that the totalitarian instinct, the horrendous human trait given religious preeminence in the progressive faith, is now the guiding driver of proponents.
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The confidence of the proponents should have been tempered by now after seeing the work their models have done, but their failure has had no effect on their opinion. Many of their predictions are now proven false. Their failed predictions have had no effect on their opinions.
“Al Gore claimed in his film An Inconvenient Truth that seas were rising so fast ‘that’s why the citizens of these Pacific nations have all had to evacuate to New Zealand’. … (but) in a British court case, Justice Michael Burton found ‘there is no evidence of any such evacuation having yet happened.’”69
In December 2008 Mr. Gore said the ‘entire North Polar ice cap will be gone in five years’.70 “Ted Scambos, of the US Snow and Ice Data Centre, told the ABC there was ‘a very strong case that in 2012 or 2013 we’ll have an ice-free (summer) Arctic’.”71 Ice covered 1.7 million square miles of Arctic in the minimum of 2015; the minimum being the period after summer temperatures have reduced the ice to its smallest footing. Eight years after his prediction, Mr. Gore is off by an ice sheet equal to six times the size of Texas.
Bertrand Timbal, of Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology, said in 2009 the rain there will never rain like it once did. “We are just not going to have that sort of good rain again as long as the system is warming up.”72
In 2010 and 2011 Australia had it wettest two-year period on record. In the story quoting Mr. Timbal, the lead paragraph said: “SCIENTISTS studying Victoria’s crippling drought have, for the first time, proved the link between rising levels of greenhouse gases and the state’s dramatic decline in rainfall.”73
If drought proves climate change, what does heavy rain prove? Did the newspaper print a story saying heavy rain proves there is no climate change?
In 2005 the IPCC said global warming would create 50 million climate refugees by 2010.74 Have there been any climate refugees as of 2016 (the year of the publication of this story)?
“In 2000, Dr. David Viner of the Climatic Research Unit of Britain’s University of East Anglia claimed ‘children just aren’t going to know what snow is’.”75 Then came the snow. “Five of the northern hemisphere’s six snowiest winters in the past 46 years have occurred since Viner’s prediction.”
If no snow proves climate change, what does heavy snow prove?
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Will the planet heat dangerously and fast?
“Little likelihood exists that conceivable levels of human emissions will cause dangerous future warming,” said Mr. Carter, the former professor of earth sciences.76 There is an “equally likely occurrence of global cooling” and cooling is more likely.77
“No unambiguous evidence exists for adverse changes to the global environment caused by human-related CO2 emissions,” said Mr. Carter. “In particular, the cryosphere (glacial ice) is not melting at an enhanced rate; sea-level rise is not accelerating; no systematic changes have been documented in evaporation or rainfall or in the magnitude or intensity of extreme meteorological events; and an increased release of methane into the atmosphere from permafrost or sub-seabed gas hydrates is unlikely.”78
In other words, “the impact of climate change will be small relative to the impacts of other drivers”79 like the sun, ocean currents, and earth’s cycles.
Changes in temperature in the 10,000-year record and the 140-year record show that recent temperature changes are normal in magnitude. The 10,000-year record has a range of 3.74 Centigrade. The 140-year record has a range of 1.34 Centigrade. The magnitude of change in the long record is almost three times greater than the range in the short record. (Please see the chart: “The Banality of Climate Change. 140 Years of Climate Change and 10,000 Years of Climate Change”.)
“We forecast that global average temperatures will trend neither up nor down, but will remain within 0.5 °C (1°F) of the 2013 average,” said Kesten C. Green, Senior Research Associate of the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute, University of South Australia, and Senior Lecturer at University of South, and J. Scott Armstrong, of Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and an expert on forecasting. “There is neither need to worry about climate change, nor reason to take action.”80
“The cost of global warming that might result from human activities, as reported by the IPCC, is very small,” said Alan Moran of the Institute of Public Affairs.81
If we do continue to experience warming, it is likely to be beneficial.82
“The optimum CO2 content is more than 1,600 ppm (as compared with current content of 400 ppm).”83 After warming “there is a huge increase in biodiversity” and “extinctions are universal in colder times.”84 “All across the planet, the historical increase in the atmosphere’s CO2 concentration has stimulated vegetative productivity.”85 “Global warming and its myriad ecological effects tend to foster the expansion and proliferation of animal habitats, ranges, and populations.”86
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It’s possible we will experience planetary catastrophe, but “there is no scientific basis”87 for predicting catastrophe, so “a policy of decarbonisation cannot possibly make sense,” especially given “the unequivocally adverse economic impact of the decarbonisation policy.”88
Even if it did make sense to limit carbon dioxide “there is no chance of any meaningful agreement being concluded”89 by the important nations that must agree.
We are pursuing a policy that’s not needed for a group of nations which will never live by the terms required which, if they did agree, they would violate, and penalties cannot be enforced.
“The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing,” said Professor James Lovelock, the author of the Gaia hypothesis. In 2006 Lovelock predicted billions of deaths from climate change. He now predicts that we cannot predict the climate’s changes.90
Climate science Professor Judith Curry, professor at the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, told the US Congress in 2014: “For the past 16 years, there has been no significant increase in surface temperature … The IPCC does not have a convincing or confident explanation for this hiatus in warming.”91
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Something is missing from our consideration of dangerous man-made warming. It is now a billion-dollar-a-day industry. What could we use that money for that is more important than CO2’s influence on temperature? We have to consider the economic tradeoffs we are making.
Does everybody have clean water? Does everybody have a dry safe home? Is every person protected from heat and cold and rain? Do the poor eat well? Is their kitchen clean? Why does their home smell? Why are they burning manure on the stove? Why is the floor made of dirt? Do they have no shower here? No soap and hot water? No clean towels? Do the poor know what it’s like to get into a clean bed and go to sleep protected from the elements and noise and hunger? Can you imagine taking all of these good things away from hundreds of millions of poor people based on a guess?
We have a very scientific method for curing the condition of poverty. It has undergone rigorous testing in millions of experiments. This method to eradicate poverty is called capitalism. Cheap energy turbocharges capitalism. Expensive energy kills it.
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“The greatest immorality of all concerns the masses in the developing world,” said Mr. Lawson, the writer.92 The most effective form of disease is dire poverty. The impoverished person ends up “suffering all the ills that this brings, in terms of malnutrition, preventable disease, and premature death.”
A great effective weapon against poverty is energy. Fossil fuels make the world go around. Make it speed up. Make capitalism work. Make the poor wealthier.
“Energy is the most basic of economic resources behind wealth and living standards even though it represents only 5 per cent of GDP.”93 The dangerous man-made global warming hypothesis demonizes the energy needed to fight poverty. By diverting us from the proven way to end poverty “global warming orthodoxy is not merely irrational. It is wicked,” said Mr. Lawson.94
Poverty is a real source of misery and death here and now. By blocking the advance of economies, our actions taken to combat dangerous man-made global warming may one day rival the great wars of the 20th Century as great totalitarian destroyers of wealth and happiness. The more successful the proponents of dangerous man-made global warming, the greater the misery they will bring to the world; the greater the opportunity cost the poor will pay.
“The economically vulnerable have been pushed into fuel poverty,” said Mr. Plimer. “Vulnerable people die earlier, costs and unemployment increase and, in the Third World, such climate policies create the continuation of crippling poverty and unnecessary deaths, especially amongst women and children.”95
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Ice is a rare rock. We expect ice on earth only 20% of the time. Since we live in a time which is comparatively cold in geologic history, shouldn’t we call warming normal? If two of three days in the last 10,000 years have been warmer than today, shouldn’t we expect warmer temperatures?
If we live in a time of carbon dioxide starvation, should we welcome the addition of carbon dioxide? It makes the plants grow. It makes the trees strong. It makes the animals and the forests come to life. Cold kills. Warmth gives life. If carbon dioxide brings life to life, do we need more carbon dioxide?
If carbon dioxide levels were up to a thousand times higher than today in the first great ice ages, how can we believe a minuscule addition of carbon dioxide now will lead to dangerous warming? In the past we had extreme cold during the time we had extreme levels of carbon dioxide. These facts make one skeptical the “man-made” carbon dioxide will be dangerous.
What about the other makers of weather? What about the sun, the oceans, the changes in the earth’s cycles? What about water and clouds? We have to know all of these things perfectly before we can precisely say what role carbon dioxide plays in temperature. Do we know all of these things well enough? Should we be skeptical of our knowledge, especially about the future?
We read about the arctic losing ice. We never read about the expansion of ice in the Antarctic. Should we trust the media if they tell us the bad all the time and the good never?
We read that 97 percent of scientists say man is responsible for a majority of global warming, but in fact only one-half percent of scientists gave that written opinion in the scholarly literature. The consensus is .5% not 97 percent. How do you believe anything the press says after that kind of lie?
All of this has an obvious cause. We must remember that progressivism is a social disease, a group psychosis, and that the heart-and-soul of progressive thought is totalitarian domination. The out group members are deniers, social outcasts, monsters. Conservatives are Jews in Nazi Germany. Skeptics are conspirators who say Hitler did not kill the Jews.
How did progressives grow so immediately comfortable and capable in the most notoriously evil human conduct; the kind of frightening conduct which is warned about in every work of literature whose theme is man’s inhumanity to man?
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The Global Warming theory, if it is disproved, will be the greatest crime ever committed against the poor and humanity. Its adherents have perpetrated shocking destruction within the scientific community by breaking centuries of principle requiring free thought, individual opinion, unswerving respect for dissent, and open-and-free publication of all data.
Even if carbon dioxide has little or no influence on weather or temperature, global warming may end up being the Joseph Stalin and the Mao Zedong of the 21st Century. It should be treated as a danger of the exact same nature except that the dead bodies are not as easy to count. The poor are spread all around the world and they will suffer and die everywhere. Many more will die if the progressives win more and more money for climate change.
The winners will be vain politicians strutting the world stage like superstar models voguing wildly back and forth, up and down the runway, desperately calling attention to themselves, as if their life depended on adulation. We live in the age of dangerous manmade global voguing.
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Another earlier case shows the totalitarian power of Big Media to slaughter truth. Consider the story of Joseph McCarthy. You know the senator from Wisconsin as a witch hunter. The truth is the witch hunter was a witch. Big Media burned him at the stake.
You will be surprised by what we have learned since his fiery death.
The Right Track Magazine 