Why do countless scientists and journalists and political figures continue to distort and manipulate climate reports for decades? The answer is the phrase from the movie Jerry Maguire: “Show me the money!” Scientists depend on grants. Journalists depend on readers/viewers. Politicians are known to distort information (or lies) so they can win elections.
IF IT BLEEDS, IT LEADS, NO MATTER WHOSE BLOOD IT IS. —William Randolph Hearst, 1898. News paper publisher.
The opinions I have formed on this topic of Climate Change are drawn from multiple sources, and several people whose expertise far exceeds mine. A couple of important distinctions, actually definitions—to begin with. Weather and Climate are often confused as being interchangeable terms. They are NOT. According to NOAA: "Whereas ‘weather' refers to short-term changes in the atmosphere, ‘climate' describes what the ‘weather' is like over a long period of time in a specific area. Different regions can have different climates…"
Here’s just one of many typical FALSE statements carried widely by news media attempting to sensationalize Climate Change:
President Joe Biden often says: “Climate change is 'the existential threat of our time” is simply wrong.
I capitalized The Science, as did author Steven Kooniin (former science advisor for the Obama administration) in his excellent recent book “Unsettled —What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn't, and Why It Matters.
Climate Change Brings a Flood of HyperboleDespite constant warnings of catastrophe, things aren’t anywhere near as dire as the media say.By Steven E. Koonin Aug. 10, 2021 6:33 pm ET ©Wall Street JournalThe Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has issued its latest report assessing the state of the climate and projecting its future. As usual, the media and politicians are exaggerating and distorting the evidence in the report. They lament an allegedly broken climate and proclaim, yet again, that we are facing the “last, best chance” to save the planet from a hellish future. In fact, things aren’t—and won’t be—anywhere near as dire.The new report, titled AR6, is almost 4,000 pages, written by several hundred government-nominated scientists over the past four years. It should command our attention, especially because this report will be a crucial element of the coming United Nations Climate Change Conference in Glasgow. Leaders from 196 countries will come together there in November, likely to adopt more-aggressive nonbinding pledges to reduce greenhouse-gas emissions.Previous climate-assessment reports have misrepresented scientific research in the “conclusions” presented to policy makers and the media. The summary of the most recent U.S. government climate report, for instance, said heat waves across the U.S. have become more frequent since 1960, but neglected to mention that the body of the report shows they are no more common today than they were in 1900. Knowledgeable independent scientists need to scrutinize the latest U.N. report because of the major societal and economic disruptions that would take place on the way to a “net zero” world, including the elimination of fossil-fueled electricity, transportation and heat, as well as complete transformation of agricultural methods.It is already easy to see things in this report that you almost certainly won’t learn from the general media coverage. Most important, the model muddle continues. We are repeatedly told “the models say.” But the complicated computer models used to project future temperature, rainfall and so on remain deficient. Some models are far more sensitive to greenhouse gases than others. Many also disagree on the baseline temperature for the Earth’s surface.The latest models also don’t reproduce the global climate of the past. The models fail to explain why rapid global warming occurred from 1910 to 1940, when human influences on the climate were less significant. The report also presents an extensive “atlas” of future regional climates based on the models. Sounds authoritative. But two experts, Tim Palmer and Bjorn Stevens, write in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences that the lack of detail in current modeling approaches makes them “not fit” to describe regional climate. The atlas is mainly meant to scare people.As is now customary, the report emphasizes climate change in recent decades but obscures, or fails to mention, historical precedents that weaken the case that humanity’s influence on the climate has been catastrophic. The Summary for Policy Makers section says the rate of global sea-level rise has been increasing over the past 50 years. It doesn’t mention that it was increasing almost as rapidly 90 years ago before decreasing strongly for 40 years.Extreme weather events are invoked as proof of impending disaster. But the floods in Europe and China and record temperatures across regions of the U.S. are weather, not climate—singular events, not decades long trends. Both Europe and China have experienced equally devastating floods in past centuries, but these are forgotten or deliberately ignored. The drought and wildfires in the Western U.S. are part of a trend going back a few decades, but forest management and expanding human presence in the forests are perhaps more important than climate change in causing these events.The report expresses low confidence in most reported hurricane trends over the next century, and it remains uncertain whether there’s any trend beyond natural variability in Atlantic hurricanes. In other words, we have no scientific proof that humans have made hurricanes worse, despite what many say.Refreshingly, the report deems its highest-emissions scenarios of the future unlikely, even though those are the ones you’re mostly likely to hear about in media reports. The more plausible scenarios have an average global temperature in 2100 about 2.5 degrees celsius warmer than the late 1800s. The globe has already warmed 1 degree since that time, and the parties of the Paris Accord arbitrarily agreed to limit further warming to another degree. But since humanity’s well-being has improved spectacularly, even as the globe warmed during the 20th century, it is absurd to suggest that an additional degree of warming over the next century will be catastrophic. In fact, the AR5 report from 2014 says even 1.5 degrees of additional warming by 2100 will have minimal net economic impact.Good science is characterized by detail, data, proven models and reasoned debate. That takes time. Meanwhile, we should be wary of the torrent of hyperbole that is sweeping the globe.-------------------------Mr. Koonin, a professor at New York University, is author of “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters.”
I found a 2009 book— HEAVEN AND EARTH global warming the missing science, by Ian Plimer, Australia’s best known geologist, and part of the School of Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of Adelaide. I read Plimer’s book shortly after it was published and a correspondent (reader of THE ENTERPRISE) told me about it. I will quote just a few of his most convincing statements. He takes almost 500 pages of scientific information to support his premises. (Confession: I didn’t actually read all 494 pages. NOTE: I read the material that follows from Plimer in the year 2010—a full decade ago.
Plimer’s Introduction p.11 says, "To reduce modern climate change to one variable, CO2 or more correctly, a small portion of one variable human (human produced CO2) is not science, especially as it requires abandoning all we know about planet Earth, the sun, and the cosmos. Such models fail.(He adds a graph of temperature increase from 1990 to 2008 that shows this.)
He adds two other simple sentences in the next few paragraphs. "If we humans in a fit of ego, think we can change the normal planetary processes then we need stronger medicine.” He goes on to say, “To argue that we humans can differentiate between human induced climate change and natural climate change is naïve.” But as he later explains, “Humans can change the weather."
As for models and projections, Plimer writes, “A phenomenon is not scientifically proven because various authorities and some scientists Say so. Evidence now no longer matters". … Models with simulations, projections and predictions prove nothing. All a model shows is something about the model itself and the modelers, normally their limitations. As the Talmud states, ' We do not see things as they are. We see them as we are.’ “
Once again, Plimer strikes out at the naivete of the modelers. “...to try to predict the future based on just one variable, (CO2) in extraordinarily complex natural systems is folly." (Remember Al Gore and his later debunked movie, An Inconvenient Truth?)
Way back on June 11, 1996 the Wall Street Journal exposed this in an article entitled Coverup in the Greenhouse, followed by similar article by the former president of the National Academy of Sciences, entitled Major Deception on Global Warming. In the IPCC'S report, the authors/editors simply decided to add “discernible human effect” and deleted passages, one of which said, “No study to date has positively attributed all or part (of the climate change observed) to (man-made) causes.” The final phrase deleted was “We do not know.”
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THERE ARE MORE ARTICLES POSTED HERE WITH SNIPPETS OF EACH, FOR THOSE WHOSE WANT MORE INFO.
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Download Same Climate Report Different Day - WSJ
CLICK ON THE PDF TO READ ALL OF THIS...The solar panels Americans are being subsidized to install, the Wall Street Journal recently noted, are produced in “carbon-dioxide- belching, coal-burning plants in China.” Your subsidy to buy an electric car is the manufacturer’s subsidy to consume fossil energy in mining the lithium and rare metals needed to make it. Your subsidy to get a Tesla is the electric company’s subsidy to burn more fossil fuels to keep it charged….
...A carbon tax, because it reduces the incentive to consume fossil fuels across the board, is the way to lower emissions meaningfully. But a carbon tax would be unpopular and never pass, exclaimed President Obama as he abandoned his climate promises the moment he took office. …
...This week the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released a draft of its long-awaited sixth assessment report coupled with an unscientific and fatuous preamble that said “no one is safe” from a warming planet. Yes, and no one is safe from iced tea and Kylie Minogue either, since both also involve costs and benefits just like humanity’s habit of using the atmosphere as a CO2 dump….
...Of interest to the nonfatuous was the track of real-world temperature changes. The IPCC estimates a rise of 1.1 degrees celsius in the past 150 years. This information, which it highlighted in bold print, led the IPCC in much finer print to lop 0.5 degree Celsius off its likely worst-case impact of a doubling of atmospheric carbon dioxide. In other words, real-world warming, the IPCC finally acknowledges, has been less than that expected from its climate models. ...
CLICK ON THE PDF TO READ THE FIRST PART OF THIS...It’s extremely hot: Climate change. It’s extremely cold: Climate change. It’s raining a little: Climate change.
With the definitive affirmation comes the lurid panic followed by the stern lecture: The Earth is going to combust (or drown, or freeze, or starve—the science isn’t fully settled on that yet). And it’s all our fault. Specifically, it’s all Americans’ fault for driving SUVs, cranking up the air conditioning and refusing to become vegetarian. How can we expect the Chinese to stop building 50 coal-fired power stations a month if those Republican-voting rubes in Missouri insist on eating hamburgers?
Be ready for much more of this in the coming weeks after the publication Monday of the update by the United Nations International Panel on Climate Change in advance of the so-called COP 26 meeting in the U.K. in November. You will scarcely hear a dissenting voice as the monolithic media faithful echoes every frightening forecast from the scientists whose livelihoods depend on maintaining the highest level of alarm.
My beef here isn’t mainly with climate extremism itself. I’m no climate scientist: I’m confident the planet is warming and that evasive action would be smart. I’m less confident that a spate of historically familiar extreme weather events constitutes proof that we’re all going to burn in the next decade or that the answer lies only in the most drastic government-mandated responses, which the media will insist we must immediately adopt. Better-informed writers on these pages have put the case for a more measured judgment and approach. “Unsettled: What Climate Science Tells Us, What It Doesn’t, and Why It Matters,” a recent book by Steven E. Koonin, a scientist and former Obama administration official, provides an elegant rebuttal to much of the extremism.
Our climate fluctuates under many influences, but one factor that overwhelms all others is the increase in human beings and their valuable property placed in the path of extreme weather, behavior encouraged by politicians. Even so, human preparedness has advanced faster than climate change or even human building propensities. As University of Colorado Boulder’s Roger Pielke Jr. has patiently pointed out, your odds of dying from extreme weather have been declining drastically all through the period of growing human climate impact.
This progress had been made, so far at least, without help from climate policy, unless you consider fracking, which has led to a decline in total U.S. emissions, to be climate policy. Since mankind demonstrably is not going to arrest climate change by banning fossil fuels, and quite likely would leave itself on balance worse off if it did, let this be your good- news story of the day.
GEOLOGISTS HAVE LONG CONTENDED “THE ROCKS DON’T LIE”
The history of the earth and its climate is contained in the rocks (and in the ice, if you want to watch the video below.
Download 0p)
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PEOPLE CAN INFLUENCE WEATHER, AND IF THEY CHOOSE TO BUILD IN WEATHER PRONE AREAS, THEY CAN ALSO CAUSE MUCH GREATER DAMAGE AND LOSS OF LIFE.
Thus much of the media hype about Climate Change causing loss of property and life are directly linked to human behavior—not the Climate Change itself. Weather is different from Climate. Humans can effect weather, and be effected by Weather. READ THE TWO PDF FILES ATTACHED BELOW TO LEARN MORE...
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