Theme: Real Science, Real Choices
Where: Hilton Chicago, 720 South Michigan Avenue, Chicago, IL
When: Monday, May 21 – Wednesday, May 23, 2012
Attend: Register here!
Signed Recent Letter Critical of NASA’s “Advocacy of an Extreme Position” on Climate Science
Two Apollo-era astronauts and two prominent former NASA scientists will speak at The Heartland Institute’s Seventh International Conference on Climate Change (ICCC-7), taking place in Chicago on May 21–23. The four men were among 49 signatories to a March 28 letter to NASA and the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) urging the agencies to cease their “unbridled advocacy” of anthropogenic global warming.
Dr. Harrison Schmitt, the first scientist and last man to walk on the moon in the Apollo 17 mission, and Apollo 7 lunar module pilot Walter Cunningham will talk about how NASA’s “unproven and unsupported remarks” on global warming damage the agency’s reputation.
The astronauts will be joined in the discussion by Harold Doiron, who worked for decades on vehicle stability and design at NASA, and Thomas Wysmuller, a meteorologist for the Royal Dutch Weather Bureau in Amsterdam and a long-time employee and consultant for NASA.
Register to attend the conference at this link.
It seems that you must be retired to become, if not skeptic at least critic.
Great news. Glad to see things are finally turning around.
lucien says:
April 19, 2012 at 5:12 pm
It seems that you must be retired to become, if not skeptic at least critic.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
That is undoubtedly true. I am retired. But as a senior manager of a major consulting company in my working life, I could never have used my real name as I do now without concern for my business given my beliefs, the clients I worked for and the kind of expectations many of those clients had along with my peers. One of the candidates running for Premier of Alberta (Danielle Smith) was resoundingly booed in public today just for stating that she believed that the science of “Climate Change” was not settled and that her party believed it was prudent to wait for further development of the science. A very intelligent, well spoken lady, but booed loudly for a simple statement. A lot of people have become very close minded on this issue. We all know climate always changes just as it always has, but if we say the science is not settled, we know it can affect our livelihood so it is understandable that many wait until they are retired to speak out.
However, I must say, her strength in stating her position today in the face of that crowd has convinced me she is as close to an honest politician as one will find one day and now I know which party I will vote for on Monday even though her party is much more right wing than I would like. However, I will take honesty over political bafflegab every time.
I thought Schmitt was known as Jack. And why am I not surprised at seeing Walt bad-boy Cunningham? 🙂
Last post – Typos – sorry – but the readers here are intelligent and can interpret. Thanks for this site by the way and for all the intelligent comments.
Over the years, I have been a call-in listener during Walter Cunninghams guest spots at a local talk radio station. I have exchanged numerous emails on the climate hoax iwth Watl during the last three years. Finally I got to meet him and his wife at the Fred Singer event at the University of Houston on Feb 7, 2012. I gave him a copy of “Slaying the Sky Dragon” and discussed our differences with Carbon warming orthodoxy. Walt is a very informed and articulate speaker. You may not get many chances to hear TWO Lunar Astronauts again in your lifetime. My thanks to Heartland for providing another great service to humanity and urge all to attend or view the webcast.
fantastic if they where still working at NASA they would be sacked
On C.B.C.’s program called The Lang O’leary Exchange, one of the astronauts who signed the letter will be interviewed tomorrow (Friday). It’s an hour long program focussed on the world of business and airs between 7 and 8 eastern time. Unfortunately I’ll be motoring down to Idaho and will miss it.
Dave
Slight correction, Gene Cernan was the last man to walk on the moon, as he was the last to get back onboard. Cernan was the first of the two to get out, so he was the 11th man on the moon, and Dr. Schmitt followed and was the 12th man on the moon. The order was reversed on re-entry to get back in their same seats. First man on the moon, Neil Armstrong – Boilermaker. Last man on the moon, Gene Cernan – Boilermaker. Boiler up!!!!! Go Purdue!!!!!
Two Apollo astronauts. Terrific!
These are not arm chair scholarly conceptual model “experts”. These guys did it. If anyone knows reality, they do. Remember the adage – “those that can, do it, those that can’t teach”? The current NASA AGW advocates reside in the latter category. Now we have those from NASA who have done it, spreading a different message from those who couldn’t and didn’t.
@David beattie. I watch L & O every day so I’ll let you know how it goes. For those outside of Canada. CBC is the Canadian equivalent of the BBC including unsubstantiated out of control eviro scare mongering. The fact that they are allowing some one like Walter Cunningham any where near the CBC is in it’s self a story. 2 years ago the CBC would have held a mass walk out before they would allow some thing like that on the air.
Don’t forget this is the same entity which has been paying David Suzuki and giving him weekly unquestioned air time for some thing like 30 – 40 years. I am pushing 50 and can’t remember a time when he wasn’t on the payroll.
Someday I’d like to be both independently wealthy and happily unemployed so I could flit about going to conferences like this. I imagine it’s fascinating!
I need no further proof that the moderators of this forum permit all sides of the debate to voice their opinions. Even useless hate filled rhetoric like yours.
Suzuki will be again be clinging to his wife and sobbing all night; Flat Earthers being given air time in his domain. The End is nigh.
I’m sure the AGW crowd views these former NASA scientists as AGW – Astronauts Gone Wild!
TomB said:
April 19, 2012 at 8:45 pm
[snippage]
————————————–
wtf is he talking about?
[REPLY: It’s getting late where Maurizio is and he made a silly joke. I think TomB is responding in the same vein. -REP]
In addition to the above excellent news, I was heartened to hear one of New Zealand’s most popular and intelligent talkback radio hosts state his position as a sceptic very clearly on air and in prime time today. The wheels really are falling off the AGW scare!
Policy Guy – ‘those who can, do; those who can’t, preach!!
Tom B – your evidence that this site doesn’t censor seems to have been censored…
@ Policy Guy, Jeef
That perjorative old saying always used to amuse me. It seemed to perfectly describe the 1970s UK soft-option in further education: if you didn’t get the A-Levels to enter your chosen degree course, you’d be offered a place at a teacher training college instead. Madness, when you think about it. I think they actually based their policy on the saying..
In an ideal world though, ‘those that can’, would actually go out and do, and then they would return eventually, to teach what they had learned to the younger generation.
And I vaguely remeber such a world, where most of my excellent school teachers had taken time out between university and teaching, to man coastal anti-aircraft guns, or fight their way across bits of occupied France. It left some of them shouting deaf, some inclined to hair-trigger outbursts of rage, and some inclined to surprising acts of violence, but all of them knew what really mattered, and how to engage with and educate an otherwise unruly mob of English schoolkids.
“Those that can’t, teach” is rarer than thought to be the case. However, “Those that can’t teach, teach teachers” is unfortunately more prevalent.
Let’s drop the angle on teachers, as a former school governor of 10 years standing I admire & respect the teaching profession. I believe that hackneyed saying is misleading. Teaching is like many professions, it is a calling, not a job! Those who treat it as a job are the bad teachers, those who don’t are the dedicated majority of professionals, they cannot always help what they are forced to teach in schools & colleges up & down the land, as dictated by Big Guvment from on high. POI, I think dear Tony must be worth around £30M since leaving office, that’s Socialism for you, Do As I Say Not As I Do, he & Cherry are lawyers to boot, sound familiar? However, as I have said earlier in posts, I would rather trust someone who has travelled in excess of half a million miles to & from the Moon, with all that psychological profiling that they have to go through (I am sure I would have cracked under the pressure with disastrous consequences), that’s why I could never trust or believe a ranting loon like James Hansen, he defies all the logic of scientific behaviour, as they all do who follow the AGW belief system! These people seem to be fixated on Human interference as opposed to Natural Variability in climate, with the typical response to questions of “but what else could it be”! Their arrogance is unfathomable, that they know all there is to know about nature & climate, yet admitting that they don’t know that much about the Sun & it’s effects on the Earth, & admit that they approximate this or that feedback, that they can reduce nature to a bunch of damned matrices & formulae, with their “sophisticated”, “representations” & “simulations” in their puter models! Regulars know my fondness of my 1925 POED, it is so useful to see the origins of the words used in so called Climate Science that are bandied around with such ignorance!
omnologos says:
April 19, 2012 at 5:46 pm
I thought Schmitt was known as Jack. And why am I not surprised at seeing Walt bad-boy Cunningham? 🙂
You know Jack, without the “m”
Not everyone goes to university. In Australia we have a wonderful tradition of trade training called apprenticeships. Some crusty old carpenter or electrician or motor mechanic trains a youngster how to work in the real world. A period of each week is spent in formal training at a trade college (TAFE) which also issues a certificate after four years. Pay is lousy as a rule but the experience is invaluable. A good plumber earns top dollar. Most scientists and professionals don’t have a clue about changing a tap washer. As a farmer I learnt from dad and by trial and error. Mistakes cost money and data/observation was king. I think that is why farmers and tradesmen tend to be skeptics.
Wayne Delbeke says:
April 19, 2012 at 5:46 pm
lucien says:
April 19, 2012 at 5:12 pm
It seems that you must be retired to become, if not skeptic at least critic.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
That is undoubtedly true. I am retired. But as a senior manager of a major consulting company in my working life, I could never have used my real name as I do now without concern for my business given my beliefs, the clients I worked for and the kind of expectations many of those clients had along with my peers.
That’s the prevailing corporate mentality. Regardless of the lip-service the suits in most companies pay to “transparency” and “open-door policy,” if you step over the line of corporate consensus — not policy, consensus — you’re history. Fortunately, I presently work for an outfit that cares only about my professional knowledge and job performance — I’ve worked for some corporations in which us worker-bees referred to ourselves as “mushrooms” — kept in the dark, fed nothing but bullsh*t, and if your head pops up into the open, they cut it off and can you.
Talking about Space
Serious blow to dark matter theories? New study finds mysterious lack of dark matter in Sun’s neighborhood
A team using the MPG/ESO 2.2-metre telescope at ESO’s La Silla Observatory, along with other telescopes, has mapped the motions of more than 400 stars up to 13 000 light-years from the Sun. From this new data they have calculated the mass of material in the vicinity of the Sun, in a volume four times larger than ever considered before.
“The amount of mass that we derive matches very well with what we see — stars, dust and gas — in the region around the Sun,” says team leader Christian Moni Bidin (Departamento de Astronomia, Universidad de Concepcion, Chile). “But this leaves no room for the extra material — dark matter — that we were expecting. Our calculations show that it should have shown up very clearly in our measurements. But it was just not there!”
http://phys.org/news/2012-04-dark-theories-mysterious-lack-sun.html
Like man made Global Warming
Models show that it should have shown up very clearly . But it is just not there!
This is great news. Maybe the other 46 signatures could also attend, or at least lend their support in some way.
“signers” and “signees” or “signatories” – whichever is the proper term for these NASA people who bravely sent this letter..
It would be ones wildest dream to sit, see and listen to ‘Two Apollo-era astronauts and two prominent former NASA scientists’ present at such a conference. To be in awe of heroes once again and science.
Australians should remember one of our own teachers, Ms Jeanette Rothapfel who won a coveted prize in the teaching of SCIENCE (SCIENCE of teaching) to youngsters.
http://www.scienceawards.org.au/teacher_awards/teacher_winners/2004.asp
This guy Harrison Schmitt is clearly a crank, see below – sarc
“EDUCATION: Graduated from Western High School, Silver City, New Mexico; received a bachelor of science degree in science from the California Institute of Technology in 1957; studied at the University of Oslo in Norway during 1957-1958; received doctorate in geology from Harvard University in 1964.
ORGANIZATIONS: The Geological Society of America (Honorary Fellow); The American Geophysical Union (Fellow); The American Association for the Advancement of Science (Fellow); The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (Fellow); Sigma XI; American Association of Petroleum Geologists (Fellow); The American Institute of Mining, Metallurgical and Petroleum Engineers (Honorary Member); New Mexico Geological Society (Honorary Member); The American Astronautical Society.”
Memo to Steve Zwick: The one group of people who know most about historic climate and the mechanisms of climate change are the geologists, the most sceptical group (government employees excepted for obvious reasons) of individuals in the world today about CAGW . You are the crank, not the sceptics, who very simply have only one common trait: they abhor bad/misleading/fraudulent science, particularly the type practiced today by most government funded, grant addicted, ‘climate scientists’. .
Lawrie Ayres said..
“Mistakes cost money and data/observation was king. I think that is why farmers and tradesmen tend to be skeptics.”
You can add engineers to the list.
In fact you can probably add everyone who has to go out and actually _make_ something to the list. There’s no hiding behind wooly liberal rhetoric or suspect ‘models’, things either work or they don’t. And if they don’t someone’s paying for it.
I don’t know if anybody watches ABC News (USA), but it seems that every day now they feature some story about climate change and it’s caused the mild winter, warm spring, continued drought, an explosion in the insect population and is threatening the polar bear.
Not one story ever features a skeptical scientist or dissenting opinion. The letter to NASA from the former engineers, scientists and astronauts? Never reported, of course.
~more soylent green!
[SNIP: Insult and snark. Cut it out. -REP]
“they are forced to teach in schools & colleges up & down the land, as dictated by Big Guvment from on high.”
This is the problem. Government really has no idea what a person should learn to be a responsible, competent, and successful member of society. Just as they cannot create wealth and do not know how to choose winners in industry (which they should not be doing anyhow, as it quickly becomes crony capitalism), they are incapable of choosing the education needed. They will always see education to be a tool to design the citizens to their liking and needs.
Here, in the US, our curriculum has suffered under the Federal Department of Education and everybody loses. However, they get to indoctrinate the kids to the government’s needs, which is not good in any way for the country or the people.
One cure is for the teachers to stand up as a group, form a power base, and set a real, honest, nonpolitical curriculum and tell the government to shove it. We can never stand up to the government if we rely on it to give us the tools to do so. It will not.
In the US, one cure is to dissolve the Dept of Education and return educational responsibilities back to the states, so they can be competitive with each other and thus strive to produce the best and most productive individuals. People will flock to the states that do the best job. Wow, sounds like free enterprise at the state level. It is!
[SNIP: You’ve been warned. -REP]
Sorry, that goldilocks zone has been completely staked out, by the CAGW advocates… AND we are paying the bill. GK
I look forward to meeting and becoming familiar with the former NASA gentlemen at ICCC-7.
Wonderful.
John
Great news indeed.
I suspect as time goes on that more and more of the folks that have to live in the real world will continue to come into the light as we have seen recently. Engineers and real world science practitioners know how to smell out the bs artists such as the team, James Hansen, Mike Mann and the rest of the scammers gig is up and they know it, the only detail remaining is the last chapters of the book, but like all bad horror movies there always seems to be another sequel.
Heres to making The Team a one hit wonder, with a sequel set in the federal pen.
lucien says:
April 19, 2012 at 5:12 pm
It seems that you must be retired to become, if not skeptic at least critic.
If you are a critic and not retired you were made redundant instead. I know. I was converted into a climate skeptic by a group of computer modellers who had just that done to them for pointing out glaring errors in the model’s basic concepts and then became chip designers for a company we dealt with. I do not find it the least bit surprising there is consensus when only one view is allowed.
This issue will be divisive, and it is a shame that those speaking up need to be free of the company line to feel comfy doing so. I was an employee of a consulting firm for 17 years, and as time progressed, they became increasingly meme-spouting about CAGW, and what they planned to do about it. Fortunately for me, they decided my employee status should change to consultant…about the time I began feeling more strongly about the issues…and beaking off against their adopted policy. The paths diverge, and I’m free to speak…at which point the AGW side takes freedom of speech to the limits of the concept. Pretty disgusting, really. But hear of it we must, in order to carry the fight.
All those millions of dollars from Big Oil are paying off. /sarc
The scientific process is self correcting.
The only reason that Heartland need their own conference on the topic of climate change is to keep out the science.
It deserves no more interest than it receives.
Gleick’s irrational (& prima fascia illegal) acts on the Heartland Institute are likely to significantly increase the popularity of and attendance at its ICCC-7 in Chicago this May.
Overall, Gleick will have caused an increase in Heartland’s skeptical influence on the climate science discourse. He weakened his CAGWist cause for sure.
Thanks to Gleick for advancing the skeptic cause!
John