NOTE: This op-ed was rejected by the New York Times. It was submitted as a response by The president of The Heartland Institute in reply to Fred Krupp’s Wall Street Journal essay. I reproduce it here in hopes of it reaching a wide audience. Feel free to reproduce it elsewhere. – Anthony
by Joe Bast
Dear Fred,
I read your August 7 opinion piece in The Wall Street Journal, “A New Climate-Change Consensus,” with great interest. As you know, The Heartland Institute is a leading voice in the international debate over climate change. The Economist recently called us “the world’s most prominent think-tank promoting skepticism about man-made climate change.”
First, I welcome you to the effort to bring skeptics and alarmists together. We need your help. We have been trying to do this for many years.
For example, we ran more than $1 million in ads calling on Al Gore to debate his critics. He repeatedly refused. We hosted seven international conferences on climate change and invited alarmists to speak at every one, the most recent one held in Chicago on May 23-24. Only one ever showed up, and he was treated respectfully.
Regrettably, your colleagues in the liberal environmental movement responded at first by pretending we don’t exist, and when opinion polls and political decisions revealed that strategy wasn’t working, by denouncing us as “deniers” and “shills for the fossil fuel industry.”
Most recently, your colleagues on the left went so far as to break the law in an attempt to silence us. Prominent global warming alarmist Peter Gleick stole corporate documents from us and circulated them with a fake and highly defamatory memo purporting to describe our “climate change strategy.” Gleick confessed to stealing the documents on February 20.
Greenpeace is using the stolen and fake documents to attack climate scientists who affiliate with The Heartland Institute, while the Center for American Progress and 350.org are using them to demonize corporations that fund us. No group on the left, including yours, has condemned these activities.
In your opinion piece, you say “if both sides can now begin to agree on some basic propositions, maybe we can restart the discussion,” and you end by saying “it is time for conservatives to compete with liberals to devise the best, most cost effective climate solutions.”
Reconciliation will be difficult so long as you and others on the left fail to express doubt or remorse over the errors, exaggerations, and unethical tactics that continue to be used against skeptics.
For example, it is impossible for skeptics and alarmists to come together so long as alarmists pretend – as you do, Fred, in this very essay – that recent weather trends in one part of the world lend proof to their theories and predictions. Anyone familiar with the science knows this claim belongs in the kindergarten of the climate science debate.
Another basic error you repeat is that surface-based temperature data validate or prove that human greenhouse gas emissions affect the climate. They cannot, first because they measure temperatures on only a small part of the Earth’s surface, second because they are notoriously unreliable, and third because they tell us nothing about what is causing warming or cooling.
You are asking, in effect, that skeptics simply “shut up and sit down,” that they concede as being true the most flawed and unlikely assumptions of the alarmist movement, and that they endorse policies that are wholly unnecessary and extremely costly.
While I cannot presume to speak for all global warming skeptics, I think I can channel the opinion of most when I say, “hell no!”
Your overture comes at a time when the science backing global warming alarmism is crumbling, as amply demonstrated by the reports of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate change (NIPCC). International negotiations for a new treaty are going nowhere. Public opinion in the U.S. and other countries decisively rejects alarmism. Politicians here and abroad who vote for cap and trade or a carbon tax rightly fear being tossed out of office by voters who know more about the issue than they do.
Your appeal to “restart the discussion” would have skeptics snatch failure from the jaws of victory. I’m sure you understand why we won’t go there.
I have a counter proposal. Let’s restart the discussion by agreeing on these basic propositions:
First, people and organizations that break the law or use hate language such as “denier” should be barred from the global warming debate.
Second, recent weather and temperature anomalies have not been unusual and are not evidence of a human effect on climate.
Third, given the rapid and unstoppable increase in greenhouse gas emissions by Third World countries, it is pointless for the U.S. and other developed countries to invest very much in reducing their own emissions.
Fourth, tax breaks and direct subsidies to solar and wind power and impossible-to-meet renewable power mandates and regulatory burdens on coal-powered electricity generation plants have been disastrous for taxpayers, businesses, and consumers of electricity, and ought to be repealed.
Fifth, the world is entering an era of fossil fuel abundance that could lift billions of people out of poverty and help restart the U.S. economy. We have the technology to use that energy safely and with minimal impact on the environment and human health. Basic human compassion and common sense dictate that fear of global warming ought not be used to block access to this new energy.
Agree to these five simple propositions, Fred, and we can begin to work together to address some of the real environmental problems facing the U.S. and the world.
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This is an excellently written piece. However, a major flaw in all these exchanges between sceptics and “believers” is the insistence on polarisation according to left/right political views. It really is terribly narrow and is a very important reason why both sides refuse to engage in a civilised or intelligent manner. This debate can only develop fruitfully if both sides of it stop attaching their views to a more general right or left political stance, and therefore it is as counter productive to refer to warming believers as being in the “liberal” camp as it is to describe the “deniers” as being republicans or rednecks.
Like many other sceptics, I am not actually right wing but it is assumed by warmists that I am. I’m interested in the facts of climate, not whether views upon it suit my political opinions in other avenues. Therefore I believe that for example the Guardian newspaper is not serving the truth by mindlessly following the Gore camp because of its leftist stance generally, nor are those on the right being helpful by a tendency to automatically subscribe to the assumption of republicanism. If CO2 warming does not exist then it still doesn’t whatever political philosophy is expressed.
The sceptics should refuse to be drawn into the debate on party political lines and should avoid phrases like “liberal”, “left”, “republican”, “right”. There are political vested interests on both sides. An intelligent debate at the very least should recognise these inevitable differences but not allow them to polarise the discussion or dominate the search for truth.
Propositions 1 through 4, okay. Number 5 – cheap, abundant energy, not so much.
First, American natural gas prices do not reflect costs of supply but over-supply pushing down prices. Heavy oil out of Canada is cheaper than it should be because of pipeline export limitations: pipeline space. Once you have to pay proportional to costs of delivery, prices will go up in this “new” era of frac-technology.
The “new” resources are also not new, but newly accessed. Because of commodity prices. $100/bbl oil, not frac-techology, is the key driver of oil shales and gas shales and oilsands. Techology helps on the back of high prices. The “new” resources are also local, not across the US, and certainly not across the world (outside of the price threshold, again). Africa can have energy, if they have the dough.
The Heartland has, by its own admission, set upon a course to fight fire with fire. Exaggerations abound on the alarmist side; so, too, they occur on the skeptic side. This is a war of partisanship, not of hearts and minds. Good for drama, though. Drama and ego love drama. Truth gets a pass in good drama, unfortunately.
The key against the alarmists is open debate. The hold they have on the public is fear, fear of death and disaster – both of which exist only in the details of CAGW theory. Any debate that brings doubt into the actual temperature rise, a la Watts et al 2012, or the rate of sea-level rise, or the attribution of heat increases to CO2, bring the detail, i.e. the death and disaster, into question. That is why Gore and others refuse to debate. Their fundamentals aren’t strong enough and they know it.
Fight for an open debate by embarrassing Hansen, Suzuki, Gore, Mann by pointing out in full-page ads that they have refused to debate. Get Inhofe to say publicly that an open debate is needed, demand, not challenge, Gore to do so if truth, not profits, is his goal. Hammer them to come to the forum to let the people know just where the certain and settled science stands.
Of course this would mean putting the Heartland’s skeptical cards on the table. Some would say that would be risky, especially if the Heartland was worried that they had also exaggerated the solidness of their position.
Pamela Gray says:
August 14, 2012 at 6:37 am
“I would have rejected this piece by the time I got through the second paragraph. One, it is poorly written in terms of standard English writing conventions required in for-profit media venues. Odd and contorted sentence structures and mechanics are everywhere in this work. Two, it is poorly reasoned in terms of the standards set for argumentative/opinion modes of writing.”
If you are going to be pedantic about poor syntax and grammar then perhaps you should look at your own: Try “firstly” and “secondly” rather than “one”, then “two”, and “mechanics” is a function of engineering, not writing. Try “regarding” rather than “In terms of” (that’s a real corker). Your own paragraph contains multiple instances of clumsy writing.
I see there are a couple of new alarmist commentators here today, spouting the same tired old arguments. So for them:
1. Most sceptics believe man made CO2 increases over the past 50 years have had an impact on global temperatures, but this impact is very modest and dwarfed by the natural climate cycles experienced by our planet. So there it is, most sceptics believe in AGW, but that it is only a mild effect and will never become a serious problem.
2. Sceptics do not believe in CAGW, which is the cornerstone of alarmist philosophy for the global warming industry. There is no evidence for the C word (Catastrophe) whatsoever and yes we deny this is a problem.
3. What sceptics find repugnant are:
a) The constant manipulation by the Global Warming Industry of raw data to always make the past cooler and the present warmer.
b) The seemingly never ending unfounded stories from the global warming industry, designed to confuse and scare the gullible, such as: i) the supposed threat to polar bears, ii) the glaciers are melting (well yes they are, but the latest melt started circa 1850), iii) the Arctic ice cap is shrinking (OK, but why is the Antarctic growing) and etc. etc..
c) The global warming industry annually receives somewhere between 500 and 3,000 times the amount of funds received by sceptic organisations and yet the global warming industry is clearly losing the argument. And no, the oil industry does not fund the sceptic organisations.
d) The outright manipulation of facts and the fraudulent statements – much beloved by the Establishment media – routinely made by the likes of Gore, Hansen and Mann.
e) The spokesmen of the global warming industry are either government employees and/or grant addicts and will do, or say, anything to maintain their comfortable lifestyles. Scientists, particularly geologists, operating in the private sector are almost universally sceptical of the alarmist nonsense spouted by the global warming industry,
f) The pal review process for ‘climate scientists’, which is an outright abuse when compared to the accepted research practices of all other fields of science.
g) The obvious fear, and therefore refusal, of the high priests of the global warming industry to publicly debate CAGW with sceptics. Fear? Yes, because they are all too aware that their ‘science’ would be shredded.
The “global warming crowd” make-up relationships and publish them. They use instantaneous weather events to further their money harvesting techniques. They make attack ads calling legitimate scientific inquiry by intelligent, reasoning people: DENIERS.
We, who are “intelligent, reasoning people”, talk about long term climatic events. We don’t put out the titillating, crisis oriented, press releases. Of course we would like funding for legitimate scientific inquiry, but our goal is not “money harvesting”.
Bottom line: They use “critical weather events” to further their religion and to attack us. We have boring charts and data showing poor site location of temperature, humidity, rainfall sensors. We are always in the rebuttal mode. The initial “hyped, news making, press release” always wins.
While I agree with many of the points made by Joe Bast, I also agree with Pamela Gray and Bill that the piece “did not make its points all that well”. It has too many inflammatory words/phrases to come across as logical and dispassionate. A rewrite is needed.
Wait! A friend just sent me a link to a reply in the WSJ to Fred Krupp’s piece, dated yesterday, written by:
• Roger W. Cohen, Fellow, American Physical Society
• William Happer, Princeton University
• Richard S. Lindzen, MIT
Here:
http://professional.wsj.com/article/SB10000872396390443991704577579951766037924.html?mod=wsj_valettop_email
“‘Climate Concensus’ Data Need a More Careful Look”
Here’s the conclusion:
The ball has been knocked out of the park!
/Mr Lynn
PS That WSJ link is good for seven days. So if you’re not a subscriber, copy the article for your files. /Mr L
Rud Istvan says:
August 14, 2012 at 6:33 am
“Neither conventional sources, nor newer unconventional sources save the planet from absolute aggregate production declines in petroleum (about 2020), natural gas (by about 2040), and coal (between 2040 and 2060).”
Color me skeptical, as I’ve been hearing these dire prognostications all my life (currently zooming through my 5th at warp speed) and nothing has ever come of them. But, even if it is so, the question is, who do we make responsible for charting a transitional course? A venal and technically illiterate non-cognoscenti in government, who take the opportunity to dispense funds and favors to their cronies (can you say “Solyndra”?), creating boondoggles that never amount to a hill of beans?
Or, do we leave it up to the energy producers who best know the tradeoffs between alternatives, and whose own money is on the line to come up with new ways of delivering energy?
I choose column B. Worry about doing your own job, and leave the rest up to those who know best, and are personally invested in the outcome, and are not in a position to extort your own funds for pie-in-the-sky schemes to make their friends obscenely wealthy and, bye-the-bye, help maintain them in power.
JamesNV says: “I’m a lefty and I get annoyed when the debate is framed in political terms. I understand that many are polarized because of their politics, but this issue isn’t supposed to be about political affiliations. Framing it in those terms only seems to exacerbate the polarization. I don’t see any good in doing that.”
With all due respect, James, the issue (can’t really call it a debate, can we?) has been polarized since its origin. The evidence for AGW is so weak and unscientific that the warmist position was clearly never about the science. It’s about promoting leftist (i.e., political) objectives, including redistribution of wealth. Ottmar Edenhofer, a high UN official has stated this in unambiguous terms. Perhaps it’s time for you to examine your thinking, whom you believe, and where you get your information. Thank you for coming to WUWT, in any case.
Yikes! I’m currently zooming through my 6th! I always have trouble e.g., remembering that the 1700’s were the 18th century and such.
[Oddly, both “alter” and “altar” of CAGW are correct in your context of sacrificing the world’s economy….. 8<) Robt]
Good catch – intended altar. Have a spell checker but not a thought checker.
Red-faced in Florida………
Pamela Gray got it right, and the conditions Joe Bast asks to be agreed upon would make further debate pointless, so there is no way that they would be accepted. Right intent, poorly executed. But that’s the cool thing about the blogosphere, weak documents can be turned into stellar documents by accepting the many suggestions for improvement that are being made and acting upon them. I’d like to see a rewrite and resubmission.
“Newspaper of Record” = “Really nice buggy whip”
Izen;
Actually you would need physicists over the age of 200 to predate the greenhouse theory which was established in science before Darwin’s evolutionary theory.
AGW dates from around 1900. The many objections to the hypothesis, {ocean sinks, negative feedbacks, human CO2 production rates} were all refuted by the 1950s when it became widely accepted as a good theory.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Would that be the theory that:
1. Predicted temperature increases that didn’t materialize over time?
2. Predicted ocean depth increases that didn’t materialize over time?
3. Predicted hurricane and cyclone intensity increases that didn’t materialize over time?
4. That predicated results on tree ring proxies that have since been shown to be anti-correlated with temperature for nearly half the instrumental record?
5. That spawned climate models that are incapable of hind casting, are incapable of forecasting, and cannot explain the last 15 years of flat temps without massive fudge factors that cannot be justified?
Is that the “good theory” that is “widely accepted” to which you refer?
This is not about restarting “the discussion,” on Carbon Dioxide’s influence on the climate. This is complete capitulation on that issue and moving forward to the discussion of implementation of capping CO2 emissions.
What is even worse THEY GOT IT!
This is Using the Delphi Technique to Achieve Consensus It is based on the logic of the Hegelian/Marxian dialectic.
We have had the Thesis and Antithesis. the Delphi Technique was used to ‘Achieve Consensus’ (This is what the IPCC was for.) Now we are moving forward with the Synthesis. Mit Romney represents the New Synthesis.
Once you wrap you mind around the Leftist’s Hegelian/Marxian philosophies, you can understand the paramount importance of Achieving Consensus or the Synthesis. Now that that has been done the discussion has moved forward to the next conflict, Methods of implementation and that is where Mit Romney now is. Offering the New Synthesis.
You can see we who are still debating the old conflict have been left far behind and that is why we are referred to as “Deniers” That discussion is done and over, the Consensus has been reached and the new conflict is on the table.
Now look at the statement again
The discussion is about achieving Consensus on a New Synthesis. “it is time for conservatives to compete with liberals to devise the best, most cost effective climate solutions.”
Now does that statement and the refusal to print the op-ed by the New York Times make sense?
izen posted:
“It is kinda depressing to see even the most basic physics of the anthropogenic source of the rising CO2 and its known role in warming the climate are STILL being … rejected by a number of posters here.
A debate with an opposition that cannot even agree within their own ranks about the underlying science that is accepted by all the scientifically informed is a non-starter.”
CAGW is a hoax!
1) the primary source, as well as the largest CO2 sink on this planet, is our vast oceans which cover 70%+ of Earth’s surface. The Earth has been warming since about 1750 as we began coming out od the LIA. The oceans outgas as they warm and dissolve CO2 when they cool. Man made CO2 from the burning of fossil fuels (wood, coal, petroleum, NG …) is trivial compared to CO2 outgassed from the warming oceans. If you don’t know that, suggest you go back to high school.
2) I have an MS in AeroSpace Engr., 30 years in the process instrumentation and control industry and am knowledgeable about process control for both negative feedback processes s well as positive feedback (think exothermic) processes. My guess is my scientific training and knowledge exceeds yours. Processes which are dominated by positive feedbacks, as postulated by the AGW crowd for Earth’s climate, are inherently unstable and saturate at one extreme or the other until acted upon by a dominant outside forcing. But you probably don’t know that.
Bill
harrydhuffman (@harrydhuffman), August 14, 2012 at 4:23 am said,
“educated before the dogma of the “greenhouse effect” was accepted as “settled science””
That’s a great point. A good generalist who likes to know the basics of all areas is also a good judge. Just because something is “settled” does not mean that a good scientist should not try to explore and understand it. Taking settled science on face value, or faith, is SOOOO unscientific.
A huge failing of a majority of studies of the effects of global warming start with the assumption that there is warming, even since 1998 when it ceased, and make observations in the total absence of concurrent temperature monitoring as part of the actual study. Instead, these studies blithely adopt the published, adjusted temperature data and jump to false conclusions.
And, indeed, greenhouse gases do no exist as gravity determines the basis temperature and the Sun and ocean currents the periodic and variable climate.
Very simply, there is not enough heat capacity in the upper atmosphere to warm the surface, neglecting the fact that a colder gas, at subzero temperature cannot warm anything warmer than it. It’s just thermodynamically impossible.
[“gases do no exist”? What is your intended phrase? Robt]
Valerie Rawlinson says: @ur momisugly August 14, 2012 at 2:49 am
Don’t agree with suggestion five. What we really need is vision to learn to live with the earth in a sustainable way
=========================================
Jeremy Poynton says: @ur momisugly August 14, 2012 at 3:57 am
Do you really understand what “sustainable” means?….
==========================================
Sustainable is the code word for Agenda 21. ‘Smart growth’ and ‘high density urban mixed use development’ are some of the other code words.
What is Agenda 21?
In other words sustainability = SLAVERY and us serfs are being hoodwinked into asking for our slave collars. SEE: 2009 – Year of the Slave
Unfortunately I can not add a /sarc
jorgekafkazar:
At August 14, 2012 at 8:53 am you say to JamesNV:
Nonsense! Absolute twaddle!
The AGW issue is a right-left issue in the USA but nowhere else. And it was started as a right-wing scare.
The AGW-hypothesis existed as an obscure scientific curiosity for nearly a century until Margaret Thatcher, a right-wing UK Prime Minister, raised it as a political issue in the early 1980s. She did this for reasons of personal political advantage, and her right-wing political party (i.e. the Conservative Party) went along with her doing it because they thought it might harm the coal industry.
Also in the early 1980s, I conducted an analysis which predicted the AGW-hypothesis would become an international political issue whether or not it obtained any supporting scientific evidence. That analysis was commissioned from me by the British Association of Colliery Management (BACM) who rejected my findings as being “extreme” and “far fetched”.
Subsequently, no supporting evidence for AGW was discovered – none has been found to this date – and Mrs Thatcher did turn AGW into an international political issue.
In 1997 the late John Daly posted my 1980 analysis together with some updating on his web site. It can be seen at
http://www.john-daly.com/history.htm
Richard
higley7:
Very simply, there is not enough heat capacity in the upper atmosphere to warm the surface, neglecting the fact that a colder gas, at subzero temperature cannot warm anything warmer than it. It’s just thermodynamically impossible.
>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Not only is it possible, it can be measured, and has been. Not only is it possible, Stefan-Boltzmann Law is in part derived from it. Not only is it possible, but there is no other way for SB Law and the 2nd Law of thermodynamics to co-exist.
Your error is in not considering what effect the total absence of the colder body would be on the warmer body. In the absence of the colder body, the warmer body would be exposed to the temperature of outer space which approaches absolute zero, and which is colder still. As a single example. nights with cloud cover are demonstrably warmer than nights with no cloud cover, despite the clouds being much, Much, MUCH colder than the surface below them. If they were not there, the surface would be radiating to outer space directly, which is far colder than the clouds.
Please !!! Let’s be honest here. This letter is nothing more than an effort to move the scientific deliberations concerning climate change from the traditional, legitimate scientific communities to the public domain (which includes a host of self proclaimed “scientists” with modest, if any, scientific credentials usually with direct ties to commercial interests). I am impressed that the New York Times had the good sense to reject it.
As in all scientific issues, there comes a time when action is warranted. Just as we now know that we cannot afford to spread radioactive nuclides about in the process of developing nuclear power plants, we now also know that we must stop the emissions of CO2 when producing energy. If we can do that while burning fossil fuels, fine (and good luck!). If we cannot do that, then we must not burn any more of our fossil fuels and use our brains and resources for the development of the other means of energy production, including nuclear.
The clear purpose of the authors of this letter is to delay those actions so that “Big Fossil Fuels” retains the lion’s share of our energy dollars for as long as possible. As requested in their letter, perhaps we should no longer call them “deniers of AGW”, since the term “traitors to humanity” now provides a better fit.
Yes, it is appropriate to demonize these former deniers and now traitors – as I am attempting to do here – because of the great influence they and their money have on public policy (i.e. Senator Inhofe of Oklahoma, for example). Even the Democratic Governor and both Democratic Senators of my home state of Montana do not dare cross our controlling fossil fuel interests. Apparently, they need to be shown that following demons generally leads to Hell.
Eric from ericgrimsrud.com
Joe Bast’s letter to the NYT got the fundamental concept identified correctly that will bring together all people interested in rational dialog about the scientific study of the total earth system of which the atmosphere is just a dependent part.
That fundamental concept is absolute openness in every aspect of the scientific dialog and processes involved. Bast has appropriately called out the notorious failure of openness in the research and in the institutional processes of the IPCC centric CAGW scientists.
The rest of Bast’s letter, although interesting to me, is just tasty but unnecessary intellectual sauce for the central intellectual concept of absolute open scientific discourse and processes.
Until a broad group of CAGW proponents accept the rational principal of absolute openness in scientific discourse they will continue have unrestricted tendencies toward irrational arguments and conclusions that are not supported by observations of the total earth system.
Thanks to Joe Bast for the letter, thanks WUWT for this venue.
John
Why is it that Izen is always spouting off about the GHE, but never, never, speaks about sensitivity, which is at the heart of the debate. The fact of a miniscule sensitivity, never seems to impact his comments nor consciousness. GK
The first agreement between sides must be that climate science is in its infancy, its data base weak and uncertain, and that all current models have no record of successful predictions.
Only the false demands of Post Normal Science and its Precautionary Principle require otherwise good and well-meaning scientists to make asses of themselves declaring an urgent need to mitigate a predicted catastrophic climate change.
Good scientists can come together and assert that no action can be prescribed until good data and proven models (tested by real world data, not computer simulations) are in hand.