Walt Cunningham, on video, follows.
There are few people on Earth as carefully vetted, as rigorously trained and as highly respected as America’s Apollo astronauts. They risked their lives in advance of science on behalf of all mankind.
CFACT organized an all day global warming conference at Warsaw’s Cardinal Stefan Wyszyński University, together with some fantastic partners from Poland and Germany, which ran parallel to the UN’s COP 19. CFACT provided headsets for simultaneous translation for the more than 250 Poles who attended with our international delegation to the global warming summit.
Colonel Walt Cunningham was lunar module pilot on Apollo VII, the first manned Apollo flight to space. Colonel Cunningham explains why America’s space pioneers are shocked and dismayed by today’s politicization of science to serve the global warming agenda. They call for the elimination of bias from scientific inquiry and a return to the rigorous application of the scientific method.
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We need a lot more efforts like this. Where are the physicists? Surely Feynman would have stepped up to counter the junk science in proportion to the need for defense of the scientific method. Is everyone else hiding in fear with their grants?
He is a truly interesting man, and has accomplished what the vast majority can only dream of. His credible and reasoned voice is one worth listening to.
It’s got to have something to do with Cunningham’s lack of fear of alienating the NASA bosses during Apollo 7, something that costed him the Moon.
And he denies the moon landings? I guess in Lewandowsky’s mind he does.
Resourceguy, 8:57am. Indeed. I like to think Feynman would have wiped the floor with the extrapolation and hyperbole of those promoting alarm about CO2. They have disgraced science as a discipline which at one time seemed to be in large part above political manipulation and motivation. Those days may be over for good thanks to these past 3 decades or so of self-serving alarmism. But please note that physicists have stepped forward to condemn these excesses. You will find several listed here for example: http://opinion.financialpost.com/2012/11/29/open-climate-letter-to-un-secretary-general-current-scientific-knowledge-does-not-substantiate-ban-ki-moon-assertions-on-weather-and-climate-say-125-scientists/
I am in agreement with his presentation. I would add that I was persuaded back in the 1980s by the early “science”, where the rise in CO2 was asserted to be causing a rise in temperature(A Scientific American article). I never checked the data myself until nearly 20 years later after someone challenged me.(I trusted “scientists” to keep me informed) I was astonished to find that I had never heard that the more accurate ice core analysis had disproved that early assertion. Why not? Ditto the missing hot spot, and ditto on the nearly identical temperature swings back over the last 100 years.
Eventually, I had to accept that the media were not playing fair and reporting the full story. Why? I still don’t get that part of the picture. Politics? Admittedly, it took hundreds of hours of reading to arrive at the conclusion that I was wrong. Maybe the media people simply do not have the spare time, or perhaps training, to do the homework needed to understand where we are at. The current nearly 17 years without warming should be easy to understand though. Why is that not reported on the front pages?
It is not just Cunningham, Harrison Schmitt and Buzz Aldrin, among many others, are also skeptics.
The key message from that speech is that the fight must be on the public perception- and political spheres.
Ed-B,
Why you ask? Money on one end, acceptance to fear on the other. Acceptance by a peer group/fear of being seen as an outcast… “Everyone KNOWS that it’s getting warmer, and the cause is Co2…what’s WRONG with you?”
Politicians like Gore, Obama, almost all of congress…are untouchable, especially with a compliant media. And they don’t care about the science. They care about securing their voter base. Just like Republicans bang the “God” drum, the Democrats bang the “Climate” drum, because it’s what their base believes in.
I have a friend who is a science teacher for 7th grade in Massachusetts. She won’t even turn the page on the possibility that SCIENCE has not been done, and that SCIENCE is not settled. She’s a firm believer in science by consensus, and even if she did doubt it, she won’t go against the beliefs of her peers, her superiors, and most parents. So even on that level, it still comes down to job security, even though she’s not directly involved in or supported by the Great Grant Gravy Train.
This will go on as long as we vote for and draw from the same pool of intellectually dishonest sources to fill and maintain seats in Congress, or UNTIL there is some unambiguous major blockbuster finding that is absolutely irrefutable. And the scope of “Climate Change” is so vast, that being able to put it to rest with a single event is impossible, I think.
My friends not only believe in this nonsense, they WANT it to be “true”…it’s the great tragedy, the “cause”, the thing that if all the mean and greedy people in the world would just go away, then it would all be ok.
And the next generation appears to be even dumber. In high school science, we should be give students an assignment to analyze the so-called science behind global warming. I’d bet that 98% would come back with nothing but media headlines in support of their forgone conclusion.
Jim From Main
So unlike Mann, who risked his lies on behalf of Mann. (Sorry, Mods, I’m freakin’ fuming at the comparison!)
We may be winning the war on authentic science but part of the reason we are losing the war in other realms is that we are playing the other sides game.
We battle them over their unproven theory of catastrophic human caused global warming/climate change. Global temperatures are important to measure and the physics of the atmosphere is extraordinarily important to understand. We battle over this and their global climate models and unfounded claims regarded extreme weather/climate. The EPA has ruled that CO2 is pollution.
That game is rigged. The politicians/government and media can say anything they want and make it sound convincing. Some of us atmospheric scientists were even convinced in the 1990’s before we dug deeper because key aspects of the propaganda did not ring true in our heads.
This battle is important but the front where the evidence is overwhelmingly one sided and is MUCH more important to whether our planets temperature will rise 1.5 degrees or 2.5 degrees this century(sort of absurd when you think about it) and most importantly, is a key undisputed law of science is PHOTOSYNTHESIS.
Thanks to the key role played by CO2(that everyone who had high school biology understands clearly) our earth is getting greener and greener and greener. The biosphere is booming. Vegetative health has never been better(as measured in the last 100 years). Crop yields and world food production is exploding upwards.
Since all animals eats plants or something that ate plants, there is nothing that is more important than food to feed creatures on this planet.
Clearly the plant world loves this atmospheric fertilizer. Because if benefits root mass the most, it allows plants to grow on less water and be more drought tolerant, conserving water-less irrigation and fertilizer needed for crops.
Even if the alarmist worst case scenario were in the ballpark, the benefits to our world to plants and massive increases in world food production everywhere, far outweigh stronger hurricanes and rising oceans.
We battle over whether hurricanes will actually be stronger and take a hit every time a Haiyan or Sandy develop. Or there is a tornado outbreak in November.
The public only hears the exaggerated facts and doesn’t think, “gee, 2013 had the least amount of tornadoes ever, so what if some of them happened in November”.
PHOTOSYNTHESIS. Notice the other side never touches on that topic. It their kryptonite!
As an Apollo astronaut Colonel Walt Cunningham has certainly assumed substantial risks over the course of his life, but one risk he has never assumed is that of being a laughingstock in front of a large number of people. So in that particular respect I think Michael Mann certainly has him beat.
I must, however, disagree with Mr. Cunningham’s use of a chart on piracy and global warming to draw his conclusion that correlation is not the same as causation. Of course it depends upon what one’s definition of piracy is, but I suspect that the correlation between piracy and global temperatures is indeed the same as causation. The only difference it’s more fashionable (although certainly less visually interesting) to have a shirt, and tie, and microphone these days than it is to have a sabre, peg leg, and skull and crossbones (although the tropical locations for the meetings has not changed).
In closing I’d like to say that Colonel Walt Cunningham and all our astronauts have demonstrated a rare combination of bravery, technical expertise, and daring. We are the better for them.
philjourdan says:
November 25, 2013 at 9:23 am
And he denies the moon landings? I guess in Lewandowsky’s mind he does.
_________________________________________
LOL…Good point but it gets worse: http://www.livescience.com/19643-nasa-astronauts-letter-global-warming.html
I apologize for grammatical and other slips on the previous response. Trying to monitor the updated weather model guidance and trade natural gas while typing.
But remember, we got it straight from Oprah – the only reason anyone would ever oppose Obama’s policies is because they are Racist!!!, and Obama supports the Global Warming agenda, so….
Courage, rationality and intelligence are rare commodities. Walter Cunningham has an abundance of all three plus a clear eye and a sharp mind. He’s the kind of man politicians fear and loathe and avoid debating at all cost.
J. Swift says…”Courage, rationality and intelligence are rare commodities. Walter Cunningham has an abundance of all three plus a clear eye and a sharp mind. He’s the kind of man politicians fear and loathe and avoid debating at all cost.”
Sorry but I see a very different man here. I clearly don’t have the same sense of patriotism as do the US readers. I just see a sad old man fumbling around reciting hackneyed old sayings.
Interesting, I once made the graph that pops up at 11:49. I’ve seen it at many places since. happy to see my child alive. I also happen to know that since then, a new chronology EDC-3 brought the two in much closer. But I’m not sure if that was that honest real data or futch factors.
Simon
November 25, 2013 at 11:09 am
says:
‘I just see a sad old man fumbling around reciting hackneyed old sayings.’
Are you sure you’re not mistaking Walter Cunningham for James Hansen? Or Thomas Wigley? Or Maurice Strong? Or Pachauri? Or Lonnie Thompson? Now I don’t doubt you’re not mistaking Walter Cunningham for Michael Mann, Kevin Trenberth, or Lewandewsky since they’re just young men fumbling around reciting hackneyed old sayings.
This is a central point I think. Most of the ‘warming’ comes from computer models and fudged data that has been “adjusted”. CO2 has not been demonstrated to be dangerous to us in any way, but has been shown to be absolutely necessary to life on this planet. It boggles the mind that the fraudsters were able to convince so many of the blatant falsehood that CO2 is dangerous to us.
The main reason that the meme of catastrophic global warming is so persistent, despite plenty of evidence to the contrary, is that it is a billion $ fundraiser for big green organizations, a newsworthy scary story for the media, a great excuse for governments to raise taxes (even for political stripes that don’t want to tax, it means vilification if they don’t at least pay lip service), a cash cow for climate scientists and an opportunity for banking interests to make money carbon trading, in other words, a perfect storm of converging interests.
Biggest movers and deceivers in this group of special interests are the Big Green organizations. Big Green is a multi-billion dollar group of operations. They love the cash flow from this big scary story. It maintains their Trotskyite adventures (e.g. Greenpeace plowing the seas in the Arctic Sunrise) and keeps their 6-figure executive salaries well supplied. As the Scottish Skeptic shows they are clearly willing to resort to threats of physical harm to maintain this flow of filthy lucre. How soon will it be before they actually resort to violence against individuals if they haven’t already?
Leonard Weinstein says:
November 25, 2013 at 9:59 am
> It is not just Cunningham, Harrison Schmitt and Buzz Aldrin, among many others, are also skeptics.
See http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/05/22/nasa-astronauts-announce-second-letter-to-nasa-at-heartland-conference/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2009/07/03/apollo-moonwalker-dr-buzz-aldrin-cites-climate-skepticism/
Simon …….. Troll much?
“For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for nature cannot be fooled.” Rogers Report
Our freedom to doubt was born out of a struggle against authority in the early days of science. It was a very deep and strong struggle: permit us to question — to doubt — to not be sure. I think that it is important that we do not forget this struggle and thus perhaps lose what we have gained. Richard Feynman, Value of Science
Does the former NASA astronaut and CAGW secptic, Walt Cunningham, accept that the moon landings took place? / sarcy question