Science or dogma at the National Geographic Society?

“First he makes a nice amalgam between deniers, as for example opponents to vaccine or flat earth believers, and sceptics.”
What a cheap and ugly propaganda trick, quite similar to the techniques of Stalinism & co. There, the destroyed enemies of the “Revolution” were not only “Skeptics” of the beloved leader Stalin and his infallible truth, but were also declared to be “Capitalists”, Enemies of the simple people”, “Secret clericals and tsarists”, “Immoral sex-freaks”, “Sick lunatics” and so on and on…
Just read Orwell’s “ANIMAL FARM” and you know it all…
Such poor and shame-less propaganda methods do only expose the pitiable intellects of some CAGW proponents!

Playboy Magazine: Naked white girls.
National Geographic: Naked brown girls.

The Tempest
By Joel Achenbach
Sunday, May 28, 2006
As evidence mounts that humans are causing dangerous changes in Earth’s climate, a handful of skeptics are providing some serious blowback
IT SHOULD BE GLORIOUS TO BE BILL GRAY, professor emeritus. He is often called the World’s Most Famous Hurricane Expert. He’s the guy who, every year, predicts the number of hurricanes that will form during the coming tropical storm season. He works on a country road leading into the Front Range of the Rocky Mountains, in the atmospheric science department of Colorado State University. He’s mentored dozens of scientists. By rights, Bill Gray should be in deep clover, enjoying retirement, pausing only to collect the occasional lifetime achievement award.
He’s a towering figure in his profession and in person. He’s 6 feet 5 inches tall, handsome, with blue eyes and white hair combed straight back. He’s still lanky, like the baseball player he used to be back at Woodrow Wilson High School in Washington in the 1940s. When he wears a suit, a dark shirt and tinted sunglasses, you can imagine him as a casino owner or a Hollywood mogul. In a room jammed with scientists, you’d probably notice him first.
He’s loud. His laugh is gale force. His personality threatens to spill into the hallway and onto the chaparral. He can be very charming.
But he’s also angry. He’s outraged.
He recently had a public shouting match with one of his former students. It went on for 45 minutes.
He was supposed to debate another scientist at a weather conference, but the organizer found him to be too obstreperous, and disinvited him.
Much of his government funding has dried up. He has had to put his own money, more than $100,000, into keeping his research going. He feels intellectually abandoned. If none of his colleagues comes to his funeral, he says, that’ll be evidence that he had the courage to say what they were afraid to admit.
Which is this: Global warming is a hoax.
“I am of the opinion that this is one of the greatest hoaxes ever perpetrated on the American people,” he says when I visit him in his office on a sunny spring afternoon.
He has testified about this to the United States Senate. He has written magazine articles, given speeches, done everything he could to get the message out. His scientific position relies heavily on what is known as the Argument From Authority. He’s the authority.
“I’ve been in meteorology over 50 years. I’ve worked damn hard, and I’ve been around. My feeling is some of us older guys who’ve been around have not been asked about this. It’s sort of a baby boomer, yuppie thing.”
Gray believes in the obs. The observations. Direct measurements. Numerical models can’t be trusted. Equation pushers with fancy computers aren’t the equals of scientists who fly into hurricanes.
“Few people know what I know. I’ve been in the tropics, I’ve flown in airplanes into storms. I’ve done studies of convection, cloud clusters and how the moist process works. I don’t think anybody in the world understands how the atmosphere functions better than me.”
In just three, five, maybe eight years, he says, the world will begin to cool again.
We sit in his office for 2 1/2 hours, until the sun drops behind the mountains, and when we’re done he offers to keep talking until midnight. He is almost desperate to be heard. His time is short. He is 76 years old. He is howling in a maelstrom.
Parallel Earths
HUMAN BEINGS ARE PUMPING GREENHOUSE GASES INTO THE ATMOSPHERE, warming the planet in the process.
Since the dawn of the industrial era, atmospheric carbon dioxide has risen steadily from about 280 to about 380 parts per million. In the past century, the average surface temperature of Earth has warmed about 1 degree Fahrenheit. Much of that warming has been in the past three decades. Regional effects can be more dramatic: The Arctic is melting at an alarming rate. Arctic sea ice is 40 percent thinner than it was in the 1970s. Glaciers in Greenland are speeding up as they slide toward the sea. A recent report shows Antarctica losing as much as 36 cubic miles of ice a year.
The permafrost is melting across broad swaths of Alaska, Canada and Siberia. Tree-devouring beetles, common in the American Southwest, are suddenly ravaging the evergreen forests of British Columbia. Coral reefs are bleaching, scalded by overheated tropical waters. There appear to have been more strong hurricanes and cyclones in recent decades, Category 3 and higher — such as Katrina.
The 1990s were the warmest decade on record. The year 1998 set the all-time mark. This decade is on its way to setting a new standard, with a succession of scorchers. The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a global effort involving hundreds of climate scientists and the governments of 100 nations, projected in 2001 that, depending on the rate of greenhouse gas emissions and general climate sensitivities, the global average temperature would rise 2.5 to 10.4 degrees Fahrenheit between 1990 and 2100. Sea levels could rise just a few inches, or nearly three feet.
All of the above is part of the emerging, solidifying scientific consensus on global warming — a consensus that raises the urgent political and economic issue of climate change. This isn’t a theory anymore. This is happening now. Business as usual, many scientists say, could lead to a wildly destabilized climate for the first time since the dawn of human civilization.
But when you step into the realm of the skeptics, you find yourself on a parallel Earth.
It is a planet where global warming isn’t happening — or, if it is happening, isn’t happening because of human beings. Or, if it is happening because of human beings, isn’t going to be a big problem. And, even if it is a big problem, we can’t realistically do anything about it other than adapt.
Certainly there’s no consensus on global warming, they say. There is only abundant uncertainty. The IPCC process is a sham, a mechanism for turning vague scientific statements into headline-grabbing alarmism. Drastic actions such as mandated cuts in carbon emissions would be imprudent. Alternative sources of energy are fine, they say, but let’s not be naive. We are an energy-intensive civilization. To obtain the kind of energy we need, we must burn fossil fuels. We must emit carbon. That’s the real world.
Since the late 1980s, when oil, gas, coal, auto and chemical companies formed the Global Climate Coalition, industries have poured millions of dollars into a campaign to discredit the emerging global warming consensus. The coalition disbanded a few years ago (some members recast themselves as “green”), but the skeptic community remains rambunctious. Many skeptics work in think tanks, such as the George C. Marshall Institute or the National Center for Policy Analysis. They have the ear of powerful leaders in the White House and on Capitol Hill. The skeptics helped scuttle any possibility that the United States would ratify the Kyoto treaty that would have committed the nation to cuts in greenhouse gas emissions (conservatives object to the treaty for, among other things, not requiring reductions by developing nations such as China and India).
In the world of the skeptics you’ll come across Richard Lindzen, an MIT climate scientist who has steadfastly maintained for years that clouds and water vapor will counteract the greenhouse emissions of human beings. You’ll find S. Fred Singer, author of Hot Talk, Cold Science, who points to the positive side of the melting Arctic: “We spent 500 years looking for a Northwest Passage, and now we’ve got one.” You’ll quickly run across Pat Michaels, the University of Virginia climatologist and author of Meltdown: The Predictable Distortion of Global Warming by Scientists, Politicians and the Media . You might dip into TCSDaily.com, the online clearinghouse for anti-global-warming punditry. You’ll meet the Cooler Heads Coalition and the Greening Earth Society.
The skeptics point to the global temperature graph for the past century. Notice how, after rising steadily in the early 20th century, in 1940 the temperature suddenly levels off. No — it goes down! For the next 35 years! If the planet is getting steadily warmer due to Industrial Age greenhouse gases, why did it get cooler when industries began belching out carbon dioxide at full tilt at the start of World War II?
Now look at the ice in Antarctica: Getting thicker in places!
Sea level rise? It’s actually dropping around certain islands in the Pacific and Indian oceans.
There are all these . . . anomalies.
The skeptics scoff at climate models. They’re just computer programs. They have to interpret innumerable feedback loops, all the convective forces, the evaporation, the winds, the ocean currents, the changing albedo (reflectivity) of Earth’s surface, on and on and on.
Bill Gray has a favorite diagram, taken from a 1985 climate model, showing little nodules in the center with such labels as “thermal inertia” and “net energy balance” and “latent heat flux” and “subsurface heat storage” and “absorbed heat radiation” and so on, and they are emitting arrows that curve and loop in all directions, bumping into yet more jargon, like “soil moisture” and “surface roughness” and “vertical wind” and “meltwater” and “volcanoes.”
“It’s a big can of worms!” Gray says. It’s his favorite line.
The models can’t even predict the weather in two weeks, much less 100 years, he says.
“They sit in this ivory tower, playing around, and they don’t tell us if this is going to be a hot summer coming up. Why not? Because the models are no damn good!”
Gray says the recent rash of strong hurricanes is just part of a cycle. This is part of the broader skeptical message: Climate change is normal and natural. There was a Medieval Warm Period, for example, long before Exxon Mobil existed.
Sterling Burnett, a skeptic who is a senior fellow at the National Center for Policy Analysis in Dallas, says that even if he’s wrong about global warming, mandating cuts in carbon emissions would mean economic disaster for poor countries, and cost jobs in America: “I don’t know any politician anywhere who is going to run on a platform of saying, ‘I’m
going to put you out of work.'”
The skeptics don’t have to win the argument, they just have to stay in the game, keep things stirred up and make sure the politicians don’t pass any laws that have dangerous climate change as a premise. They’re winning that battle. The Senate had hearings on climate change this spring but has put off action for now. The Bush administration is hoping for some kind of technological solution and won’t commit itself to cuts in emissions.
The skeptics have a final trump in the argument: Climate change is actually good. Growing seasons will be longer. Plants like carbon dioxide. Trees devour it. This demonized molecule, CO2, isn’t some kind of toxin or contaminant or pollutant — it’s fertilizer.
The Free Market Solution: Zoos
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AL GORE IS ABOUT TO COME ON THE BIG SCREEN. Fred Smith is eagerly awaiting the moment. We’re at a media
preview of “An Inconvenient Truth,” the documentary on Gore and global warming (it debuts this week in Washington). Smith is not exactly a Gore groupie. He is the head of the Competitive Enterprise Institute, a factory for global warming skepticism.
CEI has 28 people on staff, “half a platoon,” Smith likes to say. They’re in the persuasion business, fighting for the free market. They lobby against government regulations of all kinds. Smith writes articles with titles such as “Eco-Socialism: Threat to Liberty Around the World.” These promoters of capitalism don’t really operate a commercial enterprise; like any think tank, CEI relies on donations from individuals, foundations and corporations. The most generous sponsors of last year’s annual dinner at the Capital Hilton were the Alliance of Automobile Manufacturers, Exxon Mobil, the Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, and Pfizer. Other contributors included General Motors, the American Petroleum Institute, the American Plastics Council, the Chlorine Chemistry Council and Arch Coal.
Smith is short, stocky, bearded. He talks extremely fast and sprinkles his remarks with free market jargon, climate change lingo, historical references and various mysterious words that seem to come from a secret conservatives-only code book.
As we wait for the movie to start, I ask him how he would define his political beliefs. “Classical liberal,” he says. He explains that civilization is a means for allowing individuals to liberate their energies and their genius — an emergence from primitive, tribal, collectivist social arrangements. When humans switch from collectivism to private property, he says, “you have greater freedom of ideas.” This prompts the thought that the federal government owns way too much land in the West. Much of it should be privatized, he says.
Including national parks? I ask.
“Probably wouldn’t touch it for political reasons,” he says.
The movie begins: Images of a river. Lush foliage. Gore’s voice, almost sultry, rhapsodizes about nature. Then we see him take a stage in an auditorium. He is in a suit and tie and looks very much like a candidate for political office…..
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