Trump Induced Panic Exposes Media Bias and Ignorance of Climate

Guest Opinion: Dr. Tim Ball

An article in the Huffington Post titled Crooked science finds a friend in Trump” is an attempt to counter the exposure of the global warming deception that will occur with the new President. All it does is expose the willful ignorance of the author and by association the publisher. It also reflects similar activities in the deliberate deception about global warming. The opening statement of the article is sufficient exposure.

“From the same people who told you that cigarettes were perfectly healthy: Mercury in our food is just fine, too. Smog in the air? No problem. To top it off — we don’t need to do a thing about climate pollution, either. And let’s just get rid of NASA’s world class research on our own dear earth’s systems. Who needs it?”

It is not the same people who said tobacco was healthy. This is an apparent reference to the early attempt to link Fred Singer to the tobacco industry. Fred wrote a critical review of the terrible research in the original article claiming to link cancer to second-hand smoke. His review was later supported by others. Environmentalists used to claim Fred was paid by the tobacco companies and in favor of smoking. In fact, Fred has always actively and openly opposed smoking. The real story is that misuse of evidence or misrepresenting what was actually said is apparently acceptable in the campaign to silence global warming skeptics and latterly climate change deniers.

The mercury and smog references are similar and typical unsubstantiated references whose only purpose is to raise fears and distract from the truth. CO2 is not a pollutant but a necessary gas for the survival of plants and animals. The truth was always available, but deliberately suppressed. The author would avoid such misrepresentations with due diligence, but that was apparently overridden by a political bias. Now the complete story will be told by the Trump administration and the exploitation of climate for a political agenda will end. All the massive funding going to bureaucrats and environmental groups will cease. Their moral high ground will be gone and the ordinary people who looked right through the media and voted for Trump, will see the extent of the lying and deception. I know they had their suspicions because many told me after presentations, but now they will be confirmed. They will be very angry and my major concern is that they don’t totally reject the necessary concept of environmentalism. The lies and deceptions promulgated in the Huffington Post article and thousands like them over the last 40 years may result in self-proclaimed environmentalists destroying environmentalism.

The Huffington Post author’s attempt at sarcasm by the reference to NASA falls absolutely flat. It shows ignorance either because the author did not do proper research or chose to ignore the truth or both. NASA, the space agency, is being blamed for the actions of those who controlled the sub agency known as NASA GISS. This malfeasance and denigration of the space agency because of the political use of climate was so outrageous that 50 former NASA astronauts combined to bring the issue to public attention.

A short list of the of events explain why the astronauts took their unprecedented action. It also shows why the Huffington Post article is completely wrong to suggest NASA GISS ‘science’ is accurate, trustworthy, and adequate as the basis of draconian energy and environmental policy.

NASA GISS was set up as an agency to examine issues related to space exploration. The diversion to the political agenda of global warming began when Senator Timothy Wirth plucked James Hansen from a low level position at NASA GISS to appear before the 1988 hearing.

… I don’t remember exactly where the data came from, but we knew there was this scientist at NASA who had really identified the human impact before anybody else had done so and was very certain about it. So we called him up and asked him if he would testify. Now, this is a tough thing for a scientist to do when you’re going to make such an outspoken statement as this and you’re part of the federal bureaucracy. Jim Hansen has always been a very brave and outspoken individual.”

James Hansen became Director of NASA GISS, probably with the political influence of Wirth and Gore. He was politically active throughout his career in contradiction to the Hatch Act that limits such activity. For example he was arrested outside the White House for protesting coal plants. He flew to England to give testimony in a trial against six Greenpeace activists who bombed a power plant, but were found not guilty partly on his testimony?

Under Hansen and his successor Gavin Schmidt temperature records were altered, but always to accentuate warming. Director Gavin Schmidt was a significant part of the leaked email scandal from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and identified by Wegman in the section of his Report to Congress titled “SOCIAL NETWORK ANALYSIS OF AUTHORSHIPS IN TEMPERATURE RECONSTRUCTION.”. This remarkable part of the Wegman Report took sociological research techniques to identify and explain the small coterie of people that were closely linked and isolated in producing the science to fill the political agenda of the IPCC.

NASA GISS under Hansen and Schmidt became central to the myth created by the IPCC that human CO2 was causing global warming. This occurred despite the fact their predictions were consistently wrong and they tried to make the data fit their political objective. The only place where a CO2 increase causes warming is in the computer models of the IPCC. Australian Senator Malcolm Roberts challenged this computer generated data that was presented as real data by the bureaucrats who created and promoted it. Roberts was, to my knowledge, the first politician to challenge those bureaucrats directly by demanding empirical evidence, that is real data with established and defined physical explanations.

NASA did marvelous things that inspired America and the World. They saw the auxiliary branch of NASA GISS hijacked for the global warming political agenda of Senator Wirth, Al Gore and others. Wirth knew what he was doing wasn’t science because Michael Fumento writing in Science Under Siege in 1993 quoted him saying,

“We’ve got to ride the global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing, in terms of economic policy and environmental policy.”

Evidence is emerging mostly through the Internet that it is the wrong science deliberately created to push the wrong thing in terms of policy and environment is emerging. It is also clear that it survived because bureaucrats and the mainstream media, such as the Huffington Post, perpetuated the lies. This article, triggered by the panic created by a few politicians obtaining positions where they can end run them, exposes the extent to which they went to ignore, misrepresent, or misunderstand the truth. As Shakespeare had Lancelot say in the Merchant of Venice, “the truth will out”. The quote and story is more than appropriate because Lancelot chose, in a cruel trick to fool his blind father by telling him that his son was dead, was eventually exposed.

This parallels the cruel deception that Senator Wirth and the mainstream media created when they promoted science as accurate when he really believed it didn’t matter as long as it achieved the political objective. The deception was as willful as that demonstrated in the Huffington Post article.


For the record, I am firmly against cigarette smoking – both of parents died from smoking related diseases – Anthony Watts

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Toneb
December 7, 2016 11:10 am

“The right formula = 0.27 * 3.12 ln (560/280) = 0.6 C. No water feedback”
No not correct
That link is to ….
Science and Engineering Publishing Company
Not reputable peer-reviewed publishing journal.
Just a rubbish Chinese one.
Probably you will disagree – but there are standards to be adhered to in science.
THIS JOURNAL DOES NOT
Sorry
If you’d care to provide one that is – then fine.

Curious George
Reply to  Toneb
December 7, 2016 3:07 pm

Toneb is a reputable peer-reviewed publishing journal. How about a pal-review?

Moa
December 7, 2016 11:39 am

“The only place where a CO2 increase causes warming is in the computer models of the IPCC.”
This is incorrect. CO2 causes a known 1.16 C warming per doubling of CO2. Everyone agrees on this, even us CAGW skeptics.
Where we differ from the alarmists and the computer simulation is on the value of the climate sensitivities, TCS and ECS. The computer simulations predict the effect of water vapor over the effect of CO2 a factor of 3 too high compared to empirical observations. That is the true difference between skeptics (using observed reality) and alarmists (using inaccurate computer simulations).
I think it is important to make this distinction, because alarmists will point and scream that skeptics don’t believe that CO2 has a mild warming effect. We do, but that is not what the CAGW discussion is about, which is actually about the magnitude of climate sensitivity and whether or not computer simulations match observed reality (they don’t, for a variety of fundamental reasons).
So let’s be clear on what the actual point of differentiation is please, and be precise in our wording. It matters.

Toneb
Reply to  Moa
December 7, 2016 12:06 pm

Someone else who see’s through Ball’s, err, “disengenuousness”.

December 7, 2016 11:43 am

Let us define the following variables:
F = fear factor,
$$ = funding forcing function,
S = sensationalizing potential,
Tg = global average temperament.
Thus,
$$(Tg) + S = F,
which translates to … “apply funding-forcing function to global-average temperament and amplify with sensationalizing potential to induce an upward rise in the fear factor.”
This is the overriding … (what shall I call it) … “meta-equation” … that reduces all other variables to mere creative, malleable substrates of the story teller’s artistic vision.

Toneb
December 7, 2016 11:55 am

Curious George:
“Toneb dear, I am not a climatologist; a mere physicist. I may be wrong on many accounts, please bear with me. After finding that models use a wrong value for a latent heat of water vaporization, I believe:
1. On a planet with an atmosphere of N2 and O2, adding a CO2 would cause warming.
2. On a planet with N2, O2, and H2O we can’t really tell. The effects are too complex. Let’s say CO2 causes temperature to rise.”
Yes we can as it is NON-CONDENSING, and as such stops the H2O from precipitating out of the atmosphere – and a FB loop forming whereby the planetary temp would tend toward it’s BB temp.comment image
3. Then more water evaporates, thus potentially exacerbating the warming.
OK
4. But water in the atmosphere is not always a vapor. It condenses in clouds and generates phenomena known as rain and snow.
Correct.
5. During daytime, clouds reflect incoming solar energy, cooling the planet.
Low clouds do, yes – but high (Cirrus) clouds warm.
6. During nighttime, clouds prevent the surface IR radiation from escaping, warming the planet.
Correct.
7. Increased levels of CO2 support plant life, greening and cooling the planet.
Yes, but the cooling part is negligible/irrelevant.
8. This calls the premise of Point 2 in question. Does CO2 really cause the temperature to rise?
It does of itself, yes, as Arrenhius discovered over 100 yrs ago – but MORE importantly it provides a base whereby there cannot be a runaway cooling as without CO2 (mostly) we have only CONDENSING GHG (H2O).
9. Right now, temperatures are rising. They have been rising for 15,000 years – do you believe in ice ages? CO2 is also rising.
Yes I do. Miankovitch Cycles explain.
No – they have not been rising for 15,000 yrs.
There has been a long cooling phase since the peak of the HCO.comment image
It is only since the onset of industrialisation that temps have again risen.
10. Is a warmer world better than a cold one? Ice cores indicate that a cold planet was mostly covered with deserts (plenty of dust).
Irrelevant.
Mankind has advanced to the extent of there being 7bn peeps on the planet at a CO2 concentation of ~280ppm, and have settled in places of best advantage.
Eg: water availability. Temperate climate. On coasts.
All those would be challenged by AGW (in decades to come).

MarkW
Reply to  Toneb
December 7, 2016 1:51 pm

“Yes, but the cooling part is negligible/irrelevant.”
According to the models, correct.
According to the real world, false.

Curious George
Reply to  Toneb
December 7, 2016 3:10 pm

Toneb, please link to your graph under point 2. Is it a model, or a measurement?

Curious George
Reply to  Toneb
December 7, 2016 4:09 pm

Toneb, please link to your graph under point 9. I notice it is not a temperature, but an anomaly. The temperature has certainly not risen by 3 C in the last – difficult to tell how many, but few – years. How did a steep rise in the anomaly go unnoticed? Do you play hockey?

Svend Ferdinandsen
December 7, 2016 1:00 pm

“we don’t need to do a thing about climate pollution, either.”
What is climate pollution? If you try to define it, you get in trouble. It says nothing, because it would mean nothing to say i want climate pollution.
Besides that Trump seems to care a lot about real pollution, but not so much about climate pollution which mostly is a good sounding frase with a very vague meaning.

December 7, 2016 1:22 pm

One comment more about the formula of Myhre et al. I said that I carried out the calculations in the same way. I am not 100 % sure about that, because Myhre et al. have not specified the atmospheric conditions and GH gas profiles in their paper. I think that it is one of the basic requirements in any scientific paper that anybody can do the same calculations and analyses. In the famous hockey stick case this requirement was not fulfilled either. Certainly it was a high standard magazine. And carefully peer-reviewed?
If I do not need to specify the content of water vapor, you can order any results from me. The role of water is so important. Like Kiehl & Trenberth used the US Standard Atmosphere 76 in calculating the contribution of CO2 in the GH effect. They got 26 %. It is correct for this atmosphere (it is the atmosphere over USA in 1976) but not for the average global atmosphere, because the water content is 100 % greater in the global atmosphere. I checked this and I got the same result but the right percentage is between 11-13 %.

Curious George
Reply to  aveollila
December 7, 2016 4:18 pm

The hockey stick graph is deathless and wrong. See its re-incarnation a little above, in a comment by Toneb, December 7, 2016 at 11:55 am. He may be a Hinduist.

Resourceguy
December 7, 2016 1:33 pm

I doubt any HuffPo readers have a clue about how many overlapping agencies are studying climate and how big these overlapping budgets are.

MarkW
Reply to  Resourceguy
December 7, 2016 1:52 pm

Leftists believe that all money spent by government improves the economy. So it’s not likely that they would care about such duplication.

December 7, 2016 4:27 pm

Another wonderful article Tim, thank you. Its great to have your long history and clear perspective.
You wrote above:
“The lies and deceptions promulgated in the Huffington Post article and thousands like them over the last 40 years may result in self-proclaimed environmentalists destroying environmentalism.”
Over a decade ago ago, I attended a Friends of Science lecture in Calgary and one of the men at my table was the President of the Sierra Club of Canada. We obviously did not agree on the CAGW issue – he was an ardent “warmist” and I am reportedly a “denier”. 🙂
He gave me his card, and I emailed him a note that was a similar to your above statement.
From memory, I wrote:
“When global warming is proved to be a false crisis. the risk is that real environmentalism will be discredited. When nobody believes any longer in your Sierra Club, Greenpeace or any of the other global warming alarmist organizations, who will be left to speak for the environment?”
As I recall, he did not reply.
Best wishes for the Holidays, Allan
P.S. Be safe Tim! Watch out for the tree-spikers and their ilk – they are getting desperate and nasty.

P Wilson
December 8, 2016 4:47 pm

Trump may not be a scientist, but he’s no fool. I think he can see phoney when it’s put out there

The Jack Russell Terrorist
December 9, 2016 10:13 am

Dr. Tim Ball. How come you are never interviewed or mentioned on the taxpayer funded CBC?;). Especially the Bob McDonald Quacks and…I mean Quarks and Quarks. He still thinks ice is melting and polar bears are dying off. The CBC being taxpayer funded should give both sides to any argument. They even had on Bill Nye “The phony science guy”. But like Micheal Savage said. “liberalism is a mental disorder”. A good read is Green Gospel by Sheila Zilinsky. Forward by Dr. Tim Ball. Good read. Buy more than one copy and donate to your local library.

Johann Wundersamer
December 10, 2016 2:08 am

v’

December 10, 2016 8:56 am

I have important information for the Trump transition team. Does anyone know how to get in touch with them?